- Nepal’s Political Parties
- Sudan on the Brink of Civil War
- International Relations: The Myth of Multipolarity
- Putin’s War
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
Nepal’s Political Parties Without Ideology
None of Nepal’s political parties – with the possible exception of the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP/ National Democratic Party) – have a working ideology.
The Nepali Congress (NC) the oldest still-functioning party had originally oriented itself on democratic socialist principles and was also a member of the Socialist International.
With time, it gradually degenerated. It does not practice inner-party democracy. Like many parties in the Third World, it is more like a ‘leaders-clientele’ structure.
The leadership of Girija Prasad Koirala finished off any democratic pretensions.
The various Communist parties are in complete disarray. They too consider themselves ‘democratic’, but that is laughable. Communism together with democracy is a contradiction in itself.
They are also not clear about what ‘Communism’ entails. For this reason, the search for unity among the Communist parties will be a vain endeavor.
One of the Communist parties calls itself ‘Maoist’, but has no connection whatsoever with the thoughts of Mao Zedong! It is also ironic that it was also nurtured by the Indian establishment, and armed and financed by India’s secret service RAW to carry out an insurgency against the Nepalese state.
The Communist parties not only suffer from an identity crisis, but simultaneously from a crisis of confidence.
The Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP/National Independent Party) has just won two impressive by-elections. It is now a vital question of responsibility, trust – and above all, leadership – how it moves forward.
All Nepali political parties – again with the possible exception of the newly emerging parties – also have a leadership problem.
As the political scientists, Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth have written in another context [see below] :
“The best leaders have willing followers, not ones that must be coaxed or coerced.”
Sudan: Eruption of Power Struggle & Violence
The warring sides have agreed to a 3-day ceasefire.
It is at least the third suspension of hostilities since the internecine show of strength erupted this month but the others did not hold (BBC/April 25).
There has been a mass exodus of foreign diplomats and officials – like rats deserting a sinking ship!
A military power struggle is at the heart of the sudden violence in Sudan, in north-eastern Africa.
- Fighting broke out last week Saturday after weeks of tension between the regular army and the powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
- Both groups were until very recently allies. The protagonists of the flare-up in violence are army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy and the RSF leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo [commonly known as Hemedti].
Together, they seized power in a 2021 military putsch.
- During the ongoing negotiations regarding the proposed integration of the RSF into the regular army, serious differences and tensions arose.
-The key question was who should be in control and who
should be the military’s commander-in-chief during the integration period.
-Ultimately, it boiled down to a military power struggle for the control of the entire country.
-Most of the infighting occurred in the capital, Khartoum, but clashes have been reported across the country.
At least 400 people have been killed and thousands injured in the first three days.
(Al Jazeera, April 18)
Fighting is still continuing between the rival military factions. Heavy artillery is being used by both sides even in densely populated areas.
Friends & Co-Conspirators Who Became Rivals
In October 2021, al-Burhan and Dagalo orchestrated a coup, upending a fragile transition to civilian rule that had started after the 2019 removal of longtime autocratic ruler General Omar al-Bashir.
- Al-Burhan, a career soldier from northern Sudan who rose through the ranks under the nearly 30-year rule of al-Bashir, took the top position as the de facto ruler of Sudan after the coup.
- Dagalo, from the eastern region Dafur’s Arab Rizeigat people, assumed responsibility as his number two.
- As the army and civilian leaders came together to hammer out a deal to end the political crisis the coup had generated, integrating the RSF into the regular army became the point of contention.
- According to the analyst, Ms. Kholood Khair, a December framework agreement for the agreement “ratcheted up tensions between al-Burhan and Hemedti” when it “elevated Hemedti’s position into Burhan’s equal, rather than his deputy” (Al Jazeera).
- Khair, the founder of the Khartoum-based “Confluence Advisory” think tank stated: “That shift in power is why conversations about security sector reform and integration of the RSF have ended up in armed conflict rather than heated debate around the table.”
What is the RSF?
- The RSF was created in 2013 and evolved from the so-called Jajaweed militias, which are accused of war crimes in the Darfur region.
- During the Darfur conflict in 2000s, the government used the group to help the army suppress the rebellion.
- In 2017, a law legitimizing the RSF as an independent security force was passed.
- As he rose in prominence, Dagalo was rewarded by al-Bashir and his business interests grew, and his family expanded holdings in gold mining, livestock and infrastructure.
- and participated actively in overthrowing the president when the 2019 uprising broke out.
A Complicated Regional Constellation
- Sudan borders the Red Sea (east), the Horn of Africa ( south-east and south) and the sub-Saharan Sahel region.
Its strategic location and agricultural wealth have attracted regional powers, comp[licating the chances of a successful political transition.
- Several of Sudan’s neighbours, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Chad and South Sudan, have themselves been affected by political upheavals and domestic conflict.
- Sudan’s relationship with Ethiopia has been strained:
- – over disputed farmland along the border;
- – the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which drove tens of thousands of refugees into Sudan;
- – and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile
- Regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which forged close ties to the RSF when it contributed thousands of fighters to support the war in Yemen [against the Houthis, supported by Iran].
- Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United States and the United Kingdom form the ‘the quad’ , which together with the United Nations and the African Union have sponsored mediation in Sudan.
- Western powers fear Russia could establish a military base on the Red Sea (opposite Saudi Arabia), which Sudanese leaders have been positive about since the al-Bashir era.
- Egypt , to Sudan’s north, which backs Sudan’s army, has pursued an alternative track with groups that supported the 2021 coup .”
A Very Zero-Sum Game
“This is an existential power struggle on both sides,” according to Alan Boswell, director at the International Crisis Group, who added that both sides see the conflict as a “very zero sum” game.
With both generals out for blood, Khair finds it “unlikely they’ll come to the negotiating table without one or both of them suffering heavy losses.”
Both continue to make “bellicose” statements against each other, she said, telling the Agence France Presse (AFP) news agency, “Neither of them will come out of this unscathed.”
The longer they battle it out in city streets, she said, the higher the civilian toll will climb and the harder it will be for either general to rule over the wreckage.
The Sudanese analyst Magdi el-Gizouli was very discerning: “Everyone wanted a chunk of Sudan, and it couldn’t take all the meddling. Too many competing interests and too many claims. Then the fragile balance imploded, as you can see now” (NYT/April 24).
A Multipolar, Bipolar or Unipolar World?
There is a lively debate going on in the academic sphere as well as in the media whether the current constellation of powers can be described as multipolar (many powers jockeying for position in a fractured world), bipolar (two main powers in world affairs), or even unipolar (one main hegemon dictating affairs).
To date, the most convincing arguments have been put forward by two brilliant specialists: Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth (both professors of ‘Government’ at Dartmouth College ) in Foreign Affairs (April 18).
There is little doubt that after the end of the Second World War and the advent of the Cold War, we had a system of bipolarity in place with the United States and the Soviet Union being the two poles.
The other countries of the world were either aligned with these two super-powers, were dominated by them or like most of the developing countries non-aligned.
The situation changed dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
In the 1990s and the early years of the 21st century, the United States’ global dominance was unquestioned, and the world embarked on an era of unipolarity.
The question now is whether with the rise of China and other emerging powers, we are embarking on a period of bipolarity again, or even a cluster of major powers and hence multipolarity.
The professors Brooks and Wohlforth vigorously reject both propositions. The world is neither bipolar nor multipolar, and it is definitely not about to transform to either condition/state/order.
They concede that the US has become less dominant over the past 20 years, but it “remains at the top of the global power hierarchy” – well above China and far above any other country by a long shot!
They claim that the persistence of unipolarity becomes evident with the complete absence of the balancing force – which shaped great-power politics in times of multipolarity and bipolarity.
No single country today or group of countries can match the power of the United States by joining alliances or building up their militaries.
Their main thesis: What is at issue is only the nature of unipolarity, not its very existence.
They argue compellingly that it is erroneous to think of power as influence, that is, “the ability to get others to do what you want.”
Just because the United States could not pacify Afghanistan or Iraq and cannot solve many other global problems unilaterally, one cannot and should not come to the fallacious and unsound conclusion that the world must be multipolar.
For the international system to be multipolar, its workings must be shaped largely by the three or more roughly matched states at the very top.
Considering just two metrics – military outlays and economic output — undoubtedly, the United States and China are the two most powerful countries.
However, for multipolarity to exist, at least one more country must be roughly in their league.
But every country that could plausibly rank third – France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom – is in no way a near peer of the US or China.
Thus, the claims of multipolarity fall apart like a house of cards.
The current international system is not multipolar and will not be for many decades.
The gap between the US and China, on the one hand, and the ‘other powerful hopefuls’ will not close anytime soon. It is, so to speak, a ‘premier league’ with just two teams!
Just taking one crucial metric into account – population – all but India are too small to ever be in the same league.
And India is too poor – there are serious doubts whether it can ever attain ‘super-great-power’ status.
Even No Case for ‘Bipolarity’
Just using GDP and military spending, some analysts might make a plausible case for an emergent bipolarity.
However, that argument breaks down if one uses sophisticated metrics that properly account for the profound changes in the sources of state power wrought by multiple technological revolutions.
More accurate measurements indicate that the United States and China remain in fundamentally different categories and will remain there for a long period, especially in the military and technological realms.
To evaluate economic capacity, better than GDP, one could consider the proportion of worldwide profits in a given industry that one country’s business firms account for.
Research by Brooks has found that of the top 2,000 corporations in the world, US firms are ranked first in global profit shares in 74 percent of sectors, whereas Chinese firms are ranked first in just 11 percent of sectors.
The data on high-tech sectors is even more compelling: US firms now have a 53 percent profit share in these crucial industries , and every other country with a significant high-tech sector has a profit share only in the single digits – Japan comes in second at 7 percent, China comes in third at 6 percent, and Taiwan comes in 4th at 5 percent.
The experts see the best way to measure technological capacity by looking at payments for the use of intellectual property – technology so valuable that others are willing to spend money on it.
China received almost US Dollar $ 12 billion in patent royalties in 2021.
