Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Is Putin trembling in fear about Marise Payne’s threat of sanctions?
Not really. Russia is far more concerned about security than it is about the minor economic impact of sanctions, explains Anthony Brenton, former UK Ambassador to Russia, on ABC’s Breakfast program. (11 minutes).
Brenton explains the realpolitik of sanctions. Earlier sanctions, imposed after Russia took over Crimea, were ineffective. They made only a tiny dent on Russia’s economy, and because they strengthened the idea that the world was ganging up against Russia, they helped Putin consolidate his support base. In any event the sanctions announced so far are minor: even Germany’s suspension of approval for the Nord Stream gas pipeline is only symbolic.
Brenton goes on to describe Putin’s strategic strengths and weaknesses, asserting that he cautiously assesses his options and the consequences of any actions. Because Putin dares not take on any NATO country any shooting war will be confined to Ukraine, he explains, dismissing the idea of a European version of a domino theory. (If Putin really is a cautious strategist, surely he will not be silly enough to mount a sustained occupation of Ukraine. Will he rely on installing a Russia-friendly puppet administration, the model employed by the Soviet Union in relation to eastern European countries?)
On Late Night Live on Wednesday, regular UK commentator Ian Dunt describes that country’s hypocrisy and pathetic response to Putin’s aggression. Russians have donated millions to Johnson’s Conservative Party, and London, “the money laundering capital of the world”, is awash with funds from Putin’s network of oligarchs. Johnson is unlikely to do much to upset these arrangements. (13 minutes).
A wider view of the conflict
The ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report has a short (8 minute) segment Will Russia and China take advantage of a divided West?, a title that implies the existence of a geopolitical struggle, as some united “Eastern” China-Russia axis opportunistically takes on a weakened “West”.
Andrew West’s guest, Singapore academic and retired diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, takes us well beyond any such simplification. Indeed there is rivalry: China, after 200 years of the West getting its own way, is re-establishing its position in the world, but it still sees the US as a formidable force and respects its military capability.
More to the point, and partly in line with Tony Abbott’s idea that the West has lost any common set of values, Mahbubani summarises the contrast between Chinese and US societies. In China there is an optimistic sense of renaissance in both material and cultural terms, while the US is tearing itself apart in battles about identity and race, and has become a plutocracy where the living conditions of the many have stagnated. The Chinese look on the US with a sense of puzzlement, perhaps even pity, while respecting its economic and military power.
He brings the issue back to the Ukraine conflict to make the point that while China and Russia have different interests, a weakened Russia is not in Chinese interests.
Mahbubani’s most recent book is The Asian 21st Century.
Putin wants Russia back
This war isn’t about Lebensraum, resources, or even borders. It’s about Russian identity.
So writes Stan Grant: Russia's Ukraine invasion is not just about borders or power. For Putin, it's about identity. We don’t understand it, because the West “is meant to be a place beyond identity”. He goes on to write:
This is everything the West is not. The modern West grew out of Reformation and Enlightenment. It was about liberation. In the West we change citizenship, we move countries, we swap or abandon religions.
Putin (and Xi – see the post above) – see this as a weakness. “Putin is a product of our age. As globalisation has continued apace, there has been a blowback, a return to borders, tradition, religion, race. The return of the tribe.”
Grant’s short essay helps us understand the attraction of populist “leaders” – Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Orbán and other illiberal authoritarians, whom people have chosen in reasonably open elections. It helps us understand what has motivated so many people to turn out on the streets in recent weeks, protesting against something they cannot define. Maybe it helps us understand why there is still a proportion of Australians, including many in the Liberal Party, who cling to the symbols of the long-defunct British Empire.
The worldwide advance of authoritarian governance
Germany’s Bertelsmann-Stiftung has produced its Transformation Index (BTI) for 2021, a study of the health of democracy in 137 “developing” and “emerging” countries. It finds that in these countries democracy is losing ground: only 67 are still democracies, while the number of autocracies has risen to 70.
To quote from its summary:
This decline in the quality of democracy has most often been driven by political elites focusing on securing their own political and economic power at the expense of social development. For more than a decade, the BTI has observed a number of consequences to this trend, including a widespread erosion of the rule of law and civil liberties, growing economic inequality, and an increasing failure of governments around the world to seek broad consensus for policy solutions.
It goes on to note that the pandemic has imposed an extreme stress-test on governments. As it inflicted its economic damage, authoritarian governments have been able to consolidate their hold: “their attempts to ignore scientific findings, reject international cooperation and downplay Covid-19’s danger allowed the virus to spread almost unhindered, with severe economic and social consequences”.
As a side observation, it classifies Ukraine as a “defective democracy”, with a score of 6.8 out of 10, and Russia as a “hard line autocracy”, with a score of 4.4.
Energy markets
“Russia is poised to upend the global energy market”, writes David Frum in The Atlantic: The coming energy shock. That shock could be of the same global magnitude as the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 that ended the era of cheap energy. Russia is the world’s second largest exporter of natural gas and the third largest exporter of oil. Even if sanctions cost it a few European markets, Russia will find other markets and will cooperate with other oil exporters to withhold supply and sustain high prices.
The immediate consequences will be inflationary pressures in the West. Americans are already paying a dollar a litre for gasoline – poor dears! That will weaken western governments’ resolve to sustain sanctions. The more significant challenge for the West is to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels so as to lessen its economic dependence on oil exporters, a dependence that has weakened western countries’ security.
Frum doesn’t mention Australia. The conflict will see the gas industry ramp up its pressure for Australia to expand further. That path could see us becoming another pariah among countries trying to battle climate change, putting us into the same camp as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. A responsible government would see the conflict as an opportunity to de-carbonize our economy as soon as possible, and to expedite the development of a green hydrogen industry.