Debate, without Demonising
October 5, 2024
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(The article was originally published in Indian Express on October 5, 2024 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)
At the UN General Assembly last week, two speeches, delivered by leaders of countries engaged in wars in Eurasia attracted global attention. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, talked about the war on terror that his army has been waging for almost a year now. Then, there was Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, who spoke of the spirit of his people in defending their territory against Russian invasion for over two years.
Both Netanyahu and Zelenskyy insisted that they wanted the wars to end, but on their terms. Netanyahu said that he did not intend to come to the UN initially, but “decided to come and set the record straight” after listening to “the lies and slander levelled at my country”. Netanyahu minced no words in condemning what he called the “moral stain” of the UN in dealing with his country. He described the UN as a “house of darkness” and “anti-Israel flat-earth society” and complained that there is an “automatic majority” that can be mustered for “any false charge, any outlandish allegation”. Netanyahu was not making wild accusations. The UN has condemned Israel 174 times in the last 10 years, while it condemned all other countries just 73 times. When Netanyahu emphatically stated at the end of his 35-minute address that Israel will “win this battle because we don’t have a choice”, not just those in the galleries but people outside it applauded.
President Zelenskyy, who spoke a couple of days before Netanyahu, also complained that it is impossible to “truly and fairly” resolve matters of war and peace at the UN, because “too much depends in the security council on the veto power. When the aggressor exercises veto power, the UN is powerless to stop the war,” he said. People applauded Zelenskyy when he sought support from “all nations of the world” for “peace for my people — real and just peace”.
However, there is a difference between Netanyahu’s war and Zelensky’s peace. While Netanyahu wages his war without seeking anybody’s involvement, Zelenskyy assumes that the onus for ending the war in Ukraine lies on all other nations in the world. Even in that, Zelenskyy insists that he would only accept the peace formula presented by him a year ago at the UN and a few months before that at the G20 summit in Indonesia as the sole basis for ending the war. He does not mind throwing jibes at those who come up with alternative suggestions. “The peace formula has already existed for two years. Maybe somebody wants a Nobel prize for their political biography for frozen truce instead of real peace”, he quipped.
More countries stood by Ukraine than by Israel in pursuit of the resolution of the conflict. Yet, more people see Netanyahu’s war on his own terms as more justified than Zelenskyy’s peace on his own terms. This is because many outside the Western powers see the Ukraine conflict as an ego clash between Russia and the NATOpowers. While almost every major nation has condemned Russia’s tanks rolling into Ukraine, not everybody views the end of the war from Zelenskyy’s prism — not even former US President Trump who has called NATO “obsolete”.
Two decades ago, when the US faced its worst challenge in the form of a terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001, President Putin was one of the first to call then-US President George W Bush to extend support, prompting Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor, to comment that “the Cold War really is over”. Eight months later, when Bush and his wife visited Putin in St Petersburg and Moscow, many in the US administration assumed that Russia would not only join the WTO, like China did a year before but even the European Union. Some optimists argued that it could join NATO too, an organisation created to crush its former avatar, the Soviet Union.
But Putin wanted to join the Western powers on an equal footing and wanted NATO to go. He recalled what James Baker, Secretary of State in George Bush Sr’s government, asked Soviet President Michael Gorbachev in 1990, a few months after the collapse of the German Wall: Would the Soviets retreat militarily from the occupied eastern half of Germany in exchange for the NATO’s promise to not expand farther east towards Russia? Gorbachev was willing to accede to the proposal, but the Soviet Union had collapsed before it could be formalised. While Gorbachev, and later, Putin repeatedly raised this issue of NATO’s expansion, the Americans seemed convinced that Russia was not in a position anymore to stall the same and went about inviting more European countries into its orbit.
When NATO was started, it had 12 member countries. Twenty more joined through 10 rounds of expansion. Seven rounds of expansion happened after the Baker-Gorbachev conversation, which brought in countries in Russia’s neighbourhood: The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, North Macedonia in 2020, Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.
Both Gorbachev and Putin believed that the West had tricked them. George Kennan, the US diplomat of Cold War era “containment” policy fame, had warned that the expansion of NATO would be “the most fateful error” that would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russia”. Kennan proved right when NATO came knocking at Putin’s doors through continuous expansion. The Ukraine war is the result of that tussle between two egos — it can be resolved through a “frozen truce”, which Zelenskyy dislikes. Does he remember that in the 2019 presidential elections, he ran on the plank of a negotiated settlement with Russia on Donbas, prompting his rival, Yanukovych to brand him as “dangerously pro-Russian”?
