• Home
  • About
  • Reading Lists
    • Egypt
    • Great Books
    • Iran
    • Islam
    • Israel
    • Liberalism
    • Napoleon
    • Nationalism
    • The Nuclear Age
    • Science
    • Russia
    • Turkey
  • Digital Footprint
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pocket
    • SoundCloud
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr
    • YouTube
  • Contact
    • Email

Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

Politics of Spite

09 Wed May 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Iran, Middle East

≈ Comments Off on Politics of Spite

Tags

Barack Obama, Britain, CAATSA, Chabahar, China, Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, Donald Trump, EU Blocking Regulation, France, Hassan Rouhani, INSTC, International North-South Trade Corridor, Iran, Israel, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, nuclear, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United States

As predicted, US president Donald Trump has led the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The agreement, which was supposed to increase international (Western) oversight into Tehran’s nuclear programme and hopefully rein in its nuclear ambitions, was one of the few unambiguously positive legacies of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, but ran into opposition even during the delicate negotiations. Critics tried to add riders involving their pet projects – usually human rights or missile development – to the deal in an attempt to derail process. Consistent with his pre-election criticism for once, Trump had called the JCPOA a bad deal and promised to repudiate it if elected.

America’s European partners – Britain, France, Germany, and Russia – have parted ways with Washington and declared their intent to continue adherence to the JCPOA; China has so far been mute but already threatened with a trade war with the United States, it is highly likely that it, too, will follow the Europeans in holding on to the Iranian nuclear deal.

It is not yet clear what the fallout of the American departure from the JCPOA will be. Although the rhetoric of the exit has been focused on how the agreement did not go far enough in preventing Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, the fact that Trump administration officials have stated that sanctions will be “snapped back” indicates that they believe Iran to be in breach of its obligations under the JCPOA – although most technical experts disagree with this evaluation.

Given that the other members of the E3 + 3 – particularly Britain, France, and Germany – will not be following the US example, the interesting question is if Washington intends to sanction their businesses and banks under the recently passed Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) as India fears its defence dealings with Russia might. This would cause an enormous rupture in in the US and world economy as China is the United States’ single largest trading partner and Britain, France, and Germany are together the fourth largest ahead of Japan. Yet if Trump does use his presidential discretion to waive sanctions and exempt these four countries, it would be too blatant an act of political hypocrisy if the same treatment was not extended to others over Russia and North Korea as well as over Iran.

In February 2018, Patrick Pouyanné, the CEO of the French oil & gas giant Total, openly called for the implementation of the 1996 European Union Blocking Regulation, a law that prohibited European firms from cooperating with foreign demands that are in violation of international law or hurt European sovereign interests. Denis Chaibi, a senior diplomat in the European External Action Service, commented that the EU was looking at a variety of options and the blocking regulations would not be difficult to implement.

Ultimately, these are political instruments and businesses would be hurt either by European penalties for obeying US sanctions or the denial of access to American markets due to US sanctions. Obviously, firms would prefer having access to the far larger American markets than pin their hopes on soaring Euro-Iranian trade and the threat of blocking regulations is empty. States are supposed to exercise restrain and caution and a tit-for-tat exchange between the United States and its three primary European allies will hurt everyone. More to the point, the multinational supply chains of most large industrial houses today means that there would be few European firms that are not exposed to the United States and are free to do business with Iran.

Internationally, many countries would be pulled into the US wake for similar reasons; most countries are fairly integrated into the US economy and their national economies are not robust enough to withstand the loss of the American market. Additionally, others may have political reasons to reluctantly support Washington. India, for example, has been trying to purchase high-end American weapons systems and seeks Washington’s cooperation on several crucial issues such as defence technology and the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific. It is most likely that India will have to bear the damage done to its own ambitions in Chabahar and the International North-South Trade Corridor (INSTC). Delhi will have even more to lose if Tehran responds to Delhi’s distancing by handing the responsibility for the Shahid Beheshti port over to Beijing.

If India can persuade the United States for a partial waiver on trade as it had done last time, its importance to Tehran would rise again only to the extent that other countries stop or reduce links with the Islamic republic.

