Putin's war and the shape of the new world disorder
Ukraine is not so much a game-changer as a wake-up call. We have reached the end of the end of history
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin seal a strategic partnership that “knows no limits”; Russia wages war on Ukraine; India sides with Moscow because it is fearful, strange though it seems to say, of Putin’s new best friend in Beijing; Nato is reborn; and Henry Kissinger emerges to pronounce this an “entirely new era”.
Well, yes, Henry. It has been for some time. Truth be told Ukraine is not quite the game changer of received opinion. Instead the war has crystallised geopolitical trends apparent for a decade and more. The widening fractures in the West’s post cold war hegemony were visible in the global financial crash, in Putin’s attack on Georgia and annexation of Crimea, in America’s election of Donald Trump and in Xi’s belligerent pursuit of China’s claims to the western Pacific.
The real impact of Russia’s war has been to dispel any residual illusions that the open liberal order might yet be salvaged. No more wishful thinking about talking round the Kremlin. Putin puts power above law. We have reached, even Germany now admits, what we might call the end of the end of history. The effortless advance of post-modern internationalism has made way for the return of great power competition.
Mapping the contours of a new settlement is harder. Joe Biden has framed the contest as one between democracy and authoritarianism. There is something to this. The European Union has woken up to its political responsibilities and Nato has been reinvigorated under US leadership. Values have resonance, drawing a clear line between a system rooted in the rule of law and a strongman preference for might is right. And, one way or another, the struggle for primacy between the US and China will act as the pivot for the contest.
There are, though, snags. Quite a few democracies, albeit more illiberal ones, are reluctant to sign up to what they perceive as an essentially western analysis. They do not want to be told to choose sides. For their part the democracies, as during the cold war, sooner or later seek allies on the illiberal side of the line. So a more useful description of the contest is one between broadly status quo powers, democratic or otherwise, and revolutionary or revanchist powers such as China and Russia, that want to upturn the present balance.
Anyone looking for neat straight lines, however, will be disappointed. Another characteristic of the new order is that alliances and allegiances are flexible and fluid - grounded in snapshot perceptions of national interest and inevitable compromises between values and realpolitik. Some states will sit on the fence while the great powers fight it out; others will try to play on both sides. Diplomats have a phrase for this - variable geometry.
Take India’s response to Putin’s war. The starting point in Delhi was one of discomfort with such a direct challenge to the territorial integrity of a sovereign state. Might not Russia’s example in eastern Europe be followed by China in the Himalayas? Mindful of China’s regional ambitions, India has been building a stronger relationship with the US. The new Indo-Pacific “Quad”, linking the security interests of the US, Japan, Australia and India, is a direct counterpoint to China’s military buildup.
A second set of calculations, though, says that Delhi cannot afford to jeopardise ties with Moscow. The relationship is deeply rooted. India still relies heavily on Russian military equipment. And whatever Xi and Putin may have said about limitless co-operation, seen from Delhi Russia remains a natural ally against an overmighty China. Narendra Modi’s answer? To abstain at the United Nations, publicly speak up against infringements on sovereignty and then proceed to buy more Russian oil. As I have heard one Indian scholar put it, to contain China’s ambitions India needs to remain on good terms with both Moscow and Washington.
So too, it seems, does Israel. It counts itself the only democracy in the Middle East. Few are as reliant on the US for the military aid and equipment deemed vital for national security. But rather like Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey (a member of Nato), Israel has preferred to present itself as a potential mediator rather than a cheerleader for Ukraine’s freedom. It needs to co-operate, we are told, with Russian forces in Syria. And the two countries’ high tech industries have strong links.
We should expect fortunes, as well as alliances, to change. At the start of the year the smart money said that 2022 would be a good year for the autocrats. Putin was massing a seemingly unbeatable army on the borders of Ukraine and Xi was preparing for the party congress scheduled to declare him, in effect, Emperor for life. Five months on, Putin is facing military defeat and Xi’s much vaunted zero-Covid policy is threatening to crash the Chinese economy. The West looks almost, well, united. Here we catch a glimpse of the fabled “new era”. It will be nothing if not unpredictable.
Ukraine was a mistake by Putin, in that the current outcome was not the desired result and reinvigorated NATO. Do you think the Russians also overplayed their hand, with the simulated oblition of the Island of Ireland. on State TV, causing Ireland to reassess its Neutrality?
Excellent perspective. The accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, while the subject remains embarrassingly scarcely discussed in Ireland and Austria for different historic reasons, shows how the wake-up of the liberal west will have some unclear lines, as Philip says, presumably in an unvoiced reference also to Hungary. As ever, the arrogance and complacency of the English political class in the factors giving rise to Putin's war should not go uncommented. The bromance between Putin and Farage's UKIP and the Conservative love of Russian money of dubious provenance led directly to Brexit, handing Putin his biggest foreign policy win of dividing the EU, without a shot being fired, and ensuring any investigation of illegal Russian interference in UK elections and the referendum was first suppressed, and then ignored by Boris Johnson. There can be no doubt Brexit encouraged Putin in his belief he could out-smart the West and get away with further military aggression. Brexit was of course sold to the credulous English electors partly on the fiction that the UK should be able to revive an 'Empire 2.0' after years of 'neglect' of the mythical 'Anglosphere' while a 'special relationship' somehow existed with India as a result of centuries of colonial rule which would in future bear new commercial fruit. The English Brexit- deluded evidently have never been able to deal with the fact that if the British connection had been so dear to Indians, the UK would have been the primary supplier of arms to its former colony, not the Soviet Union and then Russia, and would not have sunk rapidly to 7th largest exporter to India. The UK's strengths as an arms manufacturing nation have come rapidly to the fore in supplying Ukraine quickly and without domestic political quarrel. But it has reduced the influence and impact it can have on shaping the new world order by leaving the EU at the worst possible moment (and continuing to pick petty quarrels with it while war rages on its eastern borders). No English Conservative politician can honestly answer the question that if joining the EU and sharing a common European destiny and way of life is a just and noble aim for Ukraine, why is it not for the UK? Or are they to continue their denigration of Europe's greatest peace project?