Insight: Asia In Times Of Conflict
Esquire Singapore|May/June 2022
As Ukraine continues to fight for sovereignty against a determined Russia and trepidations of a possible World War III loom, new questions arise. What role does Singapore, and more widely Asia, have in influencing the state of global affairs today? How much, if anything, can we contribute to the political landscape? How will the events unfolding in Europe penetrate through to impact the East? Why do some wars get treated as frontline news, whereas others seem to come and go from the headlines? Celebrated author, academic and multi-award-winning geopolitical expert Dr. Parag Khanna answers.
Rahat Kapur.
Insight: Asia In Times Of Conflict

Parag, to start with-could you help set the context of what's occurring in the world today? Is the war in Ukraine really that unprecedented or has it been a long time coming?

It's a great question. The immediate term that comes to mind when we think of how this has come about is 'frozen conflict'. Very often, we use this term to describe events like these; it could be Palestine or the South China Sea or other such political hotspots-because they haven't exactly blown up recently, or they're not blowing up in the news every day. We treat them as dormant. My attitude has always been that these frozen conflicts need to be aggressively tamed and resolved, because otherwise they remain powder kegs. That would be the logic I would apply to this; because clearly what you have here is a dilemma where it only takes one side to be unreasonable for the whole situation to be explosive.

So in a way, this conflict has remained unresolved for an extended period of time, and essentially it's now come to a boiling point?

Exactly. For Putin-whether we're talking about the Eastern provinces, Crimea or Ukraine's relations with the West-all three things remain unresolved. They've been unresolved for about the last 20 years, quite frankly. That is as far as Putin is concerned. Essentially, what that comes down to is that this is one of those frozen conflicts we should have been much more aggressively seeking to resolve to begin with.

Are you surprised by the way things are panning out with the war as it stands?

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