“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest”....BBC broadcast (“The Russian Enigma”), London, October 1, 1939 (partial text).
Recent events from the unfolding armed civil conflicts in Ukraine and Syria has once again brought to bare issues pertaining to bipolarity in terms of the Eastern and Western bloc in the cosmos of international affairs. Thought to have been buried after the collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in 1991, global polity assumed a unipolar status as charged by the United States, and other nations including Russia followed in the trail. The global unipolarity status got to its heights in 2001 during the 9/11 terrorist attack on USA as the global commune rallied behind the ‘counter-terrorism’ war maxim. For the first time since the end of World War 2, Russia and the United States seemed to form a cohesive bond.
The issue of the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ confrontation in ideological and political matters can be traced to the ‘Great Schism’ of Christendom in 1054AD; when the Christian church split along Latin and Greek liturgical and ideological rites resulting in the Western ideological bloc as championed by the Roman Church (Roman Catholic Church) and the (Eastern) Orthodox Church, in which the fault lines followed the East-West delineation of the Roman empire. Though the religious connotation of the East-West delineation has long waned off, it must be worthy of note that Russia’s through Ivan IV ‘the terrible’ acceded hegemony of Eastern Orthodox Christianity following the fall of Constantinople which ultimately liquidated the Byzantine empire to the Ottomans in 1453; while hegemony of Western ideology transmuted from the Holy Roman empire, and after the Napoleonic wars of the 19th Century Europe to Great Britain and then to the United States after the Second World War.
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| Delineation of the Great Schism of 1054AD Source: http://www.slideshare.net/aysarchival07/religion-during-american-occupation-and-the-great-schism-in-the-catholic-church |
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| Source:http://www.generationword.com/bible_school_notes/27.html |
Away from the religious prelude, the East-West delineation took an socio-economic ideological format with the installation of the World’s first Communist regime in Russia following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Though the delineation was not apparent then, it manifested during the later stages of World War 2. Despite being allies in the fight against Hitler’s Nazism, the Allied powers (USA, UK, France) never trusted the wits of Stalin’s Russia as there was not free access to Russian liberated areas. This made Churchill to make his famous Iron curtain statement in 1946;
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
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| http://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/iron-curtain-bicycle-trail-10-000km-history-culture-politics/ |
Apparent during the Postdam and Yalta World War Two conferences, the seeming East-West bipolarity divide rapidly deepened after the end of World War 2 resulting into what was popularly referred to as the ‘Cold War’ and of course propped up the arms race. Fully aware of the disastrous implications of any ensuing conflict between global bipolar powers which were armed with Weapons of Mass Destructions (Radiological/Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons), the ‘Cold War’ assumed a proxy front as sundry nations around the world aligned to either the ‘East’ (socialist/communist) or Western (Capitalist) ideologies. These moves were wholesomely not peaceful as it portended opportunity for the Global Bipolar powers to scramble and jostle for allies amongst these nations. With Countries emerging from colonial rule especially in Asia and Africa after World War 2, the USA frenzied about the spread of communism in these newly independent states and therefore sought to influence their governance by all means possible. This notoriously fuelled several Coup d’états in South America, Africa and Asia in especially in the 1950’s -1980’s and the of course, civil conflicts such as the Vietnam war and the Korean War.
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| http://korean-war.commemoration.gov.au/cold-war-crisis-in-korea/korean-war-strategic-map.php |
The Korean Peninsula represents the last bastion of the Global Bipolar divisions. It is a relic of the outcome of the Second World War which divided the Peninsula into USSR and USA spheres of control along the 38th Latitude parallel. Unlike divided Germany which later reunited upon the famous collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and then seemingly aligning to the Western Ideology, North and South Korea have stoically represented all what the East-West bipolar delineation stands for and though they were moves by North Korea to forcefully reunite the Korean Peninsula which resulted into the Korean war (1950-1953), neither side do not seem to let down the rhetoric which is now made more sinister with a Nuclear armed North Korea. As such, the Korean peninsula though currently conflict semi-dormant, remains a potent frontline and fault line in any clash between the bipolar powers.
The Chinese regime also remains a flash point in the East-West conflicting sphere of dominance. Resurging after the Second World War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) swept to power in 1949 as led by the military prowess of Mao Zedong who defeated the Chinese Nationalists led by Chang Kia Chek. The defeated Nationalists fled to Taiwan and yet till today still refers itself as the ‘Chinese government in exile’. Though this yielded lots of tremors in international diplomatic polity, the Chinese Nationalists were eventually derecognized as representatives of the Chinese Government by the Western powers and subsequently the government Chinese Communists was recognized and invited to take a permanent sit at the United Nations Security Council in 1971. Nevertheless, there still remains animosity between the Communist Chinese government of Mainland China and the Nationalist Chinese government of Taiwan which is backed by the USA but not granted United Nations recognition due to blockage from the Mainland Chinese government. Nevertheless, the Taiwan straits remain a dormant spot in the East-West bipolar delineation.
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, International polity assumed a seeming unipolar Status with the USA dictating the trend. However at the turn of the new Millennium in 2000, International polity was reawakened to the hot bed of the East-West delineatory polity, with the expansion of NATO and the EU member states to accommodate ex-Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe and then, Russian Nationalism renewed a resurgence after an economic battering decade following the collapse of the USSR.
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| https://www.stratfor.com/sample/image/natos-evolution |
Finding dynamism in the Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB (Russian Secret Service) agent who was President and subsequently became Russian Prime Minister, the Russians have seemly assumed a challenging statusquo to USA’s domineering of International polity through the exercise of veto powers at the UN security council and swoopingly taking the first military initiative around conflict spots of interest as seen in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria.
"One thing I learnt 50 years ago on the streets of Leningrad was that if a fight is inevitable, you need to land the first punch," Vladimir Putin
Buoyed by and economic revival from the oil boom of the mid and late 2000’s, Russia has sought to modernize it’s military and arsenal which has long been held in scorn of being ‘outdated’ by the West.
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| Russia's Vladimir Putin and The USA's Barack Obama represents all that the EAST-WEST Bipolarity stands for Source:www.bbcnews.com |
Having the knowledge of ‘mutually assured destruction’ in the case of any conflict betwixt the bipolar powers, Russia yet seeks to counter an apparent expansionism of NATO towards its Western borders. Despite an array of ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), Russia in series of tantalizing militaristic overtures have sent Western/NATO jets of the United Kingdom, Scandinavian and Baltic states scuttling and scamparing to the skies. Indeed whilst the Russian military apparatus is seeing some fighting engagement in Syria, NATO countries (though individually in a separate coalition have joined the fight against the Islamic State in the Middle East) have been having sundry military training sessions across the Baltic and Eastern Europe.
“instead of settling conflicts [the largely unipolar system] leads to their escalation, instead of sovereign and stable states, we see the growing spread of chaos.”- Vladimir Putin
Never since the end of the cold war in 1991 has international polity being heated by divergent bipolarity between the powers. Fuelling and fanning the embers of conflict situations around the globe, it is pertinent for a de-escalation in the aggressive bipolar charge of global powers so that a common understanding and agreement can be reached in sundry problem and conflict situations and issues around the globe.
