Russia’s War in Ukraine Is a Stress Test of Norway’s Public Debate

Posted by and & filed under Security, Ukraine War

What Do We Talk about When We Talk about War?

The public debate on foreign and security policy is facing new challenges following Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The strength of our democracy depends on our ability to move beyond emotions and moral outrage, to discuss openly, argue logically, and grapple with uncomfortable questions.

How can we ensure stability in Europe and the world beyond? How do we deal with the food crisis, the gas crisis, the climate crises and the horrors of war?

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Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine is dramatic, also for Norway. For three decades, following the end of the Cold War, the public debate on security has been preoccupied with far-away conflicts rather than threats to Norway. The security policy is complicated, characterized simultaneously by enduring path dependencies and great unpredictability. Political choices may have dramatic consequences for the common citizen. This is exactly why a broad political discourse is so important.Read More

Sweden and Finland Entering NATO: Norway Must Now Reconsider the Scope and Mission of Its Armed Forces

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers, Security

Norway is becoming more secure. Not only will the military balance change, but also the geographical situation.

Swedish PM Magdalena Andersson and Finnish PM Sanna Marin. Photo: Finnish Government via Flickr

The Nordic region is now more militarily capable than it has been for centuries. And Russia is in a historically weak position. Norway was in an isolated position during the Cold War: we bordered two neutral nations, a threatening Soviet Union, and the cold Atlantic Ocean. If a war had broken out, Norway would have had to independently keep the Soviet Union at bay while waiting for help. Making sure we actually received such help would have made the task all the more difficult. We therefore invested vast resources to secure our country against a military attack, both money and personnel, up until right after the end of the Cold War.Read More

Steadfast Military Support for Ukraine Is the Route to Peace

Posted by & filed under Peacebuilding, Ukraine War

In his essay Pacifism and the war, George Orwell wrote that “pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.”, because “[if] you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one.” The war that Orwell was talking about in 1942 was, of course, World War II.

This quote has been buzzing in my head over the last week. After more than 100 days of war in Ukraine, while the battle for Donbas is raging at full force with significant Russian gains, we are seeing renewed debate about how far western countries should go in supporting Ukraine.

Photo: Noah Brooks/ Ministry of Defense of Ukraine

Following near unanimous agreement among western countries at the start of the war on providing strong support to Ukraine, we are now seeing a growing ambivalence in public opinion in Europe. France and Russia are signalling that Ukraine must make territorial concessions, a view that finds support among intellectuals on both the right and left of the political spectrum, to take Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky as examples.Read More

The UN Security Council Takes Action

Posted by & filed under Governance, Security, Ukraine War

The Security Council has played an important function during the war in Ukraine.

There is a general perception that the war in Ukraine has caused an existential crisis for the UN and paralyzed the UN Security Council.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks to the UN Security Council in April 2022. AP Photo / John Minchillo / via Flickr

This perception is incorrect. On the contrary, the Security Council has shown itself to be proactive, flexible and resourceful in the midst of an international crisis involving a war of aggression by Russia – a veto-holding member of the Council – against Ukraine.Read More

Japanese Perspectives on the Ukraine War

Posted by and & filed under Regions and Powers, Security, Ukraine War

Since February 2022, Japan has imposed a series of economic sanctions on Russia, in coordination with allies in the G7, including the freezing of Russian assets and the expulsion of Russian diplomats stationed in Japan.

As the first major war involving European great powers in this century, Japanese security analysts agree that the Ukraine War will influence the international order in the post-WWII period and generate earth-shattering changes to world history.

Many analysts understand the Russian invasion as the destruction of a liberal international order that has enjoyed strong support in Japan. Addressing the Shangri-La Dialogue on 10 June 2022, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida stated: “With the very foundations of the international order being shaken by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the international community now stands at a historic crossroads” adding that no country or region in the world can shrug this off as “someone else’s problem”. In short, Japan cannot be a bystander in this situation.

Joint maritime training in 2019 with forces from Japan, Philippines and the United States. Photo credit: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Greg Johnson, US Navy

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Russian Experiment with De-modernization Yields Negative Results

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

The post-Soviet transformation took Russia from a fledgling democracy to a corrupt autocracy, but, since the start of the war against Ukraine, the Kremlin has taken a new turn, which amounts to a resolute top-down effort at reversing what progress has been achieved in modernizing the state system, economy and society.

