The Unwinnable New Age War
The war in Ukraine has now been dragging on for over two years and there is no indication that it is going to end anytime soon. In fact, with Ukraine’s daring incursion into Russian territory of Kursk, which, in effect, is Ukraine’s counter-invasion of Russia, the situation has only escalated. It is for the first time that nuclear-armed Russia has been invaded since the second world war, and that too by a non-nuclear state.
Normally, this should have been a trigger for an extensive retaliation by Russia, but president Putin has so far taken it into his stride. This has made the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy remark that the west shouldn’t be afraid of escalating the conflict, saying “the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia,” had no basis.
This also implies that Ukraine carried out the invasion without the knowledge of the west, which supplies the country with weaponry and finance to fight the war. One can safely conclude that Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s territory must have been greenlighted by the west. So, while the west is breaching Russia’s redlines, the latter, in turn, has so far chosen to play it down. All bets, however, could be off, if Ukraine presses further deeper into Russian territory, Putin may be left with no option but to mount a large-scale retaliation.
For now, the war of attrition is likely to go on until one of the sides blinks, whose probability looks very slim in the near to medium future. The problem is that both sides see it as an existential war, where the only option for them is to win. Neither Russia nor Ukraine seem to have a clear edge on the ground. Both sides are fighting to ensure the defeat of the other side, which may not happen.
Russia’s increasing defiance of the West and China’s inexorable rise have confronted the US and the European Union with a threat to their four hundred year old global hegemony. It is also altering global geopolitics and awakening the rest of the world to the reality of a declining US power.
This is clear from how the nations and regional groupings have been balancing their relations with the US and China-Russia axis. Even though the US-led western coalition against Russia is holding up well, the rest of the world is increasingly asserting its autonomy in its response to the war. Where does the world go from here? The situation has become very fraught. The future shape of the world will be determined in many ways by how the war ends.
Over the last year, the war in Ukraine has, by and large, been overshadowed by the one in Palestine. Although, the nature of two wars is different, the west is involved in both, funding and arming one side. ¸But the west which could have helped stop the war in Gaza has looked on impassively as Israel carries out daily displacements and killings of Palestinians.
Contrast this with the West’s approach to Ukraine where it engages in its familiar charade about human rights. One positive takeaway for the world from the ongoing Gaza genocide is the growing recognition that the west’s commitment to its grand principles is fake and hypocritical. And that it has a different yardstick for the violations of international law when it comes to non-white people.
Two ongoing wars have also underlined a new reality of modern warfare, and which is that it has become increasingly difficult for a country, however powerful, to defeat another country, however weaker. Over two years into its campaign in Ukraine, Russia, a great power, is showing both fatigue and inability to overrun the country. And Israel, despite its vaunted military machine and the western support, has failed to defeat Hamas in Gaza, just a 25-mile long stretch of coastal land, where it has already killed over 40,000 people.
Like Ukraine, the war in Gaza is nowhere nearer to end. At the same time, the countries that are the strongest parties in the two wars aren’t in a position to win them. Ukraine looks set to be another Afghanistan for Russia, much more so following western support for Ukraine that is disproportionately more than what it was for Afghanistan through the eighties. Will the trajectory of Russia’s Afghanistan campaign replicate in Ukraine? It may very well do. Or else in case of a Russian victory, the west, especially Europe, will have little option but to fall in line with Russia’s geopolitical aims.
The war in Gaza, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly unequal: It is a militia type group armed with largely basic weapons, up against a nuclear-armed Israel possessing the world’s most advanced weaponry. But despite almost a year of relentless bombardment, and ground assaults, the IDF is far from ensuring the surrender of Hamas. Hamas may never defeat Israel, but it has stretched Israeli power to its limits.
We may have to wait indefinitely for the outcome of the two wars, but they only look set to reinforce the status quo in the world: The west looks set to retain its pre-eminence in world affairs. But things can work out differently too: Russia’s unlikely outright victory over Ukraine and Hamas fighting Israel to a standstill has the potential to unravel the western global order that has dominated for centuries.
By: Ahmed Rizwan
