Charles Elias Chartouni/Ukraine, the New Cold War and its Middle Eastern Replicas/أوكرانيا والحرب الباردة الجديدة واستنساخاتها في الشرق الأوسط

100

أوكرانيا والحرب الباردة الجديدة واستنساخاتها في الشرق الأوسط

Ukraine, the New Cold War and its Middle Eastern Replicas
Charles Elias Chartouni/February 15/2022

The Ukrainian crisis ushers a new international dynamic structured on the crossroads between consecutive agendas: the equivocations of the transition regimes which succeeded the downfall of the Soviet Union and its world order, the plodding reforms, the death of the underpinning ideological and political scripts, and the emergence of a hackneyed political narrative crafted and manipulated by demagogues, nasty dictators and a trivialized recourse to violence as functional equivalents to failures. Ukraine awkward transition to democracy is hobbled by its oligarchic downturns and residual Soviet nomenklatura political culture, and the destructive impact of the Russian autocracy, it’s heightened strategic uncertainties, cultural dilemmas, oligarchic foreclosures, leninist power technology, reformist ineptitude, and a well entrenched paranoïa induced by the rentier economy and its mafia driven governance. The cumulative internal problems are at the origin of the overlapping conflict dynamics, developing all along the continuum between domestic bankruptcies and the uncertainties of a chaotic geopolitical configuration.

The normalization is unlikely to take place unless the reformist narrative makes its way into Russia, as a prelude to a negotiated geopolitical order which likens the Helsinki accords in 1975. The autocratic mafia style governance is no solution, and can never make up for the absence of a new democratic and liberal narrative which rhymes with the cultural and political aspirations of a more westernized and libertarian civil society on both sides of the spectrum, and addresses the pending geopolitical issues in a peaceful and a democratic way. The very idea of the war is spurned by Russians and Ukrainians, by and large, who see no point in this conflict, on account of their cultural, religious and historical commonalities, and the absurdity of bloodletting while diplomacy can settle issues in a rational, moral and equitable manner. Put in other words, Russians and Ukrainians tend, more and more, to perceive this conflict as a reflection of Putin’s protracted autocracy (26 years re-editing Oriental Despotism, and absolutism ranging between Czarism, Communist dictatorship and KGB/Mafia discretionary power) and paranoid worldview, psychotic ideological blinders, bungled governance, neo-imperial delusions and ability to manipulate Western public opinions, and inaptitude to understand and address the challenges of a transforming world. This implies the absurdity of war, its pitfalls and ineptness to tackle the above mentioned issues. The overworked blame externalization and dissembling rhetorics regarding NATO, EU and the US are threadbare pretexts to turn away the attention from the self defeating politics of an idle autocracy which has no other exit, but violence, nationalistic humbug, and post factual tale spinning.

This toxic political environment partakes of a general pattern and has its replica in the Larger Middle East, the Arab World, and at the core of Islamic geopolitics and political narratives. The Iranian, Turkish and Islamist geopolitics feed on ideological fallacies and unsettled disputes to build conflict dynamics, while overlooking the downsides of devastating domestic governance, deleterious political cultures, and incapacity to engage the rest of the world on the basis of discursive conflict resolution, working diplomacy and joint reformist undertakings. The US, EU and NATO have no choice but to reengage regional conflicts on the basis of elective military containment strategies, active and inclusive negotiation rounds to solve the open conflicts, in the Near East (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Yemen, Lybia and the Gulf strategic security quandaries). The state of endemic instability, frozen conflicts, and the destructive consequences of regional and international power politics, and their prevalence over geopolitical stabilization, state reconstruction, and developmental politics are ominous and put at stake regional, European, and international security.

The containment of political authoritarianism and totalitarian Islamism is contingent upon mobile military coalitions, creative and steady diplomatic engagements, and marshaling of financial and technological resources to cater to developmental agendas. Russia and China are capitalizing on authoritarian survivalism and vested oligarchic interests, conflict decay and systemic societal and political unraveling, to further their neo-imperial agendas and destabilization strategies. The Larger Middle East is in dire need for a comprehensive geopolitical and reformist roadmap, to extract itself from the damning cycles of systemic instability, political authoritarianism, religious totalitarianism and the endemic cycles of poverty and violence.