Several observers have expressed disappointment at Asia’s “weak” response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including by ASEAN, India and Indonesia.
My old friend and astute observer of regional affairs, Brad Glosserman, added his voice in these pages recently. He noted that in the U.N. General Assembly’s overwhelming condemnation of Russia, many Asian countries — Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam — chose to abstain.
Let me stipulate upfront that Russia’s actions are illegal, immoral and possibly amount to war crimes. That will be of little consolation if Ukraine is reduced to ashes with tens of thousands killed or the world is incinerated in a nuclear war. Deleterious consequences for Australia, India and Japan include U.S. and European distraction from the Indo-Pacific, a stronger Moscow–Beijing axis and China as the big strategic victor of the NATO–Russia clash.
When India was a British colony, the U.K. defense strategy was to deny control of the reverse Himalayan slopes to any potential hostile power as that would confer immense strategic advantages to it. Tibet and Nepal served as critical buffer zones to this effect. After independence, India’s then-prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, ignored this inherited strategic wisdom, gave his blessing to China’s control of Tibet and paid the price in the military rout by China in the 1962 border war.
Similarly, if China were to conquer Taiwan, the geostrategic repercussions for Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and others would be grave. If China is engaged in a long game of displacing the U.S. as the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific and it’s a matter of when, not if, we choose to fight and not kowtow to it, the key question would be: Do we go to war as soon as China attacks, or delay and risk China’s relative power being still stronger down the line?
That effectively is the choice Vladimir Putin faced. Russia has had its nose rubbed repeatedly in the dirt of the former Soviet Union’s historic defeat in the Cold War, its interests ignored, its buffer against NATO continually shrunk and its protests contemptuously dismissed. For reasons of history and geography, Russians regard the prospect of NATO troops in Ukraine as an existential threat. By contrast, it’s not part of core U.S. strategic interests and there will be no NATO planes over Ukraine nor boots on the ground.
There is unbroken continuity in the Russian grievance about NATO’s eastward expansion from Mikhail Gorbachev through Boris Yeltsin to Putin.
According to declassified documents from the National Security Archive published in 2017, there were multiple assurances to Soviet leaders from U.S., U.K., French and German leaders against NATO expansion that were then serially violated. The current CIA director, William Burns, was posted in Moscow when he wrote a memo in 1995, saying, “hostility to NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” Burns returned to Moscow as ambassador and on Feb. 1, 2008, sent a cable to Washington (published by WikiLeaks) titled: “Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO enlargement red lines.”
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned him that the issue of NATO membership for Ukraine “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.” Despite the blunt warning, on April 3, 2008, NATO’s Bucharest Summit Declaration affirmed that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.”
Whenever this history of broken assurances is brought up, Americans get all lawyerly (“put it in writing”), just as they did in the Vietnam War vis-a-vis the 1954 Geneva Accords. They also ignore their own history of breaches of international law and principles: rejection of the World Court’s adverse verdict for the destabilization of Nicaragua in 1986, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and exit from the Iran nuclear deal. There are parallels between NATO actions in Kosovo in 1999 and Russian actions in Crimea in 2014; and between U.S. rejection of Cuba’s sovereign right to enter into a security alliance with the Soviet Union and station Soviet missiles in 1962 and Russian rejections of comparable rights asserted for Ukraine.
In a speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 that filled many listeners with foreboding, Putin accused the West of breaking assurances on NATO expansion. In 2008 in Georgia and again in 2014 in Ukraine, he made it clear Russia had red lines that he would not allow NATO and the EU to cross. In his address to the nation on Feb. 24 announcing the military actions against Ukraine, Putin began by highlighting the threat posed by “the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.”
On March 2, the U.K. led 38 countries in a collective state referral to the ICC of possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Yet on March 5, 2020, when the ICC authorized investigation of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan by the government, Taliban and U.S. forces since 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked the judgment as “reckless” and issued threats against ICC personnel.
Against this history, just because some Asian countries come to different conclusions based on their particular circumstances and priorities does not make them intellectual and moral inferiors.
Glosserman holds that “The invasion of Ukraine is such an egregious violation of international rules and norms that it is almost impossible for a government that aspires to international leadership or status, and certainly a U.S. ally, to not condemn Russia.” I respectfully disagree. India and Israel, for example, are among a handful of countries with good relations with both sides. Public condemnation would diminish India’s diplomatic potential to be an honest broker and God knows we might need skilled and credible interlocutors as tensions ratchet up in the coming days and weeks.
Great powers rise and fall on the tide of history. Although no power remains great forever and none retreats forever, there’s no way to reliably judge in real time whether a great power has begun its descent into permanent decline or is merely in temporary retreat.
Geopolitical fault lines during periods of power transition are fraught with grave risks of war rooted in miscalculations of relative power. Meanwhile, the fate of lesser powers caught in the crossfire of great power contests is as much determined by the outcome of those contests as by their own efforts.
The U.S. bet the house on the end-of-history thesis and the belief that Russia as a major power had permanently declined. Putin may well have made a fateful error in choosing war as the means to break out of the relentless strategic encirclement by NATO. If the invasion proves the American assessment right and destroys Russia’s pretensions to great power status, Putin will pay the ultimate price.
But if defeat in the Cold War was a cyclical blip in Russia’s great power status, then Ukraine’s NATO ambitions that were non-negotiable before the war will become negotiable. And the likes of India could well have a critical role to bring Europe and the world back from the brink.
Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University and a former United Nations assistant secretary general.