20.01.2025
Trump — More Like Gorbachev Than Deng?
Revolutionary Changes in Communist and Capitalism Systems as Triggers of the World’s Geopolitical Reconfiguration
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Rein Müllerson

President, Institut de Droit International in Geneva (2013–2015)

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In my previous articles I wrote about two revolutionary processes—one affecting mostly Western liberal democracies and the other taking place in the domain of geopolitics, namely the decline of Western dominance and the end of the unipolar phase that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of U.S. hegemony. I also wrote about the relationship between two hitherto friendly phenomena—democracy and liberalism, which has become much less friendly over some decades now (both in the economic and social terms) (Müllerson, 2012; Müllerson, 2023a). I have also analyzed the Ukraine crisis as a centerpiece of the revolutionary geopolitical transition from the bipolar world order of the Cold War period to the unipolar moment to a multipolar or polyphonic order (Müllerson, 2023b, pp. 3-31). The current military phase of the Ukraine crisis is less a conflict between Russia and Ukraine than a war, qui ne disait pas son nom, between the collective West and Russia.

Yet I had been unable to dot all the i’s until I read two amazing books—Emmanuel Todd’s La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) published in January 2024 and Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration that was published in 2023 but came to my attention only at the end of 2024. The first book is written by a historian, demographer, and French public intellectual; and the second one, by a Russian-born American founder of cliodynamics—an approach that combines history, sociology, anthropology, and archaeology with mathematical modeling. These two rather different books made me see much more clearly some striking similarities, as well as differences, between Deng Xiaoping’s successful reforms in China, Michael Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies in the Soviet Union that ended with the collapse of the superpower, and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 closely contested election and his almost triumphal return to power in 2024. Although I could not foresee this latest development, in 2019-2020, during Donald Trump’s first term in office, I paid attention to some similarities between the revolutionary changes in the world’s three biggest states and the roles played by their very different leaders (Müllerson, 2021, pp. 146-167). Today, I presume we could delineate three milestones of the global revolutionary changes with the following dates: 1978, 1991, and 2024; and associate them with the names of Deng Xiaoping, Michael Gorbachev, and Donald Trump.[1] 1978 marks the beginning of China’s gaining great-power status after centuries of stagnation, civil wars, and humiliation by Western nations; 1991 symbolizes the end of the bipolar world, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s loss of great-power status, and the beginning of a short unipolar moment; and 2024 may mark, besides Russia’s resuming its great-power status, the beginning of the U.S.’s transition into the category of a normal great power devoid of any exceptional standing of a “hyperpower,” and the consolidation of a multipolar and polyphonic world.

 

Riding the waves of history in the right time and place

The world is not devoid of self-righteous naïve do-gooders who believe that everything is possible everywhere: that maize would grow in the far north of Russia (Nikita Khrushchev) or that democracy can take root in the Arabian sands (the Arab Spring of 2011 and its Syrian follow-up). Georges Malbrunot, a Grand Reporter of Le Figaro, in an article on Iran, quotes an anonymous Iranian intellectual who deplores that, unfortunately, President Rouhani of Iran, though a reformist leader, was “not Iranian Gorbachev; at best he could become our Deng Xiaoping” (Malbrunot, 2015). There is something disturbingly distorted in the idea that Michael Gorbachev was a more successful reformer than China’s Deng Xiaoping. Such a view goes against logic, to say nothing of an honest serious analysis of Deng’s and Gorbachev’s reforms and especially their results. One needs just to compare today’s China and Russia, and their respective economies and influence in the world (especially if we take into account their respective starting positions) to see the difference.

Such a myopia may be explained by the dominant Western narrative asserting that there is only one correct way of life, one appropriate political and economic system—liberal democracy and free markets.

The last quarter of the 20th century produced two leaders—Deng Xiaoping of China and Michael Gorbachev of the Soviet Union—whose policies not only changed the history of their countries, but also transformed the world’s geopolitical structure. However, while the West wholeheartedly welcomed Gorbachev’s policies that led to the collapse of the “evil empire,” it became increasingly worried about Deng’s legacy that has ultimately made China an economic superpower claiming a due place for itself under the sun. One of the August 2018 issues of The Economist, which was mostly devoted to China’s rise, considered its Belt and Road Initiative, if not ‘a frontal challenge,’ then at least a test for the Western-led ‘rules-based liberal order’(The Economist, 2018). Below I will dwell upon this order and its disagreement with international law, but here it is important to ask a question: Why did the West greet Gorbachev’s reforms that failed, but was worried about Deng’s ones that have succeeded beyond expectation? Does the answer lie exactly in the words ‘beyond expectation’? Or is it because China achieved economic success without becoming a Western-type democracy and Washington’s satellite? Or was it because Gorbachev’s futile attempts to make his country more like social-democratic Sweden led to the collapse of the rival superpower?

The reasons for the emergence of the revolutionary situations in China before Deng, in the Soviet Union before Gorbachev, and in today’s West were quite different. Communist revolutions, first in Russia and later in China, were utopian experiments of addressing real problems of their political, economic and social systems, including capitalism’s consubstantial feature—the enrichment of the minority at the expense of the majority. The geopolitical factors—the First World War in the case of the Russian Empire and the Second World War in the case of China—played a catalyzing role, supportive of these experiments’ “success.” However, communism as a remedy against capitalism turned out to be a medication that kills the patient, though not immediately. The inadequacy of these experiments became visible from the very beginning. Violence necessary to enforce the utopian communist ideas (which were meant, according to Marx, for highly developed European societies, not for Russia or China), used for the sake of a distant bright future, and the inefficiency of collectivized and centralized economies tarnished these experiments almost in the bud. To avoid something like that happening in their countries, Western elites made compromises with their oppressed majorities. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in America, the emergence of social democracies in Europe, and other similar concessions to those living in poverty saved the Western world from the “specter haunting Europe.”

