Social welfare threatened by rising East-West tensions

It is all too obvious that the firm backing of the West for Ukraine in the latter’s efforts to beat off the Russian invasion, now well exceeding its hundredth day, has helped to impart to the war the dimension of an intensifying East-West confrontation. One may even say that the Western involvement has turned the conflict into a proxy war of sorts.

While the Putin regime is unrelenting in its efforts to fragment Ukraine and turn it into a vassal state of Russia, the West is losing no time in bolstering Ukraine’s military capabilities. At the time of writing the US, the UK and Germany are in the forefront of providing Ukraine with advanced missile systems, besides other military hardware, to meet the threat of Russian long-range missiles which have been making short work of some of Ukraine’s cities. Putin’s ominous warnings to the West over such military support for Ukraine don’t seem to be deterring the West and for the foreseeable future matters are bound to remain this way.

However, it is all too clear that what we have in Ukraine right now is a military stalemate or a war of attrition that will cost both sides very dearly in terms of human lives lost. Russian forces are currently bogged down in Eastern Ukraine and are making fitful progress, if at all, while the Ukrainians are not proving doubly effective in beating off the invaders either. However, a miliary stalemate accrues to the benefit of the defenders since they have for the time being at least aborted the invader’s plans and exposed the military ineffectiveness of the latter.

Meanwhile, the negative economic effects of the war are being experienced worldwide. World food prices, for instance, are spiraling as a result of the conflict and this, according to the UN, is a precursor to globe-wide food inflation and insecurity. Recently Al Jazeera quoted the FAO’s lead analyst for food crises Luca Russo as saying that in proportion to which the Ukraine invasion sends energy prices higher, ‘the cost of delivering aid has increased as well. The risk of a severe food crisis is particularly felt in the developing world.’

Sri Lanka is apparently among the first few countries of the developing world to crumble in the face of this growing worldwide economic crunch. Sri Lanka’s economic degradation is such that it is compelling the UN to even appeal to the world to go to the economic assistance of the country urgently. Sri Lanka should see this is as a moment of shame for itself, since in recent decades it was touted by sections of the world and even by itself, as a country very much on the path of dynamic progress. While a number of internal factors could be said to have brought about Sri Lanka’s economic debacle, external forces, such as rising energy and fuel prices, have clearly precipitated her collapse into economic ruin. She joins Afghanistan as being among the worst-off countries of the world, in terms of economic standing.

While Russia could be deriving some smug satisfaction from the fact that the West too is being hit by the economic pressures it has helped unleash through its invasion of Ukraine, considering that it is being hurt a great deal by Western economic sanctions, it is the vulnerable economies of the South that are bearing the brunt of the crisis. The Horn of Africa, for example, will very likely experience food insecurity of phenomenal proportions as time goes by. The West, on the other hand, is still in a position to manage its current economic problems, though the debilitating effects of the Ukraine war are being felt by it.

The West, however, has taken the proxy war against Russia even to the diplomatic plane by taking cudgels against the latter in the UN Security Council for the global economic pressures triggered by its Ukraine war. Recently, the president of the European Council Charles Michel, speaking in the UNSC, accused Russia of being ‘solely responsible’ for the food crisis and of using ‘Food as stealth missiles’ to destabilize the world. His remarks caused the Russian envoy at the forum to ‘storm out’ of it.

This is crisis time for the UN. On the one hand it has to ensure the material wellbeing of the vulnerable countries of the South and this is going to prove very costly financially. On the other hand, it has to prevent the current East-West confrontation from getting out of hand. There are no clear or easy answers for either of these posers. As matters stand, the UN Security Council is reduced to the position of a helpless observer of the ongoing incendiary friction between East and West. The UN’s helplessness is compounded by the fact that the main parties to the Ukraine crisis are unlikely to be in agreement on any of the gut issues to the conflict any time soon.

However, arms spending by the West and its antagonists in the Ukraine theatre is bound to be on a steady increase. The current arms race between the main parties to the Ukraine crisis could very well lead to a major security crisis which could even feature the use of nuclear weapons; so great is the pace of competitive arms spending by the sides.

This arms-spending spree, so to speak, is bound to have spill-over effects in the South. Major powers of even South Asia would be compelled to arm themselves with weapons that could match the destructive power of Western arsenals, for instance. This would mean that less money will be budgeted for social welfare purposes by governments. Needless to say, this spending trend would aggravate the already grave food crisis in the South. The upshot would be runaway social discontentment; something countries such as Sri Lanka are already facing.

For Southern ruling elites it would be a case of ‘Bread or Guns’. The weaker the economies the greater would be the anxieties of rulers. This is on account of law- and- order problems growing out of a lack of ‘Bread’, getting out of hand. This would compel rulers to spend more on ‘Guns’ and go easy on social spending to keep their restive publics in check. Accordingly, authoritarian governance could be expected to grow in the South in particular in tandem with the increasing cry for ‘Bread’.