Global Organisations

A three-headed dragon looms large

The world is undergoing an epic change. The European Union is about to be dimmed by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), so much so that the American tariff policy has just pushed India into Russia’s – which is not all that surprising – and China’s embraces. The last mentioned is a big event. India and China have been at loggerheads for decades, and now they are reconciling themselves against the pressure from the United States and their West in general. India and China means putting together almost three billion people. India, China and Russia have more nuclear warheads and missiles than the collective West. Why, even small North Korea has some and the nukes. The cooperation between the three main states – Russia, China and India – occupying the bulk of what is referred to as Asia along with the many smaller states that are members of the SCO is a huge political, economic and military challenge to the collective West. Washington, Paris, London and Berlin must have miscalculated heavily and overlooked what has been looming large on the political horizon for a long time. While they thought Russia would be an easy prey to be destroyed in the proxy war, they ended up facing a three-headed dragon emerging from Asia.

To think of it: China’s might has been created by the United States of America! What of the outsourcing, what of all the support that Washington would provide Beijing with just to spite the Soviet Union, the Middle Kingdom has become a superpower to be reckoned with. During the military parade occasioned by the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in the Far East and the liberation of the Middle Kingdom from the Japanese occupation, China rolled out various kinds of armament, including drones and long-range missiles. China’s President Xi Jinping emerged in a limousine from the Tiananmen – the entrance to Beijing’s Forbidden City in a uniform habitually worn by Mao Zedong, a uniform resembling the one Joseph Stalin used to wear. Thus the Chinese leader stressed the connection with the recent past, although Chairman Mao was not the one who rendered positive services to the Chinese people. Russia does not preserve the continuity with its Soviet period of the past to that extent: true, the military parades in Moscow feature soldiers in uniforms and with military standards from the Second World War, but the tomb where mummified Lenin is till kept is shielded from public view; nor does Putin or the other members of the authorities climb the tomb as was the custom in the Soviet Union from where Soviet leaders would deliver their speeches and watch the marching soldiers.

Military parades in Moscow are compelling, yet the one in Beijing trumped Moscow’s parades. The parade held in Washington to mark the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday just cannot compare to either of the aforementioned: look for yourself. (Notice the rock music accompanying the American show; also, compare the Chinese vigorous march with the American languid walk.) China showed its military might also in equipment. 

Within the framework of SCO the three leaders – Putin, Modi and Xi Jinping – conferred about political and economic topics. SCO conferences were also attended by Turkey’s President Erdoğan, while the military march was watched by Slovakia’s leader Robert Fico and Hungary’s minister for foreign affairs. So, Europe was ultimately somehow present, though not Western Europe, apart from a minor representative from Belgium. Were the representatives from the EU absent because of Putin’s presence there?

Well, Europe is crusading against Russia, and has grandiose plans of conquering China. Kaja Kallas, one-time Estonia’s prime minister, now the face of European diplomacy made no bones about it: “If you are saying that you are not able to beat, that we collectively are not able to really pressure Russia so much that it would have an effect because… then how do you say that you’re able to take on China risk. (…) My point is that if we don’t get Russia right, we don’t get China right, either.” (The interviewer tries to tone her statement down, to little effect.) 

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un

Strange that President Donald Trump failed to seize the opportunity to attend the anniversary of China’s liberation from Japan’s yoke. Just as Washington once pushed China and Russia into each other’s embraces, such a gesture on the part of the American president might have more favourably disposed the Middle Kingdom to the United States. Either Donald Trump didn’t want to go to Beijing of his own accord or he has bad advisors. The same is true of the European Union. Sadly, they could not be bothered to take part in China’s celebration. How can they then hope to develop friendly relations with the Middle Kingdom? How can then they hope to drive a wedge between China and Russia?

SCO’s membership includes India, Iran, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Russia. It was established in 2001. SCO’s member states cumulatively make up 24% of the world’s area and 42% of the world’s population. (The European Union makes up less than 2% of the world’s area, and 5.5% of the world’s population.) Russia, China, India, and Iran are concurrently members of BRICS.

Eternal tilting at windmills

On February 18, UN Secretary General António Guterres graced the world with another of his many uplifting speeches. Of the limited range of topics that are routinely broached – climate change, discrimination, the pandemic and racism – he chose to focus on the last of the mentioned. It went something like this: Ladies and gentlemen, in case you have not noticed, (which is even absurd to assume but never mind) racism plagues our world. Then António Guterres – in the Alfred Hitchcock style: first an earthquake, then the tension rises – hyporbelised this breathtaking gambit with the usual adjectives to the tune of “abhorrent”, “ugly”, and the noun “repudiation”. Racism – despite decades of reeducating the humanity and despite the Charter of the United Nations – is !everywhere! and so it will take a long time to combat it. The top representative of humanity went on to appealing to his worldwide audience that it must – without reservation, without hesitation, without qualification – reject and condemn racism which still permeates institutions, social structures and everyday life. Furthermore, António Guterres said that although racism, a repudiation of our common humanity, is deeply entrenched in centuries of colonialism and slavery and is a complex cultural phenomenon, especially because our world is letting go of the primacy of reason, tolerance and mutual respect, leaving place for – yes, of course – growing anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred (some undefined minority Christian groups have also been thrown in), intolerance and – yes, again an easy guess – xenophobia, which, again is everywhere, around the world. António Guterres coupled the above mentioned phenomena with the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the inequalities, systematic prejudice and discrimination against marginalized, racial and ethnic groups, against – surprise, surprise – gender, age, class, caste, religion, disability, sexual orientation as if we all did not know this string of adjectives by heart by now.

The solution? There you have it. António Guterres says that we must build a better world (since the dawn of history we are nothing but engaged in building a better world), forge a new social contract (is António Guterres another embodiment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?) based on – now the usual fashionable buzz words – inclusivity and sustainability; we must invest in social cohesion (obviously by) making societies more and more diverse, more and more multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural. People must be made to see the benefits of diversity rather than perceiving it as a threat.
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Turkey: the Game Changer

The deal between Ankara and Moscow has been signed and sealed and the first shipments of the S-400 air defence system have just landed on Turkish soil, at a military airbase located at the vicinity of the country’s capital. The second-largest NATO army is acquiring weapons and materiel from a state that by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is viewed as inimical.

Turkey occupies an area which is bridging Europe with Asia and neighbouring some of the war-ridden countries like Iraq and Syria in the volatile region known as the Middle East. It is also strategically important for NATO because it controls the Straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and because it outflanks Russia from the south. A NATO member since 1952 Turkey – although a Third World country – wanted to remain a loyal member of the Alliance with ever closer ties to the Western world. Not only did Ankara join its troops to the NATO but also lent its territory to the pact. The reader will have remembered that it was the American missiles deployed to Turkish territory which caused anxiety at the Kremlin and induced Nikita Khrushchev to retaliate by deploying Soviet missiles to Cuba, which led to the international conflict threatening to culminate in a third world war. The strained relations between the two superpowers were only eased when both the Soviets withdrew their missiles from the largest island in the Caribic and the Americans removed theirs from Turkey.

Turkey’s membership in the Alliance has never meant that Ankara was a patsy in Washington’s hands. It skilfully guarded its sovereignty and pursued its own interests. Thus in 1974 Turkish armed forces landed in Northern Cyprus, establishing there of a separate Turkish state and a permanent – as yet – division of the island predominantly inhabited by Greeks. Thus Ankara dared to thwart the interest of another NATO member – Greece – and Athens could do nothing about it. Turkey was strategically too important and that is why it could afford to act independently of NATO’s most important allies.

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