Analysts and commentators, scholars and thinkers have put forward a range of ideas about Russia’s war against the Ukrainian people. We have looked for causes and correlations, and speculated about Vladimir Putin’s objectives for invading Ukraine.
Since war tends to take on a life of its own, many of us have had to revise or reconsider our conclusions. Putin’s panic about Nato’s eastward expansion; Russia’s fear of irrelevance, and the Kremlin’s attempt to re-establish Russia as a global power, have all been dissected, disambiguated and deconstructed over and again.
Having scanned news reports from around the world for most of last weekend I believe there are two issues we seem to have missed; one is a theoretical/academic position (supported by evidence, to be fair), the other is a geostrategic issue that sees Ukraine as the means to a specific end.
Let’s deal with the latter first. The contention in this first instance is that, somewhat like the Soviet Union’s entry into Afghanistan (partially) as a means to gain a shortcut to the Indian Ocean, Russia today seeks more direct access to the Mediterranean by capturing key ports on the Black Sea.
For instance, should Russia manage to take over Odesa, Moscow would have access to one of the biggest ports on the Black Sea. Odesa has 54 wharves across 141ha that can accommodate vessels up to 340m long carrying gas, oils, metal products, iron ore, sugar, grains and a range of containerised products.
Russia now relies heavily on the warm-water port of Novorossiysk, which before the Covid-19 pandemic handled about 142-million tonnes of cargo. Russia also has access to Port Batumi (Georgia) and Varna Port (Bulgaria).
The immediate problem, in the event that Russia uses Odesa and increases its export volumes on the northern shores of the Black Sea, is that it would have to start serious negotiations with Turkey, which holds exclusive rights (acknowledged by the Montreux Convention of 1936) over the two main passageways to the Mediterranean — the Bosporus and Dardanelles. The convention comes with a complex set of conditionalities.
A second thing to consider — a more rarefied idea, as it were — is that Russia’s war is providing the tipping point for global systemic change. It’s an almost 40-year-old theory that emanates from the liberal internationalists and other conservative types on the east coast of the US. There’s even a book, the title of which gives away the story: War and Change in World Politics, by Robert Gilpin.
I haven’t read the book in more than 30 years, but one of the main theses is straightforward. Large scale systemic change tends to be preceded by war. For instance, after World War 2 power shifted from Whitehall to Washington. Yes, I know there was no such shift after World War 1, but some of us believe — not without justification — that the 1914 war only ended in 1945.
The basic contention about war and change (along with cognate literature) is that periods of relative stability — where one power dominates and there is some kind of equilibrium — are threatened by pretenders that “disturb” this equilibrium. We have seen this when the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and British dominated the oceans and colonised vast parts of the world, followed by US dominance, which is now coming under threat from China, or Asia as a whole.
Parag Khanna, a research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore is forthright in his new book, The Future is Asian: Global Order in the Twenty-First Century. I generally agree with that, but given US military power and its willingness to use it, and that the US dollar may remain strong for at least another decade as a global currency, Asia, and especially China, have time to establish a much stronger political, economic and military force.
It’s sad but true; states that dominate the global order at any time should have domestic economic power, a willingness to be the lender of last resort, effectively control international co-operation and have the military strength to back it all up.
This brings us back to Russia. As written in this space before, Putin wants Russia’s “crown” back. He is also desperately nostalgic for the time when Moscow (the Soviet Union) was taken seriously as a global power. Putin’s fatal error is that he has overestimated his power.
While he may swallow Ukraine (though I think he will be stopped before that happens) the future does not belong to Putin, and nor does Russia provide a credible alternative to declining US hegemony. China and India are too powerful. Forget challenges from Africa or South America.
There may be some merit to the argument that global systemic change has historically been sparked by war, and the way the US and China are prancing about like fighting cockerels we may well see conflict in the near future.
In the meantime, Putin had better hope there is no successful Operation Valkyrie type plot, when highly placed Nazi military officers attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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