The New Cold War: How India Should Respond

The West is looking to involve India deeply in its tussle against Russia and the ISIS. How should we respond to this mess created by the West? Berlin-based journalist Hermann Denecke’s analysis, exclusively for Swarajya.

Conflict, crisis, cacophony and catastrophe. It only takes one look around today’s world to paint a fearful picture.

There’s Ukraine. There’s Syria. There’s Ebola in Africa, while the plague is ravaging Madagascar. Millions are dying of hunger. Several other millions are on the run between continents. Glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, entire species are threatening to go extinct.

Then there’s war. And civil war. Nations are locked in armed conflict over small islands and long borders. Even as Berliners celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of their hostile Wall, new ones are being zealously erected elsewhere to either lock people in or shut them out.

Centuries-old dispensations are crumbling. Cultural ties are fragmenting. Traditions are ending. The stuff that held this world together has come to the end of its shelf life and there is widespread chaos. Groups using bombs, violence and murder to capture territory and establish absolute control are on the prowl. A caliphate here, an autonomous region there, a republic elsewhere.

Terrorism is the weapon of this era and it is spreading like an autumn flu. Terrorism is the deadliest plague of today’s world. There is no vaccination against it in sight yet.

This is one way at looking at today’s horrors. A rather flat view, for it overlooks some inherently contradictory political, economic and intellectual realities of the world today.

But how an artist colours his work always depends on where his key interests lie and what he hopes to invoke in his audience.

The Munich Security Conference (MSC) held a meeting in New Delhi last month. Given the predominantly closed-door nature of its deliberations, it was under-reported in the Indian and international media. Still, and in keeping with the current trend among policy-makers around the world, MSC chairman Wolfgang Ischinger placed an “editorial” in an Indian daily. Provocatively titled “Ukraine matters to India”, the essay painted a daunting—but flat—picture of the global realities of today.

It calls for detailed dissection.

Climate change, epidemics, hunger and refugee crises—the most pressing problems confronting Indians and Asians, the target audience of Ischinger’s essay—do not feature in it. Instead, Ischinger’s delineation focuses on the concerns preoccupying the world outside Asia.

The essay laments the failure of all existing instruments available to the world to tackle global political crises, territorial aggression and human rights violations—trends that have been proliferating like Californian bush fires and threatening to consume every established foundation of  law and order.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the whole shebang of bilateral and multilateral regimes between countries, all regimes envisaged as guardians of international law and order have let the world down. The hope that these forums could peacefully overcome, if not prevent crises, too, is dead.

“Ukraine and Syria/Iraq reveal the dysfunctional state of the international order,” writes Ischinger.  “The international community is unable to manage those crises…There is neither a global policeman nor an effective concert of great powers taking care of those problems. The international capacity is shockingly low—right at a time when the world has become so complex and complicated that we need this capacity more than ever before.”

The text of the essay is also startling, in that it repeatedly refers to “we” and “us”.

Who are these undefined “first persons”? Obviously, those “inside”, the ones who have always seen themselves as officially in charge of global law and order. But the essay is addressed to the “outside”: Asians and Indians, who were never envisaged as members of the self-appointed council dispensing international justice.

Wolfgang Ischinger is a distinguished former German diplomat. He has been ambassador in Washington and Deputy Foreign Minister in Berlin.  He is a noted player on the international stage, one who has been tirelessly active in the very organizations whose demise he laments in his “editorial”. Ischinger is also a committed  European and Atlanticist.

What is the Munich Security Conference (MSC)?

Something like a public relations institute for foreign, defence and security policy, a body of the kind that both sides of the Atlantic cherish,  an unofficial think tank of the NATO, and a grouping, which like-minded forums in the US and other western countries frequently exchange insights with.

“We”, therefore, is the personification of the European-Atlantic “community of values”, more commonly known as the “West”: the same that has consistently justified its role as global leader due to its military might, powerful economy and—cultural superiority.

Ten years ago, it certainly looked as though the “West” had things firmly under control: one superpower had remained at the end of the Cold War. Its role as global sheriff was undisputed. A small but powerful clutch of allies were its deputies, while a gaggle of recalcitrant arriviste states were the only remaining bad boys on the block. That pyramid of power seemed cemented forever. But today, its foundations have begun to shake.

The text also reveals where the key interests of both Ischinger, the author, and his “we”, lie.

Up to now, the sheer magnitude of the various global crises has hardly been debated in western circles.  But things have reached a head. Even as villains around the world go from strength to strength, the White House’s willingness to fulfil its role as Global Sheriff has shrunk dramatically.  Be it in Donetsk or Kobane, the powerful West finds itself helpless, its own impotence staring it in the face while all its tried-and-tested weapons seem blunt and rusted. It is confused, rendered insecure and—crying for help.

That is the cry that Ischinger’s essay intended to lend form and shape to in New Delhi last month. It is a desperate appeal by the West to mobilize a new “Coalition of the Willing”, to co-author a new chapter of the old Cold War. It is part of an overall propaganda offensive for the world to close ranks all over again.

The frontlines of this new war have already been defined: the Russian devil in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, and the IS-criminal-syndicate on the villainous side, all others on the virtuous one.

A study by the European Leadership Network (ELN) published last week in London, was but another instrument of this new Western offensive.

The study listed 40 dangerous incidents over European airspace in the last six  months: harrowing near-mid-air-collisions, unannounced approaches by Russian long-range bombers, the scrambling of NATO interceptor jets to meet them. Undeniable incidents of considerable concern, fraught as they were with the deadly potential of triggering a military confrontation. By listing them, the ELN study only reinforced and fortified the emotional conviction that is indispensable for the building of any new blocs and fronts.

The events of the past six months and the sustained propaganda offensive by the West are already influencing thought in Germany. Since the evil Nazi era and even more so since the end of the Cold War, German society had evolved into a predominantly pacifist society. Germans have felt comfortable in their newfound civility, content in their wellness. They could accept the shrinking of their army to a small group of professional soldiers who were deployed, if at all and at best only as peacekeepers or trainers in faraway countries. They had no problems with the considerable restrictions they themselves imposed on their armaments industry and arms exports either. After all, a war in Europe, and that too, one with German participation, was simply not conceivable anymore.

But a war is raging now, right on the eastern border of the European Union.  And with astonishment and growing discomfiture, Germans are realizing that though their country is an economic powerhouse, it has also become a small and insignificant military lightweight.

German defence experts are demanding aggressive militarization worth billions of Euros in the immediate future. President Joachim Gauck, hitherto an eloquent proponent of peace and freedom, and Chancellor Angela Merkel are pressing for greater German engagement in the re-establishment of global law-and-order. If need be, with weapons.

“The world is on the verge of a new Cold War; some say it has already begun,” warned former Soviet statesman Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin earlier this month. The 83-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate was addressing euphoric crowds at the silver jubilee celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the German capital.

Gorbachev is the man that Germans have to thank for the crumbling of the Wall. He is the man Russians have to be grateful towards for liberation from Bolshevist party dictatorship. And he is the leader whom the world must salute for bringing an end to a 50-year-long East-West standoff.

In today’s Russia, Gorbachev is a relentless critic of Vladimir Putin and his foreign policy. But in Berlin, it is the West that came in for lambasting.

It had not kept the promises it had made to Moscow when the Cold War ended, he said. There had been a deal between equal partners. And yet, the West saw itself as a “victor” and continued to behave like one. The eastern expansion of NATO all the way up to the Russian border was a violation of that deal. So was the separation of Kosovo from Serbia, a Russian ally, under the cover of NATO bombs.

Gorbachev tore into the West for the invasion of Iraq and for many other actions, none of which could be remotely justified or covered by the tenets of international law.

Finally, Gorbachev pointed out that the complete absence of mutual trust between the West and Russia over the Ukraine crisis over the past months, was the result of “short-sighted European policy which ignored the interests of its partner Russia”.

It was trust, Gorbachev reminded his hosts in Berlin, that had enabled the end of the Cold War and the peaceful revolution in former East Germany. It was this trust that now stood shredded by the West.

It requires no degree in international jurisdiction to identify the violators in today’s crises.

Most certainly, Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and the separation of the Donbass region from Ukraine disregarded international law.

But so did the European annexation in 1999 of Kosovo.

The supply of arms by Iran and Qatar to Syrian rebels in the name of religious brotherhood is undoubtedly a legal violation.

But so was France’s supply of guns to rebels in the Libyan civil war in 2011.

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s holier-than-thou—and now infamous—address to the UNSC in 2003 making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, was hardly less hypocritical than Putin’s recent one on television justifying his Ukraine policy.

The West accepted its own violations of international law, because they conveniently served its own political motives. But it lost no time in labelling Moscow’s actions in Ukraine as grave legal violations and in imposing sanctions on Russia.

Over the last decades, international laws have been bent, broken, twisted and manipulated repeatedly and shamefully. All violators have oozed sanctimoniousness and cited the noblest motives and the most fervent commitment to human rights and dignity, when justifying their acts.

Therefore, if Vladimir Putin today stands accused by the West of two-facedness, the modus operandi was not invented by him.

Try an East-to-West perspective to look at the same global crises.

It is an entirely different picture, one that sharply defines how Europe has brought the Ukraine crisis upon itself and must now face the music.

This perspective also reveals how it is the western “Coalition of the Willing” under the stewardship of the United States itself, that set the Middle East on fire and led to the emergence of the Islamic Caliphate modelled on the early Middle Ages, the vision of a pan-Islamic cross-border superpower that holds such suicidal attraction for young Muslims seeking security in an increasingly anti-Islamic western world.

“Global and regional structures are crumbling before our eyes,” writes Ischinger in his editorial.

But those bemoaning this scenario have only themselves to blame. There is no international supreme court to punish violators. And yet, violators repeatedly cite law to sanctify fresh wars or—as in Ischinger’s editorial—to motivate new comrades to join their crusade.

India is not responsible for the crises currently rocking the globe and causing such discomfiture to the West. So is the MSC Chairman’s appeal—oddly titled  “Ukraine matters to India” —justified?

India’s relationship with Europe still needs clear-cut definition and shape, while that with the United States is a relatively new one, whose resilience is not yet known. On the other hand, the Russia-India friendship has withstood the test of time.

Joining new “blocs” or aiding the emergence of a new Cold War, is neither in the interest of India nor Asia. There is no reason for India to be played off by one bloc against another. Indeed, there are many opportunities to gain maximum advantage from both sides for the welfare of her people, by keeping a circumspect equidistance from both.

Through India’s prism, the real crises lie elsewhere: in climate change, in epidemics, in poverty, in development, in education. Manipulating all emerging blocs to help her overcome these, her own problems, ought to be India’s first priority.

Still, India is an emerging superpower and a justifiable contender for a permanent seat in the UNSC. Consequently she cannot be indifferent to the worrying state of world affairs and must—and will—take on responsibility at the High Table.

The Middle East crisis has little to do with the growing frostiness between the West and Russia. But it lies much closer to Asia than to Europe or America. India must therefore take independent and strong measures to check the proliferation of IS in her region in her own interest.

So should Ukraine matter to India, as Ischinger insists? Yes, but not in the way the essay envisages.

As an emerging world player and a close partner to Russia, there are few countries in the world better positioned than India. An offer of mediation or arbitration by New Delhi, would be desirable, conceivable and of immense value to the world. And a trump card for India.

(translated from German by Swarajya Foreign Affairs Editor Padma Rao Sundarji)