On the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the continuing war indicates that the foundations of a rules-based global order are not just the rules themselves but also the structure of sovereignty that supports those rules. Sovereignty includes both the use of power and the establishment of a legitimating vision of order. The challenges to the Westphalian system of global order consequently come not just from the Russian invasion but also from the Russian idea of its civilizational mission against Western secularism as well as China’s idea of a “shared humanity for mankind.” Telos 201 provides analyses of both of these alternative visions for global order. Matthew Dal Santo, for example, describes Russia’s stance as a defense of a spiritual rather than a secular conception of the basis of order. Gordon Chang analyzes the way in which China has been promoting its tianxia model of unified global governance against the chaos and conflict of separate sovereign nation-states. The frame within which to view these alternative visions is not the struggle between spirituality and secularism or between China and the West, but the global development of nationalism.
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Volodymyr Zelensky has virtually single-handedly demonstrated the world-historical importance of sovereignty and its mechanisms. Before his courageous insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty, the world—including the United States, with its offer of a helicopter ride for Zelensky out of Kyiv—was already treating the Russian subjugation of Ukraine as a fait accompli and the continuation of business as usual. Russia was using in Ukraine the methods that it had already successfully practiced in Chechnya, Syria, and Belarus while the rest of the world stood by to allow such methods to become normalized. By taking his stand in Kyiv, Zelensky was declaring to the Ukrainian people and the rest of the world that Russia’s invasion was in fact not a normal action that had to be accepted. Suddenly, Russia’s years-long undermining of the idea of popular sovereignty in different parts of the world had been called out as a transgression, leading to global insights about recent history and our role in its development. The nations of Europe above all, but also the United States, have had to face the extent to which their energy policies were contributing to Russia’s reshaping of global norms. Zelensky has forced us to take a stand one way or the other in deciding the political shape of the world for the foreseeable future. Is Putin the madman they say? Or is he, to the contrary, somebody who coldly calculates his rational self-interest, in the manner of Thomas Hobbes’s legendary sovereign power or Niccolò Machiavelli’s eponymous prince? In short, is it surrealism, rooted in deranged psychological fantasy, or Realism, grounded in hardcore political science, that we are up against? Or could there be an alternative way of looking at it, one less familiar, more specific, grown-up, and intellectually challenging, if also less emotionally reassuring? Let’s try putting in jeopardy our own “moral clarity” for a change. After all, while every war must perforce seem “needless” to beautiful souls, just as any person in charge of a modern state could be tagged a “killer” by children, nevertheless, military conflict, experience teaches, will not always be so readily averted. If only for the sake of a diverting thought experiment, let’s examine in a bit more detail some possibilities—in hopes of dispelling a portion of the gloom that engulfs us in these dark times. I was completely wrong when I opined on February 9 that the Russians would not invade Ukraine. I mistakenly took them for more rational than they turned out to be. Mea maxima culpa. For the rest, I was not mistaken at all when I enumerated the reasons that militated against a martial adventure. The course the war took shows that the Russian leadership neglected them or, what is worse, does not read the Telos blog. Here are some obstacles to a successful operation I indicated and the consequences we can see today. With the exception of the inhabitants of the separatist regions, no one greeted the Russians as liberators. The invaders crossed the border at provinces with a sizable Russian population, at regions where a significant proportion of people claim Russian as their mother tongue, no matter the ethnic group their ancestry happened to belong to. At the 2019 elections, all these regions voted overwhelmingly for current president Volodydmyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish origin, not necessarily an advantage in Eastern Europe. The comedian-turned-war-leader won more than 73 percent of the voices against his rival, billionaire and outgoing president Petro Poroshenko, who can boast Ukrainian forefathers. The Kremlin bosses apparently believed that only ethnic, religious, and linguistic affinities define political allegiances in Ukraine, or they simply did not take the trouble to have a look at the relevant statistics. The following essay originally appeared at The Hill. It is republished here by permission of the author. The Biden administration promised to return American foreign policy to reliability and international leadership after the disruptions of the Trump years. Yet its egregious mismanagement of the exit from Afghanistan has damaged America’s global standing and undercut the credibility of three of the administration’s foreign policy planks. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were supposed to repair transatlantic relations by reassuring our European allies, give priority to human rights in all decisions, and counter Chinese ambitions. The deeply flawed execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal undermines all those aspirations and leaves the Biden foreign policy vision in shambles. The diplomatic team that was supposed to bring professionalism has left America rudderless. Renaud Girard is an American-born French journalist, the author of several books on world affairs, especially the Middle East. In this trenchant commentary on the Afghan debacle, he recognizes the defeat for what it is, bluntly invoking the collapse of the imperial German army at the end of the First World War. Is that an overstatement or an unflinching naming of the collapse of an order? Girard brings a realist eye to the factors that have contributed to the current situation, asking us to understand them and their consequences, as the Taliban proceed from city to city, heading toward Kabul. |
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