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Post by Admin on May 13, 2022 19:21:01 GMT
Investigation: How is the Ukraine war redefining future conflict? - BBC Newsnight 999,155 views May 12, 2022 Newsnight’s diplomatic and defence editor Mark Urban investigates what lessons we can learn the battlefield in the Ukrainian war. Please subscribe HERE bit.ly/1rbfUogIn just two and a half months, the war in Ukraine has claimed tens of thousands of lives and flattened countless communities. The intensity of this struggle has shocked many, even those military professionals across the world who now find themselves watching, trying to understand what lessons to draw about war and its future conduct. How long could this conflict continue? Could we see a WWI stalemate? Are we witnessing the death of the tank? Newsnight’s diplomatic and defence editor Mark Urban has been scouring Russian and Ukrainian accounts online and speaking to expert observers to discover more about what those early lessons might be. This film was produced by Louis Harris-White. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long declared that Ukraine has never existed as an independent country. The former Soviet republic is “not even a state,” he said as early as 2008. In a speech on February 21 of this year, he elaborated, arguing that “modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia.” Days later, he ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine. As Russian tanks streamed across the Ukrainian border, Putin seemed to be acting on a sinister, long-held goal: to erase Ukraine from the map of the world. What made Russia’s invasion so shocking was its anachronistic nature. For decades, this kind of territorial conquest had seemed to be a thing of the past. It had been more than 30 years since one country had tried to conquer another internationally recognized country outright (when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990). This restraint formed the basis of the international system: borders were, by and large, sacrosanct. Compliance with the norms of state sovereignty—including the notion that a country gets to control what happens in its own territory—has never been perfect. But states have generally tried to observe the sanctity of borders or at least maintain the appearance of doing so. Countries could rest assured that of all the threats they faced, an invasion to redraw their borders was unlikely to be one of them. With a main cause of war largely consigned to history, this particular brand of conflict became less common.
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Post by Admin on May 13, 2022 20:05:15 GMT
Now, with Russia’s invasion, the norm against territorial conquest has been tested in the most threatening and vivid way since the end of World War II. The war in Ukraine is reminiscent of a previous, more violent era. If the global community allows Russia to subsume Ukraine, states may more frequently use force to challenge borders, and wars may break out, former empires may be reinstated, and more countries may be brought to the edge of extinction.
However disturbing Russia’s attack may be, the rest of the world can still protect the norm that Moscow has challenged. The global community can use sanctions and international courts to impose costs on Russia for its blatant and illegal aggression. It can press for reforms at the UN so that Security Council members, Russia included, cannot veto a referral to the International Criminal Court and thus hamstring that institution’s ability to mete out justice. Such a response will require cooperation and sacrifices, but it is well worth the effort. At stake is one of the bedrock principles of international law: the territorial integrity of states.
BORDER PATROL “State death,” as I have called the phenomenon, is a state’s formal loss of control over foreign policy to another state. In other words, when a country concedes that it can no longer act independently on the world stage, it effectively ceases to be its own state. At the beginning of the era of the modern state, one cause of state death predominated: blunt force trauma. From 1816 to 1945, a state disappeared from the map of the world every three years, on average—a fact all the more alarming given that there were about a third as many states back then as there are now. In that period, about a quarter of all states suffered a violent death at one point or another. Their capitals were sacked by enemy armies, their territory was annexed, and they could no longer act independently on the world stage.
Countries located between rivals were especially susceptible to being taken over. From 1772 to 1795, Poland was carved up by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Poland disappeared from the map of Europe completely for over a century. Paraguay suffered a similar fate in 1870, when it lost a war against Argentina and Brazil. Early in the twentieth century, Japan annexed Korea after a series of peninsular wars with China and Russia.
Besides having an unfortunate location, the lack of strong diplomatic ties with colonial powers was another harbinger of danger for vulnerable states. Trade relations were not enough. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African and Asian countries that had inked commercial deals with imperial powers such as France and the United Kingdom were more likely to die than countries in Latin America and the Middle East that, having stronger and more formal ties, hosted consulates and embassies from these same colonial powers. There was, in other words, a hierarchy of recognition that signaled which states were seen as legitimate conquests and which were not. The United Kingdom, for example, signed treaties with precolonial Indian states from Sindh to Nagpur to Punjab that many Indian leaders viewed as a recognition of statehood. But the British never took the next step of establishing diplomatic missions in these states—a slight that was often a prelude to invasion.
Slowly but surely, some leaders started pushing back against the practice of conquest. In the early twentieth century, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson emerged as a proponent of territorial integrity. The last of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, unveiled as World War I came to a close, referred specifically to protections for states belonging to the League of Nations, which Wilson thought could offer “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” To be sure, Wilson’s commitment to self-determination was limited to European nations; he favored independence for the Poles but was unresponsive to pleas for support from the Egyptians and the Indians. Moreover, his defense of territorial integrity was made easier by the fact that by the time Wilson became president, the United States had completed its own territorial conquests, including its march west and the accompanying capture of Native American lands; it no longer had clear ambitions to acquire additional territory. Nonetheless, Wilson did help the norm against territorial conquest take root.