Saudi Arabia, considered to be one of the beneficiaries of the American abnegation of the JCPOA, will enjoy in the short-term the spike in oil prices that is bound to follow Trump’s decision. However, this entire episode will have reiterated to Iran that the only way to be truly safe from American interference, as an Indian general is supposed to have observed after the First Gulf War in 1991, is to acquire nuclear weapons. Tehran seems to have been acutely aware of this note – Iran’s ambitions, as revealed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent document dump, were to posses just five nuclear warheads than an entire arsenal.

Riyadh has only managed to stoke Tehran’s determination and not douse it. The JCPOA was designed to give the international community breathing space to consider how best to dampen Iran’s love of the Bomb – it was never meant to provide a permanent solution as there are none. As non-proliferation experience has illustrated, the determined country will acquire nuclear weapons regardless of the financial and political costs to it and the willingness to pay such a high price will attract unscrupulous suppliers. The classic example of this is Pakistan, whose nuclear journey would have taken far longer had it not been for the generous acts of commission by China and of omission by the United States.

Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the American walkout is Israel. On the one hand, the reintroduction and expansion of sanctions hurts the Iranian economy and removes funds that might have otherwise gone to fund the Hezbollah and its adventures in Syria but on the other, the European and Iranian decision to continue observing the JCPOA keeps the checks on the Iranian nuclear programme in place for at least the next decade. If the archives reveal 30 years down the line that this was a game of good-cop-bad-cop, this would be a strategic masterstroke by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The one certainty at this moment is that Iran is not as isolated as it was prior to 2015. Even if Europe falls in line with America’s wishes, Russia and China are both unlikely to go along with the West this time. Both countries have been antagonised by Trump’s sanctions and threats of a trade war to be receptive to cooperation. This opens the door for greater Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East. Russia also gains by the rift that has been created between Europe and the United States over the Iranian nuclear programme.

In some ways, Trump has just given Iran’s hardline clerics a lease of life. There have been several signs that Iranians citizens are frustrated with their government and the poor economy. Some analysts were even hopeful of organic reforms that would gradually move the country from its extreme Islamic views. Trump’s abandonment of the JCPOA underscores everything hardliners warned against – that the United States is not a trustworthy partner and it ultimately seeks the total subjugation of Iran.

If Washington expects Tehran to come back to the negotiating table, it may have a long wait. Rather than re-engage with a party that has shown bad faith, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani may simply choose to wait out his American counterpart in the hopes that Trump’s successor would be more amenable to the Obamian status quo.

It is not clear what the Trump administration sought to achieve by leaving the JCPOA. If anything, it draws attention to the Iranian bogey in American minds and the ghosts of 1979 that such policies would have any support in the houses of legislature or with the citizens. Pace the political acrobatics that are about to ensue over the coming days, the ultimate prize is the withering of the Iranian nuclear weapons programme. It is not clear if anyone in the White House had kept that in mind while thinking about abruptly walking out of an international treaty.


This post appeared on FirstPost on May 10, 2018.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem…

06 Wed Dec 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Israel, Middle East

≈ Comments Off on If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem…

Tags

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Ali Khamenei, Egypt, Fatah, HaBayit HaYehudi, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Jerusalem, Jordan, King Abdullah, Manuel Hassassian, Mavi Marmara, Mohammad bin Salman, Palestine, Psalm 137, Reuven Rivlin, Saudi Arabia, terrorism, Tzipi Hotovely, United States

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” sang the Israelites, “may my right hand forget her cunning, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” That was approximately 2,600 years ago during the Babylonian captivity, a memory preserved in Psalm 137. To most Israelis, US president Donald Trump’s decision to declare his country’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was simply a late awakening to a most basic fact.

To the rest of the world, Trump’s actions, as always, were reason for hyperbole and haranguing. The spokesman for the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the US was “plunging the region and the world into a fire with no end in sight,” and the Palestinian envoy to the UK, Manuel Hassassian, added, “He is declaring war in the Middle East, he is declaring war against 1.5 billion Muslims.” As can be expected, criticism has been sharpest from Muslim states and with a little more diplomatic decorum from Europe, Russia, and China. In addition, analysts of all stripes have been all over print and the airwaves predicting great upheaval in the Middle East and the derailment of decades of patient US diplomacy.

It is unclear, however, how much of the breast-beating is warranted. The primary argument against Trump’s declaration seems to be that it will cause unrest in the Middle East. Yet when in the past several decades has something not caused unrest in the region? What is the guarantee that there will be no violence in Gaza if the United States desists from the announcement? Can anyone even distinguish the chaos due to the US declaration from the upheaval, tumult, riot, violence, or disturbance that are routine to the region, and at that point, does it really matter?

