We might recall when Russia stepped into the Syrian civil war mid 2015, President Obama was shocked, and claimed Syria would turn into the kind of quagmire that the United States had faced in Vietnam and Iraq.
It didn’t. Russia changed the course of the war, saved the tyrant torturer President Bashar al-Assad from defeat, and Russia are now the primary international supporter for the Syrian state. There has been no diplomatic settlement.
Russia hasn’t lost an intervention in quite some time, and there have been a few over Putin’s rule: Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Syria. Ukraine is the biggest.
Russia partitioned Ukraine in 2014 taking Crimea, and when the Minsk Agreement timed out this week he took two further regions. With full invasion, there are now many routes to Putin’s success. It could involve the installation of a compliant government, or further partition. It could be destabilised with civil and guerilla war. Either way Ukraine has been permanently detached from the West. Foreign militaries are not flocking to Ukraine’s side: they’re toast.
There will be fools on the left who will claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is all the West’s fault. No: this is Vladimir Putin’s doing.
Russian success in Ukraine will dent a few things. United States primacy in Europe will have been qualified; any sense that the European Union or NATO can ensure peace on the continent will be an artifact of a lost age. Some countries such as Finland and Sweden will want to join – NATO will pause before it further provokes Russia with that.
The EU and NATO will no longer have capacity for ambitious global adventures. That means every single defence compact that New Zealand and Australia are signed up to get a whole bunch more important. Whether massive EU donor money into the poor island nations of the Pacific continues, well I’d put that at risk as well.
This is what Russian success means for New Zealand and every other remaining liberal democracy: pick a side and make it clear because the rule-based order you’ve been relying on just shrank a whole deep measure.
The United States and Europe are also about to step into a very long if not permanent economic war with Russia. That Kiwisaver goal you had just got set back several years. The actual meaning and strength of all those trade deals we’ve signed up to is going to come under scrutiny once China realises everyone can see how much its diplomacy has been fraudulent as it was with Ukraine all along.
We can also step back and better evaluate what the rise of the hard right across northern Europe and the United States has been about: eradicating democracy and free liberal society and enabling rule by military force. Those in the Conservative Party and Republican Party who have appeased the Russian oligarchs for so many years have appeased the invasion of Ukraine. Trump and Fox news and supporters aren’t going to come out too well out of this. Nor are parties of the left who ‘don’t believe’ in military expenditure and military preparedness.
Cold War analogies aren’t helpful in a world with a Russianised Ukraine. Sure the Cold War border had its flashpoints but was primarily stabilised in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. What we have now is a vast destabilised plan from Estonia to Turkey and it will last for decades.
New Zealand and the Pacific is going to need its own version of NATO, and fast.
The European Union is going to be under extraordinary pressure to deliver dividends from democracy and of stabilised regulated economies that are superior to public anxiety of Russian military force. That’s not easy. It’s not going to generate a pan-European military force, so the dividends of both common trade union and European Union are going to need to be demonstrable. More waves of poor immigrants to absorb. There will be major energy crises out of this every winter. Germany must reverse its demolition of nuclear generation. France is accelerating nuclear, and every other European nation dependent on gas will face similar questions.
We all need to decide and act to defeat Russia.
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