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Post by Admin on May 13, 2022 21:03:41 GMT
Columnist warns US is heading closer to direct war with Russia 756,376 views May 15, 2022 New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and CNN's Michael Smerconish discuss the possibility of the United States engaging in a direct military conflict with Russia.
The war in Ukraine may lead to more states using force to subsume other countries. Wilson’s successors continued the tradition of opposing territorial grabs. In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, expressed strong opposition to Italy’s takeover of Ethiopia and was even willing to delay allying with the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II because Moscow demanded that its subjugation of the Baltic states be recognized as legitimate. Yet Roosevelt’s commitment to the norm, like Wilson’s, was not absolute; Roosevelt previously was willing, for example, to recognize Germany’s conquest of Austria if it would limit war in Europe.
The end of World War II heralded a new era. In the ensuing decades, the practice of territorial conquest did not go completely extinct; witness North Vietnam’s takeover of South Vietnam in 1975; Israel’s occupation of parts of its neighbors; Argentina’s attempt to take over the Falkland Islands; and Iraq’s thwarted invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But generally speaking, countries interfered in other states without attempting to redraw their boundaries. And they were especially unlikely to absorb other internationally recognized states wholesale. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, the aim was to prevent the Eastern European country from leaving the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets installed a new, more friendly regime in Budapest but did not lay claim to Hungarian territory. Similarly, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, it installed a puppet government but did not claim territory beyond a cluster of contested islands in the Gulf of Thailand.
Certain occupations, such as those following the United States’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, qualify as violent state deaths. But the United States did not have designs on those countries’ territory; it sought to topple regimes, but it maintained the integrity of borders. The absence of territorial aims does not make one type of violation of sovereignty better or worse than another, but it does represent an important difference. The maps, by and large, stayed the same.
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Post by Admin on May 15, 2022 19:33:12 GMT
A NORM TAKES ROOT Why the sudden drop-off in territorial conquest after World War II? The answer can be found in a powerful force in international relations: norms. As the political scientists Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink have defined the term, a norm is “a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity”—in this case, states. The leaders who developed the norm against territorial conquest recognized that most conflicts, including World War II, were fought over land. Establishing a norm against one state taking another’s territory by force was therefore part of a broader project to promote peace. By helping enshrine it in the UN Charter, the United States was determined that the norm would stick. Having emerged from the war much stronger than its allies, the United States viewed enforcing the norm against territorial conquest as a key element of preserving global stability. Newly independent states made similar commitments in the founding documents of regional organizations, such as the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity. Building on earlier attempts to enshrine the concept of territorial integrity in such treaties as the Covenant of the League of Nations, in 1919, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in 1928, a bona fide norm emerged.
States and leaders adhere to norms for various reasons. Whereas some norms—say, that against genocide—are grounded in humanitarian concerns, the norm against conquest has more strategic, self-interested roots. Some states honor the norm because they have no territorial ambitions. Others have internalized it so deeply that violating it has become inconceivable. Some—even powerful states—obey it because they know that territorial disputes have been a major cause of wars, and they view the stability of the international system as being in their interest. Still others follow it for fear of punishment if they violate it.
For all its benefits, the norm against territorial conquest has also had unintended consequences. One is the hardening of interstate boundaries in ways that create conditions ripe for state failure and collapse. As the political scientist Boaz Atzili has shown, “border fixity” has freed the leaders of weak states from having to direct their attention to protecting their own borders against external predation. Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, was able to focus his efforts on extracting resources for personal gain in part because he did not need a strong military to defend his country’s borders. And as the sociologist Ann Hironaka has shown, the norm against territorial conquest also has contributed to the growth of “never-ending wars.” Rather than settling differences over political control by attempting to take over territory, opportunistic leaders have intervened in civil wars in weak states to prolong conflict and further weaken unstable governments—as South Africa did in Angola in the 1980s, for example.
It is not an accident that the norm against conquest emerged after World War II. It is not an accident that the norm against territorial conquest emerged after World War II. The horrors of that conflict, combined with the dawn ofthe nuclear age, incentivized the great powers to avoid future wars. The era of bipolarity between the United States and the Soviet Union allowed for both regime change and the preservation of international borders. Globalization also reduced the economic benefits of territorial conquest: increased trade meant that countries could access other states’ resources without resorting to force.
Not only were borders secure; statehood itself became an increasingly valuable commodity, in part because the postwar leaders of newly independent countries could be confident that the norm against territorial conquest would hold and their fledgling states would be safe. But it is precisely the citizens of those new states, many of which are located in the post-Soviet space, who are rightly most concerned today about their countries’ futures.
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