Worldview

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov is an exceptionally articulate man. Speaking last week, he described the world as having moved to a “post-post-Cold War” condition.

We know about the Cold War. It was a condition where two main superpowers engaged in a frightening arms race, justified in the name of deterrence, to gain ascendancy over the other. It was a strictly bipolar view of the world where there was little space for non-alignment.

In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union unraveled, the view of the world changed dramatically – especially in the West. The dissolution of the old Soviet bloc meant there would only be one superpower standing: the US. The dynamics of bipolarity metamorphosed into the hegemony of American power.

Political science literature during the mid-nineties was suffused with triumphalism. A world at peace has been attained under the aegis of American power. The last superpower standing would set about establishing a benevolent world where war was a thing of the past and the nations of the world could now refocus their energies on eradicating malaria and averting global warming.

Then Al Qaeda happened. The malevolent face of fundamentalist terror threatened not just the happy vision of a world without war. It threatened the very idea of open societies, a borderless world and cosmopolitan modernity concerned only with wealth creation.

Now the world seemed threatened by an invisible force, a non-country that operated without borders. A terrifying plague had broken out. A pre-modern belief system was out to reshape the behavior of nations by means of high-casualty attacks on the most vulnerable communities.

9-11 happened. The borderless world in the age of globalization became modernity’s main vulnerability. Security against terror became the primal concern. Border protection was strengthened. We had become a world governed by fear, threatened by intolerance and alarmed by the unfamiliar.

The joyful prospect of a world without war, without an insane arms race that impoverished the already poor and encouraged the trampling of sovereignties, faded quickly in the face of terrorist attacks.

America responded to the terrorist attacks in a rather old-fashioned way: attacking nations perceived to be safe havens for the terrorist groups. Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was literally invaded, with high-technology smart bombs used to attack terrorist bands in caves. On the excuse of eliminating “weapons of mass destruction,” a US-led alliance mounted an invasion of Iraq.

These invasions did not quash the threat from terrorist groups. What it did was to unleash the sectarian demons autocratic governments had kept suppressed. When the Saddam Hussein regime was dislodged, it brought forth open warfare between Sunnis and Shiites. Thereafter, Iraq could no longer be governed as a single nation. Conditions were made fertile for the rise of the Islamic State, a more brutal variant of the fundamentalism Al Qaeda earlier represented.

In the post-Cold War global effort to crush the menace of terrorism, Russia was kept out of the loop. The “other” superpower was not invited into the “coalition of the willing.”  Her opinion was not sought by the western powers seeking to bring forth their vision of a unipolar world order governed by the liberal democracies.

Russia chaffed as she rebuilt her strength in the post-Soviet era on the basis of natural resources. Russian nationalism gathered force, especially under the leadership of Putin. Sergey Lavrov now articulates the global dimensions of that nationalism.

Russia has become more and more assertive the past few years. She picked a small war with Georgia. She annexed Crimea. Now she is in the process of annexing the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine.

More significantly, Moscow appears to have assembled an army of hackers targeting secure sites in Europe and the US. Russian hackers are believed to be behind the hundreds of attempts to break into secure British sites, scrounging for information. Many analysts believe Russian hackers formed the shock troops to influence the outcome of last November’s presidential elections in the US.

We have yet to see how these hackers will move to influence the slew of key European elections scheduled for this year. It is clear Moscow developed a program for influencing electoral outcomes to their favor.

Lavrov is challenging the unipolar “post-Cold War” worldview that has been the basis for developing the West’s strategies. He proposes a “post-post Cold War” worldview that accepts multi-polarity in global politics. In that multi-polar world, Russia and China expect to exercise equal ascendancy to the US.

Proceeding from this view of the world, expect Russia to play an increasingly assertive role in global affairs. We saw in Syria how Moscow moved in force to support the once-beleaguered Assad regime. Russian air power takes principal credit for the recapture of Aleppo by pro-regime forces.

Syria under Assad is an important toehold for Russia in a volatile region of the world. This is why Russia is in the game to crush not only the terrorist IS but the whole range of pro-Western armed groups contesting power in this ravaged country.

While we expect Russia to be increasingly assertive, the US under Donald Trump will become more reticent. Reflecting the disposition of his political base, Trump is expected to be increasingly isolationist in its foreign policy. That can only help Russia’s foreign policy goals, allowing Moscow to basically move into the vacuum the US leaves.

President Rodrigo Duterte is due to visit Moscow. We are not sure just yet if the visit will produce some sort of military agreement between our two countries. Duterte’s view of equidistance between the powers will surely enjoy a receptive ear in Moscow.