This experiment is unique not only in scale but also in content, as the Russian Federation — unlike the Soviet Union — had gained access to most high-tech products and services and still remains deeply involved in global supply chains.

Photo: Russian President’s office, via Wikimedia Commons

Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to present his resort to projecting crude military power as a forceful blow against the Western-controlled world order, positioning Russia in the vanguard of the presumed revolt of anti-globalist forces (Kommersant, June 23).Read More

The Ukraine War and the Fate of the Earth

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

The stories that are told about the Russian invasion of Ukraine – the interpretations that are advanced about what the war means and why it went the way it did – are going to play a decisive role in determining nothing less than the fate of the earth.

Photo: Bundeswehr/Stefan Petersen

The dominant story we hear today is the following:

Everything changed on the 24th February 2022, when Russian forces swept into Ukraine to wrest control from the government in Kyiv. The illegal Russian invasion shattered the European security architecture, revealing the ruthless, malicious character of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. The return of geopolitics now obliges the West to increase its military spending, modernize its nuclear weapons, and contain and confront authoritarianism.Read More

Should We Abandon the UN Security Council as an Anchor for Women, Peace and Security? Personal Reflections from New York

Posted by & filed under Gender, Ukraine War

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the UN Security Council’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

That does not mean to say that the legitimacy crisis is not real nor that the long-term trajectory – escalated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine – might not be terminal. The consequences for states in weaker positions and for the international norm on women, peace and security (WPS), a framework promoted and formalized over decades of harsh fights in the Council, can be detrimental.

The author at the UN in May 2022. Photo: PRIO / Ida Rødningen

As stated by Dag Hammarskjold: “It is not the … big Powers who need the United Nations for their protection. It is all the others.”

We arrived in New York to better understand the crisis of the UN Security Council (UNSC) following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That the Russian veto has resulted in a failure to prevent or halt the aggression, a direct breach of the UN Charter, has undoubtedly taken a large toll on the Council’s already weakened legitimacy.

I have met many for which the UNSC, and perhaps even the UN, is considered outdated and obsolete. The inability to handle the Ukraine crisis just constitutes the final nail in the coffin.Read More

How Can Russia Be Defeated but Not Humiliated

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

The problem of humiliating Russia too deeply, by ensuring its defeat in the war against Ukraine, is more serious than just an unfortunate turn of phrase by French President Emmanuel Macron.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President of France Emmanuel Macron, Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz, President of Romania Klaus Iohannis and Prime Minister of Italy Mario Draghi. Photo: Ukrainian President’s Office

Last Thursday, Macron traveled to Kyiv together with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, and delivered a vivacious speech, never mentioning the controversial H-word (Novayagazeta.eu, June 16). President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had taken an issue with Macron’s elliptic proposition on stopping the war short of humiliating Russia, declared himself entirely satisfied with clarifications on full French support for Ukraine’s resolute stance on achieving victory (NV.ua, June 16).

The matter of what kind of defeat Russia is capable of accepting without resorting to desperate (a convenient euphemism for nuclear) measures and, accordingly, what kind of victory is feasible for Ukraine, continues, nevertheless, to loom large.

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War in Ukraine – Back to the 19th Century?

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

If nations are separated by national borders, the risk of civil war and interstate conflicts increases – as in the case of Ukraine. For this reason, Lars-​Erik Cederman believes that sanctions should also be designed to have a deterrent effect on other nationalists.

Ukraine’s borders are to be shifted by force. Image: Adobe Stock

For numerous observers in the West, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine came out of the blue. Hopes of a cooperative, economically interwoven, and practically borderless world have been dealt a serious blow. In many ways, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 heralds the “return of geopolitics.”1 A large number of analysts, especially those of a realist persuasion, expect the Russian aggression to result in a return to the old-​fashioned, multipolar great-​power politics of the 19th century.2

But does realist theory depict this ostensible anachronism correctly?

Indeed, geopolitics is back with a vengeance, but the question is: which type of geopolitics? While various realists identify with the purportedly sober and sophisticated 19th-​century masters of Realpolitik, their perspective seems oddly anachronistic, even by 19th-​century standards. Great-​power competition, the law of the strongest, and territorial conquest dominated international relations long before the 19th century, and in some cases persisted beyond 1945.Read More