Therefore, both revolutionary changes—evolutionary and successful, at least so far, in China and radical and unsuccessful (except for some positive consequences of the collapse of the authoritarian rule) in the Soviet Union—were in fact a natural return of the “prodigal sons” into the fold of the dominant system. This triumphant system started, with reckless confidence, expanding its way of life all over the world. However, quite soon it became clear that a great part of the world was unable or unwilling to accept it and that the two former communist giants, while rejecting their old communist way, refused to obidiently follow the only remaining superpower (in the 1990s, Russia made an attempt to become more like the West but failed miserably).

Yet, the disappearance of the ideological rivals did not remove the problems of the capitalist system. Moreover, some of these problems were even aggravated by hyper-globalization, initially welcomed by Western, and not only Western, elites.

So today the Western world is facing geopolitical uncertainties that bode well for nobody.

As Daron Acemoglu, a 2024 Nobel laureate in Economics, put it succinctly: “Over time, as American democracy has increasingly fallen short of delivering on its core promises, the Democratic Party has contributed to the problem of catering to a narrow, privileged elite. To restore its own prospects and America’s signature form of governance, it must return to its working-class roots” (Acemoglu, 2004). Easier said than done, particularly as the concern for the working class has been rather exceptional than natural for both U.S. political parties. In Europe (of which more below), the political and economic problems, mostly self-inflicted, are even deeper. 

Peter Turchin writes about four structural drivers of instability that may cause revolutionary situations: popular immiseration leading to mass mobilization potential; elite overproduction resulting in intraelite conflicts; failing fiscal health; and weakened legitimacy of the state. If not addressed in proper and due time, this explosive combination of challenges, together with negative geopolitical factors, may lead to a severe crisis. However, he stresses that “for large, powerful empires, geopolitical factors tend to be of reduced importance. Such states tend to be too big to be affected by what their neighbors do, and social breakdown within them is generated by internal forces. To borrow from Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder but by suicide” (Turchin, 2023, p. 30). This is true. The Soviet Union collapsed mainly due to its internal contradictions, although one may, with reason, consider its demise also an assisted suicide. China, contrary to what happened in the USSR, was able to change the course under reformist Deng Xiaoping, who not only saved the country but also created the foundation for his nation’s becoming a great power on a par with the U.S.

Both Deng and Gorbachev at some point understood that ‘business as usual’ would be disastrous to their respective countries. Professor Weiwei Zhang of Fudan University, former Deng Xiaoping’s interpreter, told me that after the May 1989 meeting in Beijing with Michael Gorbachev, the Chinese paramount leader had, in the circle of his advisers, characterized the Soviet leader as naïve and weak. With hindsight, I tend to agree with this assessment, although I think had Gorbachev been tougher and less humane, the result would have been the same, but much bloodier. So, what works for China does not necessarily work for Russia. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet political and economic model was not viable and had to be reformed. In that he bore a resemblance to Deng Xiaoping, who had come to a similar conclusion about the Chinese system a decade earlier. But here the similarities end.

Deng knew what he wanted and slowly but surely, sometimes using ruthless means and methods (e.g., pitilessly suppressing the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests), moved towards the goal of making China great again. Although the Tiananmen Square protestors’ desire for democracy and liberties may have been genuine, it was also naïve. Even if the authorities had tried to satisfy the students’ demands, the chances for a liberal democracy in China would have equalled to zero. Yet one thing would have been certain: it would have heralded the end of the Chinese economic reforms and growth.

Gorbachev, on the contrary, rather naïvely believed in the possibility of Swedish-style socialism in the Soviet Union and in the sincerity of American promises not to move NATO an inch to the east. In the 1990s, Gorbachev’s nemesis Boris Yeltsin continued his predecessor’s policies in the “new Russia,” creating a country ruled by oligarchs, where the majority of the people became even poorer than they had been under the Soviet system.

Peter Turchin is right suggesting that both Chinese and Soviet economic, social and political crises as well as Deng’s effective reforms and Gorbachev’s unsuccessful attempts to save the country were dictated mainly by internal factors. Similarly, Trump’s current efforts to make America great again is a response to American domestic problems. However, all these processes show that when a big and powerful (even if potentially) country goes through a deep crisis affecting all societal strata, then not only its neighbors, but the whole world will be affected. This reminds me of the title of the book by French diplomat and intellectual Alain Peyrefitte: When China Awakes… the World Shall Tremble (Quand la Chine s’éveillera… Le monde tremblera) (Peyrefitte, 1973). Thus, the world’s geopolitical picture will no longer be the same.

Of course, a major change of society to the extent that also has global effects requires not only an extraordinary (not necessarily in the positive sense of the word) person at the helm of the state but also a big enough country to experiment with. Donald Trump’s first presidency shook both the country and the world. Although the American economy during his first term was doing fine, the growth rates were much higher than in Europe and the number of the unemployed were much lower than in the Old Continent (until COVID-19 hit the world), the beneficiaries were mainly those who had always been better off.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump’s coming to power proved useful in that it exposed the controversies and antagonisms of American society.

Similar things are happening in Europe, which shows that Donald Trump was not so much the product of the current turmoil but rather a catalyst that accelerated the arrival of the unavoidable crisis that may (or may not) be followed by recovery.

Trump, an extraordinary person mainly in his extravagance, has indeed deeply disturbed the anthill of American domestic and international politics so that not only Democrats but also many Republicans, particularly during his first term, rebelled against their President. This infight has revealed that there have never been significant differences between Democratic and Republican elites. Hillary Clinton, epitomising the Democrats’ corrupt politics, lost the 2016 presidential election not because of some foreign interference but because the rift between the political and economic elites, on the one hand, and the American people, on the other, had become all too obvious. Externally, she was a perfect example of ‘liberal interventionists’ who differ too little from hawkish ‘neocons’ who were running the show under the Republican presidency of George W. Bush. Therefore, Barack Obama’s “enlightened” worldview is closer to Donald Trump’s basic instinctive approach to many foreign policy issues (though not all) than to Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy preferences. Equally, or even more, Trump’s unpredictable and erratic foreign policy steps made it clear to some U.S. allies that blindly following the self-proclaimed leader of the “free world” is not necessarily good for them. Trump’s politically incorrect tweets and statements forced those who had fought him on the Capitol Hill and in the liberal media to leave behind their own political correctness, which has, like Orwell’s doublespeak, so far rather effectively covered the true face of American elites.

