“I am proud to announce that today’s meeting will become a monthly contact group on self-defense of Ukraine and will be a means to intensify our efforts, coordinate our assistance and focus on winning today’s battle and future battles” . From the US Air Force Base in Ramstein, Germany, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced new strategies to strengthen Ukraine’s military capabilities. But his words go far beyond the here and now. The feeling is that Austin speaks of a global and indispensable challenge, a possible point of no return for the democratic and liberal world: if you don’t win today against Russian authoritarianism, tomorrow will be worse, so we fight today, we fight tomorrow, it will be fought in the future as long as there is a need to protect democracy.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine calls into question the balance of the world order. True, compliance with the rules of state sovereignty has never really been flawless. But states have tried to respect the integrity of national borders at least according to a general line: it can be said that among all the threats and difficulties that a state must face in the 21st century, an invasion that wants to redraw its borders is a rather remote option.
Now, with the invasion of Russia, the principles, values and norms of international law that protect states from the possibility of a war of territorial conquest are being tested in the most menacing and blatant way since the Second World War. : the war in Ukraine recalls a bygone, more violent era, an era that Vladimir Putin is not afraid to recall.
“But if the global community allows Russia to take Ukraine, other states may think about using force more frequently to question national borders, and wars could break out, empires could be restored, and more and more countries could be on the verge. ‘verge of extinction,’ wrote Tanisha M. Fazal in Foreign Affairs.
Between 1816 and 1945, states disappeared from the planisphere at the rate of one every three years. But since the middle of the twentieth century, music has changed. During the Cold War the idea of territorial conquest was not completely removed, but it became weaker and weaker. On the one hand, because the technological development of war and the new military systems have changed conflicts and have made involvement in war ever more risky. On the other hand, with the birth of the United Nations, the way in which states have begun to interact with each other has changed. And over the years, independent countries have made commitments similar to those established by the UN Charter, creating regional organizations – such as the Arab League and the Organization for African Unity – on those same principles.
Not everyone respected those norms and values for noble reasons: some states simply do not have territorial ambitions, others know that disputes would be very complicated to deal with, others have an interest in preserving the stability of the international system. But the balance, however precarious, built in those years limited the use of war as an offensive and conquering instrument.
With the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, the ideological battle was resolved in favor of the Western vision, made up of liberal democracy, the rule of law and market logic. It is the “end of history” theorized by Francis Fukuyama. Of course, the end of history did not mean the absence of war or conflict at all. But it helped to consolidate a world order governed by principles and values which – in essence – held back the recourse to invasions and interference on the territory of other states.
“Does Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine mean that the spell of the end of history has been broken? Has history started again in a tragic way, as French President Emmanuel Macron said? Have we reached the end of the end of military history? », Adam Tooze wondered in an article published in New Statesman at the beginning of April.
Putin has never accepted the fall of the Soviet Union, he does not accept that the founding values of the United States and its allies can define the international order. That is why, with him at the helm, the Kremlin behaves like a revisionist power. Already in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, he announced his challenge to the West: a year later the attack on Georgia would come, in 2014 the invasion of Crimea.
“The leader of Russia, owner of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, has rebuilt an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass killings. For too long, the guardians of the liberal world order have looked away: when Russia “pacified” Chechnya by killing tens of thousands of people, when Russia bombed schools and hospitals in Syria, Western leaders decided it was not their problem, ”writes Anne Applebaum in Atlantic, reminding us that there is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules unless there is someone who enforces them. And, unless the democracies of the world defend themselves together, united, the forces of the autocracy will destroy them.
There is reason to fear that Putin’s ambitions go far beyond the goals of a regime change in Ukraine or to take the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin seems interested in returning to imperial Russia, a Russia that can afford to wage a preventive war on the West for fear of an attack that no one had planned.
Now, if the international community does not stop the war wanted by Moscow, all the states bordering the great powers – especially those that may have revisionist ambitions – will feel in danger.
It is for this reason that Russia’s war in Ukraine is much more than a simple confrontation between the Kremlin army and the defense of Kiev. «To get away with Putin – are Fazal’s words on Foreign Affairs – means to make millions of civilians more vulnerable to indiscriminate attacks. Right now, the immediate effects of the war are largely limited to Ukraine, Russia and the countries hosting Ukrainian refugees. But in the future all states would do well to take care of their borders with care ».
Start a new Thread