Bloomberg Analysis: New Alliance of Democracies May Not Survive After Ukraine War

But there is no unanimity in Europe regarding the policies to be pursued in the long run. The former Cold War security, the carefully prepared plans on the confrontation scenarios between the Soviet Union and the West, no longer exist.

France risks being led by a president like Marine Le Pen, who has openly admired Putin, and who last week called for rapprochement with Russia once the war in Ukraine is over. Going to the run-off in front of incumbent President Emmanuel Macron, Le Pen reportedly spoke of France’s withdrawal from the NATO integrated army, while refusing to support Western claims of Russian military massacres of civilians in Ukraine.

Hungary’s newly elected Prime Minister Victor Orban has sharply criticized the Kiev government. Germany claims to support NATO actions, but has yet to offer any significant military assistance to Ukraine as it finances Putin’s war machine, continuing to buy its gas and oil.

Elsewhere, Israel is distancing itself significantly from NATO, as it considers its defense relationship with Russia too important to jeopardize it. India is enthusiastically buying Russian energy at a discount and refuses to take a pro-Western stance, despite its alleged adherence to the US-led QUAD alliance to contain China.

South Africa has defended Russia. Brazil and Mexico have refused to join the sanctions, with the Mexican president saying “we want to have good relations with all the governments in the world.” China, utterly unwilling to distance itself from Russia, has never wavered in its stated commitment to the option of using force to pursue its national interests.

The old global order depended on two superpowers exerting influence over a host of clients, who tended towards authority. The US played a key role in much of Latin America, as did the Soviet Union in its Eastern European empire and several Middle Eastern states.

By the end of the twentieth century, such middle-class powers as Britain and France could rely on the governments of countries they had once colonized to achieve their foreign policy goals. Today such an impact has faded drastically, even dialogue.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is angry at Western criticism of his country’s human rights abuses and refuses to increase oil production in his country to ease the crisis. energy.

Another autocrat, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, backed the UN stance on Russia over its occupation of Ukraine, but refuses to become part of the sanctions.

The message is that the group of nations that regularly gathered on both sides of the Cold War today moves by the wind. It is difficult to predict which countries will take a stand on any particular international issue.

Although our politicians and media emphasize the condemnation of the “world” to Russia’s recent aggression, many more countries than we want to admit do not like and do not like the arrogance they perceive in the West.

Since the White House National Security Strategy in 2002, the world has changed a lot, but not in a direction that most of us welcome. The administration of President George W. Bush claimed that the promotion of free institutions offered “the best opportunity since the birth of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace, rather than constantly preparing for war ”.

That aspiration was admirable. But since then we have found that while it suits those societies that thrive strongly thanks to freedom, technology, entrepreneurship and liberalism, it does not suit those who lack these skills or who refuse such freedoms.

Statisticians tell us that the world is becoming a less violent country, and they measure this by the number of people dying in conflict. This may be true, but such figures do not take into account the hundreds of millions of people forced to bow their heads before being oppressed by an institutionalized violence.

We have entered an era of global chaos, a multipolar universe, as was the norm for most of history before World War II, but which disappeared amid the nuclear stability created by the Cold War. Today old alliances are being shaken and new partnerships are being formed, in a less predictable way, and consequently more dangerous than at any time since World War II.

The biggest change since the fall of the Soviet Union is, of course, the decline of accepted US dominance. In the 3 decades that followed, while the U.S. military force has remained strong, other countries have become much stronger. Three years ago, when Emmanuel Macron declared that “NATO is in a coma,” many of us agreed.

As no European nation except Great Britain and France had a serious army, even they were reducing them to an alarming rate. Today every European power has rallied behind NATO, pledging a drastic reinforcement of its defenses.

This is welcome, although it will take years for Europe’s armies to become worthy of fighting again. Moreover, there is still a question mark as to whether European unity will continue in the face of the protracted war in Ukraine and the ongoing global energy crisis.

Putin views Western societies with contempt, as he believes we are decadent, in contrast to the “Russian manhood” so vividly displayed in the destruction of Chechnya, Syria, and now Ukraine. He seems to be very right when he says, that many of us Westerners are spoiled.

Unlike our ancestors, accustomed to suffering and sacrifice, we have long taken comfort, security, and prosperity for granted. The idea of ​​being forced to fight in order to preserve our way of life is beyond modern Western experience.

The planet has been in chaos for most of its civilized history, and perhaps a return to that state will not be as bad as we fear.

But it is an extraordinary tragedy that the new confrontation between the superpowers will cause great harm to what should be the common challenge for humanity: to work together to prevent climate change from exterminating our descendants. al

top channel