Peter Turchin writes in his 2023 book: “To understand why Donald Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States, we should also pay less attention to his personal qualities and maneuvers and more to the deep social forces that propelled him to the top. Trump was like a small boat caught on the crest of a mighty tidal wave” (Turchin, 2023, pp 13-14). Turchin explains that this tidal wave is not at all unique for the U.S.: “As our model predicts, the extra wealth flowing to the elites (to the proverbial ‘1 percent’, but even more so to the top 0,001 percent) eventually created trouble for the wealth holders (and power holders) themselves. The social pyramid has grown top-heavy. We now have too many ‘elite aspirants’ competing for a fixed number of positions in the upper echelons of the politics and business. In our model, such conditions have a name: elite overproduction. Together with popular immoderation, elite overproduction, and the intraelite conflicts that it has engendered, has gradually undermined our civic cohesiveness, the sense of national cooperation without which states quickly rot from within” (Ibid, p. xii). As Tucker Carlson wrote in his 2018 book with a self-explanatory title Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, “happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do” (quoted by Turchin, 2023, p. 216). This could also be said about the 2024 election, since the Democrats have learned nothing from their 2016 defeat.

In my 2021 book I wrote that it was possible that Trump’s presidency would be a blip in American history and things would return to ‘business as usual.’ Hardly so. Although Trump’s presidency did not extend for more than the four years allocated to him by the voters, his legacy could be felt for many years ahead (Müllerson, 2021, p.159). In this respect, one would wonder what Henry Kissinger had in mind when in the summer 2018 interview to The Financial Times he somewhat enigmatically opined: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident” (The Financial Times, 2018). These words of the grand consigliere of American diplomacy made me reflect on whether Donald Trump would be an American Deng or an American Gorbachev. In my opinion, the role of the 45th and 47th U.S. president and his legacy in history may be rather like that of Michael Gorbachev, notwithstanding all the differences between these personalities, not at all that of Deng Xiaoping.

While Gorbachev marked the end of the Soviet era, Deng also set in motion processes leading to a new era for China and, eventually, for the whole world.

Trump, being a ruthless, wily businessman, has nevertheless been rather naïve in politics and ignorant in the international affairs. And this, notwithstanding his some rather good instincts, could be due, at least partly, to the very fact of being a novice in politics, particularly in world affairs. What is NATO for, if the Cold War was declared to be over? Why to continue seeing Russia as an existential threat, while it is China that is threatening the American dominance? Aren’t uncontrolled migration and the rise of Islamist extremism becoming global problems? Of course, foreign policy based on personal instincts has its flip side. In international relations, during Trump’s first mandate, this was expressed, for example, in the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed by the five Security Council permanent members plus Germany and Iran.

If these were only the erratic decisions and tweets of the 45th U.S. President that disturb the American and the whole Western mainstream, Trump’s impact would not be so great. Trump’s action and statements were amplified by the feverish hostility of his opponents in Congress and mainstream media. To get rid of their hated enemy, they were ready to tear down their own house. Moreover, in their frenzy they did not care about endangering international peace. Already in 2018 American political scientist Micah Zenko wrote in the article Democrats Will Regret Becoming the Anti-Russia Party: “When a political party increases its animus towards a foreign country—believing that this will enhance its own popularity—it introduces second-order effects that can manifest themselves years later. It creates a voting bloc of Americans who become socialized to hate a foreign government and, by extension, its citizens. It reduces the motivations and complexities of that government to a simplified caricature of anti-Americanism or just plain evil. More broadly, it engenders hostility between the United States and foreign countries, which makes cooperation over shared problems difficult and rapprochement unimaginable” (Zenco, 2018). Reading these words in 2018, I hoped that this dangerous infight might clear the ground for new people, who might adopt policies, both for the country and the world, that would differ from those of Donald Trump as well as from those of his fieriest opponents amongst the American political and media elites. Obviously, four years of his presidency were too short a period to mark an end of an era. This made James W. Carden state at the end of 2024 that the Democratic Party, having “conjured up a world of absolute good and absolute evil outside the supremely insular urban bubbles in which they live, has become a captive to a kind of Cold War mania” (Carden, 2024). The Biden administration’s policies showed that the Democrats had learned nothing from their 2016 defeat. Coming once again to power, they returned to the old routine.

Even more than among the American Democrats, in the UK’s Labour Party, it is prohibited to have (or at least to express) views that differ from the official warmongering rhetoric. So, when after Jeremy Corbyn, who had held somewhat more sophisticated views of the British foreign policy at the time when the hawkish clown Boris Johnson was at the helm of the government, Kier Starmer became the Labour Party’s leader, he declared high and loud that “there would be ‘no room’ in Labour for those who are [seeking] to blame the Western alliance for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine” (The Independent, 2022). Notably, his message followed the Stop the War letter signed by eleven left-wing MPs of the Labour Party.  

