Great powers, peace and conflict…Dr Muhammad Ali Ehsan

It has been almost three months that I am here in Russia. Whenever asked hows life there, my answer always is: cold very cold. Days are as cold as minus 25 degrees centigrade and nights can take the temperature up to minus 30 degrees. While I see around me cold weather and snow, I am sure its not what Russia sees and thinks about the world around it. The core concept of power guides the thinking of all great powers and Russia, if one goes by the definition of a great power given by John Mearsheimer, is amongst the three great powers left in the world today. Calculating power, analysing it for experimental needs and not using it for personal advance privileges, standing like most developing countries do but utilising it to dominate, drive and exercise influence and control over international relations thats what all great powers have done in the past and that is exactly what Russia is doing today.

Great powers are determined largely on the basis of their military capability, says Mearsheimer. To qualify as a great power, a state must be able to put up a serious fight against the most powerful state and should have reasonable prospect of turning the conflict into war of attrition that leaves the dominant state seriously weakened. In the nuclear age, a state cannot be a great power without a nuclear deterrent and its capacity to survive first strike. In nuclear age, without nuclear weapons you cannot be a great power. Presently nine countries possess nuclear weapons but not all of them are great powers. North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, the United Kingdom and France dont fulfil the Mearsheimer conditions of being a great power and that leaves just the United States, Russia and China to qualify and stake this claim.

So be it Gaza, Ukraine, South China Sea, Taiwan, North Korea, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kashmir, Haiti, Yemen, Ethiopia or Sahel, the fortunes of all the conflicts in these places are determined primarily by the politics, decisions and actions by the great powers. Great powers influence and control what goes around in the world. It is the competition between them and the intensity of that competition that translates into why conflicts peak or end in many parts of the world.

New balance of power is always formed when the most powerful state tries to alienate the other existing great powers from the international system. The US has alienated Russia by expanding NATO eastwards. It has alienated China by continuously lecturing its leaders on how to rule their country. Great power alienation has a history, and Cold War emerged from the ashes of defeat of Germany and Japan but not before these great powers were alienated by the US. Germany met the defeat in the shape of the humiliating treaty of Versailles after World War One and Japan by the imposition of oil embargo by the US because of which it ended up losing 94% of its oil supply. Pearl Harbor and Hitler were the products of policy of alienation by a great power that resulted in a great war which ultimately culminated in a new balance of power system.

Between the years 1945 and 1990, in the bipolar world the politics in every region of the world was deeply influenced by the competition between the US and the Soviet Union. So, whether it was Cuba, Angola, Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan, the conflicts in these countries were the creation of the great power competition of the two great powers of the time. The US enjoyed absolute power in an era we all call unipolar moment as it had no other great power to deal with. But then the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia happened and as explained earlier both the great powers ended up being alienated by the US.

Revisionism is born in the womb of alienation. Both Russia and China are revisionist powers today because they doubt the fairness of the international system which favours its own creator the US. There is no other way to change the system except by changing the balance of power. It took 45 years and a number of far-flung battles to change the bipolar system to a unipolar one. Would it take as many years and as many numbers of battles to change the existing balance of power? For 45 years there had been two great powers that contested and competed; today the great powers are three. The most powerful state has already brought battlefields to the doorsteps of these great powers NATOs eastern encroachment and Ukraine in case of Russia; and Taiwans support by the US in case of China. In the Cold War the battles had an ideological tone and thwarting the spread of communism was a policy that resulted in battles in far-flung regions of the world. The most powerful state is again utilising an ideological overtone. This time it is the defence of freedom, individual liberties, commercial interests, control of energy resources and rule of international law. Not a typical ideological overtone about contest of political systems but a contest of global interests and on the new shape of global order.

The worst part about the great power competition and the resulting change in balance of power is that it never cares about the people that are caught in the middle when it is happens. People from Vietnam, Angola or Cambodia, for example, in the past or people from Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan in the present. The costs and risks of shifting balance of power are great and so the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world will also be filled with many risks and many costs. Many scholars of international relations are already predicting that multipolar system will be far more war-prone than the bipolar system was with an obvious reason that the greater the number of great powers in a system the greater the potential of power acquisition and conflicts. To those that underrate the potential and dynamics of geopolitics and visualise power competition and power politics only in terms of geo-economics must understand what money is to economics, power is to international relations. Desire for power and influence by great powers is an enduring issue that sustains international relations more than anything else does.

Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met at what is called the twilight of giants Yalta. The barbarity and human atrocity, especially the killing and murder of children that we have witnessed at Gaza, tells us that there is no goodness left in the international system. The world needs another Yalta. Biden, Putin and Xi, the heads of the three current great powers, must meet if for nothing else than to consider ending alienation and conflict and promoting peace, collaboration and competition.

Courtesy The Express Tribune