West Will Lose Power But Will Leave Mess Before Giving Up

West Will Lose Power But Will Leave Mess Before Giving Up

                                                                                Saeed Naqvi

President James Monroe must have turned in his grave at the Monroe doctrine, named after him being desecrated by rank outside powers, China and Russia. The two are standing four square behind Venezuela strongman Nicolas Maduro even as the US is embarked, for the umpteenth time, on an audacious regime change operation in Caracas. Monroe doctrine was designed to keep outside powers from what the US considers its backyard.

Prof. Jeffery Sachs of Columbia describes the developing tension around Venezuela as a “turning point in international affairs that will reverberate through Washington, Latin America and indeed across the global stage.”

“Caracas has opened its doors to Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi, finding in them not just as buyers of oil but also shields against economic warfare.” The mention of New Delhi in his appraisal is intriguing.

Four days ago, US sank two Venezuelan ships allegedly ferrying narcotics, a charge denied by Caracas. Prof. Richard Wolf of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has joined the rising chorus in support of Venezuela.

The CIA, Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad have, over decades of practice, mastered regime change operation but they have hit a rock: they failed to dethrone Hugo Chavez and now his successor, Maduro.

In desperation, they innovated. Instead of going through a two-stroke operation i.e. first removing Maduro and then installing someone of their choice in Caracas, they experimented with a new formula: simply ignore Maduro and anoint 41 year Juan Guaido as President recognized by Washington. By this amazing sleight of hands an “authoritarian” leader will have been replaced by a “democratic” one.

For months and years poor Juan Guaido lived in save houses in Caracas and Columbia, waited in corridors of power in Washington. Not for the first time the world’s most powerful nation ignored the elementary lesson: there are limits to all power.

Limits to power or not, Juan Guaido, his eye on the main chance, has a CV more impressive than it might have been before his Presidential talents were noticed by Washington. Juan Guaido’s CV describes him as ex-President Venezuela (2019-2023). You will notice, he had bipartition support; he was the apple of Trump’s eye as well as Joe Biden’s.

 

Heaven knows where Guaido is hiding, but no sooner had the democracy enthusiasts in Washington developed amnesia about the Guaido initiative, the agencies were at it again.

 

Last year, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp told Parliament that Venezuela opposition leader Edmundo Gonzales had sought refuge in the Dutch embassy in Caracas, another casualty of Presidential aspirations stoked by Washington.

 

Trump’s National Security Adviser in his first term, John Bolton while in that office salivated on Venezuela. He wanted a full fledged invasion. Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson was another great votary of the Monroe doctrine. “Monroe doctrine is alive and kicking” he thundered when a reporter questioned its validity today.

 

Discussing the subject with officers in the state department, Trump’s shifting stand on issues came up for mention. “The President”, he thumped the table, “is a moron.”

 

How is Trump likely to respond to the double fisted punch China and Russia have landed on his chin.

 

On the face of it, his style remains the same. Americans vacated Afghanistan, including the Bagram air base. Trump suddenly has a revived interest in Bagram. He wants the Taleban government to give it back to him. Otherwise, “very bad things will happen.”

 

The new warmth in friendship with Pakistan may well have an Afghan dimension. Who knows, unexplored rare earth deposits in Balochistan may be in focus in addition to much else.

 

Alliances splintering, new business vistas opening are all symptoms of a settled order mutating into something else.

 

Among the incidents of note in the recent past was Field Marshal Asim Munir lunch at the White House even though Trump knew how this gesture would register with Narendra Modi. Soon Pakistan was in global high profile again having signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia. Riyadh possibly comes under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella to meet the threat from Israel, an unlikely scenario though.

 

Tehran is unlikely to have sleepless nights on this score. Beijing has already arranged for Riyadh and Tehran to reduce hostile perceptions of each other.

