Two home truths for the US and Europe from Putin’s war on Ukraine

The west cannot brush aside the charge of double standards

Beyond the real and present danger of Vladimir Putin’s aggression, the Ukraine war presents two strategic lessons for the west. The security of the Euro-Atlantic area and the Indo-Pacific are indivisible. And it is way past time for the United States and Europe to pay much closer attention to the preoccupations of the global south.

For much of the past decade Americans and Europeans have been playing a futile game of either-or. It started with Barack Obama’s much-vaunted pivot to Asia. The big threat to the United States, the argument ran in Washington, came from China. It should focus its military power on the Pacific. Europe would have to look after itself.

On the other side of the Atlantic, European nations have fretted about the supposed alternatives of begging the Americans to stay and breaking free with the creation of a serious European Union defence capability. This, the theory holds, would give the continent what the French call “strategic sovereignty”.

These have always been false choices. Whatever their frustrations with European free-riding, the United States cannot afford to abandon its closest allies to an exclusive focus on the western Pacific. And even Emmanuel Macron’s wildest hopes do not extend to a completely autonomous European foreign and security policy. 

Never mind. These should now be yesterday’s debates. The “no limits” strategic partnership offered to Putin by China’s Xi Jinping weeks before Russian troops marched into Ukraine should dispel once and for all any notion that the United States can separate its great power rivalry with China from the defence of Europe. 

Joe Biden’s characterisation of the post post-cold war order as a contest between democracies and autocracies is overly simplistic. Not long ago, the president was describing Saudi Arabia as a pariah state. Now he plans to travel cap-in-hand to Riyadh to ask Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to boost Saudi oil output. Bin Salman was behind the murder in Istanbul of the journalist and American citizen Jamal Khashoggi. Needs must. The democracies, it now seems, will call on the support of “friendly” autocrats when it suits them.

That hypocrisy aside, Putin’s effort to destroy the European security order has underscored the fact that an American retreat from Nato would be a victory also for Beijing. Both share the view that the best way to weaken the west is to detach the United States from Europe. Xi well understands that such an outcome would undermine decisively American credibility in Asia. If Washington drops Europe, much of the Indo-Pacific will drop the United States.

As for Europe, it should be obvious from the Ukraine war that it badly needs an American security guarantee against a revanchist regime in Moscow. Several European states have contributed to Ukraine’s war effort. The heavy lifting has been done by the United States. Of course, Europeans must do more to defend their own continent. The purpose should be to bind in Washington rather than replace it.

Once the west has stopped talking to itself, it can begin to pay attention to the views of the global south. Only four other members voted with Russia to oppose the UN general assembly’s condemnation of Putin’s aggression, but nations such as India and South Africa stood with China and Iran among the 35 that chose to abstain. More apparent still has been the absence since of support for western sanctions from states long assumed to be in the western “camp”.

This is not to say they support Moscow. Rather it reflects the mistrust within the emerging world of the west’s motives. I have been lucky enough to spend the past few months as a visiting fellow at the European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance. It draws its graduate students and fellows from every corner of the globe. What’s struck me is that uniform abhorrence of Putin’s aggression is accompanied by deep scepticism about the west’s response.

When Europeans talk loftily about upholding the territorial sovereignty of states and defending a values-based international order, nations in the south ask why they have shown such studied indifference to conflicts and humanitarian crises elsewhere. 

The brutal war in Yemen is to all intents and purposes a forgotten conflict in the west. And while European governments congratulate themselves on the welcome they have given to Ukrainian refugees, others recall the treatment most of them meted out to Syrian refugees in 2015. And what is to be said of the European Union’s grubby deals with Libyan warlords to stem the flow of refugees across the Mediterranean?

Then there is the Iraq war. Western politicians can point up the inexactness of the parallel - whatever its malevolent intentions George W  Bush’s administration was not seeking to annex Iraq - but they will never shake off the widely-held charge that it was an illegal war.

A measure of hypocrisy is an unfortunate fact of life in international relations. Some now accusing Europe and the United States of double standards doubtless also have more selfish reasons for avoiding an open breach with Moscow. Even a small measure of self-awareness, however, should deliver a salutary warning to rich democracies as to how badly they are losing the argument in the global south.

The Ukraine war has drawn a line under post-cold-war dreams of a world destined to embrace liberal democracy. We are promised instead a new global disorder in which nations that want to hold on to something resembling the present rules-based system will confront a Sino-Russian alliance seeking to overturn it. The west needs friends. It will win them only by paying heed to human tragedies beyond its own borders.