The countries of the Levant are swirling in a whirlpool of chaos, instability, and terrorism that has been largely of their own making for almost a decade. Arab street decries any move by the international community that may benefit Israel as detrimental to peace and stability, implicitly encouraging a complete blockade and destruction of the Jewish state.

It must also be remembered, as Tzipi Hotovely recently alluded to, that Israel has constantly lived in a state of undeclared war. Any more unrest that is promised by the terrorists of the Middle East will hardly be noticed in the quotidian deadly exchanges with Hamas, Hezbollah, the occasional Syrians, and other armed thugs.

Another point of criticism of the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has been that it violates international law – Jerusalem is seen as occupied territory and any change of demographics on disputed land or official recognition to it is illegal. However, this fails to recognise that the United States has merely recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel but has not defined the boundaries of the city – that is still left to the Israelis and Palestinians in future peace negotiations.

One might argue that Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel muddies its role as an impartial arbitrator. Yet that ship, at least in Arab eyes, has already sailed – no one views the Great Satan as a neutral judge. What Arabs and Israelis both count on is the diplomatic, economic, and military wherewithal the United States is capable of bringing to bear upon the side that violates a peace agreement.

What will Trump’s announcement have on the other states in the region? Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei has warned of dire consequences but it would be an unusual day when the Islamic Republic does not threaten to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Trump’s announcement may force the Palestinians to show strength through terror and this might fray relations between Fatah and Hamas that had only recently been mended with much difficulty. However, Jerusalem does not recognise any Palestinian player as a genuine partner for peace – translation: dial down the terrorism – and there is no missed opportunity here.

Ankara has threatened to cut off diplomatic ties with Israel but relations have already been frigid between the two American allies after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010. Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states Israel has peace treaties with, have also not reacted positively to the news. Yet it is not sure what either Abdel Fattah el-Sisi or King Abdullah will or can do as neither country has had a particularly good past with the Palestinians.

The real question is about Saudi Arabia’s reaction to this all. Traditionally, Riyadh has stoked the Palestinian crisis periodically and refused to recognise the Jewish state. Recent rumours, however, have left several commentators murmuring about a clandestine US-Israel-Saudi Arabia alliance to contain Iran’s expanded influence in the Middle East after a successful turn of events in Iraq and Syria. The whispers became even louder after Trump tacitly supported a great purge in the Saudi royal family by the crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman. This has always seemed far-fetched to me and Washington’s recent dousing of Saudi ambitions in Lebanon – Saad Hariri’s removal – leaves one thinking that there are still some kinks in that plan.

More importantly, there were even rumours that Mohammad bin Salman had secretly flown to Israel to meet with its leaders to discuss a Palestinian peace plan, a normalisation of relations, and Iran. Such delicate ventures may be beyond the crown prince in view of his streak of recklessness on display in dealing with other crises such as Yemen. While there is indeed a temporary alignment of interests between Israel and Saudi Arabia, one bête noire does not a rapprochement make.

It is also unlikely, if such a triumvirate ever existed, that the topic of Jerusalem would not have cropped up. In that case, despite Riyadh’s official dismay at the US decision, it will be interesting to see what it actually does. Yet what about the impact on US ties with its other allies in the region such as Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates? Regardless of what State Department mandarins think, this administration has made it quite clear that American allies around the globe have not done enough. It is not improbable that Trump prefers to deal with Riyadh alone and coerce the “smaller” allies with the former’s help.

Could the Jerusalem declaration be part of Trump’s personal “charm?” The president is enveloped in legal battles and his administration has yet to be fully staffed or retain any member for a decent period. Trump had also promised during his election campaign that he would recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the US embassy to the city. The Jerusalem declaration not only distracts his opponents from the domestic quagmire but also delivers on a campaign promise, thus reinforcing his image to his base, perhaps, as the anti-politician. It is also possible that Trump is using his declaration as a bargaining chip to force the Palestinians to the negotiating table, the message being that there is much to lose by holding out.

Ultimately, the issue is more religious than national as Hassassian’s statement clearly reveals. As the Oslo Accords and the failed Camp David Summit in 2000 demonstrated, Jerusalem is not a negotiable issue for either side. The Arabs want to control their holy site, the Haram al-Sharif; the Jews remind us that when that was the case before 1967, they were not given access to their holy sites. More than geopolitics, it is this facet that will shape the reaction of the Arab states to American recognition of Jerusalem as the Israelis capital – it would be political suicide to even sit idly by as the United States moved its embassy to the disputed city.

