I have vivid memories of being conned out of the cash from a week’s pay while living as a student in Dallas, Texas, USA.

A street-smart black American friend to whom I told my ordeal gave me the following advice: “The next time a con man approaches you”, he said, “don’t get into any long discussion. Just say to him, I am playing the same game you are. So let’s not get in each other’s way. You take this side of the street. I will take the other side. Then cross the street.”

I know of no better way than this story to describe the geopolitical game being played by the world’s two great military powers, the United States of America and Russia.

The goal is ultimately to carve out geographical spheres of influence in furtherance of their expansionary ambitions and to buttress their economic and security interests. Likening them to con men acting out of narrow self-interest and a win-lose mindset is harsh but not far from the truth.

One does not need to go back through the 1,000-year history of Ukraine and its relationship with Russia to come to the essential truth in the immediate circumstance. Ukraine is a pawn in a much larger game of hegemony; one that it cannot influence much less win.

President Vladmir Putin belongs to that specie of leaders of whom Martin Luther King Jr spoke when he said, “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles in the hands of misguided men.” But Putin’s actions in invading Ukraine speak to an inescapable reality and are not without rationale or precedence.

His predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) within the Soviet bloc and detente toward the West, gave rise to nationalism that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, shared a Russian perspective worth considering. He said, “Washington grew self-confident and arrogant after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the expansion of the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] military alliance,” which included former states within the former Soviet orbit.

Vladimir Putin, possibly remembering Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, grew increasingly concerned that NATO was encroaching too close to Russia’s border and sought, shall we say, a comfort letter that the US-led coalition would halt its menacing and threatening expansion.

Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, Ukraine could have used a different tact. War was not inevitable. But that would have required President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Administration in Kyiv to swallow some national pride and demonstrate the skill of a gymnast on the balance beam in pacifying the Russians while defending Ukraine’s justifiable claim to being an independent sovereign State.

In the 1970s, during the heady days of the Michael Manley Administration, there was a similar miscalculation and confusion over what is justifiable and what is possible when lives and livelihoods are at stake.

Joshua, the political moniker of Manley, had come to lead Jamaica and Jamaicans to the “promised land” by creating a new world economic order. His soaring rhetoric from a January 5, 1977 speech was one of many he would give to whip up national fervour for change: “This Government, on behalf of our people will not accept anybody anywhere telling us what to do in our country. We are the masters of our house and in our house there shall be no other master but ourselves. Above all, we are not for sale.”

The attack on imperialism and capitalism, as well as the adoption of egalitarian social democratic principles could not stave off the flight of capital and near collapse of the economy. The bombastic leader of the so-called non-aligned movement came face to face with the reality of superpower dominance and American hegemony in his meetings with then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who it is suspected used diplomatic and covert means to try and dissuade Manley from his stated intention to march to the mountaintop with the Cuban revolutionary and American nemesis Fidel Castro.

Manley belatedly grasped the profundity of this statement by Kissinger: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

This sad episode in Jamaica’s struggle, as Manley would characterise it, to stake out its place among sovereign states is painfully recounted in his book Struggle in the Periphery (1982).

Egged on by the United States and influenced by public sentiment and a growing movement within Ukraine, Zelenskyy and his Administration crossed the proverbial Rubicon, the point of no return. Overplaying his hand has resulted in dire consequences of war for the country and its beleaguered citizens, who must stand aside and look on as their homes and dreams are pulverised.

The lesson to be learnt by military minions caught in the power struggle between the East and the West is summed up by this old Jamaican proverb: “Cockroach nuh business inna fowl fight.”

hmorgan@cwjamaica.com