The Americans gained world domination by following the Monroe Doctrine. Since the Cold War ended, the US has applied its Wolfowitz Doctrine, which outlines a policy to prevent the rise of any potential rival challenging American supremacy.
A year after the Ukraine-Russia war, things are only getting worse. After President Biden’s “unprecedented” Kyiv visit on 20 February, Vladimir Putin has charged that the war in Ukraine has been unleashed by the West and that Moscow’s attempts to end it have failed. In a combative manner, Putin declared Russia’s suspension of the New START Treaty with the US. The high-stakes geopolitical moves are likely to escalate the conflict.
Russia is not known for conceding control over its vital strategic borderlands except for the geopolitical tragedy after the Soviet collapse. Moscow, however, reconciled to the post-Cold War reality, empathized with the US after 9/11, shared intelligence on Al-Qaeda, and facilitated military bases in Central Asia for the war against terror in Afghanistan.
When the West, since 2003, started stirring up Colour Revolutions in the former republics and mechanized NATO’s expansion into Russia’s “near abroad” (Georgia and Ukraine), Putin stood up to stave off Western plans to hit the Russian heartland in the guise of promoting the “international rules-based order”, the idea Putin thought is set by people having a history of settler colonialism.
Putin saw the Western intention of perverting the Russian world and when it became “a matter of time” for Ukraine to join NATO, he decided to take action against the Ukrainian puppet regime even when Russia proposed a legal guarantee.
Putin declared 2014 as the “Year of Culture” to revive the Russian ethnic roots. Putin’s idea wasn’t defined either on the Czarist imperialist or the Soviet expansionist logic but on the belief in protecting the 1,200-year-old Russia’s Slavic civilizational identity from outside trespassers.
When the West blamed Putin for working on Stalin’s playbook of annexing Crimea, Putin justified taking the reverse path to restore Russia’s destiny as a great power. Putin thought it right to act as the protector of russkiy mir, the “Russian world” extending from Moldova’s Transdniester to eastern Ukraine. After Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk were to be followed next.
Do Putin’s actions provide lessons for other civilizational nations like India, China, and others where the West keeps on stirring up trouble by raising human rights issues to indulge in regime change activities?
Clearly, the war in Ukraine is not about restoring peace and security, but a wider geopolitical gameplay launched by the neocons to dismantle bigger nations through sanctions, regime change, and direct military actions.
Vladimir Putin has shown the way that as much even an abstract entity like the EU promotes the idea of provoking civil societies in the name of building resilient states, he can still work on the facts of strategic geography—the normative heartland, rim-land, and buffer zone theories. Effectively, everything old is now becoming new again.
But why blame only Russia? The Americans too gained world domination by following the Monroe Doctrine. Since the Cold War ended, the US has applied its Wolfowitz Doctrine which outlines a policy to prevent the rise of any potential rival challenging American supremacy. In fact, what underpins the Ukraine crisis is the declining strength of American power. The Doctrine envisages the American right to intervene and undertake pre-emptive military actions to overpower potential threats coming from a resurgent Russia or an ascendant China.
Modern Ukraine was created after 1917 by Bolshevik and Communist Russia at the expense of historic Russia. It was Nikita Khrushchev who handed over Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954.
For Moscow, it is now about upholding the fame and glory of Russia as a great power, as such its resistance against NATO expansion remains unwavering.
The difficulty for Europe is that its borders are not precise, whereas Russia enjoys a much-coveted zone of influence like a thick border. This makes the position of being in-between Central European nations, caught in intersecting spheres of influence of a traditional Russian and a modern European power difficult. While some states are reconciled to maintaining their strategic neutrality, Ukraine’s desire for complete and dual accession to NATO and the EU remains flawed.
The current discourse is an artificially imposed one. It was people like Brzezinski, who devilishly suggested that “Western establishment in Ukraine would be a strong sign of Russia ceasing to be an empire and of it becoming a Nation-State like any other”. In the long term, Ukraine can only remain a buffer but not a shield against Russia.
For now, Putin is harking back to playing the classical defence in depth to regain Russia’s lost territories. Moscow has demonstrated its willingness to go to any extent to retain its protective glacis; if indeed the West has shown less belligerence in trying to trespass upon the former Soviet space, Russia would have been more mindful of regional sensibilities.
In comparison, China follows its “Middle Kingdom” notion to define its sphere of influence. It still believes in following the ritualistic tributary system of the “core” controlling the “peripheries” through myriad forms—trade and cultural relationships. Beijing views the rest of Asia within the pale of Chinese glacis. Communist China quickly nibbled its perceived glacis—Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, the Paracels, Spratly Islands, and the South China Sea. Ladakh is the latest in its list of land to be grabbed through a slow invasive tactic.
China uses modern tools to gain both territory and market access outside. Unlike Russia, plays a slow build-up game on multiple fronts to inflict incremental losses upon its adversary. Beijing uses its faltering client North Korea as a buffer against South Korea, Japan, and the US. Similarly, Pakistan is used as a buffer against India. Under the Kuomintang regime, Chinese soldiers were encouraged to marry Vietnamese brides, hoping that their off-springs would uphold China as Vietnam’s protector. This is being experimented on elsewhere including in Central Asia now.
For India, to take up the cause of its Dharmic world will take time. The West believes that its experiment with erasing the Indian Dharmic profile through genocidal means had been accomplished. India is not yet militarily strong enough for the West to apply its Wolfowitz Doctrine to prevent its rise, but Western attempts at stirring troubles from time to time have been glaring. The billionaire-philanthropist George Soros’s alleged role in backing and funding a regime change in India is a case in point. Vladimir Putin’s quick fix military solution may not be an option, but India’s aim to achieve rapid economic growth and strengthen its military might would serve to protect its Dharmic peripheries.
P. Stobdan is a former Indian ambassador.