Nancy Pelosi visit adds to the miseries and mysteries of Ukraine war

It is childish and churlish to claim that the US ‘provoked’ Russia and China respectively into the Ukraine war and military action around Taiwan only for President Joe Biden to try and win nationwide bi-annual elections for his Democratic Party later this year. But it may still be true that what is happening in Europe and now East Asia have the potential to prepare the world for acknowledging the possibility of a Third World War, whether now or later, whether joined or not.

There are those in Europe who still think that Ukraine is fighting the war with Russia, also as Washington’s proxy. US Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit achieved nothing more than provoking China, just as the latter has been provoking Taiwan all through. It’s older than the way China has been provoking other stakeholder nations with its claims on the South and East China Seas.

If China attacks Taiwan, going beyond its post-visit military exercises with live missiles, it would be a replay of Ukraine in Asia, especially South-East Asia, another prosperous region, which could be choked enough to upset the global economy more than at present. In the meantime, the US is said to have moved F-22 Raptor fighters closer to Russia, in Poland. It is unclear if it had the NATO nod, or is an independent affair like the US, the UK and some West European nations weaponising Ukraine to stand up to Russia thus far, after initial setbacks.

Cheering, weaponising

The question if the US would join such a war, or stop cheering and weaponising Taiwan, as in the case of Ukraine, would be known only if the two Asian neighbours actually start opening fire at each other. There is no NATO in the region for the US to seek clearance to join in, as was/is the case with the Ukraine War. But will ASEAN as a grouping or individual nations in the larger region, including Japan and South Korea, oppose such an American initiative, if it came to that, is a million-dollar question. If so, where should you place North Korea?

For now, Japan, as a friend and ally of the US, has called upon China to end the military exercises around Taiwan — but it also has its own reasons not to let the situation escalate, even in political terms. Military escalation is just out of the question for the whole region, Asia and the rest of the world.

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Not since World War II, so to say, is the US involved in a two-front war, though neither has actually escalated to anything close to that. That was for and on behalf of the allies, who fought alongside. If critics (not all of them Russians and Chinese) are to be acknowledged, this time round, friends and allies are fighting a ‘proxy war’ for the US after being made to fight their own war, which they too could have done without.

America’s NATO allies did it for the nation in Europe, against the erstwhile Soviet Union, though they did not have to actually fight a war with Moscow. The Soviet Union went under away from Europe, in the mountainous deserts of distant Afghanistan.

Weird argument

In logical terms, the Russian war on Ukraine makes better sense and logic than China getting more hyped up about the Pelosi visit than is required. That the US recognises Taiwan, and not Beijing’s ‘One China’ policy is well known. That the US and Taiwan also have political understanding on the subject and military cooperation for the past several decades should not be overlooked.

The fact is that between friendly, and not-so-friendly nations, exchange-visits, even at the highest levels, is a part of their diplomatic calendar and political package. There was no need for China to get hyper over the Pelosi visit and get into ‘action mode’, which would have consequences for the region, both intended and unintended.

In contrast, China has no qualms sending in a dual-purpose naval research ship into the Indian Ocean waters, knowing full well that the Indian adversary feels extremely uncomfortable about its presence and project. Going beyond its muscle-flexing in the South China / East China Sea waters, China has been irritating India from time to time, claiming that the "Indian Ocean is not India’s ocean".

Sitting at a safe distance…

Regardless of China’s provocative actions in the face of Pelosi's visit, the question arises if the US and Taiwan couldn’t have done without it just now. By egging on Ukraine and provoking Russia for some years now, the US struck at global economy and post-Cold War strategic equilibrium as nothing before it. Now, the Pelosi-centred provocation of China has spread tensions across Asia and Africa. Sitting pretty far away from where it is located, the US has been at it, time and again, in ways that it affects the rest of the world.

There are those who had argued in the past how barring Pearl Harbour, how geography has helped the nation and how the US has been able to deflect its military engagements away from its shores. The ‘Cuban missile crisis’ came close to that – or, if that was what it’s. Osama bin Laden was the only one to violate the US code on ‘homeland security’, a post facto coinage after 9/11.

There are others now who argue that Washington wants global attention to move away from Ukraine, which continues to get the beating, and neither can afford it, the former in political terms and the latter, militarily, too. Whatever the long-term consequences, for now, Russia has survived and benefited from the US sanctions, which its European allies have endorsed. However, for Moscow and Putin, too, their military loss is not any less.

