The news media is full of the nasty things that Russian soldiers are alleged to be committing in Ukraine. It surprises us that wars are so terrible. Nobody laughs at the redundancy of the term war crimes, as though there are polite and decent wars. Well, however your country has voted at the UN, everyone now agrees that Russia is headed by a nasty Mr. Putin. But he is not the only one, except that he seems to head the list now.
Here is a new theory of international relations. A government can be headed by a nasty and do quite well as a global leader provided there is a bigger nasty around. There is plenty of data to test this theory and I’m going to provide you with some. First, a nasty is deemed too terrible to work with, isolated, then another nasty shows up, and we decide that the previous one was not so bad after all.
Take our close allies, Saudi Arabia. Young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman conveniently runs the country under the name of his infirm father. He first put all his rivals and other billionaires in temporary prison at the Ritz-Carlton and extracted settlements and pronouncements of loyalty from each. (Don’t be shocked, this is still better than the days of the Ottoman sultans and Mughals who simply executed their rivals.)
Then, the nastiness worsened. His administration eliminated an irritating columnist Jamal Khashoggi by having him killed at their embassy in Istanbul. After this, the US shunned the Saudi State and refused to talk to him. Now, the Crown Prince is refusing to pump more oil as required to help the Europeans. So, talks are on and senior US officials are visiting Riyadh. Well, on reflection, he isn’t so bad after all when you need the oil.
Down south, Venezuela, was headed by a nasty. President Maduro, following the tradition set by his predecessor, would regularly curse the US as a way of distracting his people from his mismanagement at home. The country suffers from shortage of food and medicines, hyperinflation, human rights abuses, and a large emigration. The US levied strict sanctions on the country. Now, US officials have begun talking to him with the prospect of lifting sanctions if he would supply oil to the US. Perhaps, compared to Mr. Putin, Mr. Maduro is not so bad.
European turn
Moving to Europe, Turkey is learning to play the big game. After severely castigating Crown Prince MBS for the Khashoggi killing and putting the killers on trial, Turkish President Erdogan has transferred the case to Saudi Arabia and made a visit to Riyadh to normalise trade relations. All is well now. Poland and Hungary were headed by men who were undermining the independence of their judiciary, and restricting press freedom. But now they are needed in beating back the Russians and so their nastiness index has been brought down a few notches.
Nastiness pervades our globe even if CNN is not providing 24-hour coverage. The IMF has 42 countries (home to about a billion people) on a list of fragile and conflict states, using criteria that includes deaths due to conflict, refugees fleeing the country, and so on. Although the list also includes those in difficulty due to other reasons such as climate change, the people are suffering for reasons of their own leaders’ or their neighbours’ nastiness.
We ignore the suffering caused by a bad leader because we need him to fight a nastier one. Given the ineffectiveness of the UN, this seems to be a nasty foundation for international relations.
The writer is an emeritus professor at Suffolk University, Boston