2014: Two Events that Shook the World
Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR
Strategic-Culture.org
31.12.2014
The year 2014 has been a sensational year. It is the year that some hasten to bookmark as the year World War III began unobtrusively, stealthily, inexorably – involving as-yet indeterminate contestants. The tumultuous arrival of the Islamic Caliphate spearheaded by the Islamic State, the outbreak of the Ebola virus, kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls by Boko Haram – the year has had its fair share of blood-curdling events.
It has been the year that the US economy showed credible signs of recovery, but in which the US also admitted defeat in a half-century old campaign to bring the Cuban revolution down on its knees. Truly, the ascendancy of right-wing Hindu fundamentalism in India, a country of 1.3 billion people, makes it an important year for a turbulent region.
All these are significant things to be noted in their own ways, but their enduring consequence to the world order remains unclear and the probability is that they may turn out to be ephemeral, although arresting at first sight for the present – ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’, in the ultimate analysis.
However, it is two major international developments that form a cluster by itself because of their profound impact on the future trajectory of world order. They are: the crisis in Ukraine and the emergence of China as the world’s largest economy.
Ukraine crisis
No single international development in the year 2014 sent such shock waves through world politics as the crisis that erupted in Ukraine following the US-sponsored ‘regime change’ in Kiev in February. At times it seemed that the international order has begun unraveling or is galloping uncontrollably toward such a process, with the United Nations reduced to a hapless observer.
At its core, the Ukraine crisis underscores that the US-led security order has been most seriously challenged by a rising non-Western power – Russia. Second, the European order has come face to face, even if implicitly, with an organizing principle based on legitimizing spheres of influence, which, having sheltered under the umbrella of a military alliance, the West never needed to explicitly accept.
Again, on an international normative terrain, the Western ideas of international order have been contested in Ukraine. The heart of the matter is that while superficially professing respect for international law, the US and Europe have been freely acting outside it to advance their interests – which, essentially, was what Kosovo, Iraq and Libya have been all about – and Russia has held out a mirror at this essentially illiberal world order, finally, and is demanding a realistic, rational calibration, failing which Moscow will offer resistance in political terms as well as through military deterrence if it becomes necessary.
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