Need Moratoriums Beyond Binary

25 October 2020

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty(SALT) and it’s variant Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) defined much of what we can call as a Western Doctrinal Consensus borne from the bed rock of Mutually Assured Destruction(MAD). From the late 80s including a Declaration for a Nuclear Disarmament that was championed by late Rajiv Gandhi and a growing sense that Weapons of Mass Destruction need to be capped, scaled back and kept in watertight compartments away from the reach of madman dictators, we have seen how the Western Compact was singularly focused on Russia.

Of course, one hopes nations learn to climb the steep learning curve, letting go of their primal prejudices and immediacy and being able to look over the horizons and adapt to newer realities and newer challenges. The biggest such example in the immediate is USA awakening to China as a missile power and the threat posed by the PLA’s doctrine to use offshore Intermediate Range Missiles ( Ballistic, Cruise and Hypersonic of either cruise that is scramjet powered, or glide vehicles) that would offset the huge naval edge Air Craft Carrier groups the US IndoPacific Command can bring to bear against any Chinese plans for hostile take over of Taiwan. Much like how India has in last six years been ventilating over Pakistan and discovering in reality that China is more an asymmetric and strategic threat, USA too have walked that path, speaking all the while about Russia without focusing on China until 2020!

In fact Western obsession with Russians despite being their crucial allies in both First World War ( until the overthrow of the Tsar and formation of Soviet State) and the Second World War, and more importantly the simple factual that more combatants were lost under the Russian flag/Soviet leadership than the rest of the Western Allies put together, is rank prejudice and a decidedly mean level of realpolitik. So overbearing was this obsession with Russia, that USA led the ‘Engage with China’ policy in the late 60s and ever since using the ‘trap door’ called Hong Kong, parted with technology, trade secrets and promoted manufacturing in China which was rudely paid back when the 2020 Pandemic happened and the supplies of critical masks and PPEs were held back by China! Despite Tiananmen Square massacre of Pro Democracy protestors, the West has been led by pinning hopes on a Chinese version of Perestroika and Glasnost, a unique and unheralded change programme that was only possible under a Russian leadership! Germany which closely observed this transformation and was the biggest beneficiary of this dismantling of the Soviet State through reunification, and which has hosted Gorbachev whenever he needed medical attention, and which continues to host Russian opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny ( he was treated in Germany for his recent life threatening condition, poisoned by Russian agents presumably under the orders of Putin) continued to engage with China even after the crushing of democracy movement there. Subsequently when the Falun Gong were crushed, when evidence came that followers of this spiritual sect were having their organs forcibly harvested, then too the West was not deterred from its ‘One China policy’ and ‘Only China Policy’! So many multinationals relocated to China from ASEAN and Taiwan, often using Hong Kong as the springboard to the mainland.Why I bring these up now, is just to show that Western hostility to Russia is utterly predictable, and her pusillanimity and eager to please China’s CCP leadership is equally perplexing and predictable, until now. It shows how even those countries with a history of strategising and the art of Great Games were fallible to binaries, fixated as they were/are on Russia. So now when Vladimir Putin talks of an alliance with China, he is actually sounding a warning to Western nations, that without Russian efforts, the Industrial age has never defeated Fascism! He wants to West to not use the current weakness in Russia’s sphere of influence with protests in Belarus over Lukashenko’s leadership, with Nagorno Karabakh hostilities between Azeri and Armenian forces, where a NATO member Turkey is interfering actively without being held back by the West. If NATO thinks flipping Belarus to anti Russian forces, or aiding Azeris in their bid to take NK enclave which is Armeni majority ethnicity, all they have do is to listen to Garry Kasparov whose insight will inform them, that it is this very Western hunger to downgrade Russia, to box it in as it were, that has empowered the rise and continued hold of Putin as Russia’s modern day Tsar!

India has a more pragmatic view about Russia and could help the West approach Russia in a way that would help the West preserve its global domination without losing an important ally in containing the CCP regime. Today, comparing Nazi Reich with CCP China is incorrect, for the Third Reich was not a global trading partner, but an imperial infant, with small footholds and even smaller economic foot print overseas. China dominates global trade so much that even the USAF’s top of the line F35s have components that are manufactured there and shipped to US Allies everywhere where the fleet in getting inducted! So like how the West is revising her view on China, the latest being Italy shutting out Chinese Telecom Major Huawei for its 5G roll out, India’s Jio now allying with Qualcomm for 5G, the need to revisit the START is also very much a reality.

President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the INF treaty ( Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-09/news/us-completes-inf-treaty-withdrawal in 2019 is the first step to practically revisit the binary approach to WMDs and Missiles. Of course Russia has been rather smart in how after 1987 INF treaty, it entered into a Joint Development partnership with India for Brahmos, to ensure that Russia kept apace developing crucial navigation, propellant system, inertial guidance, tracking and course control, reentry envelopes in this Intermediate Range missile class. It may have even benefited from India’s work on scramjet and glide vehicles, as natural co-developers do. The arming of the Brahmos on Su30 MKIs is another piece of strategic weaponisation where the range of existing operational class can be extended by its carriage on a fighter platform.

What the West needs to do, is rope in India, China, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran apart from NATO and Western Alliance partners to limit the class of missiles, to ensure that these are not fitted with nuclear ordnances/devices as payload to continue to meet the strategic objectives of the original SALT and START agreements. What it would offer to all these countries other than Russia, is not just a seat at a Strategic table, but to be entrusted and thrust with responsibilities toward that. It would then make China’s position on India in the NSG untenable, it would make the West serious about discussions with North Korea, Pakistan and Iran about capping their capabilities and to finally dismantle these, for it was the West’s capriciousness that brought about the rogue elements of International polity into play, including conventional industrial espionage of designs, centrifuges and other sensitive technology that aided the growth of such capabilities in these countries. And the irony is simply how each of these bouts of Western madness was brought forth by its singular desire to target indirectly the Russians!

Hopefully the rebalancing of the West vis-à-vis China will make fresh and comprehensive case for review of stale western postures about NPT, MTCR, ITBT, NSG and make for a new START/SALT type treaty obligations for all those nations currently with capabilities that could endanger humanity as a WMD threat can. The missile strike by Armenia on Azerbaijan’s Ganja city https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-media-ignores-deadly-armenia-strike-on-civilians/2010170 is just like the flash of a joker in a game of poker! It is a reminder to all countries that war is not about legitimate or collateral, it is total, however small, ultra local, its form. It places all the more stress on how the Western Compact must sue to limit technologies and bring in rules based regime, that would truly make a difference to the global order, beyond binary fixations!