Ukrainian War and the Reconstruction of World Order?
▍The collapse of the old international order
No matter from which point of view, the international order centered on the United Nations after World War II has been crumbling. The old order is rapidly disintegrating, and strongman politics is once again popular among the world's major powers. All countries are ambitious, hoping to find every opportunity in the ruins of the old order to establish a regional order and even an international order with itself as the core.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia is one such strongman. A weak international order encounters great power politics led by a strongman, and the result is the reorganization and collision of strategic forces. Of course, the collapse of the old order does not mean the establishment of a new order. Empirically, behind the collapse or re-establishment of any international order are blood and fire, violence and war.
Russia has been doing everything possible to win over Belarus and eastern Ukraine for many years. This time, in order to seek a sense of security, Putin fought back violently and expanded his attention to the entirety of Ukraine. It is not impossible for his reimagined "Soviet Union" to be born in the future. Of course, the current state of war has an inevitable relationship with NATO's strategic eastward expansion, which presses Russia ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The West attributed this to Putin's own insecurity, but this is the display of their ignorance and even the demonization of Putin and the Russian nation. What NATO has created is extreme insecurity for the entire Russian nation. Veteran U.S. diplomat George Kennan foresaw the war when NATO began to expand eastward.
On May 2, 1998, the U.S. Senate formally approved the NATO expansion plan, and New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman called Kenan to interview him. Kennan was the architect of the successful U.S. policy of containing the Soviet Union. He started working in the State Department in 1926 and became the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952. He is regarded as the most powerful Russian expert in the United States. When asked about his views on NATO expansion, Kennan, 94, replied as follows:
“I think this is the beginning of a new cold war. Once NATO expands, Russia will gradually react adversely to the United States. I think NATO expansion is a sad mistake, and there is no reason for it. This expansion will make our country This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”
We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia,'' said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ''It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''
What happened today was exactly what Kennan had foreseen. If the expansion of NATO is the decision of ignorant and reckless politicians, then the "helplessness" of American politicians today is also understandable. Suffice to say, they watched Russia invade Ukraine and couldn't do anything on their own.
However, the situation in Ukraine today is not only the result of the interaction between the United States (NATO) and Russia, Ukraine itself also plays a key role. Historically, no matter in the era of empires or sovereign states, small countries must survive in the cracks between big countries, so they must have politicians with superb political calculation skills and superb diplomatic skills. But all of this is far from what Ukraine has today.
First, naive politicians fantasize about relying on the strength of the United States and NATO for their own security. Since independence, Ukraine's sense of insecurity is real, but Ukraine's sense of security can only be achieved between Russia and NATO. Ukrainian leaders did not do this, instead, they wanted to seek security by appealing exclusively to NATO. But the problem is that if Ukraine joined NATO, then Russia will have no sense of security. Once Russia feels unsafe, Ukraine will inevitably become a victim of its own behavior. Such dilemma was commonplace in the age of empires. In modern times, the international system based on national sovereign states theoretically protects small states. However, this is only an ideal and does not appear in practice.
Second, the utopianization of intellectuals. After the end of the Cold War, there was a wave of "nation construction" in countries around the world. The historian Anderson's "Imagined Community" became famous for a while. Many intellectuals fantasized about using some secular values, such as "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights" to build a "new nation," demonizing nationality in the process. The same goes for Ukrainian intellectuals. They fantasize that as long as they stand with the West, which shares their values, they will feel secure. But this kind of ideal is difficult to translate into reality.
Third, the disappearance of shrewd politicians. For small countries, diplomacy is a matter of life and death, not a child's play. But in the age of populism, more and more "political outsiders" are taking the political arena and wielding supreme power. These people often have neither internal political ability nor the superb diplomatic ability needed to guarantee the country’s survival. They have nothing but the ability to gather popular support. Their reign often results in the diminishing of their country.
In any case, the Ukraine crisis is just one symptom of the disintegration of the old international order. The action pattern of NATO and Russia's back-and-forth is the reflection of states under the state of anarchy, and their actions, in turn, exacerbated the collapse of the old international order and the formation of a new international order.
