Neo-Imperialism and the nature of power: surveillance, Edward Snowden and democracy

The author recently wrote an article documenting the rise of surveillance in modern society, and how this coincided with the rise of the internet and the widespread use of CCTV. When the Edward Snowden revelations were revealed to the world two years ago, the extent to which the USA (and its Anglophone partners, especially the UK) were gathering masses of information across the globe was astounding. In the article mentioned above I alluded to the "public" rationale for this level of surveillance (The War On Terror etc.), but also to the - more likely - "private" reason: they do it because they can.

This is not to say that these people in government are "evil". It is more down to the simple human nature of those with their hands on the levers of power. The capability exists to know almost everything there is to know about people; therefore, not to use it would seem almost like a abrogation of government's instinct to do what it can to control events.

The modern nation-state is a creation of law. It took centuries for autocratic societies to be transformed into nation-states where those in power were held in check by an objective set of laws. Britain was one of the first nations to achieve this basic principle. The USA took this principle to (for the 18th century) its logical conclusion, by creating a state based "on laws, not men". Since then, other nations have improved this concept further. It is no surprise that the nations with the most stringent application of rule of law are also the most stable and the least corrupt. Therefore, any government that follows these principles consistently (i.e. is not a corrupt dictatorship) is bound by the law of the land in its actions. But where does surveillance fit into this?

"Spycraft" has been a feature of governments for centuries, and more sophisticated  - and intrusive - techniques were developed as the technology became available. Fast forward to the end of the Second World War. The USA and the British Empire had won the war, but now faced the threat of Soviet Russia. Thanks to a quirk of geography, many of the world's telecommunications cross the Atlantic between the USA and the UK. This meant they also had the capability to intercept a large volume of the world's telecommunications. Faced with the threat of Soviet Russia, the USA and it's English-speaking partners (The UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) created the "Five Eyes": a secret surveillance network. While those within the "Five Eyes" network worked together, all other countries' communications were effectively declared "fair game" - which included other NATO allies. All this was kept secret from the outside world, until it was cracked open by Edward Snowden.

As the adage goes "information is power". While these governments are bound by their own laws. we also have seen those laws easily modified in times of crisis and war. Freedom (of expression and privacy) and the rule of law is not permanent or set in stone once it has been created. These things can be rolled back. The 9/11 attacks and the War On Terror saw the US government and its Anglophone allies grant sweeping powers of surveillance over their own citizens, as well as others all across the globe. The "rule of law" that was meant to be there to check the excesses of government, was being bent to the breaking point. It would take a great deal of legal trickery to demonstrate that what the US government was doing did not break its own constitution. In the UK, where the "rule of law" was a more flexible construct given the lack of a written constitution, the government were able to do even more.
While terrorism was the official justification to their respective parliaments, in reality the surveillance covered everything from hoovering up the browsing habits of Europeans, to bugging the phones of European leaders. Again, for what possible purpose could this serve to the "War On Terror"?

The meaning of Neo-Imperialism

In reality, these techniques and the widespread use of spycraft on allies and enemies alike showed that the Anglophone spy agencies were really using the technology in whatever way they could, within the (hazy) constraints of the law. Governments are as fallible and as hard-wired to over-reach as the rest of us; the same can be said for companies. Like any ordinary person, given the chance the government will do whatever it thinks it can get away with.

This is the meaning of what we call "Neo-Imperialism". In the 21st century, the world is a place of a number of different centres of power, with alliances here and there, each vying for control. In such a setting, where things seem so uncertain, "information" truly is key. The irony is that the two most significant geo-political events of the last five years - the Arab Spring and its aftermath, (with the subsequent Civil War in Syria and the rise of ISIS) and the crisis in Ukraine and Russia's schism with the West - happened without the west (and the "Anglophone alliance) having a clue about what was about to happen.

An intervention in Libya is called a "failure of Neo-Imperialism", while a non-intervention in Syria and the rise of ISIS is likewise called a "failure of Neo-Imperialism". Neo-Imperialism is about using the modern instruments at the disposal of the world's most powerful governments to try and control events.
We talk about "soft power" and "hard power". The USA uses both. Under George W. Bush, "hard power" was the instrument of preference, supported by "soft power". Under Barack Obama, the emphasis seems to be reversed. The UK was recently shown to be at the top of the world table in its successful use of "soft power". Given its lack of a serious military budget, it is no surprise that the UK uses more indirect methods to get what it wants. It charms and cajoles; it submits and threatens where necessary.

The British Empire may well be a thing of the past, but Britain is still an "empire" in all but name, at least in terms of the way carries out its world affairs, as well as many of its affairs at home. While we are in the 21st century, many nations are still run in a pseudo-feudalistic way. Neo-Imperialism is really just a variation on the world politics of the late 19th and early 20th century, but with modern technology allowing for other techniques to be used for the same ends.

The first half of the 20th century saw the rise of totalitarian states in Russia and Germany. Today, the idea of such a nightmare returning seems thankfully remote. However, while few would see the use of surveillance as "authoritarianism" in the classic sense, the insidious nature of this power is what makes it so easy to ignore. Comparatively few people are truly concerned; they are not aware of it happening, as they would have been in the times of the Nazis or the Soviet Union.
Again, this demonstrates the changed nature of the state: whereas before the state wanted you to know that you were being watched, these days it is done (or was, until Edward Snowden) without public awareness.

As said before, it is easy to understand why governments do it; with the technological capability there, the temptation is too strong to resist, so excuses are created for its use. This technology may seem benign to many but, as with rule of law, these things are prone to change. Governments are masters of "threat management". With the rise of the symbiosis between government and business, accountability and oversight can quickly become lost.
This is the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has ruled the roost in the Anglosphere for the last thirty-five years.

Big Brother Is Watching You: Accepting Surveillance In Modern Society

Almost exactly two years ago, the author wrote an article discussing the strange death of privacy in the 21st century. One of the key changes to society in the last twenty years, coinciding with the rise of the "internet age", is the "surveillance society".

The UK is the most highly-watched country on the planet, according to the experts. While the USA may be seen as having a longer history in this field (thanks to the long history of conspiracy theorists), the UK is the real home of "Big Brother", in both the fictitious, and real, sense of the term.
The birth of CCTV around twenty-five years ago quickly exploded across the UK, so that the nineties were the decade that saw the "surveillance society" and cameras become ubiquitous on every street corner, private and public spaces. Improved technology made it possible; political will made it happen.

A Camera In Every Corner

The original reason for the the sudden rise of CCTV was crime prevention. Of this still is the main reason for them, and why they exist in every retail space and public area that is watchable. The ethical issues were never really discussed at a serious level; it was simply assumed by everyone to be "a good thing".
Looking at it from a rational perspective, CCTV, by definition, is a very poor form of conventional "crime prevention". For anyone with an understanding of criminology (the author has a criminology background), CCTV can never be a true resource of crime prevention; only another method of securing criminal prosecution.

The simple explanation is this: cameras record events; they do not prevent events (and crimes) from happening. They are a useful police tool because, of course, it allows the authorities to know which individuals are responsible. Indirectly, yes, they may discourage people from committing crimes if they see an increased likelihood of being caught from CCTV footage, but there is little real evidence of this being actually the case. The would-be perpetrators simply wear "hoodies", thus solving this "problem". This explains why the "hoodie" is the clothing of choice of gangs and low-level criminality over the past twenty years.

So if cameras are not, in reality effective measures of crime prevention, what are they for?

Here we come to the crux of the issue, which will be fully explained once we've looked at the other, more insidious, arm of the "surveillance society" - the internet.

Full-Spectrum Dominance and "mastering" the Internet

The birth and rise of the internet coincided with the proliferation of CCTV across the world. Originally, the internet was seen as a great liberator, allowing masses of information free at the click of a button. Of course, this fact is still true; what has changed is the governments' perception of it.

The internet is essentially an "online mirror" for human nature. You can find the very best and most enlightening aspects of human knowledge; similarly, you can find the very darkest and basest elements so of the human mind also, if you are so inclined. Governments quickly realised this, and saw how criminal networks used the internet for all manner of illegal operations. In other words, it gave criminal organisations a place to carry out their operations beyond the reach of government.

In places like the USA, the internet in the nineties started to be used by right-wing extremist groups; the type of groups that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was involved with. Doubtless, this must have terrified the life out of the FBI, as they saw how exposed they could be if the internet was left more-or-less unchecked. By 1998, with the East Africa bombings by Islamic radicals, the US government must have been even more acutely-aware of how some of these extremist organisations around the world were using the internet to better co-ordinate their activities. The internet's dark underbelly wasn't just about porn and a venue for criminal activity; it was a place full of terror.

Then 9/11 happened.

Up to this point governments in the USA and UK must have felt they were always playing the game "one step behind". Now they knew that the danger was from an unanticipated, and vastly underestimated, source. The PATRIOT act in the USA, and similar legislation in the UK, gave government the authority to more effectively "master" the internet, which it has been doing with greater and greater efficiency ever since. Year on year, as revealed by the Edward Snowden revelations, more and more data was being stored and evaluated by government.
While governments protest that the vast majority of this data - essentially the internet activity of millions of people -  is ignored even if it is automatically intercepted, the basic point is that privacy no longer really exists.

