Crisis reflects NATO's blindness to multipolar world

The Libyan government was toppled in 2011, followed by determined but until now unsuccessful efforts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad even though Syria has maintained peace with Israel for four decades and more. Because the NATO alliance no longer has the power to enforce its will across the globe, each of its initiatives has been a disaster. Libya has dissolved into a fractured country, ruled by warlords. In Syria's case, the cash, weapons and training given to rebels, including terrorists, have ended up in the formation of the "Islamic State", creating monsters which threaten global security.

NATO has become a "monkey army", which can destroy a country very effectively but is powerless when it comes to rebuilding it - just as monkeys can wreak havoc but cannot clean up the resultant mess.

NATO powers tried their utmost last year to bring Ukraine into their fold, using the usual tactics of mobilizing street power and strengthening some elements in Ukraine who seem to be the "ideological descendants" of the pro-Hitler groups found in the country from 1941 to 1945. The Western military alliance's attempt failed, because Moscow refused to follow former Russian president Boris Yeltsin's script of accepting whatever punishment NATO inflicted on Russia.

The Russia-Georgia War in 2008 should have been a warning for the Western military bloc not to try its game in (or with) Ukraine. But a hyper-confident NATO, deep in the grip of the "Bretton Woods syndrome", went ahead and orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Kiev, replacing it with its own nominees.

What has followed shows that the world has moved far (nay permanently) away from the Bretton Woods system which empowered the US and the EU to dominate international discourse. MH17 is an indication of the chaos that will ensue - and has already ensued in many parts of the world - if the US and its NATO allies do not cure themselves of the "Bretton Woods syndrome" and change their policies to meet the demands of a multipolar global architecture, which had already taken shape in the 1990s but was ignored by the US and the EU in their blindness to carry forward their dominance and influence into the 21st century.

The author is vice-chair of Manipal Advanced Research Group, and UNESCO peace chair and professor of geopolitics at Manipal University, India.

(China Daily 08/07/2014 page9)