Donald Trump, like Gorbachev, can, to use Henry Kissinger’s insightful observation, “mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.” However, like Gorbachev, he has not shown any new vision that would meet the aspirations of American society, which indeed has a great potential. Like Gorbachev, Trump does not know what he is doing and what his legacy would be. To repeat what Henry Kissinger, the great American elderly statesman, thought of Trump, “it doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

Of course, whatever Trump’s legacy, the United States will not disintegrate like the Soviet Union. The USSR’s collapse had much deeper causes than Gorbachev’s naïvety or weakness. However, as Gorbachev cleared the way for the rebirth of Russia and reconfigurated the geopolitical map of the world that had outlived its “use by date,” so Trump’s policies may accelerate the coming of a world where a balance between different centers—America, China, Europe, India, Russia, and potentially some others—will, sooner rather than later, replace the historical anomaly where one center seeks to control the whole world.

A world without America, China or Russia is impossible, while a world against any one of them is suicidal.

 

The war in Ukraine as the crest of global geopolitical reconfiguration

While the U.S.-led West is trying today to perpetuate its dominance acquired after the collapse of its erstwhile rival, those belonging to the Rest, led by China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, and other nations, seek if not to put an end to the Western hegemony, then at least to limit its effects vis-à-vis themselves. The war in Ukraine, whose unfortunate victims are mostly the people of Ukraine and Russia, epitomizes the relentlessness of this geopolitical transformation of the world.

Russia’s use of military force against its neighbour was provoked, first of all, by NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, as well as by the collective West’s desire to make Ukraine an anti-Russian platform, a sword of Damocles hanging over Russia. By using Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian people, it sought to bring down Russia for openly disobeying the American hegemony. Before February 2022, the West supported the Kiev authorities in waging a civil war in Eastern Ukraine where more than 14,000 people had been killed (Maté, 2022). So, NATO’s “barking at Russia’s gates” (to use Pope Francis’s words), its efforts to remilitarize Ukraine between 2014 and 2022,[2] and the intensified bombarding by Kiev of rebel-held territories in Eastern Ukraine in mid-February 2022 (Baud, 2022, pp. 186-188) forced Russia to invade the neighboring country.

Of course, even a provoked aggression remains an aggression and Russia should have known better, learning also from the sad Soviet experience in Afghanistan. Russia’s behavior vis-à-vis Ukraine could be condemned from the point of view of international law and morals, but it is quite understandable from the geopolitical perspective. This is how a great power behaves vis-à-vis another great power moving too close to its borders. As President Putin said on March 2014, after the annexation (reunification with) of Crimea, “NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historical territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors. Of course, most of them are wonderful guys, but it would be better to have them come and visit us, be our guests, rather than the other way around” (Putin, 2014). During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, John Kennedy was prudently preparing for a nuclear war to protect his country’s “vital interest” as they were defined by the American elite, so why should President Putin be less determined to protect his country against threats that he and the Russian political elite consider existential? Dean Acheson, a distinguished American diplomat and international lawyer, U.S. Secretary of State in 1949-1953, commenting on the 1962 crisis, said: “The power, position and prestige of the United States had been challenged by another state; and law simply does not deal with such questions of ultimate power—power that comes close to sources of sovereignty” (Acheson, 1963, p. 14). A frank admission. Russian politicians and diplomats could have used the same language to justify their behavior in Ukraine (or rather NATO in Ukraine), and they would have been right.

The concentration of power by Washington in the 1990s was unparalleled in world history. Even the greatest empires of the past, such as that of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, or the British Empire “where the Sun never set,” used to control only parts of the world. After the end of the bipolar order, the U.S. considered the whole world to be the sphere of its vital interests, where no rival power was allowed to rise. Such an anomalous situation was a historical aberration that could not last long. It was also bound to end due to U.S.’s arrogance and reckless mistakes: disastrous wars against terror, attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, etc. Meanwhile, China’s peaceful rise, initiated by Deng Xiaoping reforms, accelerated and Russia rallied from the coma induced by the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s.

I cannot read President Putin’s mind, as many Western “experts” in international relations attempt to do, but I was intrigued by his remark made in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” (Putin, 2017).He may well have had in mind that as a result of this catastrophy 25 million ethnic Russians found themselves living abroad. but he certainly did not express nostalgia for the communist ideology or practices, as many claim. In my opinion, if the USSR’s breakdown is to be seen as a geopolitical tragedy, then only because it meant the disappearance of a counterbalance to the U.S. and the West. After the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. revelled in its omnipotence and omnipresence, and relished its impunity in full.

In the mainstream Western media one would hardly find reflections of how to prevent future wars. Even speaking about stopping the war in Ukraine is often seen as playing into the hands of Vladimir Putin. The dominant narrative is about further increasing defense budgets, creating more and newer weapons, and preparing populations for wars, including nuclear conflicts. In an article entitled A Franco-Britannic Nuclear Umbrella for Europe – Is It Feasible? (Vilaine, 2024), French military expert Laurent Vilaine analyzes different scenarios of Wasington’s possible withdrawing or diminishing its nuclear umbrella over its European allies under Trump. Lamenting on the insufficiency of the French and British nuclear arsenals (290 and 225 warheads, respectively), the dependence of the British nuclear deterrence on Washington’s approval, and the uncertainty about Paris’s (or London’s for that matter) readiness to use its nuclear arsenal to defend, say, Poland, the author does not even think of the possibility of discussing with Russia how to diminish or eliminate a potential nuclear catastrophe breaking out in the Old Continent. Of course, such warmongering mentality cannot be completely overcome until the conflict in Ukraine is settled in one way or another. And even then normalization of relations will, probably, take decades rather than years.  

The military conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war and therefore its end will depend less on what Kiev wants or does and more on those for whom Ukrainians are fighting Russians and, of course, on Russia.

Nevertheless, Ukraine is a very complex and multifaceted entity and may have its voice, or rather voices. Russia would hardly agree on a solution that would disregard its security concerns since it was exactly the West’s disregard for Russia’s security and Ukraine’s allowing its territory to be used as NATO’s stronghold against Russia that were the main reasons for the Russian Special Military Operation.

