A trademark statement prevalent in the security realm often crisscrosses from East to West, emphasising that, “all intelligence personnel are not hackers and all hackers do not belong to the intelligence fold”. Whether this reflects a truism or not may be borne out in the ongoing schism between Moscow and Washington over the alleged Russian intrusiveness into Democratic Party’s campaign dynamics through ‘hackers’ with probable intel backup from Moscow.
But this narrative of insinuation has by now materially queered the pitch for relations between the USA and Russia, since the Donald Trump presidency was installed in Washington. The American range of allegations, reinforced subsequently by the country’s intelligence paraphernalia that Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) among others triggered sensitive breaches in IT security of the Democratic Party’s National Convention in mid-2016, is said to have incredibly widened the chasm between the two capitals.
The FBI Director, James Comey, in an official testimony in March highlighted President Vladimir Putin’s stated animosity for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, which caused a profound bias against the former US Secretary of State.
But the RISS soon enough decried such allegations as “coveted fantasies” arising out of the “conspiratorial consciousness of authors of deceit” while Kremlin tacitly maintained that credibility of the “anonymous sources” in question could rarely “equal the worth of one real source”. All said and done, such vengeful exchanges between the world’s two major capitals relating to personalities in an election that was over in November 2016, does not augur well for unity and synergy within the UN Security Council’s Permanent Five component seeking to deal transactionally with issues of organised terror and settling of mass exoduses of refugees to Europe.
The vulnerabilities and weaknesses thereof could accentuate if intelligence estimations by major global services of the Islamic State’s (IS) capacities to strike are actually as “venomous and stupendous” as being made out. The latest, April 20, Champs-Elysees terror strike in the heart of Paris is indicative that terrorists from IS or from outside that infamous fold are displaying signs of being able to choose the time and place of attacks without much detriment, notwithstanding the national alerts in various parts of the world. But it concurrently becomes self-evident that any further degradation of the US-Russia strategic differentials and of crevices within the UN can only aggravate situations where global counter-terror postulates and seamless actioning are concerned.
Elsewhere, would international co-operation ever succeed in today’s world? It is of substantive significance that Saudi Arabia-led 41 country-strong military coalition, loosely termed as The Islamic Alliance, led by former Pakistan Army chief, Gen Raheel Sharif, is slowly finding its root and inner core, majorly to keep the world’s Islamic Zone free from the menace of terror strikes. On the other hand, the once much-touted Alliance of Democracies as a counterforce to international terror financing, logistics and arming is not even off the starting blocks as yet. That marks yet another chapter in an endless narrative of democratic fiction. Such a body, even if formed, could possibly replicate the perpetually ineffective Commonwealth of Nations under British primacy, wherein statutes of one country are not respected by any other country, including the mother-country Britain.
Frequent requests for repatriation have been made at the highest levels and a great body of clinching evidence presented to London over Vijay Mallya, an Indian citizen accused of major financial crimes. While he has been specifically charge-sheeted for such impropriety against Indian PSU banks, India will have to endure more than a year of waiting for his repatriation. A rare case where British law implacably sits over in judgment over Indian law as if the latter has no credibility!
Further, the North Korean regime’s not-so-covert nuclear threat has led to fresh tensions in Pyongyang’s links with China. These were triggered over certain sanctions in supplies to North Korea imposed by Beijing which visibly ruffled feathers in the two capitals. China got predictably snubbed for “styling itself as a big power” and “dancing to the tune of the US”. Such diplomatically unsound vocabulary reflecting negatively on an otherwise vital strategic congruence between an inward-looking Pyongyang and trading giant Beijing was but rarely evident earlier. More often than not, China for the world at large was deemed as some kind of ‘court of last appeal’ where North Korean idiosyncratic behaviour is concerned. But with Beijing no longer in that privileged position, and Russia and the US wide apart on dithering ends of the world spectrum, the European Union may have to step in as peace maker to hold Pyongyang in a “state of self-control”. If North Korea reaches the precipice of global vulnerability, global economic confidence could also be vastly hit.
Mohan Das Menon
Former additional secretary, Cabinet Secretariat
mdmenonconsulting@gmail.com