Ukraine and the world order
Has Putin’s invasion of Ukraine changed the world order?
It certainly has ended the post-Cold War order, writes Joseph Nye in The Spectator – Has Putin’s invasion changed the world order? – but he is cautious about going much further, and he dismisses analogies such as Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939.
Military outcomes are quick to realize, but the forces of soft power and people’s reactions take much longer to manifest and are hard to predict. (Remember George Bush’s “Mission accomplished” moment?)
Nye concludes with a warning about western countries lumping China and Russia together on one side of an imagined “authoritarian states” vs “democratic states” struggle. China is a rising power, Russia is a declining power. “As the world sadly discovered in 1914, on the eve of the first world war, a declining power (Austria-Hungary) can sometimes take the biggest risk in a conflict”.
Deutschland über alles
Ever since re-unification, Germany, along with many other mainland European countries, has had a comparatively low level of military spending. In 2020 Germany devoted 1.1 percent of GDP to defence. That compares with 2.0 percent in the UK, 2.0 percent in Australia and 3.4 percent in the USA.
On last weekend’s Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue interviewed Andreas Kluth, Berlin columnist for Bloomberg, following Chancellor Scholz’s announcement that the German government was to boost its defence spending to 2.0 percent of GDP and send weapons to Ukraine: Germany dramatically boosts defence spend to counter Russia.
Kluth describes the rapid policy shifts the country’s Social Democrat – Free Democrat – Green coalition has made, and the popular support for those shifts: hundreds of thousands of Germans have been marching down Unter den Linden opposing Moscow’s action.
He sees this as a complete turn from Germany’s postwar settlement and its passive tolerance of Russian aggression. Germany is to re-establish itself as a major military power in Europe (a Europe where another military power, the UK, has withdrawn from relevance). The shift is not only about military security, but also about national security more generally. For example the Greens are re-considering their opposition to nuclear power, in order to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian energy.
How financial sanctions work
Writing in The Conversation – Putin’s biggest mistake of the Ukraine war? Trusting the Western financial system – Peter Martin describes how financial sanctions against Russia work, and how some of them take effect very quickly, both in terms of their effect on the exchange rate (the rouble has tanked), and in commercial transactions more generally. They will hit ordinary Russians, who may or may not swing in their opinion of Putin: some may see the sanctions as western aggression and harden in their support for Putin, while others will see them as a consequence of his military aggression. They are likely to be most effective on Russia’s powerful plutocrats, as they are denied the opportunities for foreign travel and access to expensive private schools for their children.
As for the longer term, Peter Martin is not certain. Surely no country with poor relations with the west will ever again be so trusting of western financial institutions. As for their general effect he writes:
There’s every chance none of these will work quickly, every chance they will further impoverish Russians, and every chance that, if Russia subjugates Ukraine, the West will find the sanctions impossible to withdraw without losing face.
The cost of hypocrisy
It’s only thugs like Putin who invade other countries to overthrow democratically-elected governments that have upset the interests of the invading country, right?
Wrong.
Crispin Hull describes four situations in the postwar era where America has used its military might to overthrow governments in other countries that were perceived to be acting against US interests (generally against the interests of US corporations). Three of these interventions – Guatemala, Nicaragua and Chile – were against countries with democratic governments, and the fourth was Iraq, where the invasion was on a pretence about weapons of mass destruction. That was almost as flimsy as Putin’s line that Ukraine is run by Jewish Nazis.
Hull’s article – The parallels of history – in no way seeks to justify Putin’s brutality. Rather he points out that the US has weakened the moral authority it once used with effect, when it pursued Nazi criminals at the Nürnberg trials. In looking the other way as Putin took over Crimea it has further spent down its remaining moral authority, as has the west in general when it has been too concerned with commercial interests to impose really tough sanctions on Russia.
Hull believes that Putin and his enablers should be put behind bars under international laws. A step to such an outcome would be a little honesty on America’s part. “You cannot excuse Guatemala, Chile, and Nicaragua and come out with your hands wringing about Ukraine. A bit of truth and reconciliation … would be a good start.”