Europe – Globalities

The geopolitical impact of the ICC’s actions on Gaza

Helena CobbanMay 21, 2024May 22, 2024Diplomacy, Europe, Gaza, Global governance, Israel1 Comment

I want to pen some quick thoughts on this topic– not least because in the years 2001-06 I conducted some pretty serious research on the whole matter of “criminal liability/accountability” in individuals in cases of atrocious war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide… And in 2007 I published a whole book on the whole, then fairly recent, emergence of a set of “international courts” that sought to hold leaders and other high-ranking perpetrators criminally responsible for their acts, irrespective of whether they carried out those acts while in political/military office or not. (Most often, they had been in office.)

Two people whom I honored to call friends and colleagues have issued very powerful commentaries on yesterday’s announcement by ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan that he is applying for arrest warrants regarding the situation in Gaza, for Israeli PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and for Hamas General Secretary Ismail Haniyeh and the Gaza-based military-political heads Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif.

These two commentaries come from Jonathan Cook and from Noura Erakat.

Cook’s piece is headed thus:

Global Shifts Update, April 14

Helena CobbanApril 14, 2023April 15, 2023China, Europe, Global balance, Iran, Persian Gulf, Syria, Ukraine crisis, West Asia2 Comments

Globalities is currently releasing its new content in audio format. What follows is the text of the podcast episode I released April 14. Seen above: Brazil’s Pres. Lula Da Silva and China’s Pres. Xi Jinping, in Beijing yesterday. ~HC

Today is April 14, 2023. In today’s episode I’m going to, first of all, present a quick review of some of the key developments this past week has seen in international affairs and what some of them might mean. Then, I’m going to reflect a little on the longer-term historical significance of the seemingly rapid shifts we are currently seeing in the global balance…

But first: My survey of the major developments this balance has seen over the past week, and what they might mean more immediately:

Fallout from Macron’s recent visit to Beijing

Global Shifts Update, April 7

Helena CobbanApril 8, 2023April 8, 2023China, Europe, Global balance, Syria, West Asia

Globalities is shifting for a while to releasing its new content in audio format. What follows is the text of the podcast episode I released April 7. ~HC

Today is April 7, 2023. In today’s episode I’m going to present my review of the key shifts in the global balance that we’ve seen over the past week:

NATO-Russia contest in Ukraine

If we start by looking at the ongoing contest between NATO and Russia over Ukraine, there have been two main developments there: Finland was finally admitted to NATO, which brought to an end a lengthy period in which there has been increasingly close military cooperation between Finland and NATO and then, the year-long process of Finland’s accession to the alliance. The big change with its final admission to NATO is that Finland now receives protection under Article 5 of NATO’s charter which states that an attack on any full member of NATO is considered an attack on all of NATO, and that other NATO states will then assist it to repel the attack using any means deemed necessary, including the use of force.

China’s rise and the changing nature of global power

Helena CobbanMarch 31, 2023April 28, 2023China, Europe, Global balance, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy, White empire1 Comment

This schematic from CSIS traces the 2018 rail links between China, Russia, and the rest of Europe.

In the United States, relations between China and “the West” are viewed as a trans-oceanic affair, with the Asia-Pacific region forming its main arena of cooperation or competition. Viewed from Europe or West Asia (the area formerly known as the Middle East), relations with China look different: in recent decades the many land routes that crisscross Eurasia in all directions have been growing fast in length, connectivity, and capacity.

This could mark a big historical turning-point—or rather, a return after a 600-year hiatus to the kind of world in which, in the late 13th century CE, Marco Polo and his uncle traveled overland to, and through, large portions of China, as shown here.

In the intervening centuries, it was the lethal naval power of a handful of small West European states and their American offspring that came to dominate the destinies of all of humankind.

Everywhere they sailed in 15th through 20th centuries, those European-origined naval empires crushed the power of the large land-based polities they encountered. The Aztecs, Incas, Mughals, Ottoman, Ming and Qing Chinese, and numerous other empires and local confederations were all wiped out.

So now, 600 years after Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator first started to build his network of heavily armed trading posts along the coasts of Africa, it looks as if land empires and the ties that bind them are about to make a comeback.

What shape of a world do we want to build?

Helena CobbanFebruary 24, 2023March 11, 2023China, Europe, Global economy, Global governance, U.S. policy, Ukraine crisis4 Comments

The photo shows a unanimous vote at the U.N. Security Council in January 2022, affirming that nuclear wars must never be fought

Unless your name is Tom Friedman, I guess you’d agree that the world is not flat. But what shape does our world have today—and what shape of a world do we want to build over the years ahead?

I’m pulling strongly for the kind of multipolar order in which all the world’s children have a decent chance of growing up in an environment with a sustainably livable climate and from which the threat of nuclear ecocide has been removed.

Joe Biden seems to have a different preference. Time after time, and in a rising crescendo this past week, he has loudly been painting the world as dominated by a bipolar fight between what he calls the “rules-based order” and Russian aggression—and one that the “West” (as embodied by NATO) must win… And from the other side of the Ukraine frontline, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has been loudly proclaiming his own, mirror-image version of that view.