Another complication on the way to ending the war in Ukraine is that even if the main principal—the United States—withdraws its unconditional support of Ukraine’s war efforts, its European clients claim to be ready to break the ranks and force Ukraine to continue fighting to the last Ukrainian. Although such a scenario is hardly feasible, it should not be excluded. For example, James Nixey of British Chatham House, which presents itself as “an independent policy institute,” deplores the insufficient assistance to Ukraine: “At what point does the Western world decide that enough is enough and realize that this war needs to be fought and won, not managed and lost” (Nixey, 2024). Notably, “enough is enough” is used not in the sense of putting an end to the war but escalating it further. For that he proposes sending more and more weapons to Ukraine, investing in European defense industries with the specific aim of supplying weapons to Kiev, and even deploying Western troops in Western and Central Ukraine. And this is being said when the country is on the verge of collapse and even in the Western mainstream media some sober voices are calling for putting an end to the war. Emmanuel Todd writes: “… if the war [in Ukraine] results, as I believe, in the Western defeat and in the disintegration of NATO, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia would effectively be the main losers in the new geopolitical configuration of Europe” (Todd, 2024, p. 118).

Although Ukrainians have fought valiantly against much stronger Russia, Ukrainian successes in the conflict are often overestimated even by the most sober Western commentators. Russia’s withdrawal from the Kiev region in spring 2022 and from the right (western) bank of the Dnieper River in Kherson in fall 2022, as well as from the Kharkov region are presented as strategic successes of the Ukrainian troops. However, considering that Russia entered Ukraine in February 2022 with a limited contingent of troops and therefore had no intention of occupying Ukraine, one has to admit that the Russian troops’ initial progress was surprising for many, including for some in Russia. In my opinion, Moscow’s aim was to frighten the Ukrainian leadership and force it to accept compromise more or less in line with the 2015 Minsk Agreement. The document signed in Istanbul in April 2022 supports such a conclusion. However, due to the Western pressure and particularly British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s message delivered to Kiev that Ukraine had to continue fighting, President Zelensky rejected the deal. Of course, the main obstacle was not Johnson’s personality but complications with the West’s role of a potential guarantor of the deal (Charap and Radchenko, 2024). Preference for ‘peace through strength’, or peace against, not together with, potential rivals, has always led to wars since the latter have only a choice between surrendering and being vassalized or also adopting the ‘peace through strength’ option. 

Therefore, Michael Brenner, Professor Emeritus of Pittsburgh University, is right in estimating Russia’s position concerning the end of the war: “Russia will not stop the fighting until a firm agreement has been reached. That is one. It will not accept any ambiguity as to the future status of the Russophile territories in question. That’s two. It will not tolerate leaving in place a Kiev government controlled by the rabid anti-Russian nationalists who have run it since 2014. That’s three. It will demand a treaty that formally neutralizes Ukraine on the model of post-war Austria. That’s four. It will press hard for the constitution of a pan-European security architecture which accords Russia a legitimate place. That’s five” (Brenner, 2024).

It would indeed be hard for Russia to trust NATO and its member states after the 1990 promises not to expand NATO further eastward, after the then leaders of France and Germany—the two guarantors of the Minsk Agreements—have recognized that the accords were meant to give Kiev time to rearm and train its military with the help from the West. However, as Michael Brenner notes, “the upshot is that Putin and Xi tread carefully in treating with their feckless Western counterparts who disregard the elementary precepts of diplomacy. We are fortunate in the temper of Chinese and Russian leadership. Xi and Putin are rare leaders. They are sober, rational, intelligent, very well informed, capable of broad vision, they do not harbor imperial ambitions, and while dedicated to securing their national interests are not bellicose. Moreover, they have long tenures as heads of state and are secure in power. They have the political capital to invest in projects of magnitude whose prospective payoffs will be well into the future” (Ibid). This may sound too optimistic, even too good to be true, but the Chinese and Russian leaders have, indeed, shown less nervousness than their Western counterparts, who seem to have lost faith in the ineluctable march of history towards its end while keeping up their spirit by using military rhetoric.

Ideal for Ukraine would be a scenario where it agrees to lose Russophile territories in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and agrees to a neutral status. Becoming more homogeneous, Ukraine will have more chances to develop into a relatively prosperous country. It is noteworthy that during the Soviet period Ukraine was more prosperous than Russia or Belarus, while in 2013, i.e., before the 2014 coup-d’état and the start of Russia’s military operation in 2022, Ukraine’s GDP per capita (PPP) was only $7,400 against Russia’s $18,100 and even Belarusian quite respectable $16,100 (Turchin, 2023, pp.180-181). Anders Aslund, who in no way can be suspected of being a Russophil, wrote in 2015 that in no other post-Soviet country than Ukraine oligarchs played such an important role in society and politics (Aslund,  2015, pp.8-9). Moreover, as Peter Turchin correctly emphasizes, “partial democracies with factionalism were exceptionally unstable political regimes; such countries were the most likely to descend into civil wars” (Ibid, p. 169).

However, a neutral Ukraine with a diminished territory is seen inside the country and even more so in Europe as a strategic defeat of NATO and the collective West.

The head of German’s foreign intelligence service Bruno Kahl claims that, if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, it would attack NATO countries no later than the end of the decade (Reuters, 2024b.) and the Danish defense minister expects Russian missiles landing even earlier (Reuters, 2024a). Such rhetoric, even if not corroborated by any evidence, suggests that it would be extremely difficult for European elites to swallow any solution that may be even remotely seen as Russian victory. It is hard to tell whether political elites in Europe genuinely believe that allowing Russia to win in Ukraine would open the way to Russia’s “further” aggression in Europe. Although there are no signs showing that the Kremlin has such intentions or is capable of doing that, it may well be that the propaganda tool that was initially destined to fool the masses infects also its authors. Emmanuel Todd, having meticulously studied the demographic situation in Russia and other social and economic factors, concludes that “speculations about Russia as a conqueror capable of invading Europe after defeating Ukraine lie in the domain of fantasy and propaganda” (Todd, 2024, p. 64). Yet, even if this is so, it would be an herculean task to turn the wheel of fantasy and propaganda back.