"The purpose of power is power"

Here we arrive at the crux of the issue. The purpose of government is "to govern" i.e. to control its citizens. This is the fundamental principle of why people willingly allow themselves to be governed: for the sake of collective security. Because, when it comes down to it, we're all scared.

In the modern age, in the 21st century, the common perception is that we are living in a time of unparalleled freedom. At a superficial level this may well be true: more and more people are being granted "rights" that they have never had before (e.g. the legalisation of gay marriage; the effective decriminalisation of soft drugs). People are free to express themselves in ways that were unthinkable forty years ago. Conversely, racism and base prejudice, while certainly still in existence, are no longer accepted as the norm as they were decades ago.
But a better way of understanding what's happened is this: government is happy to cede control over issues it is indifferent to. The examples raised above are all issues that government generally has little interest in directly controlling over anyway, or are issues that are too much hassle to control (the prevalence of soft drugs being a good example).

While it is willingly cedes control on what might be called "social issues", it conversely has doubled-down on security issues. This is the essence of modern, 21st century government: where government does less, but what it does do, it does with even greater, ruthless efficiency.

The 9/11 attacks and "terrorism" in general since then demonstrate that government most fears what it can't control. Unlike social issues, it cannot remain "indifferent" to terrorism and the loss of government "security", because these issues, to government, are integral to government's functioning. This explains why government can take such a hard line on "mastering" the internet and controlling its own (and others') resources, even beyond the point of rationalism. When the meaning of government is security, people in government can quickly lose a sense of perspective.

The Edward Snowden scandal was a good example of this. When these revelations exploded onto the world scene two years ago, courtesy of "The Guardian" newspaper, the US government realised it had few legal pathways to prevent publication, so instead worked with the newspaper best it could to limit the damage. The Guardian worked carefully to make sure that it complied with US law, while still publishing everything that it could.
By contrast, the UK government was in a much more knee-jerk in its reaction, encouraged by the fact that UK law gave the government far greater power to do what it liked. So after some deliberation, they came down on The Guardian like a ton of bricks, compelling the newspaper to destroy the computers holding the secret information (with government officials watching to make sure!). The irony of this act was that it was entirely futile; The Guardian had copies of the secret information in New York, which the US government had no legal powers (or the willingness) to retrieve. The UK government was seemingly making a point: we can do what we like, even if it's pointless.

So what is the purpose of the "surveillance society"?
As said earlier, governments exist because people are, at heart, scared. This then gives governments a "raison d'etre": to exist for the sake of existing. Information is power, and as the UK government's reaction to the Edward Snowden revelations showed, power is power. In the 21st century, governments have the power to "master" the internet; therefore, there is no reason not to do it. To fail to use this power would be seen (in their eyes) as an abrogation of their duty as government. Government's job is therefore also "threat management"; any act of terrorism becomes seen as an "existential" threat to those in government because they see any threat as potentially lethal to their authority. It is down this pathway that leads logically to authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, society is largely indifferent. The proliferation of the internet and advances in media technology have coincided with a change in individual perception. Some argue that the modern generation are more narcissistic than ever. As a result, they would almost welcome the technological "opportunities" that their own version of "full-spectrum dominance" gives them over the internet: they can be everywhere, all the time - while the government knows what they are doing everywhere, all the time.

This appears to be the future: citizens of the "surveillance state",  the "me generation", gleefully enjoying the superficial limelight of Big Brother. After all, if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, right?

The loss of MH17, Russia and the West's response: a parable of the times

The events leading up to the downing of flight MH17 have the appearance of something from a Hollywood disaster movie. Collating the various bits of information that are known (or strongly suspected, based on circumstantial evidence), the story seems to have run like this:

In the war zone that is eastern Ukraine, rebels boasted in late that June they had succeeded in gaining an advanced anti-aircraft "Buk" missile system from a Ukrainian military base. More recently, the pro-Russian rebels had in the past week acquired some new heavy weaponry, including anti-aircraft hardware. It has been suggested that this was sneaked across the porous border with Russia while Putin was in Brazil watching the world cup final. It is reasonable to assume that either the rebels were trained to use it, or someone trained how to use it was there with them (given what happened with flight MH17, the former still seems more likely - more on why later).
That was last weekend. In the next three days following that, the rebels succeeded in downing Ukrainian military aircraft, with a much higher success rate than had previously been possible.

From what is known so far, Thursday's flight MH17 left Amsterdam and passed through Ukrainian airspace at a lower-than-normal altitude (but above 32,000 feet), as the higher "lanes" were busy. Ukrainian airspace is the most common transit route for Europe-South-east Asia air carriers, as it is the most fuel-efficient. That being said, some airlines had already decided to take a different route due to safety concerns. Malaysia Airlines decided to take the route anyway, as did some others. However, rather than taking the normal, more southerly, route, due to the risk of thunderstorms, the plane took a more unusual, northerly route, passing directly over the war-zone of eastern Ukraine.

Fresh from the success of downing a number of Ukrainian aircraft in a matter of a few days, the circumstantial evidence (as well as the posting on social media, later deleted) suggests that the rebels' "Buk" radar saw a plane on its scope. Eager at the prospect of another "kill", someone pressed a button, without thinking too carefully to properly check the signature of the plane first. They assumed it was a Ukrainian military transport plane. It wasn't. Given the fact that the "someone" seems to have confused a civilian airliner with a military transport plane (or in haste, didn't bother to check), it would be unlikely that a fully-trained individual (i.e. Russian "expert") would make that horrific mistake.

The story above is the one that the Western media agree most easily fits the bill, and given the circumstantial evidence, this is hard to refute.

Russia's defence

On the other hand, Russia's defence (though it is looking shakier by the day) is to bring up the question of motive. The question of "motive" neatly side-steps the actual circumstantial evidence (that the missile-launch was a horrible mistake). As Russia is keen to press: who gains from this? Certainly not Russia; only Ukraine.
The Kremlin's response to the disaster has been to blame Ukraine, while the West blames Russia. Meanwhile, it is faintly absurd to see leaders from both sides talk of the need for a full independent investigation, while they both squarely accuse the other.Russia talks of a conspiracy by Ukraine (with Western involvement?) to "frame" the separatists.
Put in this way, of course Ukraine would have a motive. But there is the problem of actual evidence to support it, which Russia does not have. Russian conspiracy stories have been something of a cultural tradition going back decades, if not centuries, so this is a story that is easy to "sell" to the Russian public. Riding on a wave of nationalist irridentism, Putin is enjoying high levels of popularity. It would be hard to blame him for wanting to do the same with the downing of MH17: it's a Western conspiracy; the West is encircling Russia; Russia is continually being undermined. This talk plays well in the Russian hinterland.

Putin's choice, and the West's nightmare

In some ways, while many the West emotionally blame Putin for the shooting-down of MH17, this tragedy is as much about the choices made by the West as by Putin.

Of course, it's much easier to see the link between Putin's choice to up the stakes in the war in eastern Ukraine. The consequence of giving advanced anti-aircraft systems to people who have been seen to be psychologically-unstable and morally-vacuous, is that events like what happened to MH17 are possible, even likely. Was it only a matter of time?

The West is now the spectator to how the Russia-backed separatists operate. As has been reported, the bodies of the dead were robbed of their valuables; even their credit cards were used. This behaviour was typical in the aftermath of medieval wars - opportunists quickly came to salvage valuables from the dead. Now the West knows first-hand that such behaviour happens in the 21st century as well. As this author has said before, human nature doesn't change: medieval (or feudal) thinking exists in the modern age; we simply have modern technology to mask over it.

In some ways, it almost feels like the actions of the separatists towards the many dead Westerners from the plane crash are deliberately mocking them, and the attitude of the West in general. The remains of them dead were left in the summer heat of the fields for nearly three days before being transferred to a number of train wagons. This feels like some kind of macabre public humiliation of the West's impotence: leaving the remains of rich Westerners to be looted and left to decay like the worthless, leftover corpses from a medieval battle-field; then, having them put into a train wagon, treated almost as though they were just carcasses of meat.

For the West, such behaviour may well be horribly reminiscent of the way victims were treated back in the Second World War, and a savage reminder of the cold-hearted neighbourhood that Europe now co-exists in with Russia and its proxies. This is the nightmare that the West has brought into creation through its own bankrupt morality.

As I said before, this is partially due to the choices of the West as much as Russia. By failing to with-hold to any worthwhile principles or consistency, the West has allowed itself to appear (or become) morally vacuous. In such a situation, this only encourages others to do the same.

There was a time when America and Europe idealistically used their combined moral authority to encourage the same in others; for good or ill, that "moral authority" came to be called "liberal interventionism". There was a time when it was seen as a force for good.

That time has long passed.

