How NATO, Quad and AUKUS failed the world in 2022

2022 was a year of conflicts. In February, Russia showed the world how the global order set up after World War 2 was still ineffective to prevent the world from plunging into global military and economic crises. Russia invaded Ukraine, and what came hot on the heels were food and energy shortages. In 2022, every continent  saw a rise in intense man-made disasters and conflicts. From Afghanistan to Ethiopia to Armenia, conflicts and humanitarian crises continued to grow larger. As International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric says, “There are more than 100 armed conflicts in the world today.”

The international community, largely comprising the US and European countries, pride itself in putting mechanisms in place to check the breakout of clashes and conflicts between countries. But 2022 showed how fragile they are in reality. The world’s largest military alliance, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), failed to stop Russia from not just intimidating but invading Ukraine. Although Ukraine is a non-NATO  country, the security guarantees that the US gave to Ukraine proved to be shallow and meaningless, which further fuelled the Kremlin’s lust for grabbing territories belonging to a sovereign nation.

While NATO did nothing to end the war in Ukraine,  it ensured it kept on dragging. It refrained from taking decisive steps but kept pouring in military and economic aid worth billions to prevent an all-out collapse of Kyiv. In some cases, NATO was even accused of fuelling the war in Ukraine. For example, without any evidence, Joe Biden declared in October that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was planning to turn the war in Ukraine into a nuclear Armageddon. This was clearly an unnecessary statement, inviting harsh public scolding from French President Emmanuel Macron who suggested Biden start choosing his words carefully.

In 2022, NATO behaved more like a group of  nations and less like the world’s biggest military alliance. It showed on various occasions a lack of unity and conflict of interests. NATO’s response to the China question perfectly epitomises this conundrum. Nations like France and UK, in their sovereign capacities, publicly shamed China on human rights issues and its expansionist ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region. But still, NATO has not been able to come up with a muscular approach towards the  nation. In June 2022, NATO declared China “a challenge” for the first time.  But in September during a meeting between Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the latter urged China to cooperate on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Stoltenberg said after the meeting, “I called on China to use its influence on Russia to end its war in Ukraine.”

Speaking of Quad, the group has lost the spotlight since the war broke out in Ukraine. Quad, consisting of four democratic powers India, Japan, the US and Australia, held its heads-of-state level meeting in May, where they failed to condemn the war in Ukraine in unison. Since the war broke out, Quad no longer features on the Biden administration’s priority list. In 2022, Quad failed to play an active role on the global geopolitical landscape, given India’s reluctance to align its foreign policy with the other three members on Russia. In 2023, the group is expected to again grab the spotlight as the democratic world shifts gear to pile pressure on China and raise the issue of Taiwan with the Chinese government. 

AUKUS, consisting of Australia, the UK and the US, was planning to provide Canberra  with advanced nuclear-powered submarines when it was first launched in September 2021. The larger objective of the initiative was to check China’s hegemony near Australia’s waters in the Pacific. But since the change of administration in Canberra, the AUKUS group seems to have lost steam. In July, Australia’s new defence minister Richard Marles said that “high-tech armaments” were “more important” than “nuclear submarines” for Australia, which raised doubts about the AUKUS deal. As Grant Wyeth wrote in the Diplomat, “at present the agreement looks to be causing more headaches than advantages for Canberra”. So, just like Quad, the AUKUS group is also mired in internal challenges, which caused it to fail in crossing any significant milestone in the year 2022.

As we enter the year 2023, we can only hope that the world powers, responsible for maintaining global peace and order, will behave cautiously and work towards making the world a safer and better place to live in.

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