President Zelensky’s proposal of temporarily relinquishing certain territories (and getting them back later through diplomacy) against speedy accession to NATO is a non-starter, since there had been no territorial problems between the two Slavic states that led to the conflict in Ukraine. The main causes of the war were Kiev’s NATO ambitions and NATO’s objective to use Ukraine for constraining Russia. Therefore, taking into account Washington’s desire to diminish its involvement in this European crisis, it would be more prudent of Europeans, instead of fuelling Kiev’s NATO ambitions, to offer it a speedy admission to the EU. Although this may result in Ukrainization of Europe rather than Europeanization of Ukraine, by doing so the EU and its member states could show that they are really concerned about Ukraine’s future and not using it to fight Russia up to the last Ukrainian. Wolfgang Streeck writes: “Any negotiated settlement of the war is likely for some time to preclude an accession of Ukraine to NATO. In compensation, fast-track admission to the EU could be offered, not least because it would secure funds for repairing the damage caused by the war—funds that the U.S. is unlikely to be willing or able to afford” (Streeck, 2024, p. 210).

In my opinion, a permanent neutrality would be the best, and may be the only, guarantee of Ukraine’s security. However, to accept neutrality as a guarantee, it is necessary that the West overcome its Manichean mentality of dividing the world into democracies and dictatorships, likeminded and other-minded, etc., and bring back neutrality status to its honorable place. Many of today’s conflicts and violations of international law have been caused by the West’s distorted vision of the world as a liberal-democratic garden surrounded by a jungle and misconception that “those who are not with us (and not like us) are against us.”

To Continue Using Other Means
Nikolai Yu. Silaev
Ukraine is the West’s largest geopolitical asset whose use in war against Russia does not automatically lead to a direct armed (and potentially nuclear) conflict between Russia and NATO. There is no other such asset.
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Europe — not an example for others, rather in need of devassalization

The structural problems discussed above have led to deep crises and revolutionary situations in China, USSR, and the U.S. Yet Europe’s situation is even worse, with no responsible political leadership in sight to address it. Italian historian Giovanni Orsina makes no exaggeration writing about crises in three biggest European countries (France, Germany, and Italy): “… it is obvious that Western representative democracies are in deep trouble and that this is not a contingent but a structural phenomenon. We have waves of protests of considerable segments of populations who, abandoned by self-centered ruling oligarchies, feel themselves at the mercy of the world that has become more and more complex and instable, within which the West has lost its privileged position” (Orsina, 2024). Orsina maintains that, although Italy under Giorgia Meloni may have found a way out of the precipice, at least for a while, the other two biggest EU states have combined economic, political and constitutional crises, and the EU, instead of being a solution, is becoming more and more an aggravating circumstance.

One of the most dangerous ideas, which can take different forms (Christianization, Islamization, colonialization, democratization, liberalization, etc.), is the idea of the unification and uniformization of the world (or even part of it) since the world is simply too big, complex and diverse to have its rich tapestry flattened into a carpet where only one pattern, be it Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon, Confucian, Muslim or secular liberal-democratic, dominates. We can see that even a small westernmost part of the Eurasian continent is too complex and diverse to be made fit for the Procrustean bed of the European Union. I was struck by Emmanuel Todd’s observation, written as if in passing, about “a liberal West and an authoritarian West” and that “the latter could have included Russia if its approaches would have been accepted in 1990-2006” (Todd, 2024, p. 141). Conversely, in those years the West was not only ready to contain the Kremlin by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, but also demanded that the latter promise to aspire to become more like the West.

In fact, the collective West has never been able to accept those who do not toe the line and who do not pretend to aspire to become more like the West.

Emphasizing gender and sexual diversity, as well as religious diversity within societies, Western elites vehemently reject the diversity of societies’ organization as states, even when it is due to the millennia of their history. Meanwhile, as Wolfgang Streeck shows in his recent book (Streeck, 2024), the more democratic societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. Therefore, the EU’s policies and attempts to standardize the economies of its members and also homogenize their internal and international politics is not only undemocratic (and it certainly is) but also goes against the general trend towards democratization of international relations, where sovereign states prefer to choose their policies without blatant interference into their domestic affairs. That is why proud Georgians, rejecting the dictate coming either from the East or the West, paused until 2028 on their accession to the European Union. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, defining EU policies towards his country as blackmail, said: “We are a proud and self-respecting nation with a rich history; therefore, it’s categorically unacceptable to view EU integration as an act of mercy” (Politico, 2024). As British Professor Philip Cunliffe pointedly noted, “von der Leyen [the President of the European Commission] is less the executive of an open democracy and more the chief officer of a Soviet politburo.” (Cunliffe, 2024). And French philosopher Chantal Delsol argues that “the populists, contrary to what some may say, are really democrats, but they are not liberals. At the same time, universalist elites, like those in Brussels, are really liberals, who are not any more democrats since they don’t like when people vote to limit some liberties” (Delsol, 2018). I would add that their liberalism applies only to those policies that conform to their liberal views.

While showing arrogance towards those in Eastern Europe who dare display independence of their mind, the EU and its member states are not ashamed of their servility towards Washington. In the last several decades, European political elites have allowed themselves to be vassalized by Washington. Emmanuel Todd writes that within the collective West, “Europeans are playing the role of vassals” (Todd, 2024, p. 28). Moreover, the very evolution of the EU contradicts the trend that is becoming increasingly visible across the world: instead of rigid institutional straightjackets à la the EU or NATO, states tend to cooperate on various matters without giving up there sovereignty (an illustrative example is BRICS+ countries).