It is altogether a different matter to discuss Palestine’s right over Jerusalem or even its own existence, given that it has never existed as a state – before 1967, the West Bank, along with Jerusalem, was occupied by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The Palestinian government Cairo set up in the Strip, ironically, was not recognised by Jordan.

Israel’s reaction to Trump’s announcement has so far been muted but the bubbling joy underneath the uncharacteristically nonchalant surface is palpable. The most reaction came from Naftali Bennett, the leader of the HaBayit HaYehudi and the Minister for both, Education and Diaspora Affairs, who is said to have written to the US president, “thank you from the bottom of my heart for your commitment and intention to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Otherwise, the government has generally been quiet. The Israeli commentariat, however, has been effusive, Caroline Glick calling the decision 70 years late but welcome and Arsen Ostrovsky reiterating that Jerusalem is the “eternal & undivided capital of the State of Israel and the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people!” Most Israelis probably relate to the words of HaAvoda leader Avi Gabbay. When asked about the imbroglio that had resulted from Trump’s announcement he replied, “When my parents came from Morocco to Jerusalem, I can assure you they didn’t check the State Department website to see if it’s the capital or not. They knew Jerusalem was the capital and just came.”

But what does Trump’s declaration really matter? Jerusalem is the seat of the Israeli government as President Reuven Rivlin remarked, and no military in the Arab world is capable of removing them from it. No borders change on the ground and no one falls one the wrong side of a line; territories are not swapped. Is the whole drama not purely symbolic? Perhaps, but society is not so cynical yet that symbols have lost their value. And in the Middle East, few symbols are bigger than the City of David.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Humanitarian Farce

29 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Humanitarian Farce

Tags

Antonio Gramsci, Bashar al-Assad, Benjamin Netanyahu, Britain, diplomacy, France, Hardeep Singh Puri, hegemony, India, Iraq, Libya, machtpolitik, matsya nyaya, media, mindfare, Muammar Gaddafi, Paul Wolfowitz, Perilous Interventions, R2P, Right To Protect, Russia, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, terrorism, think tank, Ukraine, United Nations Security Council, United States, veto, Yemen

Perilous InterventionsPuri, Hardeep Singh. Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016. 280 pp.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus tells Horatio in the opening act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Former diplomat Hardeep Singh Puri probably could not have put it better about the United Nations Security Council and the existing global order. Through his book, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, a devastating indictment of Western hypocrisy in international governance, India’s former permanent representative to the United Nations gives readers a ringside seat to some of the discussions that went on in the Security Council during some of the major crises of the past decade. Puri lambasts the existing system and warns that without reforms, faith in multilateralism will soon fade.

Disregarding the advice of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck about the making of sausages and laws, Puri details the discussions within the Security Council on the question of whether the international community should intervene in Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Yet long before then, Iraq had attracted the attention of certain American strategists such as Paul Wolfowitz. They had argued as early as the early 1970s, Puri reminds us, that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power could potentially result in a domino effect of democratisation in the region and with it better partners for the United States. Two other candidates for regime change to accelerate this region-wide democratic revolution were Iran and Iran. Revolution in the former in 1979 and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war extinguished all such thoughts from the White House.

However, they were not forgotten. In Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of the US Congress in 2002, the former and future Israeli prime minister reiterated this same idea. American fears about Iraqi ABCs – atomic, biological, and chemical weapons – rang his message sweeter to Washington. Looking to their own careers, CIA officials funnelled intelligence reports they knew would be prefered by the High Command rather than those undermining the public narrative of state sponsorship of terrorism and WMDs. The United States went to war in Iraq soon afterwards and the Middle East began to unravel – not in a manner either Wolfowitz, Netanyahu, or anyone else had envisioned.

Narrow national interests coloured the deliberations of the Security Council over Libya as well. Puri recounts how Britain, Germany, and especially France, more than the United States, were interested in deposing strongman Muammar Gaddafi from the beginning. Libya’s relations with Western governments had been slowly improving since 2003 when Tripoli reached out through the United Nations to make amends for its role in several acts of terrorism in the late 1980s. That, however, was not the public face of relations between Libya and the Western bloc. The Arab Spring protests gave the West, probably hoping for a quick success, the opportunity required to oust Gaddafi.

