2023-09-22 11:00:34
A defeat of Ukraine in Russia’s war of aggression will simply dissolve world security. Joe Biden, in his seemingly excessive address to the United Nations Assembly this week, placed the conflict at the steepest end of the global agenda. An emphasis that says much more than it seems.
He was referring to his country: to the “basic US principles for stopping an aggressor,” which if they failed would mean Russian victory and a fatal blow to American leadership.
Biden’s message hovered around the campaign speech, but it was more than that. He spoke clearly less to his UN colleagues than to the American Congress, where a request for new military aid stands to Ukraine, and to a republican opposition that seeks votes for next year’s general elections with the promise that if it returns to power it will turn off the tap of that aid.
It is not only Donald Trump who highlights this belligerent position, it is repeated by all of the party’s candidates. Those murmurs are almost a balm for the military trap that Vladimir Putin faces.
The most provocative dimension of this discussion lies in what makes it possible. The US is the greatest global power, the empire of the era. History teaches that coherence in interests and their defense is what preserves the place of power. “Biden gets it right highlight the extraordinary geopolitical significance that there would be a defeat for Ukraine,” a European diplomat tells this reporter.
Volodimir Zelensky with Joe and Jill Biden in the White House. Photo Bloomberg
Such a development would strengthen Russia and his plan to restore regional power. “It would also provide unique support to China, which in turn would problematically target Taiwan. The precedent would spread like wildfire,” he adds.
According to that principle, such a perspective should not be ignored no matter who comes to the helm of power. Unless there is a decline in imperial power as was noted during the controversial Trump government, in which the country lost prestige and ability to influence. Let us remember that when Biden arrived at the White House, his first international trip was to the annual Munich Security Summit in February 2021. There he noticed a warm reaction from European allies satisfied with the relief, but the distrust.
These leaders were not clear whether Biden was an accident of history on the populist path that began with Trump or the opposite. If the exception was the Democrat. They didn’t know if the US should be trusted again. The previous Munich summit, in 2020, in the last stretch of the tycoon’s government, had a suggestive axis, the Westlessness (without west, literally), reflection of growing global unrest and uncertainty about the fate of the West.
Joe Biden with Volodimir Zelensky in the Oval Office of the White House, December 21, 2022. AP Photo
The war largely repaired those shadows, with the strengthening in the circumstance of Washington’s leadership and, excessively, from NATO. But suspicions remain attentive to the push that Trump exhibits in the Republican internal race and, according to some surveys, also against Biden in next year’s general elections.
The question is why Ukraine or its oblivion, rather, excites a large sector of the electorate of a country accustomed to power. That conflict is a landscape distant from the interest in sectors awaiting a return to economic expansion and individual growth of the traditional North American model, a course hurt by the crisis brought about by the pandemic and which partly aggravated the war.
The vacuum
According to a study by The New York Times The US has placed 223 million a day since the conflict in Ukraine began. If the new request to the Capitol is approved, the total aid already available would rise to 135 billion dollars. Money that taxpayers intend for another destination.
Washington has guaranteed with this million-dollar assistance its place of ruling power. I could not do otherwise. The background that Biden suggests about the amplified lack of control that would be triggered by a defeat in this scenario has an anticipated record in the crisis in the South Caucasus, not the only one by the way, but the most strident in these hours.
That new and brief war that ended in a matter of hours this week with the domination of the Armenian population of the Nagorno Karabakh enclave, emerges from the void left by Russia in their spaces of influence. The political deserts are filling quickly, and there are powers like Turkey that are clearly moving behind the scenes of these developments.
“We have to confront this manifest aggression today and thus deterring other possible aggressors tomorrow”says Biden in his speech on the Ukrainian drama. He is not wrong. There are containment ropes that are beginning to come loose. The Armenians are very worried now because they fear that the vigorous Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey after winning Nagorno, will advance on that country with the same argument that Putin used regarding Ukraine when he denied it its right to sovereign existence because it would be part of Russia.
The autocracy of Baku refers to “Western AZ”, that is, Armenia, a “region to recover”according to the strong man of the dynastic regime, Ilham Aliev.
Volunteers of the Georgian legion carry a coffin of their comrade Zakaria Shubitidze, who died in a battle with Russian troops. AP Photo
It is not only there where these challenges occur. Strange demands are also piling up over Cyprus or the Aegean Sea by Turkey or the old dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, both nuclear powers. Or the one that confronts China and India, also due to territorial differences. What just happened in the Caucasus would not have happened at these extremes if that conflict in Ukraine that weakened Russia did not exist, a regional power. It is possible to gauge the consequences if it is indeed the United States that escapes from these labyrinths as the Republicans propose.
Another dimension of the problem is the fate of war if Washington does not dissolve into Trumpist insularity and maintains Western support for the beleaguered European country. Conflict is a labyrinth, but as we see, its dimension is linked to the format of global powers. It is difficult to imagine where the superstructure will give way, but strategists are still looking for a possible back door in the dilemma.
There are certain suggestive movements in that sense, among them some ambitious ones that involve the Vatican. Let’s see it in parts. In principle, China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, has just held a long meeting in Malta with Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, described by Washington as a “frank, substantial and constructive” meeting. The agenda was not indicated, but it is presumed. Immediately, the powerful official of the Beijing regime flew to Moscow for a remarkable four-day visit to the Russian capital, which will include contacts with Putin’s senior officials.
In the midst of these developments, it was learned that the Kremlin’s foreign affairs chief, the veteran Sergei Lavrov, called for an unexpected second visit to Moscow to the Italian cardinal Matteo Zuppi, “Francis’s envoy for peace in Ukraine” and cited by Vaticanologists as the one chosen by the Pope to succeed him. Lavrov’s invitation coincided with Francis’s meeting this Monday with the new Russian ambassador to the Vatican, Ivan Soltanovsky, a meeting full of smiles.
Zuppi is a pragmatic negotiator, as are the Chinese. During his first trip to Moscow, in June, he met with the Russian Minister of Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, the same person whom the International Criminal Court, two months earlier, had put on its arrest list for the kidnapping of children from Ukraine, a war crime. That visit to Russia was decided as having relative results, which is why he is interested in this new call.
The Pope, let us remember, played an important role in the thaw process that Barack Obama carried out with the island of Cuba and his communist regime. The Church operated as a kind of enormous NGO that channeled the social costs that the opening that was negotiated at that time would imply. How can that experience be emulated in any way in this conflict?
China maintains that the war is stagnant and He is concerned about the enormous power that the Atlantic Alliance gained, increasingly focused on Asia. Also the not inconsiderable possibility that Moscow will suffer a major setback on the front, which should be prevented before it can happen, NATO through.
EU wants Russia to come out with a punishment quota of this disaster to prevent the assault from being repeated and, furthermore, to create a precedent that dissipates other chapters of the restorative ambitions that cross the world. That theorem, which surely comes and goes in all these contacts, means the partial or total Russian withdrawal from the regions that he took in this war, a possibility that would open a formidable mystery about Putin’s fate.
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