What remains is a morally-vacuous world where the various "players" simply do whatever they feel they can get away with. Perhaps it was always like this, and optimists were simply deluding themselves; but the realists are now the ones who are truly in charge.

People like Vladimir Putin are supreme at being ruthless opportunists, and it is people like him who are dictating events. No-one in the West is; no-one in the West has a clue what they are doing.

A real-life "Game Of Thrones": The Multi-polar world of the 21st century

Events of the last five years have displayed the shift in the global centres of power.

Fifteen years ago, the USA was the unchallenged "superpower" (or as the French called it, "hyperpower") in the globe. By 1999, the USA had shown itself to be the world's supreme arbiter of justice, in the Kosovo war using the moral and military support of its NATO allies to bring an end to an attempted genocide and force about a change in government in Serbia (then still calling itself "Yugoslavia").

Today, the limits of America's power abroad are clear to be seen. The reign of George W. Bush displayed the amoral extent of US foreign policy to intervene and change governments in its own interests. The nadir of that was when, in 2003, post-war Iraq was ruled for a year by an American "viceroy", L.Paul Bremer III. In fact, for all his good intentions, Bremer was keen to emphasize his independence from Washington at the time; inadvertently declaring Iraq as his own personal domain. Such comments laid bare the ineptness and ignorance of American understanding of the world beyond its borders, and the lack of understanding of the places they were "intervening" in.

The Obama administration has gone to the other extreme, declaring a mostly "hands off" approach to foreign policy. The result has been an inconsistent application of that approach, in some ways similar to the foreign policy decisions made by Bill Clinton  - intervening in some cases (such as Kosovo), in a half-hearted way in others (such as Bosnia and Somalia), and sometimes not at all (such as Rwanda). Clinton's approach could be explained as a steep learning curve, from the disaster in Somalia at the start of his tenure, to the success in Kosovo at the tail end of it.
But Obama's inconsistency has more been a victim to events and the political reality of the world around him. America is no longer able to act as the "supreme arbiter of justice" as it did at the end of Clinton administration, and much of the way through the Bush administration. Nowadays, America's power has been leeched off by other rising powers, such as China and a resurgent Russia. All its actions have to be tempered by what the reaction will be from its rivals. If the USA can intervene in Libya, then why can't Russia "intervene" in Ukraine? America's inconsistent and morally-ambiguous foreign policy is now coming back to bite it where it hurts.

In the popular TV series "Game Of Thrones", the land of Westeros is the setting for the "War Of Seven Kingdoms". In many ways, the globe can be effectively carved up into seven similar spheres of influence: The USA, China, Europe (the EU), Russia, The Arab World, Latin America, and India. Like in "Game Of Thrones", each of these centres of power is competing with the others for control, using both fair means and foul.
Going through them alphabetically, these "centres of power" can be summarised like this:

The Arab World

The "Arab World" stretches from the Straights of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. An excellent article and graphic by the "Economist" summarises its current status. Historically, the Arab World hasn't been united into anything approaching a coherent political entity for nearly five hundred years. The current collection of states owe their borders due to agreements and lines on a map drawn up by Europeans over the last hundred years, much of it as a result of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, their former masters. The result is something like a squabbling group of feudalistic satraps (some of whom claim to believe in "democracy") who control varying degrees of territory, resources and population. Collectively, they belong to a loose alliance that calls itself the "Arab League". Much of the wealth in this part of the world is focused at the eastern extremity, on the oil-rich lands around the Persian Gulf.
In the years since the Arab Spring, the relative stability that occurred between these many "players" has been disturbed, and in some parts, completely destroyed. Syria and now Iraq are in a state of civil war; Libya is teetering quite close to one; Yemen likewise. Within the Arab World, different (and surprising) alliances have been formed due to the rise of Islamic extremism; the one true beneficiary of the Arab Spring.

The USA and Europe look on, trying to make sense of the confusion and fluid allegiances, and make a mess of trying to choose the "right" sort of ally (Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Qatar?). Russia looks on with interest, plotting its own allegiances with duplicitous cunning; China, like a true merchant, always follows where the money is.

China

These days, China is at its pinnacle of development and potential in world history. China has been one of the world's pre-eminent powers for the last two thousand years, the chaos and relative decline of most of 19th and 20th centuries notwithstanding.
China today is ran as a highly-organised (and efficient) hierarchical capitalist state. While the powers of the USA and Europe disapprove of its human rights record and the fact that it is not a democracy, China's internal political system tends to reward efficiency and (on the whole) punishes bad organisation and corruption. While many critics call Russia a "modern feudal state", China's hierarchy rewards efficiency above anything else; in Russia, the system rewards loyalty to the centre above anything else. As a result of this, China's population understands how to get on; a simple work ethic is rewarded. It may not look pretty to Western eyes, but it works. China's government is popular with its people for the simple fact that living standards and a Chinese person's way of life has changed beyond imagining in the last twenty years; for example, China's thriving middle class is the same size as the entire population of Europe, or the USA or the Arab World. Words like "democracy" are meaningless in such a context. China has always been a strong state, and will continue to be so.

China's attitude to the abroad seems very straightforward: what it can get out of it. Like any great power, what China looks for above all is one thing: security. Having a natural merchant's mindset, China sees security in money, trade and resources. It is for this reason that it has gained larger economic control over some the resource-heavy parts of Africa, as well as a larger stake in the energy market in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Its "String Of Pearls" policy may look like an act of aggression to Western eyes, but this tells us more about Western insecurity about the USA and Europe's relative decline. Angry rhetoric about its claims over the South and East China Seas may also be a combination of nationalism at home and territorial security of its "near abroad". In this sense, it looks somewhat comparable with Russia, but minus the psychological insecurity.

Europe (The EU)

Like the Arab World, Europe is a collection of states; the difference is that most of them sit together as part of a super-national entity that has legal and economic authority over them, called the EU. Most of the EU shares the same currency, which is effectively controlled by Germany, the EU's biggest economic power. In many ways, the modern-day EU shares the same characteristics of the former European empire, Austria-Hungary: as a multi-national super-state with a parliament full of different languages, ruled by a unaccountable and essentially autocratic government that struggles to adapt to changing circumstances.
While the individual states of the EU are all recognised as democracies (though some far from perfect), the legal authority in Brussels that rules over them and dictates law to them, is not a democratic entity in the real sense of the word. Its "government" is appointed through opaque negotiation, while the "parliament" has little real control on the executive. In essence, the various nation-states that are part of the EU have given up many of their legal powers to a centralised European autocracy.

The contradiction here is that while the many nation-states of Europe have willingly surrendered power over their internal affairs to the EU, these nation-states still have almost complete independence in foreign affairs. While this works fine for the likes of Germany, it makes smaller countries look ridiculous on the world stage when they have to balance their commitments; rather like how the original Thirteen Colonies that made up the USA after their independence all had their own foreign affairs between gaining independence in 1783, and becoming a proper federal state, in 1789.
Of course, the EU does have its own foreign policy (and foreign minister, Catherine Ashton, since 2009), but when it has tried to create a combined front (such as over Ukraine), it has not taken long for the individual states' whims to take over, or be manipulated by outside "players". Just like with the Arab League.

India

In many ways, India is the polar opposite to China. While India is the "world power" with easily the second-biggest population, it is a democracy compared to China's one-party state. The other major difference is that while China is a highly-organised, centralised state, India is a highly corrupt, disorganised state. While in China, everyone knows who is in control, in India, it often appears that no-one is in control. The culture of corruption that infiltrates all levels of the government means that it is almost impossible to get things done. While China has leapt forward economically in the last twenty years, India's pace of growth has been far more modest; and that is down to a combination of corruption and inefficiency. While India's middle class has been growing in an impressive manner, without reforms in the basics of how the state is governed, this is simply a detail.

The talk of India becoming one of the "big players" on the world stage (as the USA would like to see) still looks like a far-off pipe-dream. There's being a democracy, and then there's "democracy" that paralyzes the decision-making process. This, combined with corruption and inefficiency, is what is keeping India on the lower rankings of the "players" on the world stage.
This compares to, say, Turkey: a nation with a population many times smaller than India, but has an efficiently-organised economy and a very well-structured government agenda that has allowed Turkey far greater influence with other (bigger) world powers than would have been thought possible.
India's "foreign policy", if it can be seriously called that, seems an incoherent tangle of ideas. Different politicians from the main parties have contradictory ideas about the future direction of the country; without a coherent sense of purpose, India will be going nowhere quickly, and will be prey to the designs of other, more powerful, rivals.

Latin America

Within Latin America (the American continent south of the Rio Grande), Brazil is by far the biggest power. Brazil's rise in the past ten years has been impressive, and has been helped with its growing energy market. Like India, Latin America is a "rising power", not a "risen power" like China, or to a much lesser extent, Russia. The main advantage that LatAm (primarily a result of Brazil's success, and to a lesser extent, Mexico's economic growth) has over India is that LatAm's foundations are firmer.
Brazil as the largest power in the region has recently started to tap into its potential: using its growing oil sector, and wealth, it has begun to build its economic independence on assertive foreign relations. The USA once considered LatAm to be its backyard, and historically claimed rights to the Western hemisphere. That changed with the more assertive Socialist government of "Lula" DaSilva a decade ago, and has continued with his successor, Dilma Rousseff.