Looking back today, the moment when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 meant both the collapse of the world order based on the bipolarity established in the Cold War and the germination of the seeds of a new order. In the early 1990s, Japanese-American scholar Fukuyama published his so-called "End of History," arguing that Western liberal democracy is the best in the world and the last political system for mankind. On the one hand, it is in line with the needs of mainstream Western ideology, and on the other hand, because of the sudden collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, this theory has been widely circulated.
Francis Fukuyama holds his famous book "The End of History and the Last Man"./ Picture via Daily Sabah
After World War II, the United States and Britain led the establishment of the "liberal world order". The First and Second World Wars, which caused devastating blows to Europe, directly triggered the formation of this order. The primary goal of establishing a "liberal world order" is to ensure that the conditions that led to World War I and World War II do not arise in the future. But ironically, the starting point of the problems and challenges faced by this "liberal world order" is its "total victory," the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Although the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc had an intricate set of internal reasons, it was a complete victory for the Western liberal order from a Western perspective. This judgment has had a huge impact on the internal and external behavior of the West, especially the United States. The first manifestation is the excessive expansion of the American empire. The expansion of empires is first and foremost manifested in a geopolitical sense. After the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, the United States and the West quickly occupied the geopolitical space of the former Soviet Union, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Russia's insecurity is naturally the result of NATO's over-expansion. That is to say, the disintegration of the Cold War order appears to be a total victory of the Western order, but in fact, it has started a new international order.
The new international order is developed along two aspects.
The first aspect is the extreme compression of NATO's eastward expansion on Russia's strategic space and the resulting extreme insecurity of Russia. Putin was active at the forefront of the Cold War, especially in East Germany, as a KGB operative. Putin once lamented the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 2004: "The disintegration of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical disaster in the 20th century, and it is a tragedy for the Russian people." After the end of the Cold War, NATO did not disband with the Warsaw Pact, but it continued to exist and expand.
For Putin, the eastward expansion of NATO runs counter to the promises made to Russia by Western leaders when East and West Germany were unified, thus a historic betrayal of Russia. In. In Academia and policy-making spheres, people often believe that the "gentleman's agreement" that Putin called was not included in official documents, and this dispute has become controversial since both sides believe they are in the right. But even if the promise was entered in official documents, it does not constitute an effective restraint on the behavior of great powers, because the essence of the world order is what international relations scholars call "anarchy."
NATO expanded for the first time in 1999, and in 2004 absorbed the three Soviet republics in the Baltic Sea (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia). With a wave of "color revolutions" after the new millennium, the situation is increasingly unfavorable for Russia. Georgia's "Rose Revolution" (2003) and Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" (2004) both ended in regime change. After the pro-Western leaders came to power, they spared no effort to demand accession to NATO and the European Union, constantly intensifying disagreements with Russia. The Russo-Georgian war in 2008 was the result of such disagreement getting out of hand.
At the end of 2021, NATO reaffirmed the established policy for Ukraine to finally join NATO, which undoubtedly aroused the anger of the Russians based on the sense of fear over the loss of the buffer. For Russia, Ukraine is much more important than Georgia, not only because Ukraine has a comparatively larger population and land area, but also due to Russia’s inseparable national sentiment toward Ukraine. Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was the birthplace of the first Russian nation-state in history. Writer Gogol, politicians Trotsky, and Brezhnev were all born in Ukraine.
Russians consider themselves to share the same roots as Ukrainians. Putin and others still compare the split between Russia and Ukraine to "a huge shared disaster" and a "pain wrapped in pain". As long as one knows anything about Russian history, as long as one knows about the extreme insecurity Russia faces today, one should not be surprised by Putin's war in Ukraine, only by Putin's dexterity and shrewd political calculations.
The second main aspect is the rise of China and the US defense against China. The disintegration of the Soviet Union has made the United States the only hegemony in the world. Invading the former Soviet dominions in the name of NATO is only one front of the United States. Another more important front of the United States is to deal with a rapidly rising China in Asia.
In 2001, when the Bush administration took office, a neoconservative China policy was formed. Neoconservatism mainly wants to contain China by establishing an Asian "Little NATO". It's just that after the "9.11", the United States temporarily abandoned this strategy and focused its energy on the War on Terror.
