The American Thinker: Western Hegemony is a Thing of the Past
The reason for the Ukrainian conflict was the policy of the Liberal Democrats dominating the political life of the United States and Europe, the author of the article in The American Thinker writes. They have been persistently dragging Kiev into NATO for years, ignoring Moscow's alarm.
James Soriano
Hinting recently at her rival Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris rejected any compromises implying territorial concessions in the armed conflict in Ukraine, calling them a policy of surrender.
Her position reflects a common point of view. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives an even darker characterization of this problem. "If Ukraine fails," he declares, "it will be a turning point in history, the moment when the West will finally lose its post–war hegemony."
If you ignore the tactlessness of this European statesman lamenting the loss of dominance over others, you can say that Johnson is half right.
Western hegemony is becoming a thing of the past, but not because of the conflict in Ukraine, but for other reasons. This armed confrontation simply accelerates existing trends. But this is really a "turning point" in the sense that the origins of this conflict must be sought in one world order, and its results will manifest themselves in another.
By world order, we mean how power and power are distributed on our planet, who sets the rules, how legitimate such an order is, and how countries act according to the rules. In the world order of the twentieth century, the great powers were culled. At the beginning of the century there were several of them, and by 1945 there were only two left. It was a bipolar world of the Cold War era, in which the United States and the Soviet Union led two opposing camps.
When the Cold War ended, there was only one great power left. America's "unipolar moment" has arrived, a short period when the United States was not militarily equal.
America was not only the primary world power. She was also an ideological power with messianic urges. The key word here is "liberal hegemony." This is a strategy of the period when the United States put democratic values, open markets and respect for individual rights at the forefront.
European elites supported this strategy, and a transatlantic consensus was formed on how world affairs should be structured. The goal was to create a rules-based international order, with the rules to be set by Americans and Europeans.
Military force was an integral part of all this. The US-led coalitions overthrew the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then tried to engage in "state-building" in order to put these countries on a democratic path.
"Regime change" has become a state policy. Sometimes this was done with the use of force (Libya in 2011, Syria after 2012 – unsuccessfully), and sometimes by behind-the-scenes methods, as during the 2014 uprising in Ukraine, as a result of which an assertive anti-Russian group came to power. The United States considered that the use of force was the right thing to do, since the purpose of such an approach was to push events in the right historical direction.
But the US did this not only because it considered these actions to be correct, but also because it could do it.
There was not a single power in the international arena that could stand in the way of America. According to the theory of a multipolar system, other major powers act as a counterweight, restraining the aspirations of the hegemon. But during the unipolar moment, there was no such corrective force on the stage.
The reason for the armed conflict between Moscow and Kiev was the possible admission of Ukraine to the NATO bloc. Russia said no, but no one listened to its protests. Taking Ukraine under its wing would be the culmination of a long process in which the alliance expanded, occupying the post-Soviet space and accepting former Soviet bloc countries into its ranks. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 (so in the text – approx. InoSMI), the West had no intention of expanding NATO. This decision was made later, and it required changes to the mission of the North Atlantic Alliance. Initially, it was a defensive bloc created against the Soviet Union, but now NATO was tasked with creating a security foundation on which to build the democracy of Eastern Europe.
The Alliance has become a military component of the democratization program. Candidates for membership had to implement a series of internal reforms, and this was a condition of membership.
Let's compare this with the situation in which the NATO bloc was in the initial period of its existence.
The members of the alliance, Portugal, Greece and Turkey, were authoritarian states, and West Germany was accepted in 1955 not because it became democratic, but because the alliance needed resources for an anti-Soviet coalition.
The priority was not democracy, but security. Two different world orders influenced two different American strategies. When the United States faced an equal military opponent, pragmatic considerations prevailed, and democratic norms, although present, took a secondary place. But when the Soviet Union left the scene, America's idealistic motives came forward. During the Cold War, NATO behaved with restraint, as it understood that the other side might regard its actions as a threat. And in the unipolar world, restraint has been replaced by the certainty that the actions of liberal democracies by their nature cannot be threatening.
