It may be among the rare occasions when the Left and the Right in India are on the same page. They both support the government’s position on the Ukraine war, though to varying degrees, of course. The Ukraine crisis has been among the toughest and the most significant of the Modi government’s foreign policy decisions. India had to tread a fine diplomatic line without being seen as siding with any of the two sides — and so far it has done a good job.
It hasn’t been an easy decision for India. For, the country has invested heavily on its ties with the West, especially the United States. And yet, it knew the hazards of taking the Westward turn, out of habit or democratic sentimentalities. One single misstep and India faces a grave geostrategic scenario, with China baying for its blood.
Today, India may seem alone but in the world of diplomacy what is apparent may not be true. We, for instance, know how Nehruvian India had so many friends but when Mao’s China came cruising inside our borders in 1962, we found not a single ally standing by us. The Russians then categorically told us they would not take sides between a brother and a friend. Ultimately, it was left on the “capitalist and imperialist Americans” to come to Nehru’s rescue! It tells a lot about India’s diplomatic finesse under the Modi dispensation that, after India abstained from the Ukraine voting in the UN, the Biden Administration says it “understands India’s compulsions”. And Vladimir Putin dialing Narendra Modi twice and letting him know Russia’s stand on the war and also reportedly agreeing to provide a six-hour ceasefire so that Indian students could safely evacuate Ukraine.
India has also rightly avoided the pitfalls created in the name of liberalism and democracy. Just a few months ago, this same bogey which is today invoking ‘democratic India’ to stand with the ‘liberal West’ was missing when the Chinese were encroaching into Indian territories in eastern Ladakh. In fact, this same lobby has been busy writing the obituaries on India’s democracy under the Modi government till Putin decided to invade Ukraine. Overnight, India became a model democracy and its decision at the UN and elsewhere became the matter of vital democratic concerns.
At the core of the Ukraine issue, however, lies Russia’s fear of being encircled by the US-led NATO. And the fear is not quite unfounded, as pointed out by an Indian-origin legislator in Russia, who asked an Indian reporter how India would react “if China sets up its military base in Bangladesh”? But why invoke India when the US itself has drawn redlines on how close a foreign nation can come to its borders — remember the Monroe Doctrine?
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Richard Lourie recalls in his book, Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash, how American secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that if the USSR pulled its troops out of East Germany and permitted the peaceful reunion of the two Germanys, NATO, in return, would not move “one inch east”. The author adds, “NATO, of course, moved not inches but hundreds of miles east. This was effectuated by granting membership to three former Soviet republics — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — and seven former Eastern Bloc countries — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia — between 1999 and 2004.”
This policy has been criticised by none other than George Kennan, US ambassador to the USSR and author of the containment doctrine that guided the American policy throughout the Cold War. He called the NATO’s expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era” and foresaw its leading to a resurgence of “nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”.
Even Gorbachev felt cheated as he said in an interview later: “The Americans promised that NATO wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”
Author Brian Landers brings out American double-standards in his book, Empires Apart: America and Russia from the Vikings to Iraq, when he writes how the US “reacted angrily” when Russia asserted that it had the right to intervene in Georgia because in the nations on its borders Russia had a “privileged interest”. Moscow was “just applying to the Russian empire”, writes Landers, its “own equivalent to the Monroe Doctrine, a doctrine Obama (then US President) himself implicitly endorsed with his campaign attacks on the governments of Cuba and Venezuela”.
It is in this backdrop comes Putin, and this explains why for all the misinformation campaign being run by the West, his popularity remains unassailable in Russia. He is, after all, seen as someone who is fighting for Russia’s pride, its rightful place in the comity of great nations.
Putin has been raising the issue of NATO’s eastward movement for more than a decade now. In February 2007, he said at the Munich Security Conference: “We have the right to ask: Against whom is this (NATO) expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Seven years later, he again raised this issue: “They (Western leaders) have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.”
The US-led West has pushed Russia into a corner, little realising that sooner than later a great Russian pushback would be coming. Joe Biden and his team have erred on three major counts: Historically, from Napoleon to Hitler, Russia had been the waterloo for most European empires. And in the Ukraine case, this might be the beginning of the end of Pax Americana, which saw major signs of decay in Kabul late last year.
In the post-American world, a term pompously coined by Fareed Zakaria for the cover of his 2008 book, which was “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else”, the US could have accentuated its superpower status by getting right friends and allies. With the imminent rise of China as the biggest competitor of America and Americanism, all that the US leadership could have done was to get the countries in the neighbourhood of the Dragon on its side. To the contrary, the US played a short-term, myopic game by going after Russia, which it could have avoided by giving Moscow some leeway in its neighbourhood, and instead created a grand alliance to check and probably mate China. Today, Emperor Xi Jinping must be laughing at ‘His Friend’ Joe’s stupidity. This might be the US’ goodbye moment as far as its Pax Americana dream is concerned.
Second, the US administration (and not just Biden’s, though it must accrue the maximum blame) may have experts who know Russia but don’t really know Russians, especially Putin. This is what Defence Secretary Robert M Gates was probably hinting at when, lamenting the free fall in US-Russia relations, he said of himself and Condoleezza Rice: “For the first time both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defence have doctorates in Russian studies. A fat lot of good that’s done us.”
As for Putin, even a cursory look at his life would suggest he should never be pushed into a corner. People like Putin, Modi, et al have reached the top after a lot of hardship and struggle, they won’t give up that easily when cornered.
Putin spent his early life on the streets of Leningrad which taught him a simple but profound lesson: “The weak get beaten. Weakness is both disgrace and danger.” As Lourie points out, “The streets would shape not only Putin's worldview but his tactics as well. In discussing pre-emptive attacks on ISIS in Syria when justifying his support of the Assad regime, he said: ‘The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing — if a fight is unavoidable, throw the first punch.’” Cornered in the neighbourhood, Putin did exactly that: He threw the first punch. To Biden’s misfortune, it won’t be his last either.
Last but not the least: Ukraine is non-negotiable for Russia, both historically as well as geographically. It not just provides Russia with the access to a warm-water port, but also provides soul to its otherwise long history. “All Russian history flowed from Kiev. Every schoolchild learned: Kiev is the mother of Russian cities, Ukraine is Russia’s breadbasket. And the losses weren't only emotional and symbolic,” Lourie writes. One can understand the historic significance of Ukraine in the Russian scheme of things from the fact that of the 75 years that the Soviet Union existed, 30 years were ruled by Ukrainian leaders led by Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko.
In this backdrop, it was imprudent on the part of the American administration to first corner Putin, knowing well that he gives much more than he gets, and then making Ukraine a prestige issue. For Putin, his strong image is non-negotiable. And for Russians, Ukraine can’t be on the bargain table either. By pursuing this treacherous path, Biden seems to have unwittingly hastened the beginning of the end of Pax Americana. Joe’s Ukraine gamble is going to be rather costly for America’s global image. And it’s going to be costly for democracies such as India and Taiwan, already feeling the pinch of Chinese hegemony.
This is Part 1 of the two-part series. The second part will deal with how the West is setting the narrative of the Ukraine war and the lessons for India.
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