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has made Washington’s European vassals extremely nervous since the process of devassalization may be indeed painful. This reminds me of an episode in Denmark’s history of the 1770s, when royal physician Johann Friedrich Struensee became, by a strange and fatal confluence of circumstances, very close to the physically feeble and mentally unstable King Christian VII and, using (or abusing) his influence, ultimately became de facto prime minister of the country. He issued laws that, among other wonderful things, led to the abolition of serfdom and subsidies to unprofitable industries owned by the nobility (see: Enquist, 2003; Ross and Espersen, 1980, p. 707). Remarkably, he also permitted the freedom of expression and religious freedoms, but the serfs, not knowing what to do with the newly acquired freedoms, instead of thanking the King (or Struensee), revolted against the authorities and the freedom of expression was used against Struensee. He was decapitated. This episode, besides typifying vassals’ (the European political elites’) confusion and apprehension of the new lord’s policies (Trump’s second coming to power), shows that exporting democracy and liberal ideas into hostile soils is counterproductive. Egypt, being traumatized by the Arab Spring, which was meant, according to Condoleezza Rice,[3] to democratize the entire Middle East, was prudent enough to return to the military dictatorship instead of succumbing, like some of its neighbors, to a civil war. As Peter Turchin writes, “the end result of the 2011-2014 crisis was that Egypt returned to a traditional—for it, at least—power configuration, which has been in place for at least a millennium” (Turchin, 2023, p. 117).

Although today no European leader is openly calling for the establishment of the “ever closer union” (it is replaced now by the phrase “we need more Europe, not less”), the dominant trend is still towards Europe’s federalization, although it is being counterbalanced by calls for a union of nation-states. Even EU members are not willing to get rid of their sovereignty. Mathieu Bock-Coté is right in saying that “when one attacks national sovereignty and historical identity of the people, its cultural heritage or civilizational roots of the Western world, one undermines knowingly or inadvertently what has helped democracy survive. The men and women fought against totalitarianisms not only to save their rights but also to save their country, their culture and their civilization” (Bock-Coté, 2019, p. 326).

Besides the competition of these two trends—the EU’s further federalization versus retaining or even strengthening the sovereignty of its member states—there is a host of more specific problems: the criticism of widening the Union (i.e., extending it to Central and Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states) instead of deepening the integration of the Union’s historical core; the issue of a multi-speed Union; difficulties with the Schengen zone, and the difficulties of EU membership for Moldova and Ukraine. Attempts to resolve this bundle of controversial problems indeed amount to the Herculean (or rather Archimedean) task of squaring the circle. Wolfgang Streeck summarizes one of the important aspects of his analysis in the following way: “It will not do damage to the interest of citizens and peoples—of ordinary people—if they, as they increasingly do, resist further centralization, unification, and integration, and, to the contrary, insist on a return of power and responsibility, and, indeed, sovereignty, to political formations more down to earth, closer to the ground, after the failure of global governance and similar neoliberal chimeras” (Streeck, 2024, p, XV).

It is difficult to disagree with this conclusion. Dani Rodrik has earlier shown that there is a fundamental incompatibility between hyper-globalization, on the one hand, and democracy and national sovereignty, on the other (Rodrik, 2007). One cannot have all of them at the same time. While decades ago the EU could be considered by many a successful experiment of integration, showing the world at large its possible bright future (quite in the spirit of Marxist interpretation of history), today many Europeans realize that regional hyper-globalization, even in the Western corner of Eurasia, is causing backlashes. Bureaucratic and technocratic centralization à la von der Leyen, expanding the EU mandate beyond its traditional (already too wide) competences to military affairs, thereby transforming the EU into NATO’s auxiliary or its replacement, is increasing opposition to such policies in most EU member states.  

The Western corner of Eurasia cannot have security against Russia, only together with Russia. This is understood by many in Europe. Thierry de Montbrial, the IFRI President and founder, warns: “If Europe and Russia do not find during a reasonable period of time ground for a strong mutual understanding, both will run the risk of finding themselves as objects of a great-power competition, which is already unfolding between the United States and China for future domination in the Eurasian continent” (de Montbrial, 2017, p. 140). And Caroline Galactéros, a French political scientist, incisively points out that “strategic rapprochement of the EU with Russia would add additional value to Europe in new geopolitical games.” (Galactéros, 2019). However, such voices are not mainstream in Western media, to say nothing of the political elites that are on the war path.

Imperialism and the Rise of Populism
Rein Müllerson
Instead of pouring oil on the fire of the relentless struggle between self-declared progressivists and populists and looking for dragons (or bears) to slay abroad, Western politicians and mainstream media should resort to the art of compromise in dealing with their political opponents at home and accept that in international relations balance of power is even more important than separation of powers in domestic politics.
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Returning international law to replace the rules-based order

Wolfgang Friedmann of Columbia University, one of the 20th century’s greatest legal minds, predicted in the 1960s a trend towards bifurcation of international law into the law of coexistence, the law of cooperation, and the law of integration (Friedmann, 1964). Whereas the first corresponds to the traditional inter-state international society where states, their sovereignty and independence from outside interference prime, the latter would correspond more to what Friedmann believed to be an emerging world society where not only or not even so much states but also individuals with their rights and various other entities, including supranational ones, would be influential actors. Since then the development of international law has indeed diverged. In Europe, instead of international law we have the EU law—a law of integration. And human rights are no longer—and not only in Europe but across the world—a matter exclusively within states’ domestic jurisdiction. We even have international criminal courts and tribunals, although their functioning has so far shown that mechanisms that work rather well within states have relatively limited, sometimes even distorted, effects when transplanted into the domain of international relations. We live in a world that has become Lockean in some places but remains Hobbesian in many other regions, or, as Robert Kagan has written, “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus” (Kagan, 2003). If in Europe the law of integration, even a supra-national law, has indeed emerged, the wider—Hobbesian—world where men from Mars act, still needs stricter observance of the law of coexistence with its principles of respect of sovereignty of states notwithstanding differences of their political and economic systems, non-use of force, and non-interference in domestic affairs. The latter principle seems to be the most important since its violations have often led to the use of military force either as a follow-up to insufficient interference or with the aim of countering such interference.