 

Events in Africa have for a long time indicated a shift in global equations. Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore has struck a unique deal with Pakistan: a fleet of jets, tanks, naval equipments based on Chinese technology will be built in Burkina Faso. At the outset of the Ukraine war Macron was the most vocal on Russia: Europe must talk to Putin. But as soon as Russian interests advanced in former French colonies, Macron lined up with the European consensus hostile to Putin.

 

Macron was among the first to grasp the implications of not just the outcome of Ukraine war but also of Israel-Palestinian mega eruption. Russian troops moved into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In September of that year Macron assembled all his diplomats, the Armed Forces and senior bureaucracy and showed them the writing on the wall as he saw it then. “Over 400 years of western domination of world affairs was coming to an end.”

 

Prof. Grahame Allison’s study “the Thucydides trap” is being cited. Peloponnesian wars authored by the Greek historian concludes that Athens rise created such insecurities in Sparta that war became inevitable. Is it inevitable that China’s rise and the West’s decline must lead to war? The war between Sparta and Athens was a conventional military and naval engagement.

 

Allison, whose earlier work, Essence of Decision, a study of decision making during the Cuban missile crisis, is considered a classic. In his latest study he has taken 15 historical case studies since the 16^th century.

 

Examples like Germany’s rise to power: this challenged British dominance. The interplay was one of the reasons of World War I. The abundance of nuclear weapons makes the present situation unique to be assessed in the framework of the great Greek historian. Will the West commit suicide to remain on top?

 

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Record Audiences At Separate Venues For Two Historians In their 90s

Record Audiences At Separate Venues For Two Historians In their 90s

                                                                                 Saeed Naqvi

New Delhi witnessed two extraordinary events, on successive days, at different venues by two of the country’s celebrated historians – Prof. Irfan Habib and Prof. Romila Thapar, both in their 90s.

What they said was important enough but what could not escape notice were the multitudes who thronged to the venues much in advance and yet found themselves unable to enter. Even the aisles were packed with students balancing their notebooks on their knees.

The human spillover must be seen as evidence of an enormous hunger for alternative discourse, along with multiple other reasons.

Prof. Thapar read an elaborate paper at the India International Centre, on a theme identified with her – Present colonizes the past: future forsaken.

Prof. Habib’s talk was circumscribed by the occasion – death anniversary of CPM General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury. His theme was Communists and the national movement. The points he dwelt on will be discussed within CPM of which he remains a life member. That the venue, Harikishen Singh Surjeet Bhavan off Rouse Avenue could accommodate so many was, to me, a revelation.

“The Communist party asked Muslim members to join the Muslim League; Hindus to join the Congress.” Prof. Habib dismissed this party line of the 1940s as “an enormous error.” The line, enunciated by the Party General secretary, P.C. Joshi, “divided communists on communal lines” he said. It also cast the Congress as a “Hindu party”, which was a faulty appreciation of the INC.

The issue will surely be debated both, within the party and outside. A Joshi loyalist would probably defend the line as a tactic to advance the cause of communists in both the parties at a critical moment in history.

Prof. Habib quoted Rajni Palme Dutt’s India Today. There is a whole chapter (written in 1945) in which Dutt “laid out why India should not be divided on communal lines.” Dutt was, after all, “a major communist spokesman of the time in both England and India.” Prof. Habib’s anger was most pulpable when he attacked the communist leadership of the day. “Either our leaders did not read Dutt or there were other reasons why the communist party at the time decided to treat the Congress and the Muslim League in the same way?”

Trust a historian of Habib’s vintage to enunciate with such passion the “grievous mistake” his party made (then the CPI) in the 40s. He insisted, the issue “be debated and corrected by the party.”

It turns out that great historians too, in their lighter moments, fall back on anecdotage. His father Prof. Mohammad Habib was in 1960 visited by his former student, who had reached the highest echelons of Pakistan’s public life. Because of his training as a communist, the Muslim League found him exceptionally capable. His rise, first in UP and subsequently in Pakistan was meteoric. He visited Irfan Habib’s father to ironically complain of the absence of a soul in his post communist, pure Muslim experience.

