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The headline on The New York Times’s landing page holds a bitter irony: “The War in Ukraine Holds a Warning for the World Order.” That warning about the world order is a couple of decades late.
We thought we’d left that old order behind in the previous century. Vladimir Putin had other ideas. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked “the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II,” said UN refugee agency commissioner Filippo Grandi this morning. Germany is rearming to meet the threat. Even neutral Switzerland and Sweden are spooked.
The Times’ Australian bureau chief Damien Cave begins by admitting that the liberal world order “has been on life support for a while.” This new war in Europe is an omen, “a warning that the American-led system of internationalism needs to get itself back into gear, for the war at hand and for the struggle against authoritarianism to come.”
Cave writes:
Almost universally, from leaders in Europe and Asia to current and former American officials, Ukraine is being viewed as a test for the survival of a 75-year-old idea: that liberal democracy, American military might and free trade can create the conditions for peace and global prosperity.
Because the founder of that concept, the United States, continues to struggle — with partisanship, Covid and failure in distant war zones — many foreign policy leaders already see Ukraine in dire terms, as marking an official end of the American era and the start of a more contested, multipolar moment.
For at least a decade, liberal democracies have been disappearing. Their numbers peaked in 2012 with 42 countries, and now there are just 34, home to only 13 percent of the world population, according to V-Dem, a nonprofit that studies governments. In many of those, including the United States, “toxic polarization” is on the rise.
Ukraine may be “a global air raid siren,” but klaxons have blared in careful observers’ heads for 20 years. Putin’s invasion simply put them on our TVs.
Not so long ago, George W. Bush justified his invasion of Iraq on trumped-up allegations of an imminent threat to North American peace by arguing we needed to “fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” Them being Islamist extremists. Bush’s invasion of a country half a world away was built on the kind of phony threat Putin used to justify invading a country next door.
The Bushies’ belief that somehow their war of choice would lead to a flowering of democracy in the Persian Gulf was beyond hubris. They committed war crimes. The collapse of Iraq displaced and/or killed countless numbers and sparked the rise of ISIS and even more death, destruction, and human suffering.
If Bush issued Putin a permission slip to behave similarly, Donald Trump laid out a red carpet. Trump weakened NATO and meant to withdraw from the alliance in a second term, says former national security adviser John Bolton. He and his truth-denying grievance cult (with Russian help) have all but repudiated everything the United States stands for and reduced its democratic aspirations to flags, shibboleths, and a thirst for strong men. On Jan. 6, 2021, Putin watched American conservatives attack their own democracy. Why would they defend Ukraine’s? Even now, they cheer on Putin’s aggression as a sign he is a real man, a real Christian, and the kind of leader to restore white men to their proper place in the world.
Cave cites experts who see the rapidity with which the West has snapped out of its funk as a sign there is still a spark left in the liberal order. Ryan C. Crocker, a retired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan see the near future in more precarious terms, and a choice:
“If we emerge from Ukraine with the narrative being that a united NATO, a united Europe, were able to face down Putin,” he said, then “we move forward to deal with the inevitable challenges ahead from a position of unity and American leadership.”
If Russia takes over most or all of Ukraine and Mr. Putin is still in charge of a largely stable Russian economy, he added, “welcome to the new world of disorder.”
That disorder formally arrived here in November 2016. Americans must commit to fighting it over here as well as over there.
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