Today, notwithstanding Kantian hopes prevailing at the end of the Cold War, the world is more and more revealing its Hobbesian characteristics. Maybe, instead of following Kantian instincts it would have been better at the turn of the centuries to concentrate our efforts on taming Hobbesian reflexes. In terms of international law, it would have meant that those principles and norms that belong to the so-called law of coexistence, to use Wolfgang Friedmann’s terminology, such as respect of sovereign equality of states, non-use of force and non-interference in domestic affairs should retain and even reinforce their role.

For many decades, the West has used and abused human rights concerns by interfering in domestic affairs of states, whose internal political or economic systems and particularly whose role in international relations were seen in the West as contrary to Western interests, without having any positive impact on human rights in target states. Since the end of the bipolar world, such interferences have not only intensified but have become legitimized as ‘humanitarian interventions’ or as a means of ‘promoting democracy.’ And once again with no positive results. In February 2014, one could see on the TV how U.S. Senator John McCain expressed American support for the opponents of the Ukrainian authorities, while then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the then U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, discussed in a telephone conversation, that was later leaked, the composition of Ukraine’s new government. It all ended very sadly for Ukraine. Yet, notwithstanding the failure in Ukraine, at the end of 2024, European diplomats, once again, participated in opposition rallies on the streets of Tbilisi against the government of Georgia, and the European Union incited the rebels to continue their protests.

Many, like myself, and, importantly, those in a position of power, acting ingenuously upon their naïve beliefs, have contributed to the rise to power of those who have high-jacked positive, but immature, fruits that emerged at the end of the Cold War. However, on a more optimistic note, I believe that not all is lost. We should work towards a realistically achievable state of international relations where no state, or a group of states, would impose its visions and values on the whole world, which is too big and diverse to be ruled from one center. The main role of international law should be the prevention and resolution of misunderstandings, tensions and conflicts between states without trying to impose uniformity on differing societies. This simply does not work. Moreover, it is counterproductive.

True, arrogance and recklessness of a superpower (and especially a hyperpower) cannot be tamed or controlled only by international law. There has to be another superpower or a coalition of great powers to bring to senses a triumphalist superpower running amok. Already in 2004, Martti Koskenniemi noted that “to apply Schmitt’s description of the new Nomos [law] to the behavior of the Western powers in Kosovo and Iraq, the 50-year interlude may be explained by the Cold War having prevented a full-scale moralization of international politics. Ironically, then, for a century, the Soviet Union may have taken the role of the Schmittian Katechon—the restrainer of the coming of the Antichrist” (Koskenniemi, 2004, p. 493). Of course, Moscow did not play the role of an idealistic restrainer of Washington’s arrogance, but one of the effects, or side-effects if you will, of the relative balance of power was certainly that it put limits on the use of force in international relations, and not only between the two superpowers; it had restraining effects beyond. Then international law, too, could play its civilizing function.

The emerging multipolarity would not only create better conditions for the functioning of international law and relatively peaceful world. It could also be benefitial for the power that has tried to perpetuate its hegemony.

Aris Roussinos is right when he observes: “Just as the bipolar order of the Cold War world, by restraining liberalism’s inherent tendencies to radicalization and hubris, made the Western world safe for a tempered and moderate liberalism, so may the multipolar world we have entered save liberals from their own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their voters at home, liberals will once again have to learn restraint” (Roussinos, 2024).

When in January 2017 then British Prime Minister Theresa May during her visit to Washington declared that there is no “return to the failed policies of the past. The days of Britain and America intervening in sovereign countries in an attempt to remake the world in our own image are over” (May, 2017), I felt cautiously optimistic. The British Prime Minister vowed never to repeat the “failed policies of the past” in reference to Western military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, breaking from “liberal interventionism” advocated by her distant predecessor Tony Blair and brought to fruition by her immediate predecessor David Cameron in Libya. Add to this the West’s inteference in other countries’ domestic affairs, political pressure and economic sanctions not authorized by the UN Security Council.

Hubert Védrine, former French foreign minister, believed that “in the future democracy and human rights will progress much less through the prescriptions and interference from the outside by the West than through dependence on the internal dynamics of individual societies” (Védrine, 2016, p. 79). However, these good ideas were not followed by corresponding practices. Theresa May’s successors, particularly Boris Johnson, became most actively involved in pouring the fuel in the Ukraine conflict, and Labour’s Keir Starmer, who famously warned that “there would be ‘no room’ in Labour for anyone who [is] seeking to blame the Western alliance for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” continues the disastrous policy of foreign interference. With any luck, Donald Trump’s second round in power may contribute to cooling down the British and other European leaders’ missionary zeal, although it is not so much the personality of the U.S. 47th President that matters but the revolutionary situation in the United States and the changing geopolitical and geo-economic configuration of the world.

What Went Wrong?
Rein Müllerson
Although Russia is responsible for its actions, there are those, both in Ukraine and particularly in the West, who have been working hard for years to transform Ukraine into a bridgehead, even a launching pad against Russia, not caring at all what it may ultimately mean not only for Russia but also for Ukraine.
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References

[1] However, only one of them seems to have been more or less conscious of where the attempts to tame the waves of historical processes would lead his country.

[2] On 9 December 2022, German ex-Chancellor Merkel said in an interview to Die Zeit: “The Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.” “It was clear to all of us that this was a frozen conflict, that the problem had not been solved, but that is precisely what gave Ukraine valuable time” Merkel told Die Zeit (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html).

[3] Speaking of the developments in the Middle East, she claimed, without any sign of irony or hesitation in her voice, that “what we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing – the birth pangs of a new Middle East” (Rice, 2006).

_________________________

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