Non-UN sanctions are a direct route to diplomatic impasse international relations
Issue:
November 2014
The West’s sanctions designed to change the Kremlin policy in Ukraine in particular and its geopolitical agenda on the international arena in general are not working.
The West came to this most obvious conclusion only after imposing a series of increasingly tougher sanctions against Russia, its most prominent citizens and top corporations. As US President Barack Obama frankly put it recently, apart from declaration of a war, the US does not have any realistic mechanisms that can effectively impact on the Kremlin’s foreign policies agenda in a way to fit Washington’s strategic goals.
These sanctions should not work because they are not supposed to, if their ultimate goal is to change the Kremlin’s goal in Ukraine. For one, it is the Kremlin, given the historical and cultural links between Russia and Ukraine, that is expecting the West to change its current Kiev policy.
Secondly, Moscow, unlike Brussels, read EU, does not have to change its policies to suit Washington’s agenda because, again unlike the EU, it sees itself as an independent sovereign power with its own national security and economic interests across the globe that need to respected by other global powers and defended, if necessary, with all means possible.
And, again, unlike the EU, Russia does not have to blindly follow some one’s ideology or outsource its foreign policies agenda to a third party. And, finally, a country that controls about one-sixth of the world’s habitable territory that is generously endowed with enormous natural resources and has the world’s largest and most efficient nuclear weaponry ever invented and deployed by mankind to defend them, cannot, and should not, be treated like so-called “banana republics.”
Moscow, again unlike the EU, values its sovereign rights to have different positions on different geopolitical issues that do not coincide with Washington’s foreign policy strategies. Paradoxically, the US, also unlike the EU, also values such sovereign rights and had even gone on several occasions to use full-blown wars and disproportionate military forces to defend such rights. Washington, knowing that the EU will always toe its line, does not even explain most its motivations to its EU partners. The EU members are happy playing this second fiddle role, sort of a junior partner or a minority shareholder in a large global corporation. Both US/EU see this as a democratic alliance.
For whatever reasons, Washington also expects Moscow and Beijing to behave similarly to its EU partners. And when this does not occur, Russia and China, and indeed, other countries, such as leftist leaning Latam leaders, are automatically branded undemocratic, uncivilized and even uncultured.
All along, the West had always used all types of sanctions, economic and political, justified and unjustified, to pressurize other countries to play only by its rules. At times, it cites the UN humanitarian charter when it suits its agenda, such as using the using the “UN No Fly Zone resolution on Libya as a pretext to overthrow its long serving president, Muammar Gaddafi. However, when the UN approval cannot be secured, such as Iraq and Syria, the West usually ignore the UN as a useless vestige from the WWII era and always go ahead to impose such sanctions either unilaterally or in a coalition of its satellite allies.
But, against Russia, this unilateral approach to resolving global issues only in ways that please Washington and Brussels has hit a rock for several reasons, including first and foremost, the authors’ completely failure to factor into their policies the increasingly changing geopolitical realities after the current global crisis and rise of new global powers and the shift of the center of global economic gravity to the east.
The US seriously hit by the last global financial meltdown and two wars with Iraq and Afghanistan is no longer the absolute global hegemony in the world economy, as China has risen to the forefront, expecting to overthrow Washington in non-too-distant future as the new largest global economic power.
Washington’s staunchest ally, the EU, with its 28 members that include some of the world’s poorest countries and currently hanging on the cliff of collapse as a political and economic project, as shown by the last elections, as debt crisis took its toll, now looks more like the African Union or the Association of Latam states.
In the nuclear sphere, Russia, after almost two decades in geopolitical limbo, has resurfaced under President Vladimir Putin with far reaching geopolitical ambitions that could even surpass those of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin’s stance on Syria and the master-stroke diplomacy of diffusion the tension over the US’ imminent attack on Damascus on fabricated charges of gas attacks speaks of Putin’s effective use of “soft diplomatic powers” compared to Obama’s “bomb first and ask questions later policy.”
Using sanctions to force other states to do other states’ bidding against their wishes is a wrong approach to international diplomacy, a road to no where, a dead end. This is because even the poorest and weakest nations also have their national security and economic interests and most, like Russia and China, are not very keen to sacrifice them at the alter of the US/EU.
The fact that most countries often have to play by the West’s rule against their wishes does not mean such approach to diplomacy is correct and most importantly that the same behavior should be expected from the rest of the world.
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