This realignment of LatAm relations (essentially an assertion of independence) coincided with the first years of the Bush administration. A rising China was seen as a useful partner, LatAm welcomed China's hands-off approach, and a new economic alliance was born. By the end of the decade - and coinciding with the financial crisis - Brazil's oil independence meant that it had also become more assertive. This meant that Brazil became one of China's main rivals for influence and resources in sub-Saharan Africa.
With Europe consumed with its own economic problems, and the new Obama administration taking a more hands-off approach to some areas of foreign relations, much of Africa's resources were effectively up for grabs. Some African nations looked to Brazil as a more "European-like" partner to deal with, with the advantage of being geographically closer than Europe itself or China.
In other areas, LatAm's foreign policy has generally been to go against whatever the USA (or Europe) were doing. This explains the economic closeness to China, as well as healthy relations with Russia. In a primitive sense, some voices in the West would see LatAm as going from being on the side of the "good guys" to that of the "bad guys".

Russia

The author has spoken before about Russia's place in the world: its mentality is due to a combination of geography and history. It has been called a "modern-day feudal state" by some (although that term can be used about many places in the world). Historically, it has always been a "resource exporter": a hundred years ago and more, it was a grain exporter; now it is an oil and gas exporter. In many ways, the Kremlin is one of the archetypal "courts" of world power, as it has been for centuries. The fact that the current resident is not a "tsar" but there by popular will is a historical detail.
Russia has always been a country needed to be ruled by will-power. Its greatest time of weakness, in the late 16th and early 17th century (called the "Time Of Troubles"), was when the country was overrun by foreign powers, eventually leading to the rise of the Romanov family, who ruled the empire for the next three hundred years. The 1990s are seen by contemporary Russians in something of a similar light: a time of weakness and anarchy. Vladimir Putin changed all that.

Russia's foreign policy has always been to defend its interests in whatever way it can: if it means siding with butchers, so be it. Is the USA so very different, in spite of its claim to the highest motives? From Chechnya to Syria, Russia's interests are the Kremlin's interests, and vice versa.
Russia's historic antipathy towards the USA, and pragmatism elsewhere, have meant that Russia has made allies of China and Latin America, while following a policy of divide-and-rule in the Arab World and Europe. This has left the USA at perhaps its weakest moment in foreign relations in decades, perhaps since the start of the Second World War.

The USA

The USA's geo-political situation is well-known, as summarised at the start of the article. The USA's internal situation is akin to being divided between two factions (red and blue), managed by an kleptocratic elite - calling the USA a properly-functioning democracy is a bad joke. While productive and rich, the "empire" is going through a period of introspection, not seen since before the Second World War. Tired after fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for thirteen years, the American people now see that war abroad creates more problems than solutions. As I write, Iraq is effectively divided in three by sectarian and ethnic divisions, and Afghanistan looks like it may go the same way, de facto divided into a north and south along ethnic lines after a disputed presidential election. Karzai was the "strongman" that held the US-occupied country together; with him gone, the motivation to stay together becomes tenuous.
This would be the nightmare scenario for American foreign policy makers and military planners, with so much blood and treasure poured into a bottomless pit of chaos.

To be fair, I have omitted Japan, which is a huge oversight considering its economic might (if negligible military might). Somehow, Japan appears to carry less obvious geo-political influence over its neighbours than, say, Germany has over the rest of Europe. This has more to do with Japan's reliance on the USA as a military ally, lending itself to being a "pygmy" on the military round-table. Even in this globalised world of economics, military spending and prestige count for a lot. And while Germany's military spending is also modest, it has a lot more economic muscle it can leverage when it needs to; with huge China facing it across the sea, Japan's economic power can only be compared in respects to its neighbourhood. The behemoth of China dwarfs even the advanced economy of Japan.

These are the "players" in the game of global power. Right now, things bear a worrying similarity to things a hundred years ago, when Europe was divided into a variety of alliances.

More specifically, the Middle East looks like it has the most spontaneous likelihood to explode into a regional war. And no-one can predict where that could lead...

The nature of power: from Feudalism to 21st century Capitalism

The word "feudalism" evokes images of slavery: medieval serfdom, peasants bound to serve a class of landed gentry. By definition, feudalism was a form of slavery. In the modern world, "feudalism" is considered as dead as the age of knights that is associated with it. But perceptions can be misleading.

Feudalism was mainly concerned with two things: property, and freedom of movement. As land was considered property, so were the people who tilled the land of the person who owned the land. These "serfs", or slaves in other words, were bound to the landowner, and any attempts by serfs to flee their fate could be punishable by death.

The first part of the world that began to change this system was Europe, with the growth of the professional merchant class, skilled professions that allowed individuals freedom of property, movement and so on. The Republic Of Venice was an early medieval example of this. Gradually, more and more European states moved in this direction: the last major European power to formally abolish serfdom was the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century; over in North America around the same time, the southern states of the USA fought for secession from the USA in order to continue their own form of serfdom on African slaves and their descendants. They lost.

A land of milk and honey?

Karl Marx famously wrote about the path of feudalism to Capitalism, in the end equating the "satanic mills" to a form of "industrialised serfdom".

Industrialisation brought a transformation of society to those it affected. The serfdom of the land was transformed into the subservience to the factory. Proponents of Capitalism would argue that this was an inevitable stage of the process of mankind's advancement, and unless people wish to live in tree-houses and tilling the fields in an agrarian commune, this logic is hard to refute.

In a more basic way, feudalism was about power, who controlled what, and how. And this is where the argument for feudalism's death becomes more complicated.

In the 21st century, in 2014, who holds power, and how? In a great many cases, the way that nation-states are ran is really not so very different from five hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or more. Certainly, technology has changed life in many ways beyond recognition, but human nature is unchanged, and the nature of power is fundamentally unchanged also. This is a point that Jonathon Swift explained very well in the last part of his famous novel, "Gulliver's Travels", all the way back in the early 18th century. The TV series "Game Of Thrones" is famous across the world, but one of the main reasons is that human nature and the use of power is represented by the characters in a very accessible way for the viewer. In other words, medieval politics and power are fundamentally no different from the modern-day.

A handful of examples can easily express the point.

The UK is held up as an exemplar for the rest of the world to follow. As the mother of modern democracy (apologies, Greece...), the rule of law, and a sensible balance of power, an education system that is the envy of the world, and so on. And yet, this "exemplar" is one of the most feudalistic modern states in the developed world.
While the UK has no "serfs", its "citizens" are still legally subjects to the crown. The UK has no constitution. The British crown is one of the biggest landowners in the world. While the British royal family may well seem harmless enough, one half of the electoral system (The House Of Lords) still consists of individuals who are either from centuries-old landed gentry (i.e. landowners), or are there by the favour of a bygone government. The House Of Lords has few contemporaries in the developed world as a temple for feudal values. The British establishment also propagates itself through the UK's education system, which is one of the best methods in the developed world for maintaining the untouchable position of Britain's peculiarly-modern form of feudalism. This system has done wonders for preserving the elite, while the lot of the average Briton has suffered, especially since the financial crisis. Needless to say, like any feudalistic institutions, this system isn't even very efficient; it is simply is very good at doing the best for those in positions of power.

Aside from the UK, many of the most developed countries in Europe are still monarchies: in Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark and Norway; the Low Countries are all monarchies; as is Spain. Yes, they are "constitutional monarchies", but while the power they wield is only theoretical, it tells us more about the psychology of the people themselves: they like having a monarch. The interesting question is "why?", and this tells us that while many people in the modern world are far more educated (and the world they live in technologically-advanced) they still want to believe in fairy tales.

Modern-day feudalism?

Crossing the pond, many political commentators like comparing the modern-day USA to the Roman Empire of the past. The "Land Of The Free". Few objective economists would argue that the USA is the most unequal nation-state in the developed world, and that is a result of the way it is managed. While health care is considered a human right in the rest of the developed world, in the USA it is considered something you can only have if you can afford it. While Obama's controversial health care reform has claimed to have helped (a little), any objective observer would look at the private health care system as a grossly-inefficient and amoral answer to the world superpower's health problems.

But the American model of running the country was never meant to be "fair": it was meant to be "laissez-faire". Ayn Rand was the most famous proponent of modern-day neoliberalism, which idolised the gains of the rich as a way to motivate the poor. The rich in the USA, in the last thirty years have reached a level of wealth so far from that of the average person that they may as well be considered aristocracy in their own right. No-one in the know seriously doubts that the elite of America are the ones who decide how the game of power is played every four years for the White House. The Koch brothers, who funded the "Tea Party", are simply the newest (and most polarising) set of characters on the scene.
While the USA rid itself of legal slavery, it advocated an economic model that created a new riddle: a slave may be fed and housed, but has no freedom; a freed slave has freedom, but no house nor food to eat. Since the the USA became an imperial power at the turn of the 20th century, it has been exporting this riddle across the world, spreading its own "riddle of freedom".