Under the guise of humanitarian intervention and R2P – the Right to Protect – Western nations placed onerous conditions upon Tripoli. Puri narrates the arguments over the language of Resolution 1970 and how, through wording that was loose at best and deceptive at worst, the Western powers tried to gain international sanction to bring Gaddafi to heel using “all necessary means to protect civilians and make available humanitarian assistance.” As Libyan government forces started to turn the tide against the rebels in the civil war that had devolved out of earlier protests, France, buoyed by an Arab League resolution calling upon the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, pushed through Resolution 1973 that was sufficiently lax in its formulation to allow military action. NATO, led by France and supported by the United States went to war in Libya. Puri strenuously makes the point that this was in complete violation of the spirit of the discussions in the Security Council but the West did not wait until even the inl was dry before invding Libya.

Everything has conequences, and the Western sleight of hand over Libya had got Russia’s back up over Syria. As a result, when the Security Council started deliberating on Bashar al-Assad’s civil war, Moscow was implacable in their opposition to any sort of intervention. It is also possible, Puri admits, that this was due to greater Russian interest in Syria – a naval and ar force base – or because there had been a change in power in Moscow from Dmitry Medvedev to Vladimir Putin. It is also possible that there was no appetite for yet another war in the Middle East in Washington during an election year. Yet the pattern of Western behaviour was similar: hollow humanitarian claims supported by regional powers with vested interests against the incumbent authority. Predictably, the results were also similar: chaos, instability, wanton destruction of life and infrastructure, the rise of private militias, and terrorism – all at the cost of the region. Any chance for an early peace was stymied by unrealistic preconditions such as the abdication of Assad. Furthermore, Washington’s too clever by half notion of ‘good terrorist’ and ‘bad terrorist’ helped spawn its own nemesis – something American politicians, despite several repetitions, are yet to learn from.

Perilous Interventions also describes the paralysis of the Security Council owing to its veto provisions over the crisis in Ukraine caused by the secession of Crimea and its return to Russia. The author stops short of excusing Russian behaviour as he lambasts European and American ambition in seeking to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. From the beginning, military force was out of the question in Ukraine for two reasons: Russia maintained a veto in the Security Council, and it was a major nuclear power that could not be trifled with as the likes of Iraq or Libya. The Western strategy, then, was to try and isolate Russia through economic sanctions. These may have worked partially but were doomed to fail eventually without the support of Moscow’s BRICS partners.

Yemen saw similar inaction from the Security Council. The country, already a regular on the UN body’s agenda even before civil war broke out, has experienced more death and destruction in five months than even Syria after four long years of fighting. Impoverished Yemen has for long been Saudi Arabia’s bete noire: fearful of foreign intervention – Egypt in the 1960s and Iran since the 1980s – in a country bordering its own restive Shia population, Riyadh has been quick and ruthless in its involvement in Yemen. The Saudi campaign, Puri reminds us, has received complete support from the United States and other Western powers despite the horrendous loss of civilian life due to the callousness of Riyadh’s military tactics that ranged from the use of missiles to indiscriminate bombing, which in one case even destroyed a Medecins sans Frontieres hospital.

Puri is not unfair in targetting only Western nations. He has a few choice words for the Indian debacle in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s too. However, the reader may surmise from the tone that the author is more understanding of Delhi’s compulsions than he is with Washington, London, or Paris. Furthermore, India’s reasons for getting involved in its southern neighbour’s affairs are a far more convoluted cocktail of domestic political considerations rather than the relatively straight-forward rapacious realpolitik of the West. The narrative also feels more restrained about the human cost of the tragedy in Sri Lanka compared to Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Yemen – but that may also be because the South Asian island has suffered far less despite a longer lasting conflict.

In each of the chapters is detailed a series of operational blunders that fed on each other and led to the present quagmire. From the insane notion of good and bad terrorism to the arming of certain rebel factions, from an utter disregard of historical follies to an almost stubborn refusal to accept intelligence from the ground, from giving ground to less informed commentators over professionals to cherry-picking intelligence, Puri’s rap sheet of Western political myopia and ideological blindness makes for a discomforting read – each of these mistakes, as we disapssionately read them, cost tens of thousands of lives.

