Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
I have the pleasure of sending you a new Egmont Paper, in which I travel around the world in 10 pages to assess the geopolitical consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine:
The illustration shows the multipolar world of 1937. It is a period map that was given out as a supplement with a Belgian newspaper in that year. I picked it up at the Brussels flea market, and now it graces our bedroom. Nevertheless, geopolitics does not keep me awake at night, nor do I dream of Grand Strategy. Well, maybe a little bit…
Best wishes,
Sven
Prof. Dr. Sven Biscop
Director – Europe in the World Programme, Egmont
Professor – Ghent University
Associate Member – Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences
Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations
Just like many Allied leaders during World War One could only see what was right in front of them, i.e., the continuous line of trenches in Belgium and France, so many EU leaders today see only the land war in Ukraine. They disregard, at their peril, that for Russia, one of the vital interests at stake is control over the Black Sea and access to the Mediterranean. For years, in fact, Russia has been doing what Churchill advocated the Allies do in the Great War. In the face of the perceived frontal onslaught of EU and NATO enlargement into Eastern Europe, Putin has been turning Europe’s flanks. Russia has forged a special relationship with Turkey; it has intervened successfully in Syria, safeguarding its naval base in Tartus; and it has established a military presence from the shores of the Mediterranean to Central Africa. Europeans are forever debating which flank, East or South, should receive priority. Seen from Moscow this is one vast theatre, where Russia constantly acts as a spoiler, thwarting Europe’s plans, with the aim of weakening the EU and NATO and diverting them from Eastern Europe.
Military Offensives, Hybrid Attacks – And No Peace in Sight
“In war everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. Those difficulties add up and cause friction, which nobody can really imagine who has not witnessed war”. Thus Clausewitz. An effective plan of attack is based on a simple idea, for a plan that is too complex to explain to one’s own commanders, will not be executed. But the best plans go awry, first of all because, naturally, the opponent also has a plan. This renders war very unpredictable per definition, as Vladimir Putin has experienced – as well as the many military and academic analysts in the West.
The Self-Defeating Offensive
I had expected active fighting to have fizzled out long before the summer. After a few weeks, it was clear for all to see that Russia could not achieve its initial objectives of regime change in Kyiv and occupying (at least) half of the country to the Dnepr river. My assessment was that Russia would halt offensive operations once it had conquered the land bridge between the Crimea and the Donbass, and dig in there.
With hindsight, that would have been smarter on their part. At that time, the Ukrainian armed forces were not yet capable of launching a powerful counterattack. Russia could have consolidated its control over occupied territory, making a counteroffensive at a later stage even more difficult. Undoubtedly, some in the West would have been tempted to probably still adopt sanctions, but to basically accept the fait accompli on the ground.
By keeping on the offensive tough, Russia paradoxically weakened itself more than Ukraine. Russia did conquer more territory, but only by overstretching its (unexpectedly low) military power. At the same time it fortified unity and resolve in the West to fully support Ukraine and to punish Russia. The brutal war crimes of the Russian army further strengthened that dynamic. Thanks to its own strong will to fight and with Western support, Ukraine not only blocked the Russian advance, but in some sectors of the front even succeeded in driving it back.
Hybrid Attacks
What we see now – nuclear bluff, fake referenda and sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines – are signs of Russian weakness and frustration with defeat on the battlefield. The actual impact on the war may be limited. Putin’s tale of Western aggression, against which ultimately nuclear weapons can be deployed, must veil Russia’s failure from his own public. For how to explain that a supposedly inexistent Ukrainian nation fights so hard that mobilisation must be decreed, if not by a Western conspiracy? The referenda and illegal annexation of more lands will not stop Ukraine from continuing its efforts to liberate its entire national territory.
Sabotaging the pipelines in the short term ratchets up energy prices again, which hurts Europe, but in the long term it will hurt Russia more. They are their pipelines. Before the war I wrote that the EU should signal to Russia: if ever you cut off the gas, it will never be reconnected again. That has now become very certain indeed.