The USA's "riddle of freedom" was taken in by the UK under the tutelage of Margeret Thatcher, which is these days known as the "Anglo-Saxon Model" by some, and has been implemented ruthlessly by the Conservative government since 2010 under the excuse that "there is no alternative"(!). Since 1979, the UK has been ran like a multinational company, if symbolically headed by a feudalistic establishment: the asset-stripping mentality has turned the UK into a vulture market even for foreign governments.

Since 2008, in the Euro-zone, it's "Club Med" that are being treated to a similar kind of treatment. As Germany holds the purse-strings, it has the right to dictate the economic affairs of Southern Europe. It has already toppled governments in Greece and Italy to do so. While in the latter case, the sitting premier (Silvio Berlusconi) was hardly going to be missed by most Italians, it is hard to deny that the European Union itself is an unaccountable bureaucratic behemoth (not unlike empires of old) that seems to grow with ambition year-on-year. The EU's ambition has been laid bare with its efforts to bring Ukraine into the fold.

At the end of the Cold War, the "Anglo-Saxon Model" was exported to Russia and the former Communist bloc.
Some commentators have described Putin's Russia as a "modern feudal state", or worse. But in reality it was always likely that once the Soviet Union was gone, Russians would revert back to their old way of thinking. Modern Russia and the battle for who controlled the Kremlin in the 1990s became another version of the "Game Of Thrones" seen on TV. Putin was simply in the right place at the right time, and was the most effective player of that oldest of games: power. "Capitalism" in Russia simply became a battle for who controlled the most property, and who controlled the most had the most leverage (or so he hoped). The Kremlin is run as the supreme "court" that it has been for centuries, ruling the largest realm in the globe. Technology is just a detail; all freedom is relative.

A number of other post-Soviet states are also ran as "modern feudal states" in the same manner, with ruling families or oligarchies; come to think of it, almost all the the Middle East is run in such a manner. Given the blessing of oil, and what does an emir need to keep power over his modern-day feudal state than sprinkling a little of his wealth around? Give enough of the population enough money to afford an "iPad" or an off-road vehicle for the desert, and what would any person care about "democracy"? China is living proof of that logic, and both it and Russia are the two biggest countries in the world, by population and area respectively. The USA's dominance looks transient compared to the many centuries that these two states have thrived.

The third world (e.g. most of Africa) is hopelessly corrupt, inefficient and sunk deep in poverty. Investment by aid charities will not change that. Some say you get the government you deserve. But you cannot change human nature, and for all the technological advances made since the time of "real" feudalism, some people still want to live in a "real" feudal society (with "wifi", of course!). The establishment of a trans-national "caliphate" in the heart of the Middle East by the Islamic extremists of ISIS (regardless of how long it lasts) is a very definitive endorsement of that view. Feudalism and power struggles will be around in one form or another as long as people have a feudal mentality.

And that doesn't look like it will disappear very soon.

American foreign policy, the Ukraine Crisis and ISIS in Iraq: is nihilism the "new normal"?

Nature abhors a vacuum.

If you look through periods of history over the last two thousand years or so, every so often you see periods of time when the predominant power in a region loses its influence. This may be through internal dissent or strife, economic overstretch, or a lack of will to govern.

Historians often call these blips in history "periods of transition", between one state of affairs and another. This is when the "dialectic" of the time is in dispute, before another narrative appears that fuses together the old and the new.

A short history of nearly everything

Pretensions aside, history is full of these examples. Alexander The Great conquered the Middle East and beyond due as much to the relative weakness of other powers at the time as his own organisation. His Greek-speaking empire fragmented after his death, whose division of power bases lead in time to the rise of Rome.
Rome then became a victim of its own success, when it was financially overwhelmed by the inefficiency of its state and the many tribes that occupied the empire from the Eurasian steppe; what we call today "imperial over-stretch".
The result of this was the so-called "Dark Ages", when the remainder of the Roman Empire in the East morphed in the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, while the Western half of Europe became a patchwork of weak and fluid national entities until the largest and most stable part became, in time, the Holy Roman Empire.

The weakness and fluidity of the "Dark Ages" was one factor for the rise of Islam, which was fortunate to have a good sense of timing. Islam conquered the Middle East, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula due to the relative weakness of the other main powers at that time: in the Middle East and North Africa, the Byzantines were weakened from fighting a long war with Persia. The Muslim Arabs took full advantage. Pushing west, the Arabs crossed into Iberia and pushed north, over the Pyrenees until they were pushed back in the middle of France, and left to consolidate their position in modern-day Spin for the next five hundred years.

Skipping forward, the spread of the Mongol Empire (more about them here) was also due to key factors such as the relative weakness of their rivals at the time. The Mongols quickly overwhelmed the embryonic Russian state, and got as far as Eastern and Central Europe, devastating half of the continent and wiping out the armies put before it. Only the untimely (but for Europe, fortunate) death of the Mongol khan put a halt to the advance. With the death of the khan, the Mongols became pre-occupied with the battle for succession, and Europe was never again a serious priority for them. Instead, Asia and the Middle East bore the brunt of their attention.

In time, the Mongols also lost their pre-eminence. The story of the next five hundred years, from the end of Mongol rule in China towards the end of the 14th century (which coincided with the renaissance in Europe) to the end of the 19th century (which coincided with the rise of the modern democratic state), we see a common pattern. We see the rise and fall of imperial powers like waves in the sea. And we see the rise of new powers happening on the back of the weakness of others.

Stepping into the breach

When the influence of an imperial power (or state actor, to use a modern term) recedes like a wave, it leaves an empty space; a stretch of virgin beach, if you like, ready to be inhabited by a new set of occupiers. In 2014, the two events of the year so far have been the Ukraine Crisis and, more recently, the sudden rise to power of ISIS in the Middle East, an al-Qaeda-inspired extremist force.

The factors that led to the Ukraine Crisis include, as always, the relative weakness of the imperial actor, which is exploited by another (opportunistic) power. In the case of Ukraine, the "imperial actor" was jointly the USA and the EU; on an economic level the EU was driving for Ukraine to enter under its wing, while on a political and diplomatic level, the USA saw a chance to bring Ukraine closer to its orbit.
The problem here was the weakness of both the EU and the USA's position. They had misread (and underestimated) Russia's position (and therefore response). Due to the weakness of both the EU and the USA, they failed to back up their rhetoric with firm actions; relying on the power of threats alone, their actions turned out to be predictably toothless. Ukraine now has a weak central government supported by a toothless West.

It is the weakness of the EU and the USA that is responsible for Russia's response. Putin correctly calculated that the the West lacked the collective will to follow up its words with actions. The West is now at least partly to blame for encouraging the Ukrainian opposition into a position that requires a forceful Russian response.
Now Ukraine is divided in almost the same manner as the USA was back its Civil War, with a separatist region fighting against a government of the north. In this narrative, Kiev is the new Washington, with Donetsk acting as the "southern capital". By a ironic twist of fate, the southern separatists even have a flag that closely resembles that of the old Confederacy, and call their unified "state" the "Confederation of New Russia". This "CNR" is bankrolled and militarily supported by Russia, in the same way that France supported the Americans during the War of Independence. The old Confederacy never got the real support from Britain or others that would have given it a fighting chance during the civil war; the modern-day CNR, however, stands a much better chance of frustrating and wearing-down Kiev through sheer attrition and a mounting cost in blood and treasure, with the support of Russia. Kiev cannot afford a war in the long-term. Russia can.

In the war-zone of east Ukraine, it is the drip-drip of military casualties that may wear down Kiev over time. Moscow's support for the separatists is covert, but consistent. Moscow looks unlikely to back down from its covert military support as long as the West is weak. In the psychology of the Kremlin, if Ukraine is weak, then the West is weak. This gives Moscow all the reason to continue doing what it is doing; the weakness of Kiev demonstrates the strength of Moscow, with Russia stepping into the breach left behind by the West's geo-political weakness.

The army of Islam

The Arab Spring has had many consequences. The most worrying (yet predictable) is the increased power that Islamic extremism has across the the Middle East. The dictatorial states of the Middle East are generally awful, but brought (imposed) stability to the region, to the benefit of the West. In many cases, most of all Syria and Iraq, that stability is effectively destroyed.

The Syrian Civil War is now more than three years old. Few people predicted it would last this long, including this writer. There is now a kind of "unstable stability" with Syria, with the government controlling roughly the south, centre and the west, the pro-Western Sunni rebels controlling the north, and the Sunni Muslim extremists controlling the east. The war is now bogged-down into a stalemate of attrition, with neither side looking close to making any significant advances for the foreseeable future.

