By CHARLES ONUNAIJU
Despite the outlandish bogus allegations and the visceral criticism of Russia’s leadership by the U.S political establishment and its media wing, Moscow is playing a pivotal and constructive role in the emerging multi-polar world. The hysteria and paranoia in Washington over Russia’s leadership is a result of the disappointing outcome of the recent U.S presidential election, in which the entire American mainstream elite was trumped by President Donald Trump, a maverick and an outsider, who duped the mainly white working class electorate by playing to their misplaced fears of immigrations and globalisation.
From shamelessly accusing Moscow of manipulating the U.S presidential election and derailing its result in favour of Russia’s preferred candidate, to the current vituperation against President Trump’s former national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, who resigned following the allegation that he had a phone call with a U.S- based Russian ambassador about the prospects of easing U.S sanctions on Russia and gave a half-brief to Vice President Pence without allegedly stating the full conversation, there has been a media media uproar that forced Mr. Flynn to resign. If foreign diplomats engaging members of incoming administrations to smoothen the path for better relations with their home governments is bad and unacceptable, isn’t Washington serially culpable of this? Wiki-leaks’ treasure trove of documents graphically illustrate how U.S diplomats bully their host governments and describe their officials in the most demeaning terms.
The United States, as a routine, relishes passing judgments on the democratic quotients of other nations and, in the particular case of Russia neighborhoods, openly instigated all manner of colour street revolts that culminated in the overthrow of Moscow’s friendly governments. Soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Washington, under the umbrella of its NATO alliance, deployed 4,000 crack troops with heavy equipment to Poland, Russia’s frontier. As if that is not provocative enough, NATO is organising military drills in Lithuania with the intention of sowing paranoia over a phantom Moscow threat in Russia’s neighbour.
However, in spite of the inveterate obsession with Russia in Washington, Moscow has certainly recovered from the trauma of the “geo-political catastrophe” that arose from the demise of the former Soviet Union and is earnestly working itself into the mainstream of designing a more inclusive and broad-based international architecture that can accommodate a wide range of values under the universally acceptable principles of the United Nations Charter. Along with China, Russia is balancing out the excesses of Washington and its NATO alliance, to exclusively define international legitimacy outside the consensual framework of the United Nations. The debacle of the great disorder that followed immediately after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the retreat of China to domestic reforms, let loose on the international landscape, unprecedented Western power politics, culminating in the continuous chaos in Iraq, former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and others. While relishing Russia’s weakness in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Washington rode roughshod on the former Warsaw pact treaty nations in Eastern Europe and triggered unprecedented hostility towards Moscow. The return of the defunct Soviet Union’s foremost successor State, Russia, to global reckoning, has forced a retreat from the purveyors of a liberal global order. Moscow and Beijing have considerably played up the broad-based rules of international legitimacy embodied in the United Nations as the corner stone of the emerging global order. The doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect”, a Liberal ideological tool to guide Washington’s hegemonic aspirations, has fumbled in the face of both Moscow and Beijing’s insistence on a multilateral framework as an effective mechanism for engagements. While Washington and NATO allies kept Crimea’s return to Russia as Moscow’s affront to the post-war European order, it conveniently forgot the brutal yanking of Kosovo, the spiritual centre of the Serbs, from Serbia, into an independent state for ethnic Albanians. Kosovo is largely recognised as a sovereign state by Washington and some of her NATO allies, and no other nations.
The disruption of Balkan Europe’s political order by the violent creation of Kosovo as a state was a prelude to a similar attempt to disrupt the order in Russia’s neighbourhood, especially in Ukraine where an elected government, in spite of the subsisting consensus underwritten by Moscow, Brussels and Washington, was overthrown. The lingering crises in Ukraine, including the democratic decision of mostly Russian ethnic residents of Crimea to revert to Russian sovereignty has been blamed on Moscow, whereas it was a Western ploy to draw the entire Russia’s neighborhood into the hegemony of its liberal order that plunged the country into chaos.
Apart from the well-known economic lifeline which Moscow has generously extended to its neighbours, providing gas at less than market price, the economies of the former republics in the former Soviet Union induced to hitch a ride on NATO’s military machine, depend largely on Russia’s market for survival.
The Dutch, in a referendum last year, coolly rebuffed the Ukrainians in any joint effort to close economic cooperation. Actually, while NATO military muscles puff up the pro-western leaders of the republics of the defunct USSR, Russia’s economic engagement with them, through the formerly elaborate economic network developed during the era of the defunct Soviet Union, puts food on their citizens’ tables, in spite of the daily diet of anti-Russia propaganda that NATO serves them.
From a determined and constructive effort to build a framework of political understanding in its neighborhood based on multi-lateral engagement, Moscow has stepped up her role. The monster of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) has been considerably degraded, allowing the victim states in West Asia or the Middle East to enhance their respective national capacities to recover from wars imposed from outside to effect regime change.
Moscow has been the main game changer in not only checkmating the disruptive activities of ISIL in the region but has designed a broad-based framework for the negotiated settlement of the intractable Syrian crises.
From Iran’s nuclear deal, in which Moscow and Beijing played crucial roles of confidence builders, to the upholding of the integrity of the U.N as the foremost framework for multilateral international relations, Russia’s contribution to building the emerging inclusive and accommodating global order, cannot be undermined or even tarnished by the politics of bitterness and vendetta that is currently tormenting the U.S political landscape and tearing its elites apart.
As in the Cold War era, where the former Soviet Union and China provided the necessary political support and even the military muscle to drive the anti-colonial project of the developing nations, including the fight against the obnoxious apartheid regime, Moscow and Beijing are now strengthening collective consultative and decision-making mechanism that genuinely engages the developing countries to participate in the mainstream of global affairs.
Onunaiju, Director of the Centre for China Studies (CCS), writes from Abuja