Opinion The cost of Zelenskyy’s folly is being borne by his people

These questions acquire significance in view of the “Putinology” — laying the entire blame for war and suffering on the obduracy of Vladimir Putin, cast as Russia’s new czar — which has completely overshadowed serious reflection and realistic thinking in popular media as well as in statements of Western leaders. As a matter of fact, all major stakeholders are having a good war. There is a rating “war” among the networks seeking out every photo opportunity to beat their rivals. NATO has now found a new raison d’etre for its relevance and has secured increased funding. In Germany, Olaf Scholz, the new Chancellor, with his long record as a conscientious objector to war, has announced increased funding for the military and authorised sending German weapons to Ukraine. President Emmanuel Macron of France, deep into campaigning for re-election, has promptly got onto the bandwagon of “Western solidarity”. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK, deep in the quagmire of the “partygate” scandal, with the London police launching a criminal investigation into him and with his own job hanging by a thread, has found a wonderful exit, and is now projecting himself as the great defender of democracy and civility. But the best show belongs to President Zelenskyy, a television-actor-turned-politician, who is now getting a standing ovation from parliaments across Europe and North America. Behind these cheerleaders of war are other less visible interests. The military-industrial complex, active as ever underneath the façade of the western liberal democracy, is not dead.

The real cost of war is borne by the citizens of Ukraine. Their security and welfare should have been the primary responsibility of the elected president of the country, who should have calculated his options, the costs and benefits of each, during the final months preceding the war, as the vast Russian army was camping on his doorstep. Has there been then a grand failure of governance and diplomacy on the part of the Ukrainian leadership, for which they have taken no responsibility? This is puzzling.

One way of solving this puzzle is to understand how states go about making foreign policy, and how they balance simultaneously what would be saleable domestically and acceptable internationally. This is best understood with the help of a “toolbox” — a dynamic model comprising “domestic” level variables of interests, values, perceptions, and personalities, set against contextual and structural determinants that are historical, institutional and systemic. National decision-makers aim to make choices that enhance national security, and, simultaneously, maintain or extend their clout at home. Several factors influence their reasoning. These include their knowledge and preferences about the national interest, their ideational framework and the personality of the decision-maker, the attitude towards risk, and, finally, the simulation of similar calculations of their adversaries. In light of this reasoning, the significance of Zelenskyy’s remarks come in the timing of his recent statement.

It is little realised outside Ukraine how fundamentally the collective mindset in that country was affected by the fall of the Soviet Union and how rabid, pungent nationalism took hold of public imagination. Neo-Nazi groups, often acting with covert support of the official machinery and military, have had a free run, particularly in the East, once separatists, with Russian support, raised their flag of insurgency. President Zelenskyy, a novice in politics with little strategic understanding of the constellation of domestic and international forces, has been trapped into the domestic opinion, and has been egged on by NATO, which, having created expectations of intervening, has, very realistically, pulled back.

All of this was known. The Ukraine war follows decades of warnings by experts in the field that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe could provoke Russia. Nor is Ukraine the first instance of such a problem. During the Cold War, Finland, bordering the Soviet Union, faced the choice between disastrous hostility and negotiated neutrality. “Finlandisation”, the process through which a country decides not to challenge a more powerful neighbour, while maintaining its sovereignty, has brought peace and prosperity to countries sandwiched between powerful adversaries. However, control over domestic politics that a national leader requires for his people to swallow the bitter pill of self-containment is conspicuous by its absence in Ukraine.

At issue today are two different ways of looking at global politics. The first, propagated by the United States, believes in “making the world safe for democracy”, regardless of the costs — borne mostly by the people, from the Vietnamese in the old days to Iraq, Syria, Libya or Afghanistan now, meant to be brought into the fold of democracy. The second voice — one remembers Jawaharlal Nehru with gratitude — is to let each country choose its own path, and be obliged to respect the choices of others. The remarkable restraint with which India and Pakistan — two nuclear powers — have handled the recent mischance of an unarmed missile being fired from Indian territory into Pakistan, and their consistent insistence that the problems between Ukraine and Russia should be solved through negotiation should be a lesson in restraint, reflection and mature diplomacy for the warmongers in the West.

This column first appeared in the print edition on March 21, 2022 under the title ‘Why everybody loves the war’. The writer, emeritus professor of political science in Heidelberg University, is the author of India: Statecraft and Foreign Policy (forthcoming), written jointly with Jivanta Schoettli and Markus Pauli