Except for the extremists. ISIS, an al-Qaeda-inspired militia, has now evolved from being a "mere" terror group into something like an army. The breakneck speed with which they took control of Mosul, Iraq's biggest city in the north, and a swathe of Sunni-inhabited territory across northern and western Iraq, seemed to come out of the blue. As a result of this, ISIS now control a "de facto" state encompassing eastern Syria, and northern and western Iraq, straddling both sides of the Euphrates valley for hundreds of miles.
One of the most stunning successes was looting Mosul's banks after they took the city; in what must surely be the biggest collective bank robbery in history, ISIS wiped Mosul's banks clean of half a billion dollars in gold and money.
This event compares historically with how the Bolsheviks financed their agenda with bank robberies and other means in the years before they came to power; the most famous was the 1907 Tbilisi robbery in broad daylight in what is now Freedom Square, orchestrated by Stalin (more on his early years here). That robbery was the largest ever at that time.

Their success in Iraq is due to the weakness of support for the government in Sunni-inhabited areas of Iraq. The USA military left Iraq more than two years ago, to be defended by an army comprised of Shias, for the government comprised of Shias. While Kurds more-or-less run their own affairs in their own territory in the north, the Sunni are left powerless, and at the whim of the Shia-led government. ISIS has now stepped into this breach, with evidence that former Baathist officers had done some kind of deal with ISIS, and may also account for the swelling of ISIS's ranks in Iraq. This would also explain why there was no resistance to ISIS taking control of many Sunni-inhabited cities. In other words, the Sunnis of Iraq now have an army of their own to match the "government" Shia army, and the Kurdish peshmergas.
The ingredients are all there for a full-blown civil war like in Syria.

Where does this leave American foreign policy? 

Obama's strategy after the reign of George W Bush had been to repair diplomacy and restore America's reputation as a "peacemaker" rather than a warmonger.
Ignoring the ratcheting-up of the "drone wars" under Obama's watch, it's hard for other "state actors" to ignore the impression that America has now become more consumed by internal politics and introspection (given the rise of The Tea Party - see here and here), and that Obama sees the USA's relative decline as inevitable given the rise of China.

Putting this into consideration, the result is a moral "free-for-all". The UN has become an open joke among the more belligerent powers of the world, to be used as a theatre more than a diplomatic space. With the relative isolationism of the USA under Obama's watch (and likely to continue under his successor, regardless of which party they are from), the world resembles those periods of transition in history gone by, where other powers race to fill in the space left behind by the receding imperial power.

On the evidence so far, Russia, China and Islamic extremists seem to be the beneficiaries of this.

The Ukraine Crisis: Crimea's referendum, Putin's power-play, and Russian irridentism

The Crimean "referendum" has been damned in the West as a sham, and its merger with Russia as nothing more than a military annexation, but it's clear that the West has been out-foxed by Vladimir Putin, yet again.

I've described in a previous article about Putin's perspective on the "revolution" in Kiev. In simple terms, "regaining" Crimea was opportunism gained from the position of the new and weak Ukrainian government. The West supported a "coup" against Putin's ally, Yanukovich, so Putin then supported a parliamentary coup in Crimea a few days afterwards. Crimea's new prime minister, Sergei Aksyunov, prior to the events in Kiev, was a non-entity in Crimea, with a history as a former gangster and smuggler in "Transdnistria", the internationally-unrecognised (pro-Russian) statelet on the eastern side of the Dniestr in Moldova, along Ukraine's western border; after unidentified armed men took control of Crimea's parliament, he was nominated as the new prime minister, and promptly declared Crimea's unilateral independence, to be confirmed in a referendum later on. In other words, Crimea has become the latest appendage of what has been called a "Mafia State", appropriately ran by a former gangster.

The Ukrainian game

Russia's behaviour since the new interim government was established in Kiev shows a consistent pattern: provocation, propaganda and psychological terror. This follows the same behaviour that led to the Georgia war in 2008; Russia provoking, Georgia rising to the bait, only to be hammered, leaving Putin's gambit successful. The 2008 war left Georgia's semi-detached regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia permanently out of their grasp and firmly in Russia's control, even if not recognised by the rest of the world.

Putin's view of the government in Kiev is both ambivalent and mocking. He is ambivalent due to the worrying precedent that the "revolution" represents to his control over Russia, and the real concern he has that it could spread to Moscow.
To that end, he treats the interim government as though it doesn't really exist, using the language of legitimacy and the fear of fascism to breed anti-Ukrainian propaganda in the Russophone sphere. The Russian media is full of exaggerated coverage of violence in the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, and the "provocative" behaviour and words of the new Kiev government.

At the same time, Russia's acts appear as everything short of full-on war: Ukraine is Putin's psychological game on a grand scale; "prodding" Ukraine's military (like with Georgia's in 2008) time and time again, using a wide variety of methods, to see if they will react, and therefore justify war; creating an atmosphere of fear and anticipation in Ukraine through military manoeuvres, provoking Ukraine's government to mobilise its forces, obligating Russia to do the same, and bring the situation closer to war; instigating violence in the east and south of Ukraine, to display the impotence of the Kiev government in controlling its own people, while at the same time blaming Kiev for the violence.

Putin is the puppet-master in this psychological power-play, manipulating events, toying with Kiev's government, while at the same time gaining adulation at home. And that doesn't even begin to deal with Putin's play with the West, as the master chess player, as well as an expert poker player of the West's impotence.

The return of the irridentism menace

I've compared these events to those of 1914 before. Politicians often prefer to play events according to the last war, which is why Western comparisons to a "new Cold War" are understandable, if inaccurate. Similarly, wilder comparisons of Putin's behaviour to that of Hitler are also far off the mark.

While some of Putin's tactics might resemble those last used by the Soviet Union, and why Putin's behaviour might seem similar to the cold-blooded fanaticism of Hitler, Putin's motivations seem more similar to those of Serbian nationalists that justified the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in late June, 1914. Serbian nationalists in the early twentieth century were obsessed with the "restoration" of Serb lands to the Serbian state. These people said that wherever there were Serbs, that was Serbia; borders and other ethnicities were irrelevant. Many in the Kremlin seem to have the same view about Russians.
In this way, Russia in 2014 is far similar to Russia in 1914: irridentism fuels the Kremlin's "near abroad" strategy. Whether this is a means to an end - stability and power throughout the Russian-speaking world, and an effective restoration of the Russian Empire - or a genuine cultural belief, is immaterial. The evidence suggests that Putin's interest in Russian irridentism is simply one of cynical convenience and opportunism: a means to project power at home by increasing it abroad.

The cultural clock is turning back to a hundred years ago. Serb nationalists are in Crimea, projecting their irridentist faith just like in 1914. At the same time, now Poland has rediscovered its historical (Catholic) links to Lithuania and Ukraine, by planning a joint military brigade of the three countries forces (against Russia). This last development is the most worrying for the West. As I mentioned in a previous article:

"While the rest of Europe and America may dismiss some of their fears as paranoia, the fact that there are a large number of East European countries in NATO means that the number of variables increases accordingly. If Russia decided to invade Ukraine, it is unclear what the reaction of Eastern Europe (especially Poland) would be; history and emotion are two very powerful motivations that can make governments and statesmen do irrational things"

It was always the reactions of the Eastern European countries that would be most likely to drag the rest of NATO into the ultimate nightmare confrontation with Russia. A similar point can be made about Turkey, and its cultural and historical ties to the Crimean Tatars.

No, this is no "new Cold War": it's potentially much more serious than that. To learn more about the history, it's better to look back to the continental situation one hundred years ago, or that during the many European wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Looking around the world, China is an acquiescent (if awkward) companion to Russia's world view; India's role has been to firmly sit on the fence. While Europe and the USA appear united, no-one is sure how long that will last if (or more accurately, when) their sanctions on Russia are returned in kind. Meanwhile, centuries of historical forces are returning to the European theatre, with no-one having any idea where things will lead; we may all have modern technology, but we're are as infallible and complacent as a hundred years ago.

All it needs is a spark.

(Update, Tuesday, 18 March

Vladimir Putin gave a speech to grant Crimea into Russian rule proper, using this as another opportunity to emphasize his angle on events, the "legitimacy" of Crimean independence, using Western precedents as in previous speeches, while calling into question the legitimacy of the Kiev government and his concerns at the "instability" in Ukraine towards Russian speakers; at the same time, he makes claims of Russia's non-aggression while simultaneously questioning the stance of Kiev.
With exquisite timing, shortly after the conclusion of this speech and the formal inclusion of Crimea into Russia, Russian troops storm a Ukrainian base in Crimea, resulting in shots being fired, and a soldier killed. Russia claims that the victim was one of Crimea's "self-defence forces", while Ukraine says it was a Ukrainian serviceman shot by the Russians.

Is this the spark to the next "act" of Putin's power-play?

Also, I mentioned in the above article about the planned joint brigade of Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, which would doubtlessly be seen by the Kremlin as a provocation, and a method of informally including Ukraine into NATO's orbit. This is an example of NATO being callously and dangerously used as a vehicle for centuries-old historical issues, as western Ukraine belonged to Poland-Lithuania until the late 18th century; something I alluded to previously (see the last couple of paragraphs in the linked article).