There are two big problems with seeing the world as essentially bipolar:

The zero-sum-game aspect of any bipolar view of the world entrenches competitive actions at a time when the already evident effects of climate change (hello!) and the threat of nuclear annihilation demand cooperation, rather than competition.
Our world is already deeply and irreversibly multipolar! Hence, seeing it as bipolar, or acting as if it were, is extremely retrograde and ends up being damaging for all the peoples of the world (and almost certainly counter-productive for any leader who follows such a path.)

We should all be glad that this week, the government of China has published a concept paper for a new “Global Security Initiative” (GSI) that presents a realistic, essentially multipolar description of the nature of global power. And just today, Pres. Xi Jinping has issued a powerful call for a ceasefire and peace talks in Ukraine that is clearly derived from the GSI’s principles.

There’s no word yet on whether anyone in China’s corps of global diplomats has been exploring with Moscow or Washington whether and how a Ukraine ceasefire can be attained, or what role Beijing or others might play in that diplomacy. (If such contacts are being conducted, by any party, we most likely wouldn’t hear about them until they were close to success… For my part, I live in hope.)

Meanwhile, two studies recently published in “the West” underline the degree to which power in the world has already become widely diffused. In this one, “The New Geopolitics”, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs focuses on the economic underpinnings of today’s world. And in this one, “United West, divided from the rest”, three analysts from the European Council on Foreign Relations look at the degree to which the public attitudes in China, India, Türkiye, and Russia already diverge starkly from those in NATO countries.

In today’s essay, I will quickly summarize the key findings of the Sachs and ECFR papers, then offer my own preliminary thoughts on the nature and shape of power in today’s world.

Sy Hersh and Pres. Biden’s desperate measures

Helena CobbanFebruary 17, 2023February 20, 2023Europe, U.S. policy, Ukraine crisis6 Comments

For a number of reasons, I am inclined to believe that the landmark piece of reporting that Sy Hersh released last week on Pres. Biden’s decision to bomb the Nord Stream pipelines, got the essential facts of the story right. I also, for what it’s worth, don’t rule out the possibility that the single insider source on whose revelations much of Hersh’s story relied may also to some extent have been playing him by revealing facts that the source’s bosses in the national security apparatus wanted to be revealed. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t undermine the credibility of the revelations themselves, though it would raise other intriguing questions.

Two basic facts stand out, with or without the new revelations from Hersh’s source. The first is Pres. Biden’s stark declaration on February 7 last year that, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it… I promise you that we will be able to do it.” The second is the fact that on September 26 the two Nord Stream pipelines were indeed blown up, in an operation that investigators from nearby Sweden and Denmark later concluded had been conducted by agents of a state actor, un-named.

We might also note that the countries that have benefited the most from the explosion have been Norway and the United States. And the countries that have suffered most from the explosion have been Germany and Russia.

Ukraine’s 3 circles of hell (or, of opportunity?)

Helena CobbanJanuary 27, 2023January 28, 2023Europe, Global governance, Ukraine crisis

Image: Signing ceremony for the 2015 “Minsk II” agreement on Ukraine. Shown l. to r. are the leaders of host country Belarus, Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine.

This week’s news that the United States, Germany, and other NATO countries will be adding two more types of complex Western tanks to the confused mix the Ukrainian military are already trying to deal with is a worrying sign of Washington’s readiness to climb to a higher rung of the potentially catastrophic escalation ladder in Ukraine. But it will take quite some time till those tanks can be used in Ukraine by capable, trained-up Ukrainian tank crews…

Meantime, the need for a speedy, total, country-wide armistice in Ukraine only continues to grow.

Any sustainable peace effort in Ukraine is going to have to address issues at three (or more!) different levels. None of these issues is easy. Initially, I thought of the three levels as constituting three potential “circles of hell.” Then, on further reflection, I concluded we should also think of them as challenges, or even opportunities to build a better-governed and more sustainable world… But first, we need to recognize and understand what the levels are and how they are inter-connected.

Addressing them all will, of course, take time. But luckily there is one powerful tool that diplomats can use today that will speedily stop the carnage on the ground and allow the breathing-space that’s needed to address the deeper issues. It’s called an armistice. As I wrote here, an armistice is what Ukrainians and everyone who has been harmed by this conflict needs right now. (Note: not more weapons, more fear and dispossession, more carnage…)

But let me, anyway, first try to delineate the different levels of confrontation involved in Ukraine, which for now I’ll continue, a little tongue-in-cheek, to describe as the “three circles of hell.”

The good news is that the Ukraine conflict sits amid only three circles of hell, far fewer than the nine identified by Dante Aligheri! The bad news is that each of these is a very tough nut to crack. Then again, two other items of good news: (a) None of these “nuts” need to be cracked immediately. Remember, the leaders of NATO and Russia can agree to a complete armistice in Ukraine any time they choose to, without even starting to negotiate the terms of a “final” peace settlement; and (b) Addressing these challenges in international relations can turn out to be a holistic effort that lays the basis for global stability for many decades to come. (Humankind does, after all, have quite a few other massive challenges to address over the years ahead… )

So what are the three “circles of hell” of which the Ukraine conflict is the epicenter? They are:

The intra-Ukrainian & Ukraine-Russia circle
The European circle, and
The global-balance circle

For now, let me sketch the dimensions of each of these circles briefly. Then, in one or more subsequent essays I’ll unpack them a little more and start to look at the many interactions among them.