Ukraine crisis: is there reason to be optimistic about peace?

On the matter of Russia and Ukraine, Beijing has been notably careful not to endorse any invasion
It is Washington that should stop taking a dim view of countries with national interests different from its own

Tom Plate

Published: 1:30am, 22 Feb 2022

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Regarding the Ukraine crisis, suppose I were not the sunny optimist I try to be but, instead, a dark pessimist always anticipating the worst?

Consider Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just try to stay optimistic after reading the depressing but immensely useful book, Mr Putin: Operative In the Kremlin. More than 500 pages, published by the Brookings Institution years ago, the book by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy is a sprawling portrait of evil. As such, it caught the eye of high-level people in the US foreign policy establishment.

Putin, a former Soviet intelligence operative, comes across as a man so manifestly wired for no good that he could make Niccolo Machiavelli look like the second coming of a teenage environmentalist.

What a package: nurtured in the shadows of the KGB over a 16-year career. Canny blackmailer. Conniving for years to suck Ukraine into the big belly of Mother Russia. Patient plotter of anti-West warfare, whether via assaults by tank or technology. Master of political multiplicity. “Since 2000, Mr Putin has been the ultimate international political performance artist,” write Washington insiders and co-authors Gaddy and Hill.

Hill, a widely respected US National Security Council official for the Russian and European portfolio now replanted at Brookings, surfaced dramatically in the 2019 House impeachment hearings of president Donald Trump. She was a star witness.

That’s the reason I found my way to her tome and started to wonder whether a pessimist might make better sense of what will happen next in Ukraine than an optimist. It turns out that I am not the only reader who found his way to that book.

02:30

Xi meets with Putin ahead of Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony

In a 2013 Rolling Stone magazine interview, then vice-president Joe Biden specifically praised the book. “Insightful,” he said, adding of Putin: “He’s an interesting man.” An understatement, indeed. When Biden, now US president, declared in a nationwide address late last week that he was convinced Russia would in time invade Ukraine, he startled the nation. But it was not a judgment without substance.

Switch to Asia: maybe I should re-examine my relatively optimistic perspective on China. After all, President Xi Jinping just staged a major spectacle of concurrence with Putin on a number of issues.

Suppose I were to become a Fiona Hill-level pessimist on China. How exactly would that look? Perhaps I would imagine that Xi has abandoned the traditional approach of grinding down Taiwan psychologically year after year and is now in a hurry, and so may seek to use the coming distraction of a Ukraine invasion to launch his forces against Taiwan.

Not only Nixon could go to China: there’s still hope for Sino-US relations

Suppose the much publicised social credit scheme winds up as chillingly Orwellian as some people imagine it – especially in the demographic absorption of Uygurs. Suppose Beijing continues on its path of talking a good game on climate change while still being wedded to coal for heating its 1.4 billion citizens?

And suppose there comes an accident or miscalculation leading to an eruption of conflict in the South China Sea? Or the banking crisis punching the Chinese economy in the gut? Or a mounting critical backlash in receptor countries against Belt and Road debt? Or a steadily increasing global wail over China’s growly “wolf warrior” diplomacy?

In the matter of Russia’s stance on Ukraine, we must note that the Chinese government has been careful not to muddle its vaunted foreign policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations with an overt endorsement of any invasion. And that is a good thing.

At the same time, anyone could make the point that, geopolitically, Ukraine is to Russia (more or less) as North Korea is to China. Buffer countries make the nicest neighbours, don’t they? Look at the United States: over Central America, it has insisted on suzerainty consistently since the 19th century. Under the Soviet Union, Moscow had the comfort of Eastern Europe standing by. So why shouldn’t Beijing have big power sway in the South China Sea?

The link between Putin and Xi is less ideological than geopolitical – not global Leninism but time-honoured Machiavellianism. What adds to one’s pessimism is the degree to which the US serves as the convenient focal point for the Russian and Chinese hyper-nationalism needed to rally people.

As long as Washington takes a global policeman’s dim view of countries with national interests different from its own, almost any perceptible difference anywhere could be made into a major issue.

Take, for example, the post-Cold-War expansion of Nato membership towards Russia when Washington, in some eyes, had all but signalled that it would limit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s expansion. Even Mikhail Gorbachev – the West’s favourite former Soviet leader – saw this as a violation of the spirit of the assurances given to Moscow in 1990 by the West.

Is it a sign when we find that Germany, which historically should doubt the utility of warfare as much as anyone, is out in front in the anti-war campaign? Last week, Olaf Scholz, Germany’s new chancellor – successor to the extraordinary Angela Merkel – laid it on the line in Moscow when he put it to Putin that today’s leaders have an absolute obligation to avoid war.

Notably, the utopian German philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) insisted that humanity must live by “the principle of hope” if we are to remain human. But as the negatives pile up these days, only a true optimist can envision a hopeful course. That’s precisely why I stick with optimism, especially for Asia. The alternative is too depressing for words.

Tom Plate, LMU Clinical Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies, is vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute, a non-profit dedicated to peace building between Asia and America