This is less than a tenth of what the US does each year (US Dollar $ 125 billion), and even lags behind Germany (US Dollar $ 59 billion) and Japan (US Dollar $ 47 billion).
As regards the crucial military factor, most security analysts do not consider China being a global peer of the United States by a very large margin.
The United States’ ‘command of the commons” – that is, control over the air, the open sea, and space – makes it a true global military power.
Until China can contest the US’ dominance in these domains, it will remain merely a regional military power.
Brooks and Wohlforth have counted 13 categories of military systems as underlying this capability – everything from nuclear submarines to satellites to aircraft carriers to heavy transport planes.
They establish that China is below 20 percent of the US level in all but five of these capabilities, and in only two areas (cruisers and destroyers; military satellites) does China have more than a third of the US capability.
This is the result of the US devoting immense resources to developing these systems over many decades.
Closing these gaps would also require many decades of effort and finance.
If one moves beyond the raw count and factors in quality, the disparity becomes even more significant.
Today, there is one dominant power and one dominant alliance.
The distribution of power today remains closer to unipolarity than to either bipolarity or multipolarity.
However, the power allocation is best described as “partial unipolarity”, as compared with the “total unipolarity” that existed after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
The end of total unipolarity explains why Beijing, Moscow, and other dissatisfied powers are now more willing to act on their discontentment, accepting some risk of attracting the focused enmity of the United States.
However, the prospect of being balanced against is a more challenging constraint on the US’ rivals than on the US itself.
The successes of the revisionist powers – Russia and China – are astonishingly modest.
Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and looking for ways to extricate itself from Putin’s mess.
China is far from ‘possessing’ the South China Sea. It may also claim Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory, but currently it may threaten it in various ways, but does not have the capability of challenging the US and its Western Pacific allies.
And the writers are of the opinion that the flourishing partnership between China and Russia holds no promise of a systemic power shift.
Thus, “even if China and Russia upgraded their relations, each is still merely a regional military power. Putting together two powers capable of regional balancing does not equate to global balancing.”
Putin’s Aggression in Ukraine
Negotiating Ukraine’s Future
Is it high time to negotiate the future of Ukraine?
This question has hung over the war since Ukraine successfully repelled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invading army as it advanced on Kyiv.
This has become even more palpable since the conflict settled into grinding trench warfare in Ukraine’s east and south.
In a Foreign Affairs essay, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan make the case for negotiation anew.
“For all the good that greater Western military help would do, it is unlikely to change the fundamental reality that this war is headed for stalemate,” they write.
“It is of course possible that Ukraine’s coming offensive proves stunningly successful…resulting in a complete Russian defeat. But such an outcome is improbable…Ukraine is running out of soldiers and ammunition, and its economy continues to deteriorate. Russian troops are dug in, and fresh recruits are heading to the front.”
Proposing Ukraine should receive Western security guarantees and European economic help, Haass and Kupchan argue a negotiated settlement could actually work: “Provided that Ukraine makes battlefield gains this summer, it is at least plausible that Putin would view a cease-fire and peace plan as aface-saving off-ramp,” the foreign policy experts surmise.
In a Foreign Policy op-ed, Stephen M. Walt goes even further, suggesting that the US and China should help forge a peace agreement.
Such a deal would be “more likely to endure. As Moscow and Kyiv would be less likely to renege on a deal arranged and blessed by their principal patrons,” Walt speculates.
[This looks very attractive on paper, but is far from reality given the current state of Sino-American relations – non-cooperation in many sectors, outright confrontation in the Western Pacific].
The Case Against Negotiation
However, a very strong case can be made against negotiation.
In the first instance, both Russia and Ukraine have not indicated their readiness/willingness to discuss terms.
Throughout the war, security experts have argued that allowing Russia to keep seized Ukrainian territory – including Crimea – would incentivize aggression and merely offer Putin a convenient launching pad for future attacks.
Then there is the question of Ukraine’s looming spring offensive, which some say is likely to succeed.
Also in Foreign Affairs , Rajan Menon argues Ukraine has a chance to reshape the war in its favour, as its troops are committed and its citizens resilient, while Russia’s army remains a big question mark.
Liberation of Crimea is Key
The world waits with bated breath for Ukraine’s widely anticipated spring offensive.
Debate continues to rage whether Ukraine’s military objectives should include the re-conquest and liberation of Crimea.
Some sceptics question if Ukraine has the military capabilities to successfully liberate the still Russian-occupied peninsula jutting into the Black Sea.
Others claim Crimea’s personal importance to Putin make it a red line for the Russian autocrat that could spark a nuclear escalation.
Mariia Zolkina, research fellow at the London School of Economics & Political Science, argues very convincingly that these concerns are understandable but shortsighted (Atlantic Council/Ukraine Alert, April 20).
Crucially, they fail to recognize Crimea’s prominence as the decisive battlefield in the ongoing war of aggression.
Zolkina is emphatic that there can be no lasting peace with Russia until and unless Ukraine liberates Crimea.
Some Western governments have indicated – most unfortunately – that they are eager to avoid a further escalation in nuclear tensions at almost any price.
For Zolkina this is a fundamental miscalculation that “risks legitimizing nuclear blackmail as a foreign policy tool.”
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
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