Nevertheless, these acts of sabotage (a form of “hybrid attack”) do represent an escalation. We, the EU and NATO countries, are not at war with Russia, and the unspoken understanding remains that direct war between nuclear powers must be avoided. Such hybrid attacks, which remain below the threshold of military violence and as long as they don’t cause loss of life, the West will not quickly consider to be an act of war. (Although at its summit last June NATO did explicitly decide, for the first time, that the option to do so exists). But we must react when sabotage, or other far-reaching hybrid attacks, happen on our territory.
For now, we attempt to deter hybrid attacks by building up strong defences. But we ought also to deter by threatening retaliation. Whoever paralyses a port through a cyber attack or blows up a pipeline in any EU or NATO country, ought to know that the EU or NATO as a whole will launch a counterstrike against their infrastructure. The West should develop a doctrine along those lines, but that debate had only just started before the war.
For my country, Belgium, in particular, this is of crucial importance, for as the host nation for EU and NATO headquarters, it is a primary target for hybrid attacks, and the Belgian state holds the primary responsibility for averting them. That is a core message of the country’s first ever National Security Strategy, adopted in December 2021.
No End in Sight
Meanwhile, let us not forget that militarily, Russia is far from finished. We see the ongoing protests, but the regime (which is much more than just Putin) is firmly established. We see how many try to escape mobilisation, but tens of thousands have now joined the ranks and will shortly reinforce Russian positions in the occupied areas. That will not enable Russia to seize large parts of territory again, but it may allow it to stabilise the front. Sadly, it is far from certain, therefore, that Ukraine will be able to liberate all of the sizeable territory that Russia still holds.
As stated above, war is especially unpredictable. At this point in time, the most likely outcome still seems that both sides will eventually fight each other to a standstill, and that large active operations will cease at least temporarily – hopefully when the front has moved as much as possible to the east. Winter conditions may contribute to this, though one should not forget that in 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, major battle continued well into December.
If there were indeed a (temporary) lull in the fighting, would this create conditions for tentative talks, or would the war just flare up again next spring, with more firepower deployed on both sides? Or might Putin, faced with the defeat of his ambitions, be tempted to opt for massive escalation and use the nuclear weapon against Ukraine, in spite of the risk of an escalatory spiral? For that might in turn invite a direct intervention by the United States and its European allies. Nobody can know anything for certain.
The West must in any case prepare to support Ukraine on a structural basis, economically and militarily, and to render its economy structurally independent from Russia. A peace agreement remains the ideal outcome, but is impossible as long as Russia is not prepared to make major concessions. We better adjust therefore, if the hot war ever ends, to a long-term frozen conflict, with an ever present risk of renewed escalation.
Prof. Dr. Sven Biscop (Egmont Institute & Ghent University) struggles to see a likely positive scenario.
What is an extra slice of Ukrainian territory to Russia? A war of aggression no longer fits in our European logic, but it does in that of President Putin. He seeks to permanently position Russia as a great power to be taken into account, and to restore a sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union.
Russia Invades Ukraine: The Dangerous Weakness of a Military Superpower
What is an extra slice of Ukrainian territory to Russia? A war of aggression no longer fits in our European logic, but it does in that of President Putin. He seeks to permanently position Russia as a great power to be taken into account, and to restore a sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. For Putin, the greatest threat is not potential NATO membership of Ukraine, but the country’s gradual westernisation through its close association with the European Union. For if that succeeds in one large former Soviet republic, then who knows where else the public might turn against its authoritarian leaders…
It is precisely because the new regime in Ukraine was about to conclude a far-reaching free trade agreement with the EU, that Putin attacked the first time, in 2014. Perhaps most determining of his actions today, is that in fact that first invasion was a failure. Russia annexed the Crimea, but against its expectations the rest of the country totally turned against it. Only in a small region in the east could Russia instrumentalise limited numbers of armed separatists. Putin, therefore, is trying to undo his own failure.
