<nettime> Vivek Menezes: Ukraine and the Lessons of History (Dhaka Tribune)

[patrice riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:

https://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2022/03/18/ukraine-and-the-new-world-order

Ukraine and the New World Order

By Vivek Menezes, St Patrick's Day, 2022 ;-)

We have seen precisely this before, and Europe is doing it all over again

It may be a universal sentiment -- some scholars credit it as “unattributable” -- with reverberations of its wisdom in everything from Plato to the oeuvre of “Piano Man” Billy Joel.

In our contemporary reading, however, the phrase mostly refers to the two World Wars instigated in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, that wrought unimaginable destruction across the planet. Everyone was affected, and even here in the subcontinent -- which was mercifully spared the brunt -- there are locations like Kohima (*) which witnessed epic carnage of the kind no one in their right mind might want to revisit.

So difficult then, for any student of history, to watch the West tie itself in knots while hand-wringing impotently over what exactly to do after Vladimir Putin’s Russia has invaded Ukraine. We have seen precisely this before, and Europe is doing it all over again nonetheless.

In his daily video address on March 16, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Putin “a war criminal” while directly addressing the Russian people with the pointed question, “how does your blockade of Mariupol differ from the blockade of Leningrad during WWII?”

Zelenskiy’s thrust is clear -- there is no difference.

He is implying that Russia will eventually break itself apart in the face of heroic resistance, just as the Wehrmacht foundered, weakened, and retreated from Leningrad despite its all-out siege that famously extended for “two years, four months, two weeks, and five days.”

In fact, that kind of result is highly unlikely.

Either the Russians will methodically grind through Ukrainian defenses, to an inevitable military victory (which cannot possibly be delayed longer than the extent of the coming summer months). Or, it’s possible there will be a cease fire, which may be close after both sides say they have already agreed on the main elements to compel truce.

That happenstance -- which we must pray will occur as soon as possible -- will still leave major questions, each one loaded with ingredients for resumed conflict.

Paramount amongst these is the problem of Putin himself -- can he be restored to the kind of status quo that existed just a few weeks ago, as just another “normal” world leader? Can the likes of Biden -- who just recently called his counterpart “war criminal” -- afford comity after this supposed point of no return?

Even more important, but perhaps less immediate, is the nature of settlement imposed on the region. Will Russia be forced to retreat to pre-war positions, and will future generations of Ukrainians be allowed substantial freedoms to pursue their own destiny?

There are fiendishly difficult conundrums, with endlessly thorny implications. Thus, for just one example, it should not be lost on anyone that the costly settlement forced upon Germany at Versailles in 1919 directly laid the ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Whatever happens next, it’s already clear that the old world order -- inequitable, exploitative, flawed, and bloody as it was -- has been effectively demolished. We already live in another paradigm altogether.

As the highly perceptive geopolitical analyst Bruno Maçães wrote in The New Statesman earlier this week: “We now live in the middle of a great recession” where “American power is everywhere retreating, leaving behind vacuums that others strive to fill.” (**)

In Ukraine, that decline “is magnified by the incipience of European power, creating a combustible mixture, a propitious landscape for a war of worlds. [Here] the end of the American empire is taking an even grimmer form than in Afghanistan: A war of genocide whose declared goal is the extermination of Ukrainian nationhood.”

What’s next?

Martin Wolf laid out one set of scenarios in the Financial Times, starting with this summation: “A new world is being born. The hope for peaceful relations is fading. Instead, we have Russia’s war on Ukraine, threats of nuclear Armageddon, a mobilized West, an alliance of autocracies, unprecedented economic sanctions, and a huge energy and food shock. No one knows what will happen. But we do know this looks to be a disaster.”

Wolf says that after the battle Austerlitz in 1805, William Pitt the Younger said, presciently: “Roll up the map [of Europe]; it will not be needed these 10 years.”

He concludes: “Russia’s war on Ukraine has similarly transformed the map of our world. A prolonged bout of stagflation seems certain, with large potential effects on financial markets. In the long term, the emergence of two blocs with deep splits between them is likely, as is an accelerating reversal of globalization and sacrifice of business interests to geopolitics. Even nuclear war is, alas, conceivable. Pray for a miracle in Moscow. Without it, the road ahead will be long and hard.” (***)

Vivek Menezes is a writer and photographer based in Goa, India.

(*)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kohima

(**) https://www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/world-review-podcast/2022/03/why-russia-gambled-on-ukraine-with-bruno-mac%CC%A7a%CC%83es

(Free limited registration needed/ paywall)

(***) Martin Wolf in FT: paywalled

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: