Kazakhstan is a vast country, the ninth largest by area in the world. You could fit four Ukraines or five Frances, and still have room left over. You could fit all of Western Europe into it. But it has fewer than 20 million people, one of the sparsest populated countries on the globe. At one point only 30 years ago, there were as many Russians as there were Kazakhs. Now the Russians are less than a quarter of the population.
What is happening there now is both a sign of a foreboding future and possibly the most important current conflict in the world. That conflict seems to have come out of nowhere, a gas price hike and popular protests that quickly spiraled into bloody and destructive violence. But nothing, or leastwise very little, comes from nowhere.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I like to call post-post-colonialism, especially in regard to Indonesia, but also in regard to the ongoing decay of left wing thinking and thought. When we start with appearances, and banish depth, well, before you know it, weakness becomes strength, and all that is dull is seemingly gold. This is the problem that Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, nominal President of Kazakhstan, faces in considerably more physical danger than we blogiating commentators face.
Before I go further, let me affirm that war is horror, and no one, least of all me, would wish it on his worst enemy. That said, we need to understand war, discuss it, rip away the veils of ideology and moralism which obscure it, and try to understand why it happens and how it might end in any instance. I do not mean to reduce or obscure the suffering that accompanies it by trying to look at it with clear eyes.
Ethiopia, less than half as large as Kazakhstan, but with a population almost six times larger, also has a conflict. A bloodthirsty war that also stems from a fight over whose weakness will be nominated as strength. It has been a fascinating war of movement; I’ve followed it on Google up and down the highways of Ethiopia. Abiy Ahmed, Nobel-Prize-winning Prime Minister of Ethiopia, almost led himself into a catastrophe, but the tide seems to be turning in his favor thanks to drones supplied by the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran, an unholy alliance if ever there was one, alongside China ever willing to fuel chaos for its own ends. So Mr. Ahmed, a Pentecostal Christian, finds himself in bed with two Sunni states, one Shi‘a state, and one Communist state.
Mr. Ahmed’s gambit in attacking the Tigrayans was both to demonstrate his strength and to increase his hold on the country, but it backfired spectacularly. It revealed his deep weakness and he has had to retreat in unacknowledged shame from his earlier fame for peace making and democratic reforms. China, already heavily investing in the Horn of Africa including Ethiopia, will certain be calling for its pay back, and Abiy’s weakness will be plain for all to see.
I digress to Ethiopia because, notwithstanding the horrors of the present war, it illustrates how dictators, in this case a would-be dictator, often err from weakness. It also demonstrates that unfortunate rule of history that horror does not always indicate larger significance. The Ethiopian conflict is not as important geopolitically as the events in Kazakhstan even as it hastens a little China’s deepening domination of Africa. But it does demonstrate how weakness can masquerade as strength.
Kazakhstan is more geopolitically important because it affects Europe. Follow me here.
Dictators have a problem. They are mortal. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the bloviating former strongman, understood his mortality, so he picked one of his flunkeys to succeed him, then set himself up as overseer and put a bunch of his people in key positions. That is a rickety system, folks, typical of the monomania of the strongman. The New York Times has a nice essay on this issue pursuant to Mr. Nazarbayev’s bad calculations and his underlying weakness.
Then a simple decision by a weak leader to raise fuel prices triggered a series of actions that has led to a de facto Russian invasion. All the evidence suggests that the over-the-top violence into which the protests evolved was an opportunistic intervention by partisans of the old goat, to what end one is not sure. Perhaps they saw that the weak toadie was about to move against them. And indeed he did. But his weakness and isolation was such that he had no choice but to appeal to Putin for salvation.
And, of course, this serves hand-wringing Putin’s purposes perfectly. He has an opportunity to show the entire world, especially Europe, that he can invade yet another country, his imperial ambitions are expanded, and he puts the fear further into Ukraine. I actually think that this makes an invasion of Ukraine even less likely. The point has been made, and the costs of actually putting armed force into Ukraine would be staggering. Meanwhile, Europe has noticed. He knows that. He really doesn’t care what the USA thinks.
A nice clean military intervention with no body bags. And a weak but compliant dictator who can be manipulated as needed, or kicked out in the event that events require it.
Tokayev did make one terrible mistake, stating in public that he had given orders to shoot without warning any “terrorists”. That may make him a bad deal for Putin, but on the other hand, Putin has put up with the Belarussian blustering toadie Lukashenko for a very long time. So perhaps a blubbering sycophant is just what he prefers. I think Lukashenko might be wise to be nervous about the events in Kazakhstan.
It is worth noting that China has an interest here as well given how much they have invested in Kazakhstan as part of the belt and road initiative. But they know well how to make deals with dictators, and this is a case where Chinese and Russian ambitions can probably be made commensurate. That in itself would be a noteworthy development.
The global loser in both Ethiopia and Kazakhstan? That would be us, the good old US of A. We are not in the mix. Corporate headquarters with energy interests in Kazakhstan must be abuzz right now, wondering how to play this. But the US is not a player, left glowering from the sidelines. I don’t blame Biden; he was handed a broken foreign policy by the blob who preceded him. I am not so sure that the world is a better place with the US no longer its chief policeman. Our weakness, in this event, is the strength of reactionary forces from China to Russia to every one of the drooling authoritarians hanging onto to their corrupt regimes for fear of what might await them in defeat.
The ideological loser? I do not want to get too petty here, but the American ultraleft has not a whimper of a word to say about either Ethiopia or Kazakhstan, or the rise of Chinese totalitarianism, or the haughty pretense of a new Russian imperialism. It does not fit cookie cutter diversity analysis, the US is not the bad guy in any case, so what do they say? Nothing. Our endearing little ultraleft does not understand in any sense the post-post-colonial world. I’ll be addressing this issue in weeks and months to come.
Weakness is strength. Not your own strength, but someone’s strength. Weakness in power masquerades as strength, and many are those that suffer the aftermath.
I'm not sure what you mean by the term "ultraleft". I read a lot that is on the left end of the spectrum that is highly critical of both China and Russia when they violate human rights and other countries sovereignty. This recent article in the Nation is critical of China's policies in Xinjiang and people within DSA that are apologists for them. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-left-foreign-policy/?custno%3D20002526721&zip=94114&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Issue%20Alert:%20January%2024/31%2C%202022%20Issue%20-%2001.11.2022&utm_term=Active_Subscribers