Turkey is similarly using historical and emotional links to Crimea's Tatars, as Erdogan is reported to today have threatened Putin with closing the Turkish straights to Russia if violence against Tatars escalates. Such an act could only be considered tantamount to war by Putin if carried out.
Poland and Turkey are showing themselves to be the "weak points" in NATO in regards to Russia. Like in 1914, it was the Balkans that provided the spark to a European war; it is Poland and Turkey's reaction to Russia's actions in Crimea and Ukraine that could provide a domino effect that drags in all of NATO.)

The Ukraine Crisis: Understanding Europe's "proxy battleground"

Although the "Ukraine Crisis" cannot be called a "war" in the sense of being as a "shooting war", in almost every other manner, it is a war.

Russia has been using "war" strategies against Ukraine for ten days already: surrounding Ukrainian bases and holding their soldiers effectively hostage in their own bases; attempts to storm Ukrainian bases and ships in Crimea have been neutered by the Ukrainian blockading themselves in and preventing Russian soldiers from the chance of boarding their ships; even more aggressively "war-like" tactics have included blockading Sevastopol's harbour that the Russian Black Sea fleet share with Ukraine's naval headquarters; another Ukrainian naval base in an inlet elsewhere in Crimea has been blockaded even more aggressively, by scuttling mothballed Russian ships in the bay, trapping those Ukrainian naval ships inside the bay. Shots have been fired at a Ukrainian military observation plane passing by the "border" between Crimea and Ukraine proper.
In the meantime, Russia has been steadily building up its forces in Crimea. For what purpose? They already have had effective military control of the peninsula for a week. Are they preparing for the next part of the campaign?

Europe's chessboard

With the status of Crimea now effectively settled by a Russian fait accompli, Putin's "chess game" enters its next phase. As one business insider put it last week, while Russia may have Crimea, the rest of Ukraine is still very much "in play". This revealing expression tells you all you need to know about the maturity and mentality of some the European and American "players" involved in Ukraine's future.

The path that led to this current crisis was begun back in November last year. The EU offered Yanukovich a deal that was very much "take it or leave it"; or more exactly, Ukraine was squeezed between a rock and a hard place: to side with Europe or with Russia. Unwilling to spurn his Russia ally, Yanukovich turned down the EU and took the politically "safer" option of a sweetened deal from the Kremlin. It was then that "Euromaidan" movement began, and a three-month long campaign that involved right-wing fascists led to shootings and Yanukovich's flight to Russia. The West had won, or so it seemed.

Using the chessboard analogy of Europe versus Russia, the "Ukrainian revolution" was a case of "knight takes bishop". Russia reacted almost at once; after initially appearing to retreat, the Crimea annexation was taking away a highly-prized "chess piece" of Ukraine's that was deep in Russia's "half" of the board. The Russian "knight" takes the Ukrainian "rook". The Kiev government's position still looks shaky and vulnerable, while Russia has a more dominant position, and looks to assess its next move.

Both Europe and Russia appear to be moving their pieces around the "Ukrainian chessboard", but there seems little real room for manoeuvre: for both sides there is a lot at stake. Europe has invested a lot of time and energy into the current situation in Ukraine, while Russia cannot afford to "lose" the country to Europe. The situation in Ukraine looks destined to be either a stalemate where both sides agree they cannot "win" decisively and reach some kind of face-saving agreement, or Russia decides to go for the "nuclear" option (i.e. invades Ukraine proper), and then all bets are off. But whatever the outcome will be, it will not be a simple one; Europe has opened a can of worms that could have far-reaching consequences.

The EU's drive to the east brought it inevitably into Russia's "near abroad", and to the current situation where Europe finds itself deep into Russia's "side" of the "chess board". Europe can hardly be surprised at Russia's reaction to its conspicuous flaunting of its "wares" to Ukraine. A temporary respite seems to have occurred, as both Europe and Russia wait and see what the effects of the Crimea "referendum" on 16 March will be. After that date, things could get very messy.
Whatever apparent respite there is now, may only be temporary, and entirely illusory: the players are still moving their pieces on both sides, and tensions below the surface are as high as they have been. There are reports of violence in the east of Ukraine, strongly promoted by the Russian foreign ministry; very convenient for Russia to use these events as a justification to enter Ukraine proper for the sake of restoring order. Last week, Russia changed the law to make it much easier for any Russian-speaking person to get Russian citizenship. The equivalent of this would be if the USA made it very easy for any native English-speaker to get US citizenship, for the purposes of extending its "soft power".

No doubt, the Kremlin has a longer-term aim in mind here; less the restoration of the Soviet Union and a "new Cold War "(there are no Communist ideologues in the Kremlin), but the the restoration of the "glory" of Russia, and dominance over the regions once controlled by the former Russian Empire. Accelerating the path to citizenship for people across Russia's "near abroad" creates the rationale for coming to the aide of any of its aggrieved citizens in neighbouring countries, and changing "soft power" to "hard power".

A crisis of complacency

I've written before about the parallels to the current crisis and that which followed the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June, 1914.
While no-one in the West is talking about war with Russia if they invade Ukraine, it should be remembered that neither was anyone talking about a general European war in the immediate aftermath of the events in Sarajevo.

What is odder is that while the rhetoric of the West is far from bellicose, its actions seen from a Russian perspective look highly-threatening, and yet the West cannot see that. Talk of sanctions is one thing; movements of NATO's airborne assets to close to the Russian border is quite another. Similarly, while the West's rhetoric towards Ukraine has been strongly supportive of the new government in Kiev; the danger here is that the inexperienced (and politically-immature) government reads phrases as "unconditional" Western backing as a green light for Kiev to start a military campaign against Moscow. In the same way, Moscow may also (more correctly) interpret such Western talk as nothing but words, giving Moscow the tacit assurance that any military action in Ukraine will meet with only diplomatic reactions.

In this sense, we're very, very far from out of the woods yet, even if the story seems to be dropping off the leading headlines of Western media due to the impression of a hiatus in the crisis. Going back to 1914, it's worth remembering that it was a month before Austria reacted by declaring war on Serbia due to its indirect involvement in the assassination. It was another ten days after that before all the major European powers were militarily involved. The "July Crisis" of 1914 that led to the Great War took nearly six weeks to reach the point of no return; it was more than three weeks before Austria even sent an ultimatum to Serbia.

This "crisis" has only really existed for two and a half weeks; two weeks ago was when Yanukovich first fled Ukraine and the opposition took the initial steps to try and form a government. While no-one it the West is even contemplating "war", there are also a lot of variables to factor in; possibly even more than in the initial crisis in that summer of 1914.
In Crimea itself, there are the Tatars, whose reaction to joining Russia is an unknown quantity. Might a flash-point there have a cascade effect of encouraging other Muslim countries to come to their aid? Turkey's unpredictable Prime Minister (who himself is embroiled in scandal - and in need of a helpful distraction?) has made some statements that Russia could read as being unhelpful at best.  
There is the reaction of the other East European countries. Some of them have a personal experience of Russia, and have no wish to see themselves become "another Ukraine". While the rest of Europe and America may dismiss some of their fears as paranoia, the fact that there are a large number of East European countries in NATO means that the number of variables increases accordingly. If Russia decided to invade Ukraine, it is unclear what the reaction of Eastern Europe (especially Poland) would be; history and emotion are two very powerful motivations that can make governments and statesmen do irrational things.
The Baltic States, too, would feel themselves in a bind, hemmed in between Russia and the sea. They have already put pressure on NATO to bolster their forces; the chances that this could be interpreted as a direct threat by Russia is large.

In short, the Ukraine Crisis has re-opened issues and emotions in Europe that have laid dormant since the end of the First World War, let alone the "Cold War".
Western Europe and the USA are now beginning to realise that historical forces have been unleashed in "battle for Ukraine"; forces that, in their complacency, they did not even begin to comprehend. The next time, perhaps they should read a history book first.

The Ukraine Crisis: Putin's psychology, and the failure of the West

Since the Russian military annexation of the Crimea began in earnest last Friday, Russia has been slowly tightening its grip on the peninsula; taking control of Ukrainian military assets, and surrounding Ukrainian military garrisons and its navy. The Russian noose has been getting ever tighter day by day, making the Ukrainian military units a hostage in their own bases and ships, with nerves getting ever more frayed as time passes.

Tuesday evening saw a seemingly alarming escalation, with reports of an ultimatum, giving Ukrainian units until the following morning to surrender.While this "deadline" passed without incident and the Russian military manoeuvres over the border finished on Wednesday, events and the stand-off hang by a thread. There are daily disturbances in the cities of the east and south of Ukraine.

What is going on?

