RUSSIA WORKS ON THE ‘NEAR ABROAD’ THEORY

Friday, 21 March 2014 | M Zulqernain

The country would have been more mindful of regional sensibilities if the West had been less aggressive in trying to fill the space Soviet Union vacated, and if regime change wasn’t integral to Washington's agenda 

Events in Crimea confirm that every large country must enjoy exclusive authority in its neighbourhood. The analogy that comes to mind is of Kolkata’s Fort William. The surrounding Maidan is the fort’s strategic glacis. Military historians agree that Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah captured the earlier Fort William so easily in 1756 because the glacis was crowded with houses which he took one by one. The possibility of an American-sponsored coup in Kiev holds a similar danger.

This is the logic of what Russia calls its Near Abroad. Actually, the Americans first enunciated the theory in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine. China has tried to safeguard its glacis by swallowing up Tibet and Xinjiang, nibbling at the Paracel and Spratly Islands, designating the South China Sea a “core interest”, and unilaterally announcing an Air Defence Identification Zone restricting flights in international air space. India’s security demands international recognition of its own geopolitical ‘near abroad’. This means not only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, but also Sri Lanka, probably Myanmar and possibly parts of Tibet. I would have included Sikkim if India had not in this one respect self-defeatingly followed the Chinese example of annexing a fragment of the Near Abroad.

The main question revolves round Pakistan which is yoked with India in the American consciousness like unreconciled Siamese twins. As I noted in Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium, sometimes the hyphenation is symbolic, like Harry Truman lavishing exactly the same hospitality on Liaquat Ali Khan immediately after Jawaharlal Nehru’s first US visit. Sometimes it is substantive like successive administrations building up Pakistan militarily. The latest instance of that is provided by the current talks to hand over to Pakistan $7 billion worth of mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles the US Army no longer needs in Afghanistan.

“Parity was extended to create the myth that if India’s neighbours were not its equal in every way (despite their combined area and population being a fraction of India’s), this invested India with a special responsibility to shrink to their level in all regional transactions.” Indians did not repudiate this theory, perhaps seeing in it a tribute to their own pre-eminence. In January 2002, China’s Foreign Minister, Tang Jiaxuan, advised Mr Jaswant Singh that “as a big country” India should “play a more positive role” in the subcontinent. No one asked Mr Tang what concession big China made to smaller Vietnam or to the even more vulnerable Philippines.

Some facts may have changed since I wrote, “Pakistan’s domestic product is one-eighth India’s; it has one-seventh the population and one-fifth the area. Pakistan’s Armed Forces are only between two-and-a-half to three times smaller than India’s because the military has been built up at the expense of social welfare. While India has sustained its parliamentary democracy through regular elections at several levels — from village council to Parliament — Pakistan had already known three prolonged spells of military rule before General Pervez Musharraf seized power.” Yet, Mr Henry Kissinger dared to argue that a strong and stable Pakistan threatened India with a psychological challenge!

The nation that invented the Monroe Doctrine and enforced it for nearly two centuries knows all too well why Moscow feels vulnerable as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union relentlessly push eastwards. Subsequent American Presidents refined and expanded James Monroe’s 1823 formulation. Some asserted the right unilaterally to intervene in small Caribbean and South American nations to stabilize their economic affairs (Theodore Roosevelt 1904); others to “isolate the Communist menace” (John F. Kennedy 1962). The 1928 Clark Corollary clarified the US didn’t need to hide behind the skirts of any doctrine: military intervention was its self-evident right. In 1954 John Foster Dulles specifically targeted the Soviet Union for allegedly violating the Monroe Doctrine, especially in Guatemala.

Claims of America’s “manifest destiny” further enhanced the Monroe Doctrine. This was facilitated on the ground by the construction of the Panama Canal which permitted US naval domination of both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The manner in which this was achieved bears reiteration in light of the international furore over Moscow’s actions after the regime change in Ukraine. Bluntly stated, Washington promised to support a bunch of Colombian politicians representing the Panama secessionist movement on condition they allowed the US not only to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, which was then part of Colombia, but to enjoy de facto proprietory rights over it. The treaty concluded in 1903 between John Hay, the US Secretary of State, and Philipe Bunau-Varilla, a French commercial adventurer in Washington’s pay, who had bought up a number of Colombian politicians, granted the US “in perpetuity the use, occupation and control of a zone of land” and further allowed it “all the rights, power and authority within the same….which the United States would have if it were sovereign of the territory… to the exclusion of the exercise by the republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority”.

Panama retained titular jurisdiction, but nothing more. The US dismembered Colombia and created Panama to reinforce control over its ‘near abroad’. That was also the rationale for buying Alaska from Moscow, deposing independent Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani, and annexing Texas and California. It explained why Kennedy nearly plunged the world into a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. Cuba lay within the American ‘near abroad’. Moscow was the trespasser.

Andrei Kozyrev, who became Russia’s Foreign Minister in 1991, used the term Near Abroad to mean the 14 countries that became independent when the Soviet Union disintegrated. They are economically and strategically important for Russia. Millions of Russians also live there. Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasised this political and economic importance by using Near Abroad interchangeably with “sphere of influence”. The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation that third President and current Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, finalised in 2010 justifies intervening militarily in the Near Abroad to protect Russian minorities. A Russian passport-holder living in Georgia or Ukraine has the same claim on Moscow as a Russian citizen living in Russia. Mr Medvedev stated he would “protect the life and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are”.

Perhaps Russia would be more mindful of regional sensibilities if the West were less aggressive in trying to occupy the space vacated by the Soviet Union and if regime change were not integral to Washington’s agenda.

(The accompanying visual is of the members of the Crimean pro-Russian self-defence forces climbing up to take down a Ukrainian flag (R), and a Ukrainian Navy flag (L) at the Ukrainian Navy headquarters in Sevastopol in Crimea, on March 19. AP photo by Andrew Lubimov)