Although Perilous Interventions is an excellent exposition of Great Power hypocrisy and the weakness of the United Nations in both, curbing the predatory instincts of some of its members and the oppressive nature of other members, it does not offer more insight on the crises of the past decade and half than a discerning reader could have gleaned from the regular perusal of the daily newspaper over the years. Why would a seasoned and distinguished diplomat be surprised by an unremarkable display of matsya nyaya?

The real punch of Perilous Interventions comes from its author’s assertion that this behaviour of the Western powers was given intellectual cover by their think tanks and media. In fact, Puri explicitly states that the push towards intervention in Libya came from the Western media over the inclination of a hesitant diplomatic corps. Gaddafi was portrayed negatively, incompletely, and even falsely – he had not, for example, threatened civilians with retaliation – in the tabloids to the extent that it was difficult for him to even get hotel rooms in New York during a 2012 visit. These observations by Puri only cement the cautious view of Western organisations in the rest of the world. They can no longer be seen as sources of intellectually rigorous, methodologically sound, and unbiased information. In fact, reading Puri between the lines, think tanks and media have become a new front for the West to propagate their hegemony through ‘mindfare’ – the war for opinions and minds throughout the world – true hegemony as described by Antonio Gramsci.

Perhaps the only criticism of Perilous Interventions is the author’s discordantly Pollyanna-ish view that India played a positive role during the deliberations over these crises. The Indian stance has always been distant, unhelpful, and predictable – urge a cessation of hostilities, encourage negotiations, and plead for an arms embargo on the region. Although these are perfectly rational recommendations, it is similarly irrational to expect that the agitated actors in a conflict that has already spilled over to violence wish to listen to sense. Consider, for example, the Indian response to international calls for restraint during its wars with Pakistan.

Furthermore, Puri’s suggestion that the permanent members of the Security Council volunatrily give up their veto powers – de facto if not de jure – is laughable. Such largesse may be expected only from foreign policy neophytes of the kind India has been blessed with but not anywhere else. Yet even if the Permanent Five were to surrender their veto powers, the question then arises as to who will bell the cat. Is the international community truly willing or capable of conducting a military intervention in China, for example, for any reason?

Perilous Interventions will certainly feed those who are already deeply sceptical of the West and subliminally hostile to it. However, rather than adding ghee to the fire of conspiracy theories, Puri records in detail, with evidence, genuine cases of opportunism and hypocrisy. His call for reforms in the United Nations is likely to go unheeded for the same reasons he gives for the crises of the past decade and half – machtpolitik and opportunism. As a result, Puri’s admonition that the Security Council and multilateralism will lose credibility may indeed come true.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Chirps

  • IDF Chief of Staff candidate calls for targeted killings of IRGC officials: bit.ly/3uuhwS5 | What would it… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 24 minutes ago
  • Nehru’s aide who turned into an art dealer in the US: bit.ly/3AunFS7 | So much for Congress nationalism... 2 hours ago
  • Is Bangladesh next to fall in China's debt-trap diplomacy? bit.ly/3P0NSLW | It already has, though Dhaka p… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
  • Russia nudges India to break ranks with Germany, Japan in pursuit of UNSC membership: bit.ly/3ONR6Ty | As… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
  • Ben & Jerry's sues parent Unilever to block sale of Israeli business: reut.rs/3AtG4yh | I hope the judge fi… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
Follow @orsoraggiante

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 225 other followers

Follow through RSS

  • RSS - Posts

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • The Mysterious Case of India’s Jews
  • Polarised Electorates
  • The Election Season
  • Does Narendra Modi Have A Foreign Policy?
  • India and the Bomb
  • Nationalism Restored
  • Jews and Israel, Nation and State
  • The Asian in Europe
  • Modern Political Shibboleths
  • The Death of Civilisation
  • Hope on the Korean Peninsula
  • Diminishing the Heathens
  • The Writing on the Minority Wall
  • Mischief in Gaza
  • Politics of Spite
  • Thoughts on Nationalism
  • Never Again (As Long As It Is Convenient)
  • Earning the Dragon’s Respect
  • Creating an Indian Lake
  • Does India Have An Israel Policy?
  • Reclaiming David’s Kingdom
  • Not a Mahatma, Just Mohandas
  • How To Read
  • India’s Jerusalem Misstep
  • A Rebirth of American Power

Management

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com
Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Chaturanga
    • Join 225 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Chaturanga
    • Customise
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: