Ukraine changes our world view
The invasion of Ukraine argues to take much more seriously the authoritarian alliance announced by Russia and China just a few weeks prior.
And that, in turn, argues for a reorientation of American foreign policy and even of the international order.
The alliance took the form of a joint statement rejecting the norms of democratic governance and market economies, and an international order based upon rules established by countries practicing them.
In 2008, Robert Kagan wrote a book, “The Return of History,” that is proving prescient. The driver of geopolitics, he asserted, wouldn’t be a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington had posited more than a decade earlier. Instead, it would be competition and tension between democracies and autocracies.
The Russia-China alliance and declaration is pretty conclusive evidence that Kagan got it right.
There has been an enduring discussion in American foreign policy circles about the balance between pursing realpolitik national interests and advancing our values of individual rights, democratic governance, rule of law and market economies.
This was most acute in the Cold War. If a despot was anti-Soviet and strategically placed, it was a U.S. ally and received U.S. support.
This purportedly necessary trade-off has survived the end of the Cold War. Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Yet among foreign policy practitioners of both parties, it has been regarded as an ally.
With the formal announcement
the authoritarian alliance between two countries with powerful militaries, the perceived tension between our realpolitik interests and our values shrinks, and perhaps disappears.
The alliance formally stands in opposition to our values. The invasion of Ukraine is to prevent a neighbor from growing into them.
China has extinguished those values in Hong Kong and violated treaty obligations in so doing. It threatens to do the same in Taiwan. It engaged in a trade war with Australia, demanding the suppression of free speech there critical of it.
After being on the march globally in the 1980s and 1990s, democratic capitalism has been in retreat over the last two decades. Authoritarianism has been on the rise.
The Biden administration has taken tentative steps to create a larger sense of shared interests among democratic countries, with its Summit for Democracy. But there has been no strategic direction or heft to it.
The invasion of Ukraine has provided both. A consensus formed in democratic Europe to not only assist the Ukrainians but also to isolate Russia, take seriously its security threat, and treat it as a pariah regime.
Until President Joe Biden started improvising during his NATO summit trip, the United States appropriately stayed within the European consensus, being neither too far ahead nor behind it.
But the alliance and the joint statement make clear that this is far more than just a Ukrainian or European security challenge. This is the world Kagan described.
Reorienting American foreign policy to operate in this world requires an acceptance of it. Americans are optimists by nature. But goodwill, diplomacy and economic engagement didn’t keep Putin’s Russia from brutalizing Ukraine. They will not change China, at least so long as Xi remains the reigning strongman.
They have declared themselves in the joint statement. We should assume they mean what they say. Ukraine should remove any doubt.
That should make alliances with other democratic countries the focus of American foreign policy. But rather than assertions of American bossiness, it should be more like the Ukrainian response, where the United States is part of a consensus led by those democracies most directly affected geographically.
This shouldn’t be the United States vs. China or Russia or North Korea. That‘s the framing the autocrats want and exploit, domestically and internationally. It should be broad, regional democratic alliances vs. regional autocracies.
Fully committed, it will require some at least minor domestic sacrifices here. We expect Europe to pay more for oil and natural gas to remove the leverage Russia has over it, and the Europeans seem prepared to do that. We should be willing to pay more for manufactured goods to further our economic disengagement from China.
If this is a conflict and competition between democracies and autocracies, then no autocrats should be regarded as allies. The Saudis are reportedly upset that we would not fight their battles for them vigorously enough. They are increasing their engagement with Russia and China. So be it.
Israel has to play a realpolitik game with the region’s despots. We don’t.
Some will regard such a reorientation of American foreign policy to strengthening alliances with fellow democracies, while disengaging from regional geopolitical conflicts in which these values are not at stake and from supposedly friendly autocrats, as naïve.
True naivety would be ignoring the meaning of the authoritarian alliance, the joint statement, the suppression of Hong Kong and the invasion of Ukraine.