And we just stand aside and watch? “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, Thucydides wrote already. Sadly, all too often that still is the hard reality of international politics today. When a great power decides upon war against another country, there is little the other powers can do to prevent it. Unless they are prepared to go to war themselves, but a direct confrontation between nuclear powers is so incredibly dangerous that all refrain from it unless their own territory is directly under threat. Once Putin had decided, therefore, the renewed invasion of Ukraine could no longer be stopped (just like in 2003 nobody could halt the US once it had made up its mind to invade Iraq).
That does not mean it was a mistake to enter into negotiations with Russia – attempting to prevent bloodshed is never wrong. Today, however, we can assume that actually Putin decided early on in the current crisis to revert to military action anyhow (but perhaps not at which scale). Maybe he had even set his eyes on this years ago, and was just waiting for what he considered the right moment. This is not a failure of diplomacy. When two sides want to talk yet part ways without an agreement, that is a failure. But when one side is not willing to concede anything, and uses diplomacy only to mask its true intentions (and thus to lie to its interlocutors), real negotiations have never actually started.
Now that Putin has opted for war, there is little space left for diplomacy. At some point regular combat will come to a halt and a new demarcation line will emerge (if Russia does not occupy all of Ukraine). The EU and the US cannot in any way legitimise the result of this war of aggression. There will be no peace conference drawing new borders. At most we will see a ceasefire between Russia and what remains of Ukraine.
What will the future bring then? Tough sanctions from the EU and the US, and a freezing of relations with Russia for probably many years to come. That will not immediately help Ukraine: sanctions will not make Russia retreat, and will hurt us too. Yet they are absolutely necessary to send a signal to the entire world: one cannot violate the core rules of the world order without paying a price. Otherwise the rules would be hollowed out and no order would eventually remain. Reducing relations with Russia will hit the EU hardest in the energy domain, but it can be done – one more argument to accelerate the green transition. Russia has built up great reserves and can do without the revenue of gas export to Europe for now, but cannot sell that gas to anyone else; those fields are connected to us alone.
Is Putin really winning, therefore, or is he trying not to lose? War with Ukraine will not solve Russia’s domestic problems; instead, it will worsen its economic prospects. The sphere of influence that Putin says he is defending he already has to share with China, a major economic presence in all former Soviet republics. In that sense, conquering Ukraine is a sign of weakness: Russia does not have any positive project that can attract other countries of their own accord. The same applies to Russian interventions in Africa and the Middle East: sufficient to disrupt our plans (as in Mali, where the military regime kicked us out), but not to construct their ow project. Indirectly Russian military adventurism also undermines China’s, mostly economic strategy. That is why today China does not really pronounce itself: it will not openly go against Russia, but will not openly support it either.
Nonetheless, a declining great power that remains a military superpower can be very dangerous. The EU will have to seriously reassess its strategy, therefore. First of all, we must enhance our territorial defence. In previous decades, most European armed forces have focused on expeditionary operations. Those remain necessary, but at the same time we must reinforce our conventional deterrence. Today, the US fully assumes its leadership role within NATO, but what if there were a major crisis in Asia at the same time, or if Trump were in the White House? A dimension of our defence that demands urgent reinforcement, is deterrence of hybrid actions. Russia will undoubtedly intensify those: cyber-attacks, disinformation, sabotage, coercion etc. As the host of NATO and the EU, Belgium is a primary target, as its National Security Strategy adopted last December emphasises. We must dare to retaliate against hybrid actions, including with our own offensive cyber operations. The EU must also elaborate an entirely new strategy for North Africa, in order not to lose all influence.