Also under his scanner was the CPI’s shift in its attitude to World War II, at a time when the Congress had given notice to the British in 1942 – Quit India. There were two issues involved. First, it was an intra-imperialist war until Hitler launched operation Barabarosa in 1941. The world’s principal Fascist power had attacked the world’s only socialist power, the Soviet Union.

It was no longer an intra imperial war, Habib argued. It had become a peoples War, the criticism heaped on the Communists for this “shift” notwithstanding.

What complicated matters was the Congress call to the British in 1942 to Quit India. Habib questioned Congress sagacity in asking the British to Quit just when the Japanese army was “knocking at our door.”

“If you look at Jawaharlal Nehru’s own papers, far from opposing the British at the time, he was worrying on how the Japanese invasion would be tackled by Indians.”

Japan was the enemy in Nehru’s mind at the time. Habib expressed surprise that “Nehru concurred” when the Congress passed the Quit India resolution. The communists needed to question the wisdom of the Congress giving a clarion call to the British to Quit India when the axis power, Japan was about to invade India.

A compromised judiciary being a theme of contemporary saliency, Habib’s story of Justice Suleiman, one of the judges for The Meerut Conspiracy case of 1920 deserves mention. He told the British lawyer for the prosecution that “what you are saying is absurd. “What you are alleging the communist did was physically not possible.”

The English Chief Justice summoned Justice Suleiman. “Your name has been sent up for appointment to the “Federal court”, today’s Supreme Court. The hint was -don’t mess up “your future” by making an error in the crucial conspiracy case.

Justice Suleiman took the hint. He salved his conscience by reducing the sentence, but he kept his eye on the main chance by “not exposing the fraud.” He became a judge of the federal court and, later, Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim university duly rewarded for being a compromised judge.

Prof. Thapar kept a steady gaze on history written by a professional historian i.e. sifting the evidence and rigorously analyzing it. She was anguished at historical research being discounted in favour of history by social media.

Two theories in particular are in favour and which were deeply ingrained in Indian history. These were the Aryan theory of race and the two-nation theory. The Aryan theory assumes that history began when the subcontinent was settled by the Aryans. The other theory was, of course, the much better known two-nation theory initially set out by James Mill in 1817. India consisted of two nations, the Hindu and the Muslim, and that they were permanently hostile to each other. This theory ignored the fact that a nation depends on drawing diverse people together whereas religion segregates them according to belief. There are these two contrary processes but they've been bundled into one by James Mill. “Can nationalism therefore be qualified by a religious identity?”

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Ukraine, Gaza Wars Will End With A Bang Not Whimper

Ukraine, Gaza Wars Will End With A Bang Not Whimper

                                                                                   Saeed Naqvi

Ukraine and Gaza are TV serials streaming interminably on our screens because the authors do not know how to script the final scene. The general drift of the story is known but not the end.

The end to the Gaza war is in perpetual delay because both, the US and Israel are embarrassed admitting that global exceptionalism for one and regional exceptionalism for the Jewish state ring hollow with global power shifting rapidly from the North to the South since the collapse in 2008 of Lehman Brothers.

It had taken decades to recover from the Vietnam syndrome, the deep resistance US public opinion developed to foreign involvements after the debacle in Saigon in 1975.

Post 9/11 wars caused an adrenalin rush as the neo-cons embarked on expediting the American century. With the US embroiled in numerous wars, big and small, maintaining 760 bases worldwide, candidate Trump asked President Jimmy Carter: “China is going ahead of US; what should we do?” Carter’s response was precise. “Except for a skirmish with Vietnam in 1978, China has not been at war; we have never stopped being at war.”

US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was, in many ways, even more destructive of American, indeed Western, self esteem than was the Vietnam debacle 50 years ago. Indefatigable Vietnamese nationalism was a factor, but it was American public opinion, stoked by outstanding journalism by anchors like Walter Cronkite which helped precipitate the dramatic end.

