An opinion piece by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Secretary General of NATO, (The Hindu, January 17, 2025) is reflective of the author’s deep-seated confrontational approach. Nowadays, he is trying to spread it beyond his traditional acolytes in the North Atlantic area. Mr Rasmussen’s failure to understand India, Russia, regional and global geopolitics leads him to make fallacious suggestions of monumental proportions.
Ukraine Conflict’s ‘Distorted’ Picture
Presenting a distorted picture of the Ukraine conflict, he ends up misleading Indian readers. Sadly, his perspective brings up a sense of déjà vu and here we go again.
Be it Napoleon, Hitler or the modern-day NATO, European leaders traditionally justify their own provocative, aggressive and subversive strategies towards Russia by invoking a phantom of a Russian threat. It was the notorious Euro-Atlantic community which, after centuries of enriching themselves through colonial plunder, created NATO in 1949 to contain its former ally the Soviet Union. The same Soviet Union which at a tremendous cost several years earlier had saved Europe from the Nazi oppression, not the other way round. Only to witness on the 80th anniversary of the victory in WW II the re-emergence of the Nazi ideology in Europe and Ukraine. It was NATO that rejected Russia’s proposals for developing a collective security architecture in Eurasia.
Eastward Expansion Of NATO
During Mr Rasmussen’s tenure, NATO continued its eastward expansion goose-stepping the military bloc closer to Russia. And it was he who dismissed Moscow’s repeated protestations and security concerns as being without merit. European leaders such as Mr Rasmussen never learn in a mistaken belief of being on the right side of history. His equally misguided successor, Jens Stoltenberg, speaking at the European Parliament on September 7, 2023 acknowledged Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021 sending a draft treaty to Brussels to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement (it was rejected). Mr Stoltenberg then admitted that the Ukraine conflict erupted to “prevent NATO, more NATO” close to Russia’s borders.
Having utterly failed through mistaken policies in his primary task to keep Europe at peace and safe, Mr Rasmussen has now come up with another ingenious plan. He advises that India should end its time-tested special and privileged strategic partnership with Russia (calling it “unnatural entanglement”) and join Europe and America in their anti-Russia confrontation. Astonishing is not only the tedious preaching of Mr Rasmussen and not even his contempt for Russia (that has been Europe’s favourite entertainment for centuries) but his call to again draw dividing lines between nations. He is obviously not familiar with the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and its promotion of peace, accord, universal amity and harmonious co-existence.
Ukraine ‘Pawn’ In NATO Strategy
Instead, as a reflection of his bellicose mentality, Mr Rasmussen would like India to enlist in a “democratic bloc’s” crusade against “autocratic regimes”. Contrary to India’s strategic autonomy paradigm, he envisions the quadrilateral security dialogue (Quad) involving the United States, India, Japan and Australia, evolving into a military alliance, the “Asia-Pacific NATO”.
In his pipe dream, he already sees Europe, India and the United States marching together “unstoppable against the united autocrats”. Learning from a copybook of the British East India Company, he is clearly in the market for Indian sepoys to do the bidding of European masterminds. Anxious to find “much-needed investment” for stagnating European economies, Mr Rasmussen (always a good businessman) even offers India “better weapons than Russia”. A tragic example of Ukraine devastated by conflict and unwittingly made a pawn in NATO’s strategy to encircle and damage Russia should serve a useful reminder to all naïve enough to believe the promises of the West.
“I have a cunning plan,” Baldrick, the fictional character in BBC’s comedy show Blackadder, used to say before coming up with another hopelessly flawed idea. Mr Rasmussen’s plan is not even cunning and should be rejected.
(Denis Alipov is the Russian Ambassador to India. Views expressed in this article are personal)