Putin's psychological game

I've talked before about my theory of the "Russian Gambit":

"What are Russia's intentions? While accepting a de facto split of Ukraine on the ground (at least in the short term), accepting it de jure would be another matter, and we know that Russia follows the line that the opposition now in power in Kiev is engineered by fascists that have come to power through a violent coup. On Saturday, having fled Kiev, Yanukovich may well have asked for Russian protection for a Russian-speaking eastern and southern rump state. But the Kremlin may have explained their own motivation, based on their analysis of the opposition: to allow the opposition a taste of power in Kiev (while having no control of the east), playing a waiting game for the disparate opposition to violently turn on each other, allowing Yanukovich and his party to return to power in Kiev soon afterwards, with Russian help or not, depending on the situation."

Putin's press conference yesterday gave more weight to this ruse.
In it, he spoke of Yanukovich still being the legitimate president, even though he accepted that he had no real future in Ukraine. Putin talked of there being "no-one to talk to in Kiev", as there was no legitimate government; the only plan worth mentioning was the one that Yanukovich signed (agreeing to some form of all-party coalition, and elections in December). As the opposition has reneged on that deal (as Putin saw it), it seems clear that the planned elections in May would only be "legitimate" to the Kremlin if they voted in Yanukovich's "Party Of The Regions"; if not, then there surely would be no hope of a thaw in relations between Kiev and Moscow in the foreseeable future.

Putin gave the impression of being happy to cause as much political mischief as possible to the "interim government" in Kiev as long as they (or indeed any future "fascist" elected successor government) existed. At the moment, this has included the pro-Russian party being in effective control of the east and south of Ukraine, not recognising the Kiev government, and causing regional instability. On top of that was mood of casual harassment of Ukraine's sovereignty by the Russian military; air incursions, patrolling close to the border, and so on. If there was no government in Kiev as Putin saw it, then Moscow was within its rights to move almost at will across Ukrainian territory. Then there was the economic punishment, with the threat to Ukraine's gas supply, its nuclear energy, and many other financial instruments that could be used and payments withheld. In short, Putin would make the Kiev government's existence a living nightmare; everything short of out-and-out war. This would continue to be psychological torture for Kiev, and for the whole of Ukraine.

The Crimean land-grab was a piece of convenient opportunism, from the Kremlin's point of view, righting a "wrong" that has been done by the ethnic Ukrainian Soviet leader, Khruschev, during the Cold War. Crimea had been ethnically Russian since Stalin purged it of Tatars in the Second World War, and had been a key part of Russian territory since the late 18th century.

Putin's motivations are more internal than external: he cannot allow the Kiev government to exist with impunity as it would send a fatal message to his own standing at home, and give encouragement to the pro-Western opposition. The effective annexation of Crimea was an act of opportunism; nothing more. His "gambit" in Ukraine is about securing a friendly government there; nothing more. How he achieves that depends more on the actions of Kiev. It would be more convenient that he not use the military to achieve it, but Putin has no moral qualms about using it if he feels he has no other choice. That was the underlying message from his press conference.

The political game continues, as Putin and his adept foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, twist the West's logic of foreign intervention in unto itself, while making an art-form of the apparent barefaced lies about the situation on the ground in Crimea. In the meantime, the West looks on at a nightmare largely of its own making.

The West's nightmare scenario

The road to this crisis came partly from creating some awful geo-political precedents. The Kosovo War of 1999, and the Iraq war of 2003 were both US-led military engagements without UN support that led (either indirectly or directly) to regime change. While both situations were very different, under different administrations, and provoked very different moral responses, they both followed the same precedent: military unilateralism that could skirt international law (i.e. through the use of the UN).
Furthermore, it was hard in Moscow to dispel the feeling that Russia was being encircled economically and militarily, by the EU and NATO; the American use of military bases in Central Asia as part of its "War On Terror" can't have helped either.

Putin duly took note of this. Russia has historically always been protective of its right to intervene to protect its interests in its "near abroad": the Russian equivalent of the "Monroe Doctrine". In this way, the West's accusation of Putin starting a "new Cold War", while easy to throw, is a misleading comparison. Other Western politicians (such as even Hillary Clinton), have accused Putin of behaving like a "new Hitler". Again, while it is tempting to make the comparison, this also an exaggeration: he has no wish to overwhelm Europe. Russia has been the largest nation on earth for well over a century, and Putin has made Russia one of the world's leading economies.
The fall of the Soviet Union (and loss of Russian territory and prestige) may be compared historically with Germany's punishment at the end of the First World War; even the twenty-year period of transition to German/Russian military "aggression" matches. In this sense, Hillary Clinton's comparison of Putin to Hitler makes some sense, though it is too simplistic an analogy.
This is no "new Cold War". There is no "ideological war" as twenty years ago; also, we are no longer living in a bipolar world, but nowadays one of various "power blocs" and key players (more on that in a moment). A better historical comparison is to the period of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with imperial powers (or these days, "neo-Imperial powers") re-learning their historical roles in the world after the chaotic period between the First World War and the end of the "Cold War".

The wider precedent that the West has created stems from a) the precedent of military unilateralism, and b) allowing countries to cross artificial "red lines" with impunity. The example of Syria last year was critical. Together, these two signals are fatal to Western prestige and respect across the world; the West is hypocritical to accuse others of acting aggressively in their one interests, and in any case, no-one believes that the West have the moral courage to act against anyone.

Kim Jong-un is probably making note of this.

But that is only one of a number of effects that the West's reaction to the "Ukraine Crisis" may have.

The talk of a "new Cold War" may be overblown, but the real change that this crisis is likely to bring about is the hardening of "power blocs" that have been forming over the last ten years: by this I mean the waning power of the USA in comparison to that of China; the EU becoming more of a "inter-national grouping" for the sake of economic and military influence; the role of Russia as a power balancing its interests between that of China and the others; and the rising influence of smaller players such as Brazil, and regional players like the Arab states (GCC) and Turkey.
In other worlds, "multilateralism" may be now definitively fading, being replaced by a world power unilateralism, last seen in the decades prior to the First World War. The West's influence is fading; the East's is rising. The lack of appetite for intervention in the West may now be seen as a "weakness" in the dominant nature of democracy, while the East has no such political inhibitions to hold back its wishes.

The split between the West on the use of sanctions also seems to be opening rifts between those East European countries that had recently joined the EU and NATO (or both), and what Donald Rumsfeld once called "Old Europe"; the original members of the EU. The USA seems to be taking the side of the East Europeans, already making promises to be a more conspicuous guardian of its new NATO allies along the Russian border. In this sense, historic differences between Eastern and Western Europe, their different perspectives and motivations, are coming to the surface after decades (even centuries) of slumber. The divergent attitudes towards Russia of the UK and Germany compared to Poland, Hungary, the Czechs and Lithuania are now plain to see. This may put huge strain on a united European front towards Russia. Putin will also be watching this issue closely.

No-one in Europe has any real clue what will come of the new government in Ukraine, but the far-right, nationalist elements are hiding in plain sight. One unintended consequence of the EU so conspicuously supporting "fascistic" elements is the damage it does to its own reputation (it has already given masses of political ammunition to Russia); it also may encourage further support for the far-right all across the member-states of the EU itself.
That would be a real nightmare for the EU.

Any sanctions on Russia, as Putin smartly pointed out, can be returned in kind by Russia. The economic effect of this across the globalised market is uncertain; the only thing that does seem certain is that this will create more uncertainty about the future of open multinational trade, and therefore may tip the world into another recession.

Lastly, Obama has been receiving sharp criticism from the right, that now his chickens have come home to roost. In effect, Obama has created a "neo-isolationist" policy since the end of the Bush administration. Apart from Libya, the military has disengaged from Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is little appetite for any other conflict for the remainder of Obama's tenure. This "weakness" in foreign policy can potentially open things up in the 2016 elections: it would be a reverse of the 1940 election between the "isolationism" of the Republicans at the time, and the interventionist tendency of Roosevelt's Democrats.

The word on people's lips these days is "appeasement".

(Update Thursday, 6 March

In the last twenty-four hours, the USA has ramped-up its rhetoric on sanctions, as well as making explicit orders to increase its air-force assets to Lithuania, as well as reminding Russia that a US navy vessel will soon be entering the Black Sea.
This escalation of pressure by the USA seems to be aimed at reversing the more mealy-mouthed statements of the last week on the Ukraine crisis. This may be aimed at a) the critics at home, and therefore nipping in the bud any perceived foreign policy weakness ahead of the elections later this year, and in 2016, and b) the explicit support for the Eastern European nations in NATO against the perceived threat of Russia.
In other words, there is now a clear divergence between a "pacifist" and cautious Western Europe unwilling to harm its Russian assets, and a "militant" Eastern Europe, supported by the USA.

This can only lead to the "Balkanisation" of Eastern Europe now becoming widened to the conflicting motivations of Eastern and Western Europe, and now the USA and Russia are now involved in a longer-term "proxy war" of influence over the European continent.
In many respects, this is less the clock has turning back to the "Cold War" politics of the past, but more to the similar form of conflicting "alliances" and "agreements" that existed in 1914)