In Afghanistan the mainstream media played a negative role. It covered up. Indeed one of the current tragedies of the West is the collapse of the credibility of the western media. There is a complex bunch of reasons for this enormous reliability deficit but let me touch on two.

A uniform Murdochization mistook the fleeting Sole Superpower moment as a more durable happening. Editorials in the Washington Post in their general drift became indistinguishable from, say, Le Monde. Even though the unipolar world passed, the media has remained frozen in its habit. It still deludes itself that it is in the service of a unipolar moment.

Also, when wars break out the war correspondent in any case becomes a propagandist and mythmaker. Since the US has been continuously at war from the 1990s, journalists have tended to be propagandists’ sans credibility.

The narrative in both the wars is in conflict with the ground realities. The narrative, amplified by the media dreamt up a scenario in which Putin invaded Ukraine without any provocation to fulfil his “imperialist dreams.”

Forgotten were the promises to Gorbachev made in 1991 by Secretary of State, James Baker that “NATO would not move by an inch any closer to Russia.”  At the Bucharest Summit of NATO in 2008 President George W Bush virtually poked Putin in the eye by announcing that Georgia and Ukraine would join NATO. This Red line, Putin would not allow to be transgressed. For Russia this was an existential threat.

There were worse provocations, including the coup in 2014 in which elected President Yanukovych, who sought neutrality, was replaced by a West friendly candidate. All this and much more the western media developed an acute amnesia for.

Likewise, on the Gaza front Israel’s genocide and mass murder by starvation, spread over two years are justified as punishment for Hamas’s temerity for having murdered 1,200 Jews and taken 251 hostages with stunning audacity on October 7, 2023.

In Ukraine the might of NATO, EU, Europe and the US are all pitted against Russia. What has thrown a monkey-wrench in western plans against Russia is the friendship “with no limits” which Russia and China announced earlier in the same month that Russian troops moved into Ukraine.

What is actually fueling the two wars was blurted out by Boris Johnson when he, trapped in partygate, scuttled a deal arrived at as early as April 2022 in Istanbul. According to a Foreign Policy article Johnson turned up in Kyiv to stay Zelensky’s hand. “The West was not ready to end the war yet.” To him, the war was not about Ukraine but western hegemony.

The casualty figure of Ukrainians is 1.7 million. By all reliable accounts the Russian advance on the battlefield is relentless. The seven leaders of what Donald Rumsfeld disparagingly described as “old Europe”, chaperoned Volodymyr Zelensky to the Trump Durbar in the Oval office with what purpose? Please don’t talk to Putin? Don’t end the Ukraine war on Putin’s terms. Cite European security even though it is western hegemony which is on the line.

On the Gaza front, nearly two years after the October 7 “Al Aqsa flood” attack, what is the scorecard? Hamas’s audacious, bold, bleak attack was not designed to inflict defeat on Israel but invite Israeli retaliation. The Jewish state walked straight into the trap with such unspeakable barbarity as to make the world gasp and close its eyes.

Supposing Hitler had survived in some Satanic scenario, would he have been welcome in any post war assembly. The answer, obviously, is a resounding No. Why would any other logic apply to the apartheid state which has perpetrated genocide, murdered by starvation on live TV and whose only expertise in war is to assassinate popular leaders.

The day after this war is over, I cannot visualize Netanyahu being showered with petals. Neither he nor the “river to the sea” project he strives for has survivability.

How will the West cope with two more defeats – one in the heart of Europe and the other in its most powerful outpost in West Asia? This will not be allowed to happen easily. There has been talk of Taurus missiles and medium range missile to bolster Ukraine. In desperation these could be brought into play with cameras prepositioned around Moscow and St. Petersburg for fireworks which will temporarily drown out the reversal on the ground. Israel, with its back to the wall, may target Iran with something, more lethal. The world will keep a steady gaze on Moscow and Tehran in mortifying suspense.

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