Asharq Al Awsat (Saudi Arabia): was liberalism the real cause of the conflict?
The American project presented to the world by Joe Biden under the slogan "democracy against authoritarianism" implies the delegitimization of the ruling regimes, whether in China, Russia or any other country in the world, writes Asharq Al Awsat. This is what prompted Moscow to launch a special operation in Ukraine and thereby protect its political system, the author of the article is sure.
There were many reasons for the conflict in Ukraine. Was the reason for Russia's propensity for territorial expansion or President Putin's complexes about what happened to the Soviet Union and even tsarist Russia? Or is the reason in the United States, which demanded the expansion of NATO and the inclusion of Ukraine in its composition? In the latter case, what happened resembles the American position on the Cuban missile crisis, which caused the largest nuclear crisis in history.
There were other reasons. Some of them are connected with the peculiarities of the unipolar international system, where globalization served the interests of far from all states of the world, and others — with President Biden, whose popularity has declined to such an extent that he needed a major international crisis capable of uniting the American people, and with it the entire Western camp.
Whatever the list of reasons mentioned, which will soon become the lot of historians, it cannot be excluded that the concepts of liberalism and democracy themselves became the culprits of the crisis. The fact is that being initially the embodiment of the noble idea of individual freedom, and then the political system that took root in a number of Western countries and gave them progress and prosperity, these concepts soon turned into an ideological tool used by the United States to destabilize other states, delegitimize the regimes ruling in them and interfere in internal affairs with the help of a kind of political engineering. The latter, as is well known, often had deplorable results that have nothing to do with freedom or prosperity.
After the end of the Cold War, American political scientist John Mearsheimer was among the minority in the scientific community, according to which Washington's movement in this liberal direction would lead not only to war, but also to a major failure. He embodied this idea in a series of books, articles and lectures, each of which had approximately the following title: "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities."
For those who don't know, John Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1982. He was born on December 14, 1947, then studied at the Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1970, after which he served as an officer of the US Air Force for five years. In 1975, he began studying political science at Cornell University graduate school and received his doctorate five years later. Mearsheimer is one of the representatives of the realistic school of international Relations founded by the great scientist Hans Morgenthau, who also taught at the University of Chicago. Later, their ideas became popular at other universities and had an impact on American public opinion, forming a major trend. Together with Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Mearsheimer participated in writing and publishing studies on the negative influence of the Israeli lobby in America and its role in shaping American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. In their opinion, the interests of the Israeli lobby contradict the real interests of the United States in the region.
Mearsheimer and his colleagues have thrown a big challenge to the liberal Democratic paradigm. In his book, he described liberalism as a "great delusion", which is why the foreign policy of the liberal hegemon, adopted by the United States at the end of the Cold War, suffered a crushing failure. The professor identifies two main postulates of liberalism underlying human nature. First, the individual is supposed to have priority over the group. Secondly, liberalism implies that people cannot reach universal agreement on core values, and these differences often lead to violence. To deal with this potential violence, liberalism offers a solution consisting of three elements: everyone has inalienable individual rights, special attention is paid to tolerance, and the State becomes a necessary mechanism to reduce the threat from those who do not respect the rights of others.
Such theses make liberalism a "religious" theory that has turned the United States into a crusader state, which believes that it is obliged to spread liberal democracy around the world, promote an open international economy and build international institutions. The policy of transforming the world in the image and likeness of America is designed to protect human rights, promote peace and make the world safe for democracy. However, this did not happen. Instead, the United States has become an extremely militaristic State, waging wars that undermine international stability, harm human rights and threaten liberal values in America itself. Nationalism in the countries of the world and real circumstances have always defeated liberalism, which proved unable to solve their economic, social and ethnic problems.
Perhaps we here in the Middle East do not need to delve into how the American realistic school sees the mistakes of American politics, since we have the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, where a long process of liberal political engineering in both cases ended in failure. In Iraq, we are witnessing the inability to manage the state politically, and in Afghanistan, the return to power of the Taliban*. Among other things, for a whole decade Washington supported the so-called "Arab Spring", which also ended in failure, resulting in the rise of political Islam and terrorism.
Although revolutions in the Middle East were given names for flowers and plants, the result was religious control, as happened in Egypt, and political and economic paralysis, as in the case of Tunisia. In the former Soviet republics, revolutions were called "colored", and the main result was ineffective democratic governance, including with regard to Russian-speaking minorities.
The American project presented to the world by Joe Biden under the slogan "democracy against authoritarianism" implies not only interference in the internal affairs of states, but also the delegitimization of ruling regimes, whether in China, Russia or any other country in the world without exception. He forced the leading powers to make attempts to revise the international system formed after the end of the Cold War, which ultimately led to Russia conducting a special operation in Ukraine and increasing tensions with the allies of the United States. They saw many advantages in the revision of the world order in all its strategic, political and economic aspects. The expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance after the end of the Cold War was not a consequence of strategic factors — the collapse of the Soviet Union and the readiness of the Russian Federation itself to join NATO. Rather, it happened for ideological reasons related to the promotion of liberalism and the American model to the forefront, which prompted Moscow to launch a military special operation in Ukraine and thereby protect its political system.
Abdel Moneim Saeed (عبد المنعم سعيد)
* prohibited in the Russian Federation
