In Ukraine as in Syria, Western words are hollow if not backed by steel

After Georgia and Syria, Russia has again demonstrated its raw power over an impotent West in Ukraine, writes Faisal Al Yafai

Russia's president Vladimir Putin has understood the West's words are not backed by a credible threat of force. March 8, 2014. Alexey Nikolsky/EPA

No war is an island, entire of itself. For the past three years, it has looked as if the Syrian conflict fitted into the category of an Arab Spring uprising. And yet politics, like geography, is too interconnected for a country as central as Syria to fall into merely one narrative.

It now looks as if Syria also deserves a place in a second category, as one in a sequence of countries in which Russia has demonstrated its raw power against an impotent West. Georgia, Syria, Ukraine. A trend is evident.

What is happening in Ukraine is a seismic political shift written in a language few understand.

It started in 2008, when Russia – then, as now, led by Vladimir Putin – sent troops into Georgia, a country formerly part of the Soviet Union but increasingly falling into the orbit of the European Union.

Despite dire warnings on the part of the West – “There is no room for debate on these issues,” a stern George W Bush said at the time – the Russian army moved in and effectively annexed two parts of the country, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

“The United States will continue to insist that Georgia’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity be respected,” thundered Mr Bush. A year later, Barack Obama came into office and, with Russian troops still in Georgia, “reset” relations with Russia.

And five long years later, the US is still insisting on Mr Bush’s position and Russian troops are still comfortably in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Exactly the same scenario has played out over Ukraine. A thundering response from America and Europe, followed by warnings and threats. Russia’s response, as a popular meme on social networks has it, is: Crimea river.

Even now, European countries like the UK and Germany are seeking a basket of sanctions that might persuade Russia to halt its march through Ukraine. There is considerable anxiety that Mr Putin might seek to have the eastern part of Ukraine, which is generally pro-Russian, break away.

But even the British foreign secretary has admitted there is little chance of persuading Russia to withdraw its troops from Crimea.

If this clash of big powers in a region as charged with history as Crimea – Russia has now clashed with other European countries over that region in every one of the past three centuries – cries out for a historical analogy, then commentators have readily furnished one: the military expansion of Germany in the 1930s.

Indeed, Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia and leader during the Russian incursion of 2008, explicitly compared the current situation with Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938.

Such a direct comparison may be overblown – although the president of a country effectively invaded by Russia can be forgiven for making it – but there are sufficient parallels with the lead-up to the Second World War as to be deeply worrying. In both cases, the prevalent world order was unequal to the provocations of a powerful country.

The fact is the current global order is broken. America’s brief unipolar moment lasted for just over a decade, until the swamp of Iraq sapped its political will and snapped its military threat.

Neither the United Nations nor international popular condemnation could stop the US attacking Iraq, just as, 10 years on, neither the UN nor popular will can stop Russia prolonging the Syrian conflict. Now, Russia has easily swaggered into one of Europe’s largest countries, unconcerned by the United Nations – where it holds a veto – nor by international isolation, nor by any diplomatic, economic or military sanctions that might follow.

Nothing that the West says to Russia matters, because Mr Putin, like Bashar Al Assad before him, recognises that the words are not backed by steel. All the warships in the Mediterranean mean nothing if Washington is not prepared to use them.

We are tiptoeing into a multipolar world and it is not, frankly, clear if it is going to be any better than the past half century. The re-emergence of Russia has come at the same time as China’s rise, and at precisely the point when the two power centres of the West, the United States and the European Union, are least able to project power and are financially and diplomatically weak.

That leaves both Ukraine and Syria locked in a zero-sum game, which is precisely the cause of the latest conflicts. Russia sees no way of compromising with the opposition, whether that be protesters and a new government in Kiev, or the Syrian opposition and the Free Syrian Army. And those supporting those groups have no way of either deterring Russia from getting involved, nor of pushing the parties towards a compromise.

That will be small comfort for Syrians and Ukrainians. The one bright spot in a bleak horizon is, surprisingly, over the conflict in Syria. Because Syria cannot remain an island of instability in the Middle East. If the international community has forgotten the Syrian conflict, regional powers have not.

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai