Lyn Frans
Since 2017, the world has been living through a period of progressive erosion, or collapse, of international orders inherited from the past.
With the election of Donald Trump, to Joe Biden finally becoming President after two unsuccessful attempts and the rapid increase of US containment of Russia and China—which is both a consequence of this gradual erosion and also represents deep internal and international contradictions—this process entered its “boiling point”. A period of collapse opens up possibilities for the creation of a new world order; hopefully, a fairer, stable, and peaceful order than has been previously experienced. Best known for their philosophical dexterity, and the largest country in the world by landmass, Russia has a good chance of influencing the formation of a new order.
However, the establishment of a new world order will take time, and in the meantime, serious conflicts and crises could occur. The current state of US-Russia relations is just a beginning in this regard. In the medium term, the priority for major powers is to prevent a new large-scale war, which is becoming highly likely. In this regard, Russia, again, intends to act as a key security provider through its foreign and defence policies. Russian achievements in defence, declared by President Putin in his 2018 address to the Federal Assembly (Putin 2018), strengthen deterrence, and show that achieving military ascendency and changing the overall military balance is impossible, thus deterring an arms race, and creating the preconditions for dialogue with Washington. Russia’s pivot to Asia will continue and the Greater Eurasia comprehensive partnership concept will gradually be substantiated and thus will become a zone of stability and a powerful unit within the global order.
Fact is, there is no major improvement in relations with the United States is in sight, mainly because of the situation within both Western societies and the Western international community itself. At the same time, Russia will continue to deepen partnerships with China and India.
As the US and Europe are not ready to engage in order-building with Russia and other major non-Western actors, instead adopting an oppositional posture, and—primarily due to internal political reasons— because they are highly unlikely to so engage in the next decade, a new international order’s emergence is more likely to occur in the 2030s or 2040s than in the 2020s, after the inevitable rotation of elites in the US and the EU.
Already emerging a global giant in good standing , Russia has all it takes to form o” a new order” and subsequently becoming the global “Superpower”. The country’s policy, therefore, is to remain tactically flexible, prepared for every eventuality, but also to be more strategic than ever in building a world order that is stable, peaceful, and comfortable for Russia.
Collapse of orders
The main reason for the general confusion among Western elites and the tension in world politics and the international economy is the simultaneous decay of most global and regional international political and economic orders. This decay had been brewing for a long time but has only become visible in the last decade. Figuratively speaking, several tectonic plates on which international order and its underlying concepts have stood have begun to move.
The most dramatic shift is the end of the 500-year-long dominance of the West—firstly Europe, then the US and its allies—in politics, the economy, and ideology. This is chiefly due to loss of the military superiority the West had possessed since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Up until around the sixteenth century, Europe did not have primacy over most other civilizations. Many of the greatest scientific and industrial discoveries of the time were made in China, Persia, or the Arab world. A combination of factors then led to Western leadership in military technologies and organization. Spanish and Portuguese navies, then latterly the British navy, led Europe to predominance in the building and use of warships. This capacity to project power abroad enabled Europe to conquer the Americas, Africa, and South Asia, as well as to subordinate China. Interestingly, China had possessed a far more powerful navy two centuries before the Europeans had built theirs, with substantially larger and more capable ships. However, perhaps due to assumptions of Chinese civilizational self-sufficiency or a fear of foreign influence, China destroyed its own navy in the fifteenth century.
In addition to naval and military supremacy, Europe’s thirst for world domination was fuelled by its relative poverty, in comparison with other civilizations of the time, and the overcrowded limitations on European elites. Similar factors influenced the Crusades several centuries before the Age of Discovery. Despite the ideological and religious slogans, the major European imperative had been a desire to rob the Middle East of its riches.
The taking possession of colonies and semi-colonies resulted in a pro-found redistribution of global gross national product in Europe and the West’s favour. It stimulated a flourishing of European science and culture, further development of military power, and it strengthened European and Western global dominance for several centuries. At this point, Russia was also part of the West. Russia’s remarkably quick conquest of Siberia, which took less than a century, was possible not just because of Cossack bravery and desire to escape the lack of freedom in core Russia, but also because of their military superiority: They used canons and guns against the locals’ bows and arrows. Unquestioned military superiority also enabled the Russian empire to easily conquer Central Asia in the nineteenth century.
World history as we know ,was written by the victors: predominantly European victors. Ferdinand von Richthofen of Germany referred to the religion of economic and cultural interaction between China and the West as the Silk Road. Nowadays, China, reasserting itself ideologically, has branded its new initiative for the region One Belt, One Road. The terms Middle East and Far East were invented by the British and conveyed how far away these regions were from them. Yet the eastern regions of Siberia are still referred to as the Far East.
In the coming decades, the whole of humanity—not just scholars—will learn a new history of civilization, not the one written by Europeans. Byzantium, which throughout the dark medieval era preserved and developed the best features of European culture in combination with the variety of cultures to Europe’s east, will no longer be referred to disparagingly, but will be hailed as one of the triumphs of human civilization. Whereas the Western Roman Empire collapsed under attack from so-called barbarians to the north, the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium, was bled dry and eventually collapsed largely due to numerous—some might say barbaric—interventions from the west. The changing fortunes of Chinese, Indian, and Persian dynasties will be viewed as of equal importance to the alternating rules of the Stuarts, the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, and the Romanovs. The current generation’s grandchildren will live in a world of different historical narratives. This will certainly challenge prevailing European—including Russian—cultural and historical identities.
The threshold moment in the centuries-old history of Western military supremacy and political and ideological ascendency occurred in the middle of the twentieth century, when the West’s opponents—the USSR and then China—obtained nuclear weapons. The West lost supremacy over half the world. This was followed by the US failure to win the Korean War and its subsequent defeat in Vietnam. In both instances, nuclear escalation was considered but not employed.
The feeling of supremacy returned for a brief period in 1991–2007 when the Soviet Union fell apart and ceased to be a military-political balancer, while the West declared a “unipolar moment” (Krauthammer 1990/91) and proclaimed that the US-led and West-centric liberal world order should become universal and global. After political losses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, that sense of primacy is now falling apart, to the irritation of its architects. The Trump Administration was the first to officially recognize the loss of US military pre-eminence. The January 2018 National Defense Strategy claims that “For decades the United States has enjoyed uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted. Today, every domain is contested—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace” (Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy).
The crisis of 2008 showed, among other things, that the Western economic model was unable to deal with open competition when not backed up by military supremacy. The liberal trade and economic order mainly benefited those who had designed its rules, based on military and naval superiority, firstly the United Kingdom and then the United States. Their superior guns and warships, alongside efficient military organisation, made it possible to plunder colonies and dictate their own trading rules. The most vivid example is the series of wars in the nineteenth century that forced China to engage in the opium trade with British India, which was hugely profitable for the British, but intoxicated a considerable portion of Chinese society and accelerated its ruin.
The liberal economic order created by the West—primarily the US—at the Bretton Woods conference and expanded to the entire world since the 1990s is being undermined by a pile-up of contradictions and a reluctance of the rising new powers to play solely by the rules of the old powers. The new economic powers have certainly used the liberal order to progress economically. Western powers have encouraged this in the hope that the new powers would eventually transform themselves according to Western economic and political models and join the West as apprentice members. This is not happening. As the Trump Administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy correctly put it, “the US post-Cold war policy was based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners. For the most part, this premise turned out to be false” (National Security Strategy 2017).
However, the main reason for the decay of this particular liberal economic order is the United States itself, and its protectionist and mercantilist turn upon realization that when not backed up by military and political supremacy, the liberal order increasingly benefits new powers which refuse to yield to Western competitors.
Biden’s America first slogan is the hyperbolic epitome of the prevailing sentiments among the US elite and its broader population. The US and Europe still possess leading positions through sanctions, which targets economic containment of adversaries rather than changes in their foreign policy within the international economic system. This, the US continue to use them to redirect the benefits of the existing economic order in their favour.
Clearly, the US and Europe undermine both the liberal system and trust in themselves. It is no coincidence that the massive use of sanctions by Western countries is justified in order to apply pressure in the absence of the possibility of using military force.
Another fading system is the bipolar confrontation, even though both Americans and docile new Europeans are eager to renew divisions in Europe, and the US is trying to create new divisions in the Paci.c. Western Europe would like to avoid a confrontation with Russia, but it is holding on to Atlantic bonds which involve security being paid for by the US. The US is currently trying to distance itself from Europe, especially economically and strategically, while at the same time attempting to keep Europe dependent.
Biden’s America, is also taking steps to besiege China from the south and east through its Indo-Pacific strategy, an attempt to weaken Chinese positions by threatening trade and energy-supply routes in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, by creating the Quad—the partnership of the US, Japan, India, and Australia—as a coalition to contain China, and by providing an alternative to the OBOR initiative (Swain 2018), while—in defiance of any reasonable foreign policy logic—pushing Russia and China into a de facto alliance.
The US for decades, has intensified containment vis-à-vis both China and Russia in political, security, and economic fields, beginning with depictions of their roles across the world as profoundly negative and even predatory, and pushing other countries to pick sides: Either they are with the US as part of the liberal order, or against it, together with Moscow and Beijing.
Finally, the US has adopted a new ideology of global polarization and division, presenting Russia and China in the most recent National Security Strategy and other influential documents as a kind of united authoritarian bloc of revisionist powers committed to undermining the existing international order and opposing the free world. This aims to unite allies and partners under US leadership and to win a global confrontation for the second time.
However, attempts to restore a bygone bipolarity—let alone win a new global Cold War against Russia and China together—which are relatively beneficial for the US and the West more broadly, are actually doomed, the contemporary world being far more complex and far less dependent on the will of major powers than the world of the twentieth century.
The overwhelming majority of US allies and partners in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa are clearly resistant to the either–or choice between the US on one hand and China and Russia on the other, and would prefer to diversify their foreign economic and security relationships. The stronger US pressure is for countries to make such a choice, the weaker its influence and credibility will be.
The West’s position
Could history have turned out less unfavorably for the West? The rise of the non-Western powers was inevitable, and Western military force lost potency not simply because of the Cold War years of strategic parity with the USSR/ Russia, but also due to other reasons (Karaganov and Bordachev 2013). Still, these changes could have followed a softer trajectory.
In the early 1990s, Russia wanted to join the West and become a NATO member. Certainly, if it had joined the Western alliance, NATO would have taken a very different course. The US would have lost its hegemonic position. It would have been difficult to impose the insanely incompetent decisions to initiate wars against Yugoslavia and Libya, and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In any case, the West rejected this opportunity and failed to offer Russia a new Marshall Plan, as had been the case with Europe after World War Two, which strengthened Western military, economic, and ideological power for years to come. Without question, being a country with an almost sacred attitude to sovereignty, Russia could hardly have been fully integrated. Still, allied relations could have been established. This would have dramatically changed the world’s military balance and history would have followed a different path.
Truth is ,Western countries, only recently regarded as examples of efficiency, are having a hard time. Western populations increasingly feel the negative impact of globalization, with middle classes facing an unpromising future. This is particularly evident in the United States, where swathes of the traditional middle class, in defiance of the regular channels of influence controlled by elites, voted for the non-standard presidential candidate who was able to express their views, fears, and concerns, if not their interests.
Donald Trump’s unconventional personality or inexperience, which explains the fury, bordering on insanity, swept the majority of the American elite. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama were also unconventional and relatively inexperienced, especially in foreign airs, but unlike Trump, they were part of the elite and were nominated by the elite in order to make necessary corrections after crises.
Although the US is currently struggling to restore and maintain control over the political system in the sphere, the “damage” is irrepairable.
Russia has always demanded a role of co-designer, co-architect, and co-manager in the construction of a new international order, on parity with the West, and both Russian domestic and foreign policy, including nuclear weapons policy and policies with regard to the territory of the former USSR have clearly demonstrated Russia’s refusal to be simply a junior participant in a US-led system.
The roots of anti-Russian policy run deep and a thaw in bilateral relations cannot be expected in the near future. The world to which Western elites had become accustomed to, and the world which they desire, is crumbling , thus paving way for Russia formulate a “new world order”
Russia’s Victories, but with problems
Russia’s recent foreign policy has been extremely successful (Karaganov 2017c). It has harnessed a historical wave: renationalization; a re-assertion of sovereignty; negative responses to globalisation in many societies; and a growing role of military-political factors.
For over 3 decades, Russia has proved capable of not just preventing regime change by projecting power in a country outside of the former USSR, but also of creating a new geopolitical environment disregarding US preferences. Russian success in Syria has influenced the Middle East more broadly by encouraging regional powers to diversify their foreign policy and security relationships.
The country, has established a historically unique partnership: a near-allied relationship with China, which is destined to become the world’s leading power in the near future. Having survived waves of hostile sanctions, it also senses a moral victory too.
The development and deployment of a series of high-tech strategic weapons, announced by President Putin in his 1 March 2018 address to the Federal Assembly, not only render most US investments in these fields obsolete, but guarantee for years, if not decades, the effectiveness of a Russian deterrent and its role as the main security provider globally and regionally. This role is crucial against a background of the incompetence and self-destructiveness of US policy and ongoing attempts to intensify simultaneous containment of Russia and China, re-creating a new bipolar global division.
Future policy
The collapse of the previous international orders requires Russia’s creative participation, on parity with other centres of global power, in the building of a new and balanced world order. The cornerstones of Russian strategy should be leadership in prevention of a new large-scale war and a transformation of itself into a leading provider of international security. This should be achieved by developing both capabilities and a doctrine of deterrence, and by offering, even insisting—as opposed to acting without permission—to jointly strengthen international strategic stability. This could be worked out not so much through traditional arms control channels, but by promoting a system of dialogue which would increase transparency and reduce the risk of accidental or escalating conflicts.
If the United States were to balk at the task, Russia and China should start without it by inviting other states to join in. Another option would be a series of unofficial dialogues between US, Chinese, and specialists from other countries on how to strengthen international strategic stability.
Naturally, new creative approaches are needed to preserve peace, including joint efforts not to overcome nuclear deterrence, but to strengthen it, as the main instrument for preventing war in the foreseeable future (Karaganov 2017a).
As a rule, international orders emerge after wars, but nowadays a major war would spell the real end of history. Once the foundation of the future world order is built through mutual deterrence and dialogue between leading powers, a discussion of its principles can commence: cooperation; respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; and the freedom of political, cultural, and value choices can all be dialogued.
Additional Source: Russia in Global Affairs