But what if like the US through the past decades, Russia sees it all as an occasion to feed its military industrial complex, thus keeping and creating jobs when the world was taking baby-steps of economic recovery and social restoration after unprecedented global lock-down(s) in the face of the Covid pandemic. Or, is it that the US calculates that military engagements of the kind would drain Russia and China, whose economies, western analysts (alone) keep repeating, were going downhill?

Unjust and unfair

Even in the face of the most convincing justifications, war is both unjust and unfair. The more sophisticated the war has become, larger and deeper are how populations are affected. For the present generation, the Ukraine War affects billions of people who have nothing to do with the nations at war. Those peoples won’t even know what bomb had fallen on their dinner table.

Now that Russia and Ukraine have agreed to facilitate food ships’ movement especially from the latter without military interference from the former, the world may go easy on attendant fears of food shortage, rising prices and inflation across several parts of the world – developed, developing and under-developed, though not in that order.

But the pressure and premium on the two to go to the negotiations table would become less. As may be recalled, the Afghan War and the Iraq War, involving the US, incidentally, did not impact the rest of the world much. They also turned out to be unilateral wars. But not a single Afghani or Iraqi was spared the destruction, deprivation and agony that those wars wrought on them.

Revenge or self-assurance?

The US took out Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as if to test its ‘fly-by-wire’ war technique, to reassure itself and its population that the era of body-bags of the Vietnam kind was all in the past. In the absence of counter-attacks of the kind that Al Qaeda engaged in after the ‘Soviet occupation’ of Afghanistan, all the US bombardments in Afghanistan, post-9/11, proved to be one technology demonstrator after another. It was a message to its allies and adversaries elsewhere, and for the benefit of the military-industrial complex back home.

The more recent drone-based R9X ‘Flying Ginsu’ attack to take out remnant Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Taliban-controlled Kabul in a way was a technical demonstrator for the US missile without warheads that could keep collateral damage, or civilian casualties, low.  The 2012 killing of Bin-Laden in Pakistan’s Abbottabad again was targeted killing, but was carried out not by drones but by humans, the US Marine SEALS, again to test/prove that the US could do it. Of course, both men had to be brought to justice, not just in the name of the US, but of all humanity.

US President Joe Biden, like his predecessors in recent years, has said that the Al-Zawahiri killing was to account for American lives lost in 9/11 as he was said to be the co-conspirator with Bin Laden. It is the kind of penchant for revenge-pursuit mentality, which only Israel was known to have demonstrated thus far. Or, is it that the mighty US needs to re-assure itself and its people every now and again as Establishment America is still not able to come to terms with its 9/11 humiliation, involving humans unconnected with any State-centric demon as it had painted the Soviet Union in its time?

Clash of civilisations

The Ukraine-Pelosi episodes may have finally shifted American, and by extension global attention away from individual enemies of the US, hence, ‘enemies of humanity’, to post-Cold War State players. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the unwillingness of America’s European allies, and nations like China and India, to actually form or formulate a multi-polar world had created a vacuum that Osama and Al Qaeda filled in effortlessly. American Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ helped theorise it all.

The idea was a take-off from the Crusade Wars close to a millennium back and was thought to be alive only in the minds of individuals, not of nation-States, as might have been mistakenly concluded. It led to avoidable consequences, and not just to the perpetrators or their attackers. It was/is unlike the war in Europe that Europe does not want in the name of Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and freedom of choice (to join NATO), that is of interest to the US, from a distance.

It also suited the US to have non-State adversaries which it possibly thought was easy to handle. However, over decades, the spread of the Al Qaeda brand of terrorism, taking different names and turns like the ISIS, did create greater problems for a greater number of nations than might have been bargained for. As the meaning of the term Al-Qaeda goes, it has provided ‘The Base’, an ideology and concept that could be moulded to suit local conditions, needs and resources, including human resources. So, either it is a new and local collective of ‘lone wolves’.

The world has finally learnt it cannot end religious terrorism, where commitments only went deeper. Beliefs are both adequately incomprehensible and uncompromising. States are both predictable and manageable – even if it means that you too are willing to walk half-way. Ukraine is the best example in recent times as the US’ conduct over the past decades proved that even if it compromised with Putin’s Russia on more direct issues, it could not and would not let Ukraine do it.

In a way, the Ukraine war and the Taiwan crisis, both in the Eurasian landmass, are an endurance test for nations and humans alike as they hope to get out of the Covid-19 catastrophe that hit economies as much as it took human lives. It looks as if that man should be taught not to forget the horrors of war and deprivation — and should also learn to live with it and through it for long years and decades as the world, especially Europe did through the first half of the previous century.

There is more to meeting the eye. And that is also what the miseries and mysteries of the evolving global situation is all about.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and commentator. Views expressed are personal.

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