David Pratt: So how do we deal with the challenges posed by Putin?

It wouldn’t quite be so embarrassing were it not for the fact that Britannia has long since relinquished its claim to rule the waves and that today’s world of diplomacy and geopolitics is a far cry from the bygone age that Johnson it appears would prefer to inhabit.  

No one doubts that responding to Russia has become one of the most pressing challenges facing the West today. Poking the Russian bear by sending the British warship HMS Defender into the disputed waters around Crimea at this precise moment strikes many as less than helpful on a diplomatic level. 

“Sticking up for our values, sticking up for what we believe in,” was how the Prime Minister explained away the British warship’s voyage. But is this really the best way to engage with the challenges Russia poses under President Vladimir Putin?  Doesn’t such an approach not simply heighten the risk of miscommunication or misperception leading to an even greater and more dangerous level of confrontation? 

Don’t get me wrong, Putin is not the kind of autocratic political leader or operator that the West should roll over to when challenged by him far from it. It hasn’t helped of course that former US President Donald Trump spent four years doing just that praising and courting Putin.  

That much was clear during the recent summit between Putin and US president Joe Biden, but even this less than cordial first encounter opened up possibilities for a lowering in tensions between the two nations.  

What Biden at least tried to do was find potential areas of cooperation between Washington and Moscow. The same can be said last week of recent efforts by Germany and France to step up dialogue with Putin. 

“It is not enough for US President Joe Biden to talk to the Russian president. I very much welcome that, but the EU must also create forums for dialogue,” was how Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led the initiative summed up the European approach.  

But despite having the backing of France’s president Emmanuel Macron and the summit proposals being welcomed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, they ran into serious opposition at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels last Thursday.  

Scepticism and opposition to the Franco-German push came especially from those Baltic countries that border Russia, with some leaders warning against engagement with Moscow without first laying down clear preconditions for the Kremlin to rein in its regional ambitions. 

“It seems to me like we try to engage a bear to keep a pot of honey safe,” was how Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda wryly summed up the Merkel- Macron initiative. 

Other opponents also said now was not the time for “free concessions” in the face of Russia’s continued meddling with Poland’s prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki arguing that dialogue should only happen if there was “actual de-escalation”. 

As is often the case in such diplomatic standoffs one side ultimately will have to make the first move and the rebuffing of the Franco- German initiative has again revealed the difficulty European leaders and the Biden administration will have in stabilising and taking forward relations with Moscow.  

Presenting a united front is critical in this process and right now the EU and US are struggling to achieve that.  

Never missing any opportunity to exploit such divisions among European leaders, Russia’s long-time ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov, said the bloc should “get its act together and define what it really wants from its relations with Russia.” 

Just as few weeks ago it appeared that the EU had done just that when its foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, presented in a 14 page report the commission’s policy options on EU-Russia relations entitled, “Push back, constrain and engage.”  

Last week the Royal Navy’s HMS Defender did a bit of pushing back of its own with the approval of Boris Johnson. But only the most gullible would believe for a moment that this was anything other than posturing rather than constructive foreign policy at work. 

Afghanistan: The new ‘Great Game’

 A “rapid disintegration,” was how one veteran military analyst described the unfolding situation. Meanwhile an op-ed headline in The Washington Post last week predicted, ‘In Afghanistan a summer of pain awaits.’ 

As a journalist long associated with this country, it pains me to follow what is happening in Afghanistan right now. Since May the Taliban have seized more than 50 districts and surrounded five provincial capitals.  

In fact, so desperate has the military situation become because of such relentless gains that last week the Kabul government made an extraordinary appeal for all able- bodied Afghans to stand and fight the Taliban advance.  

The “National Mobilisation” as it has been called seeks to arm all volunteers, but observers say the move will only resurrect those militias who owe allegiance to local commanders and warlords many of them rivals that destroyed swathes of the capital in similar factional fighting in the 1990’s that I witnessed myself as a reporter.  

If ever the people of Afghanistan found themselves caught between a rock and hard place – and there has been no shortage of past occasions – then this is such a moment. 

The options are stark. Do nothing while the Taliban gain control of the country or arm militias that could lead to civil war.  

The unfolding tragedy comes as this weekend Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visits Washington for talks with US President Joe Biden who has already issued the order for a withdrawal of American troops alongside others from the US- led coalition. Given that it’s too late for any rethink on US military support, the Afghans not for the first time are being abandoned to their own fate.  

Also, not for the first time in history too other neighbouring countries and big powers are looking on wondering what they can salvage or how they can profit in terms of geo-politics or influence from Afghanistan’s vulnerability. 