Obama is the first president to shift the US strategic focus eastward to China after the Cold War, and his signature policy is the "Pivot to Asia" strategy. The security goal of "Pivot to Asia" is to maintain the security and stability of the Pacific Ocean, but a series of actions by the United States has instead increased tension in the Asia-Pacific region. The economic backbone of the "Pivot to Asia" policy was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a "China-excluded (trade and investment) club" that ultimately failed due to US middle-class opposition and the Trump administration's withdrawal.
The Trump administration has changed the basic rhetoric of the U.S. policy toward China, announcing that it will abandon its long-term policy of engagement with China and replace it with China-U.S. competition; strategically, the concept of "Indo-Pacific" has replaced "Asia-Pacific", and the first "Indo-Pacific Strategy Report" has been released. ”, the main component of America’s security in Asia is the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) between the United States, Japan, India, and Australia.
The Trump administration's economic and technology policies toward China are extremely aggressive, claiming that "China's industrial policy and technology policy undermines the rules and harms U.S. global interests." Instead of crowding out China with a multilateral agreement, Trump directly started a trade war with China. In terms of maintaining America’s technological dominance, the US policy toward China directly targets companies and technologies and uses a series of measures such as sanctions, financial decoupling, investment review, technology embargoes, and diplomatic boycotts to suppress Chinese technology companies and technological progress.
The Biden administration's national security team is largely inherited from the Obama administration. Campbell was a key architect of the "Pivot to Asia" policy and is now organizing research on the "China Strategy" and "Indo-Pacific Strategy" for the Biden administration. Biden's and Obama's China strategies are highly similar in the goals of "human rights" and "militarization of the Indo-Pacific", and technology and industrial chains have become the focus of Biden's China strategy. While Biden and Trump appear to be "sworn enemies" on almost every issue (including Russia), when it comes to China, Biden has a very similar line of thinking to the Trump administration and has become a refiner and loyal executor of Trump's China policy.
Today's U.S. policy toward China has moved beyond the economic realm to focus on the so-called " strategic and geopolitical threats posed by China." The Biden administration issued the "U.S. Strategic Approach to the People's Republic of China" in May 2020, formally establishing the competitive relationship between the United States and China. A new edition of the Indo-Pacific Strategy was recently released.
In terms of operations, the United States has constructed various so-called alliances, including the US-UK-Australia core alliance, the US-Japan-Australia-India "Quarter Security Dialogue" and the "Five Eyes Alliance". All of these have only one goal, and that is to target China, especially to hinder China's national unity. Around the South China Sea and Taiwan issues, the militarization of Asia is accelerating. More and more strategists worry that Asia is becoming the "tinderbox" of a new world war.
But now, Putin has shocked Europe, America, and the world with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is unlikely that the United States will participate in this war by sending troops to Ukraine, but it has truly realized its strategic misjudgment of Putin. Today’s Russia still cannot be underestimated. This would significantly delay the shift of US strategic energy from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.
In the future, Putin expects to have 15 to 20 years to further form and improve a "little Soviet Union". Therefore, for Americans, the assertion that "China is America's number one threat" over the years is called into question. This means that as long as we (China) do not make grave strategic mistakes ourselves, not only will China's modernization process not be interrupted by the United States, but China can also play a more important role in the construction of the new world order.
▍China and the emerging new world order
The geopolitical balance is again tilted toward China.
The behavior of NATO led by the United States shows that the original world order with one superpower and many minor powers cannot be maintained. The new world order is developing towards multi-polarity. In today's world, there are not only Putin's Russia, but also Modi's India, Erdogan's Turkey, the EU's France and Germany, and so on.
In the gestation period of the new world order, each major country is constructing its own vision of the future world order, and their expectations are often conflicting with each other, unable to reach a strategic consensus on fundamental interests, and even lack the will to make strategic compromises. The emerging new international order is reflected in a more decentralized wealth, power, and cultural authority, with no superpowers, only great and regional powers. Western liberal ideology will continue to exist, but will no longer dominate the international order.
For China, the Ukrainian war further complicates the already unprecedented international situation it faces. The international situation is turbulent, and we need to calmly analyze the new changes and trends in the interaction of major powers, be more rational, and not be emotional at all. Any emotional impulse will bring about subversive strategic mistakes. But one thing is very clear, the reason why a great power is a great power, or is regarded as one, lies not in its ability to challenge the old order, much less in its ability to wage war, but in its ability for promoting and maintaining international peace.
This piece is translated by Aowen Guan and Harry Huang