TRUMP’S GAZE TURNS TO INHERITED WAR, XI’S TO ORDER BEYOND

The US President is pivoting from the Persian Gulf to reboot the proxy war in Ukraine, retracting the steps taken in Anchorage. Meanwhile, Beijing is signalling a warmer relationship with Washington

- M K BHADRAKUMAR

It was not surprising that Russia’s war in Ukraine gave way to the US-Israeli war with Iran, which surged through the past year to hog international attention.

Fuel, fertiliser and food are of immediate concern to humanity, unlike geopolitics, which is far too esoteric to be felt in the blood and the heart. But that does not mean that the Ukraine war is any less important. Arguably, its outcome will be far more consequential from a medium- and long-term perspective.

There is a mystique about geopolitical conflicts that is seductive—brutal, but at the same time, pragmatic games played in ‘national interest’ with indeterminate timelines that often linger in the shade lost in thoughts, like a passenger train shunted to a rail siding to clear the main line so that express trains can pass.

The panoramic sweep of geopolitical conflicts makes the outcome harder to predict, as the Ukraine war exemplifies. To borrow from a famous Churchillian metaphor, they are like any political intrigues, “comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won”.

US President Donald Trump beat a quiet retreat from his self-imposed mediatory role in the Ukraine war once it dawned on him that the geopolitical conflict is far too complicated to lend itself to easy solutions. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proved more than a match for Trump. Trump’s hubris also alienated the Europeans who were kept out of the three-way talks between Washington, Moscow and Kyiv.