This is not the end of the European security architecture. Russia cannot bring down the EU or NATO. Only our own antidemocratic extremists can do that, who often act as useful idiots in the service of Russia. But relations with Russia will become very cold again, and we will be forced to invest more in defence. At the same time, we must continue to invest in our own positive project, the EU, and in multilateral cooperation with all states, authoritarian regimes included, whenever interests coincide. Cooperate when you can, push back when you must. Keeping the world together in one order to which all states subscribe: that is the challenge for international politics in the 21st century. Russia has now put itself outside that order for some time to come, but it does not have the power to overturn it. China could, but so far has opted for an assertive economic rather than military strategy. The US hopefully realises that in addition to its military contribution, for which Europe must be grateful, it ought to propose a positive project for the world as well. No country can safeguard its way of life alone, and with military means alone – not even a great power.
Finally, those with a knowledge of military history recognise all the names. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa: those were the sites of large-scale murderous battles where Soviet soldiers and citizens fought against the Nazi invaders. Today that is where Vladimir Putin attacks Ukraine.
***
Every year, Sven Biscop lectures at the National Defence University in Kyiv. Today, his thoughts are with the Ukrainian military in the field.
Eu pensava que a Europa tinha deixado de moldar o mundo em torno da Grande Guerra, ou seja, cem anos atrás. Alguns europeus acreditam que ela continua no jogo, mas o livro sobre o "efeito Bruxelas" é de um professor da Columbia University. Seria um americano? Duvido...
Egmont - the Royal Institute for International Relations, has the honour to invite you to an Expert Seminar on the occasion of the publication of:
The Brussels Effect – How the European Union Rules the World
Date:04 March 2020
Time:15:00 - 17:00 (Registration from 14:30) Venue:Orange Room of the Egmont Palace, Place du Petit Sablon, 8bis, 1000 Brussels
With the author, Professor Anu Bradford (Columbia Law School, New York City)
The Brussels Effect challenges the prevalent view that the European Union is a declining world power. It argues that notwithstanding its many obvious challenges, the EU remains an influential superpower that shapes the world in its image through a phenomenon called the “Brussels Effect.”
The Brussels Effect refers to the EU’s unilateral power to regulate global markets. Without the need to resort to international institutions or seek other nations’ cooperation, the EU has the unique ability among nations today to promulgate regulations that shape the global business environment, elevating standards worldwide and leading to a notable Europeanization of many important aspects of global commerce. Different from many other forms of global influence, the Brussels Effect entails that the EU does not need to impose its standards coercively on anyone—market forces alone are often sufficient to convert the EU standard into the global standard as multinational companies voluntarily extend the EU rule to govern their global operations. In this way, the EU wields significant, unique, and highly penetrating power to unilaterally transform global markets, including through its ability to set the standards in diverse areas such as antitrust regulation, data protection, online hate speech, consumer health and safety, or environmental protection.
The event will be chaired by Professor Sven Biscop (Egmont Institute & Ghent University)
Egmont - Royal Institute for International Relations
Rue des Petits Carmes 15 (postal address) - 1000 Brussels - Belgium
Tel: +32/(0)2.223.41.14 www.egmontinstitute.be
Um grande scholar, belga flamengo, do Royal Institute for International Relations, em Bruxelas, Sven Biscop, acaba de me enviar seu mais recente paper, que acredito tenha interesse para todos os estudiosos de relações internacionais.
I have the pleasure of sending you my first policy brief of 2020, in which I ambitiously look at the entire decade ahead: Strategic Choices for the 2020s.
These past few years, the European Union (EU) has taken various decisions which, when taken together, amount to a careful repositioning in international politics. Let us be bold and call it the inkling of a Grand Strategy: an idea of the Union’s shifting place in the great power relations that determine international politics.
Yet that nascent Grand Strategy is not equally shared by all EU Member States or even by all EU institutions, nor has it yet been incorporated into all relevant strands of EU policy. If the implications are not fully thought through and the repositioning stops here, the EU as well as the Member States risk ending up in a permanently ambivalent position: more than a satellite of the US, but not a really independent power either. Such a half-hearted stance would alienate their allies and partners while tempting their adversaries. For now, the EU has done enough to irritate the US but not to obtain the benefits sought: to further the European interest and to play a stabilising role in great power relations.