Back throughout most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century during the political and diplomatic tussle between Britain and Russia over Afghanistan, they called it ‘The Great Game.’  

The “graveyard of empires” they also called it given the losses incurred but which never stopped outsiders committing themselves from wanting to control Afghanistan. And so, the talk of another great game has returned given that the looming power vacuum in the country has the potential to destabilise the entire region.  

There’s no shortage of players lining up to take part after the US withdrawal. Iran, Pakistan, China, India, and Russia all have eyes on Afghanistan for a variety of reasons. For China alone Afghanistan poses a potentially profitable corridor for its so-called Belt and Road Initiative of global infrastructure development.  

For Pakistan and India, it will be continuation of their old rivalry in which they use Afghanistan as a proxy battleground. For Iran and Russian meanwhile, it’s a chance to gain diplomatic leverage over the US.  

No one knows for sure how this new Great Game will play out, not least given the threat now posed by the Taliban. Only one thing is certain, the Afghan people will once again be the losers. 

France: A regional aperitif to presidential race 

Ten months from now France will elect its next president. The dates confirmed are April 10th, 2022, for the first round and April 24th for the second round. As is usual in French elections, both days are Sundays.  

But it was last Sunday and again today that the country’s voters have been going to the polls in two rounds of regional elections that have shaken up next year’s presidential race. 

If last Sunday’s first round was anything to go by there were a few worrying signs for the main parties not least given that only 33% of the electorate made the effort to vote. Young voters especially were not impressed with almost 90% of France’s youngest voters failing to show up. 

It’s perhaps unwise to read too much into any regional poll but that doesn’t stop pundits from seeing them as a taster of voter mood given that it’s the last chance for the French people to express their political inclinations before next April’s big one. The bad news - for   

France’s far right at least - is that it performed worse than predicted. 

Marine Le Pen leader of the National Rally, Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant party formerly known as the National Front, was especially disappointed having hoped to take over a number of regional councils, using the gains as a launch pad for her presidential campaign next April. 

“Our voters did not come out,” Le Pen said last week, urging supporters to “mobilise their efforts” for today’s runoff. 

But bad as it was for Le Pen, her disappointment paled alongside that of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist La Republique en Marche. Macron’s party took a thumping last Sunday coming in at fifth place and taking only 10% of the nationwide vote and leading in none of the 12 mainland regions.  

The only party with a smile on its face was France’s mainstream conservative, Les Republicains, which fared better than expected, taking in 29 % of the ballots cast. 

Given last Sunday’s result there are big fears for today’s second round with both Le Pen and Macron urging voters to head to the polls and warning about the dangers of abstention. 

“To let abstention win is to make democracy lose,” Prime Minister Jean Castex tweeted last week in the wake of the first round, adding that voting was every citizen’s “responsibility”.  

But whether France’s young voters will heed such a call remains doubtful indeed. 

Canada: A nation’s indigenous reckoning 

Some sections of the Canadian press have been calling it the country’s “genocide moment.” 

The latest reports that an indigenous nation in Canada has found 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan comes in the wake of a previous find a few weeks ago when the remains of 215 children were found at a similar residential school in British Columbia. It was all done supposedly in the name of solving Canada’s ‘Indian problem.’ In all some 130 compulsory boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by religious authorities were established during the 19th and 20th centuries with some still open as recently as 1997.  

But members of First Nations Indigenous people say the discovery of the unmarked graves are evidence of what generations from within their communities have been saying for years about atrocities that were committed but ignored. 

This despite a 2015 Truth and Reconciliation report that detailed how the schools were less about education and more about separating Indigenous children from their families in order to weaken cultural ties and indoctrinate them in what Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, called “the habits and modes of thought of white men.”   

This a is story that has shocked Canada and given rise to an announcement by the federal government in neighbouring United States that it will now investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of the institutions, which across the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities. 

The US move is a welcome development and a call to action that should be heard across the world wherever the lives of Indigenous peoples are under threat and at risk of persecution.  

To take but one example, in Brazil Indigenous chiefs and human rights organisations have long accused Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro of enabling killings through state policies that they say encourage the destruction of the Amazon for profit while failing to protect Indigenous people’s rights. 

“Bolsonaro has been campaigning against Indigenous people and their rights since the first day he took office,” observed Marcio Astrini, head of the environmental protection organisation Climate Observatory in a recent interview.  

But Brazil is far from the only country where the rights of Indigenous peoples are still being ignored, supressed, and abused. Canada is now being forced to face its own Indigenous reckoning. It’s long overdue for many other countries to do the same.