Ukraine: The West’s power has its limits
The liberal vision of international order is still the best game in town. But it is no longer the only one. As multiple visions compete for acceptance and sway, hard power is increasingly becoming the factor that determines the balance
There are only two major aspects of the crisis that has shown its full face over Ukraine. The first is its potential to inflict immense pain on the people of Ukraine should a war break out. Internally divided, militarily weak, and sandwiched between two powers, Ukraine lacks any effective agency in the crisis.
Whether or not Ukrainians suffer more than they continue to will be determined by how the Russia–West diplomacy, being conducted against the backdrop of the meeting between Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Geneva on January 21, plays out.
The second is that the crisis is not really about Ukraine, but about competing visions of international order. The West may be right in considering Putin’s unabashed pursuit of an order that is based on spheres of influence destabilising, suboptimal, and morally indefensible. But it must be thankful to Putin. After positioning his military for a potential invasion of Ukraine, he has asked the West to not merely stop expanding eastwards, but also rollback its security architecture from eastern Europe. In threatening to use force if his demands are not met, Putin has forced the West to confront power politics in all starkness. It is a reality check that was long overdue.
The West possesses and offers the least imperfect model — based on liberalism and democracy — for organising domestic government and international order. When the Cold War ended, this model appeared to be the only game in town. In the 1990s, western hopes about transforming domestic regimes around the world as well as the international order as a whole were high. This was understandable as the West had overwhelming capabilities and practically no rivals.
The western foreign policy that emerged from this conjuncture was ambitious in its scope. Illustratively, the Muslim world had to be democratised, the security and political frontiers of Europe expanded eastwards, and non-Russian, post-Soviet States gradually made a part of the western ecosystem. Overly optimistic liberals waited for the Chinese people to demand political reforms on the back of capitalist development initiated by Beijing. By 2001, the then President George W Bush could look into Putin’s soul and find him trustworthy.
The chief defect of the policy was its poor anchoring in reality, especially of power politics, and nowhere has it been more obvious than in the West’s relations with Russia under Putin. Since the 1990s, the West has pushed its political and security frontiers, in the form of the eastward expansion of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to what Putin claims is Russia’s doorstep. Putin has been expressing his unhappiness over the expansion for two decades and has clearly and repeatedly articulated his red lines.
But Washington and Brussels (and Berlin, London and Paris) have continued the course without seriously spelling out whether or how they would respond militarily were Russia to threaten the use of force to stall the process. In effect, they have pursued a forward policy on political and security fronts with what has essentially been a distracted and defensive military posture. This behaviour is entirely not in keeping with how western great powers themselves have responded to expansionist neighbours in the past.
In response, and apart from efforts at recovering the “near abroad” that was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin’s Russia has also exploited domestic vulnerabilities across Europe and North America. It is credibly reported to have interfered in two US presidential elections since 2016, thus undermining the American political system. It is believed to have poisoned defectors on UK soil. And its global media network undermines liberal democratic ideas across the two continents, strengthening far-Right forces, while Putin himself claimed in 2019 that liberalism had become obsolete.
These non-traditional aggressions of various scales and intensity have aimed at destabilising western societies and governments while weakening the bloc as a whole. Western countries have responded with targeted sanctions and diplomatic expulsions, which have dented but not deterred Moscow.
The essential weakness of the West’s Russia policy has shown in the destruction of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. After backing political change in Kyiv, the West let an angry Russia get away with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and has since been ineffective in helping Kyiv end the Russia-backed civil war in the Donbas region.
Worse, over the last two months, as the two sides have engaged in political, security, and diplomatic dialogue — including a long call between Presidents Joe Biden and Putin — Russia has continued to increase its force build-up around Ukraine, increasing its leverage in negotiations. That the West finds itself so tightly cornered in a matter of weeks is instructive.
Put on notice, the West has two courses to choose from. First, commit its superior military hardware and economic capabilities to the defence of its expanding frontiers in the east, which would mean a military-fronted retaliatory posture over the threat to Ukraine. Second, recognise but negotiate the security perimeter that Russia seeks and buy an agreement that Moscow will cease non-conventional aggression in the West’s domestic life. Either choice requires the West to take hard power seriously.
The liberal vision of international order is still the best game in town. But it is no longer the only one. As multiple visions compete for acceptance and sway, hard power is increasingly becoming the factor that determines the balance. The West’s hard power remains superior to those of Russia and China. The guns surrounding Ukraine should force western governments and societies to seriously think about the limits of their military power as well as the purposes to which they should deploy it.
Atul Mishra teaches international relations at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR, and is the author of The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan The views expressed are personal