Will 2020 see the EU and the Member States muster the courage to fully implement the choices that they have already started to make?
I hope this may be of interest!
Best wishes,
Sven En excerpt: "But whoever wins the White House in November of this year: China will be seen as the adversary to be contained or reduced in power; there will be a more transactional approach to multilateralism, including NATO; Europe will continue to be seen in a more instrumental way, as a source of allies to be mobilised against America’s adversaries; and the EU’s economic and energy interests as such will never be a priority for the US. Nor will they be for China or Russia, obviously."
Stalin era georgiano. Beria também. Não obstante, Stalin nunca conseguiu eliminar Beria, não porque ele fosse georgiano, mas porque Beria tinha suas próprias fontes de informação, inclusive sobre Stalin, independentes do GPU ou do NKVD, pois que baseados na antiga classe dominante georgiana, emigrados ou permanecidos na União Soviética, o que lhe permitiu sobreviver até ao ditador psicopata. Ainda deu a bomba atômica de presente ao Stalin, em grande medida baseado em espionagem contra UK e EUA. Só foi eliminado por Kruschev, três anos depois da morte do seu antigo patrono.
Em todo caso, a Georgia é um fenômeno, a vários títulos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
The Egmont Institute and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia have the pleasure to invite you to a conference on:
Date: 18 June 2018 Time: 17:00-19:30 Venue: Egmont Palace, 8bis, Place du Petit Sablon, 1000 Brussels
«Si quelques années avant la guerre, des militants informés des choses internationales, pénétrés des idées fondamentales du marxisme, s’étaient posé la question de savoir quelle serait la première capitale où s’établirait un gouvernement démocrate socialiste, quelques-uns eussent songé à Paris…, d’autres plus nombreux eussent parlé de Berlin ou de Londres, de Stockholm ou de Bruxelles ; mais je gage que pas un n’eût songé à Tiflis, Capitale de la République Géorgienne.»
Emile Vandervelde, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères de la Belgique 1925-1927 Juillet 1921
«Refuser de libérer la Géorgie comme on a libéré la Pologne, la Finlande, les populations du littoral Baltique, comme on sera conduit demain par la force des choses à libérer d’autres régions encore, c’est bien pis que commettre un illogisme flagrant...»
«Ses habitants (de Géorgie) connurent un malheur auquel nous autres Belges pouvons d’autant mieux compatir que nous l’avons nous-mêmes maintes fois éprouvé : le malheur d’être en trop bonne place, à celle où chacun vous bouscule pour la prendre.»
«En tout organisant contre une attaque éventuelle la plus énergique résistance, ils ont toujours soigneusement évité jusqu’à l’apparence d’une agression. Ils ne comptaient pour vaincre leurs adversaires que sur la force de l’idée et sur celle de l’exemple. Ils voulaient que leur petite république manifeste une telle supériorité sur la grande tyrannie que chacun en ait sa conviction faite et sa résolution arrêtée.»
Louis de Brouckère, sénateur belge 1925-1932 Juillet 1921
La Géorgie est le seul Etat socialiste du monde entier. C’est un Etat socialiste qui n’a pas été fondé sur la terreur, la contrainte ou le meurtre, mais sur la démocratie.
Camille Huysmans, Premier Ministre belge 1946-1947, Président de la Chambre 1954-1958 Octobre 1921
Programme
-17:00-17:15 : Opening Remarks
H. E. Aniek Van Calster, Director General, Belgian MFA
H. E. Natalie Sabanadze, Ambassador of Georgia
-17:15-18:45: Panel Discussion: First Republic and Its Successors:
Moderator: Marc Franco, Senior Associate Fellow, Egmont Institute
Speakers:
Mr. Stephen Jones (1st republic, Socialism in Georgian colours)
Mr. Tornike Gordadze (Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia)
Ms. Amanda Paul (European Georgia: myth and reality)
