A Historic Vote at the United Nations

It is rare for United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions to cause a diplomatic flutter let alone signal a momentous political change. The resolutions are usually piously worded but carry little weight. But something dramatic occurred on Monday when the US and Russia voted together against a resolution moved by Ukraine for “advancing a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

The resolution was passed—defeating the joint American and Russian effort—but it signalled a historic turn in the world’s geopolitics. 93 countries voted in favour of the resolution, 18 against it and another 65 abstained. In the list of naysayers that the US found itself in company were: Sudan, Nicaragua, Niger, Palau, Mali, Marshall Islands, Israel, Hungary, Haiti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Central African Republic, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Belarus, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and, of course, Russia.

THREE MESSAGES

The first and foremost message from the resolution was the return of realpolitik to the world stage, shorn of liberal pieties. There have been very few UNGA and UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions involving wars where the US and Russia have voted together and none where they have been ranged against each other. The last time when the US and Russia voted together during a major conflict was during the First Gulf War when, on 29^th November 1990, the USSR—the predecessor state of Russia–and the US voted for UNSC resolution 678 that virtually gave the US a carte blanche to act against Iraq.

Until very recently, the US was backing Ukraine with huge material/military support buttressed with political/diplomatic cover against Russia. It had been signalling Ukraine to return to the negotiating table ever since Donald Trump returned as President earlier this year. Monday’s vote, in effect, put a stamp of approval on that change. The draft resolution was presented by Ukraine earlier this month and was couched in a language that was unacceptable to Russia: It described the conflict as “the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.”

The resolution found European countries on the wrong foot in the rapidly changing geopolitical situation where the US is now more understanding of Russian concerns, if not goals, along Russia’s sensitive southern periphery.

The second message symbolic in nature but perhaps even more important for the world-at-large is ideological. The US has voted alongside Russia, Hungary, Sudan, North Korea and other countries. These countries, in liberal political demonology, are “non-democracies” if not the very antithesis of what democracy stands for. Until very recently even established democracies like India were demonised as “backsliding democracies.” Today, the US has voted alongside the “mother of all non-democracies”: Russia. Not that these ideological labels–the products of the intellectual apparatus of the US and its appendages in other countries—matter. The problem was that once a country is labelled as a “non-democracy,” it becomes a fair game for attempts at regime change. Bangladesh, a country that witnessed a change that was welcomed, if not pushed, by the last American administration under Joseph Biden, is an example. The current controversy over the role of USAID, supposedly an aid agency of the US government, is another example of how these political operations are carried out in the name of promoting democracy.

The vote on Monday has dented the image of the US as a “promoter of democracy” in no uncertain terms. If these shibboleths are discarded in the time ahead, who knows that the peoples of the world may be able to exercise their choices—“democracy” or “non-democracy” alike—without “nudging” from the US?

The final message from the vote is that countries should not get sucked into wars that they cannot prosecute by their own means. Ukraine, by all means a country that deserves its independence, was caught in a “proxy” war between the US and Russia. Russia’s security interests in its southern flank have a long and tortured history. These interests were blithely ignored since the early 1990s when the USSR was promised that NATO would not be expanded eastward. There is a history of that claim and counter-claims to it. The simplest one being that there was no formal guarantee for that “promise.” Russia went along with Western moves even as NATO was expanded eastward all the way to the Baltics. But its southern border with Ukraine was a different matter. When Ukraine approached the threshold where its membership of NATO became a possibility, Russia reacted. The Russian reaction, more than a decade in the making, was described as “Putin’s quest for empire”—another memorable line from the Western academy that is now being erased—instead of any realistic understanding of Russian motives.

The long and short of it all was that Ukraine, a country that could not match the materiel and men that Russia could pour into the conflict, went into the war on the basis of military support and supplies provided by the US. When the domestic political conditions for that support vanished in the US, Ukraine found itself in a very difficult, if not alarming, situation against Russia. The lesson is clear: never go to war if you are not capable of waging it on your own.

These three lessons have been starkly stated in a single vote at the UN. That is the takeaway for countries like India.

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