Disassembly of recent international balance and the organizations meant to ensure it will be followed by the next stage in the attempt to shape a multipolar world, which is the liquidation or realigning the orbits of nonviable states, Mart Helme writes.
Russia, by misusing the organization’s consensual decision-making mechanism, has blocked Estonia’s OSCE chairmanship.
While it undoubtedly constitutes an attack on Estonia, our foreign policy course and international authority, Russia’s goal in doing so goes beyond. It is nothing less than an attempt to disassemble the post-Cold War world order, the Western orientation of international organizations and international law.
As Russia claims that it is currently fighting not just the Ukrainians but the collective West, it makes perfect sense for Moscow to seize every opportunity to harm the collective West also on the diplomatic arena. And so it was found in the Kremlin that blocking what is seen as an insignificant Eastern European state’s chairmanship provides just such an opportunity, allows it to drive a wedge between the Western powers and force them to haggle at the expense of Estonia.
Russia’s initiative is made all the safer by the fact that the OSCE has been suffering from an existential crisis of identity for a long time, having persistently demonstrated it is capable neither of cooperation nor ensuring security.
What did the OSCE do during the Bosnian War, Kosovo (crises), Georgian War or the Karabakh wars, to give just the most burning examples? It passed declarations, condemned and urged the sides to put aside violence. Did anyone pay these recommendations even the slightest attention? Of course not.
Therefore, the Russians now find the OSCE, as a chatroom of diplomats and spies, to be one area where they can set about dismantling the West-centric world with impunity to move closer to a multipolar world order where centers of power hold satellites and allies in their gravity fields.
Disassembly of recent international balance and the organizations meant to ensure it will be followed by the next phase in building that multipolar world – liquidating artificial and nonviable states or realigning their orbits.
It is more than likely that annexing Abkhazia and South Ossetia and making them part of the Russian Federation has been all but decided and the only thing left is to pick the right moment.
It is also quite likely that the Bosnian state will cease to exist in the near future. It is probable that Serbia will annex the northern part of Kosovo, while the rest of it will join Albania. There is a strong probability that Azerbaijan will conquer the southern part of Armenia, with support from Turkey and to the tune of Russia’s gloating, in order to gain land access to Nakhchivan and Turkey. It is furthermore very likely that Turkey will annex Northern Cyprus.
What would the OSCE do in these cases? What would NATO or the EU do for that matter? Or what about America?
They will protest, pass resolutions, demand a return to previous borders, urge looking for diplomatic solutions, introduce sanctions. But they will settle for it, realizing that using force to stop the recent structure from crumbling is more dangerous than its gradual shaping into a more complicated but pragmatic new world order.
Of course, the question constantly in the back of our heads is what will this unwieldy new world of geopolitical tectonic plates mean for Estonia? The answer depends on what will happen to the Euro-Atlantic world we know in the coming years. This in turn depends on whether Europe will remain a priority on the political agenda of the U.S. or whether it will be left to its own devices because the Americans will have to concentrate on the Middle East and the Pacific.
Should the U.S. decide to pull back, both Washington and leading European capitals are bound to engage Russia in talks to ensure a new tolerable balance for the continent.
This leaves Estonia facing three options. We may remain on the winning side (where we will not be sold out), we may remain a gray area for the benefit of the big players, while, unfortunately, it is also possible we will become a pendant state of Russia. To try and achieve even a least bit favorable outcome, we need to rethink our cliches-based foreign and security policy and achieve a new national consensus for that purpose.
Source : News