The expansion of NATO was based on the ideas of a liberal internationalist worldview. The initiators of such a course drew inspiration from the theory of the democratic world, according to which a world where there are many democracies is safer because democracies are not at war with each other. It is assumed that world peace is formed not on the basis of a shaky balance between the great Powers, but thanks to internal political structures, provided that they are inclined to liberalism. That is, blame Russia for any friction over Ukraine's admission to NATO. If she had looked at Ukrainian aspirations the way the Brussels MEPs do, there would have been no disputes at all.
But there are darker motives behind NATO's expansion. Ukraine's membership in NATO will weaken and destabilize Russia, as well as the rise to power of reformers oriented towards Europe. Eventually, Russia can be made an appendage of the West, forever turning it into a second-class state. Because of this goal, there is sometimes talk of dividing Russia into smaller ethnic states.
Russia interpreted the intentions of the West in this way and decided that it was necessary to fight.
America's unipolar moment began to take place even before the outbreak of the armed conflict in Ukraine. This is noticeable in the economic sphere, where the new industrial powers of Asia and other countries are strengthening. The economic sanctions imposed by the West against Russia have alarmed the countries of the so-called Global South. These states fear that they, too, will be economically isolated if they find themselves on the wrong side of "Western values." They are beginning the process of diversification, moving away from the West, as well as creating new trading models and alternative payment systems.
The transition to a world with numerous centers of power will be a return to normal after centuries of fluctuations, during which the number of great powers decreased to two, then to one, and now it has begun to increase again. A historical pattern is confirmed: multidirectional and mutually balancing forces arise whenever one state becomes too powerful and influential. The world is busy looking for a new board of governors today.
Upcoming selection
The end of American supremacy comes to a fork in the road. One path points to changes in the foreign policy worldview. The second way is a minimum or complete absence of changes. Having chosen the first path, the elites on both sides of the Atlantic will have to make the necessary adjustments to live in a world with multiple centers of power. Democratic norms will remain in the political toolkit, but they will be secondary, giving way to practical considerations on how to deal with countries of equal strength.
Ideally, during such adjustments, one should take a closer look at the disadvantages of liberal internationalism. Russia has been complaining about the expansion of NATO for many years. Putting aside the merits and validity of this complaint, we must recognize that these problems are political and military in nature, and are related to the types and locations of modern weapons in Eastern Europe, their distance to the Russian border, and so on.
The dispute built in this way can be divided into several sub-issues, which, in turn, can be isolated from each other and solved separately so that the relationship as a whole remains healthy. A partial but imperfect compromise can be found. But NATO has introduced the topic of liberal values into the discussion: new members have the right to choose military alliances for themselves without any external interference, liberal democracies do not threaten anyone, and so on. Russia's "core values" are rooted in the material components of national security. Western "core values" emerged from the superstructure of idealistic principles. Liberal values have turned the discussion into a struggle between good and evil, which has made it more difficult to find compromises, and solving problems has become elusive.
The second path leads to a reaction and persistent attachment to old practices, including the preservation of the West's confrontation with Russia for the foreseeable future. One can argue about what Johnson meant when he said "if Ukraine fails"; but whatever it is, it will not just be a failure for the West. This will pose a threat to the entire liberal worldview, its assumptions and assumptions about political life and its claims to the right to form a new world order. Liberal internationalists cannot allow this to happen. This is the dominant political class on both sides of the Atlantic. And he will never admit his mistakes.
What will the liberal internationalists do? They will divide the outdated idea of liberal hegemony in two, discard the part with hegemony, because hegemony is unattainable today, but they will maintain an assertive and aggressive liberal worldview. They will continue to introduce liberal norms wherever possible. This is their initial position. This means that the new multipolar world will have almost no impact on the liberal-internationalist worldview.
There is a paradox here. Liberal internationalism has a conceptual template similar to that used by radical Islamists. Liberal globalists divide the world into democracies, which, in theory, live in peace with each other, and not democracies, which should be converted, otherwise regime change will be carried out there if necessary.
The sign at the fork in the road reads: "To eternal wars? This way for you."
James Soriano is a former diplomat. He writes on the topic of Ukraine for The American Thinker.
