As the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, there is little sign of an end to hostilities. Professor of Global Political Economy at the London School of Economics, Robert H. Wade, explains how the competing ideologies of Russia and the US got us to this point, and how each side’s interests can be brought together through a compromise that can end the war.
The Ukrainian crisis expresses the clash of two megapowers that shape the world order. One is the long-standing US claim of “primacy” or “hegemony” over all other countries. Presidents Putin and Xi speak often and fondly of the decline of the US and the disintegration of the West, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. Yet what is striking about the US and Western response to Russia’s invasion is how strongly the US has united other Western countries – and Western multinational corporations – to isolate a prominent G-20 country and former G-8 member. This is US “hegemony” in action.
The second long-standing mega power comes from Russia. Observers’ tendency to focus on Putin’s actions misses Russia’s long-held goal of becoming the center of Eurasian politics, culture and economics. This focus on Putin, coupled with the hope of regime change to democracy, also misses the more important point that Russia has for centuries operated as a “patrimonial” state, a personal fiefdom of the Tsar, a structure widely accepted by the Russian population as something ” normal”. Nobles hold status and property at the king’s discretion. Today’s oligarchs are in the same position, which means that, as in China, there is no private sector in the Western sense; rather state and non-state sector.
Eurasianism in Russia
Ever since the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, a number of Russian thinkers developed an ideology of Eurasianism. It was suppressed during the Soviet period, but exploded during perestroika in the late 1980s. The ideology places not only America, but the entire Atlantic world as Russia’s adversary in the “clash of civilizations,” with Russian Orthodoxy harnessed as the fuse in the coming geopolitical war. Under Putin, themes of imperial glory and the victimization of the West have been brought to center stage across the country.
Ukraine figured in the Eurasian ideology as an obstacle from the beginning. Eurasian ideologues in the 1920s were already talking about the “Ukrainian problem”, portraying Ukraine as too “individualistic” and not Orthodox enough. Prominent ideologues of the 1990s defined Ukrainian sovereignty as, in the words of one, “a huge danger to all of Eurasia.” Russia’s Eurasia project, he said, requires as an “absolute imperative” full control of the entire northern Black Sea coast (not least to preserve the Black Sea as western Russia’s only ice-free access to the sea). Ukraine was to become a “purely administrative sector of the Russian centralized state”.
This is the ideology that motivates Putin, which led him to declare Ukraine a “(Western) puppet regime colony” on the eve of the February 24, 2022 invasion. This is the ideology that inspires and justifies the brutal war in his eyes.
US and NATO strategy
The US’s broad foreign policy toward Russia and China aims to ensure that neither becomes a “regional hegemon,” let alone one of sufficient scope to challenge US hegemony. This larger strategy to contain Russia is the context for understanding the expansion of NATO members along Russia’s entire border, from the Baltics to Bulgaria, and 30,000 NATO-designated troops; and to understand why the Kremlin does not see NATO as a defensive alliance, despite NATO’s protestations that it is only that.
Not surprisingly, Moscow has long viewed US and NATO actions as deeply hostile, aimed at inducing “regime change” in the Kremlin and installing a ruler who accepts US hegemony so that the US can block the Sino-Russian bloc and to focus more entirely on containing China.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country was subjected to the harshest sanctions the US and Europe have ever imposed on any country. As noted, even for those skeptical of claims of the “end of American empire” it is astonishing how effectively the US has mobilized Western nations around the project of isolating one of the world’s largest economies, one of the two largest nuclear powers, and the most -the major supplier of energy to Europe, as if it were North Korea.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian explained that the aim was to “suffocate Russia’s economy”, even if the West was harmed in the process. The damage to the West is a price worth paying for regime change in Moscow with new leaders who respect US primacy.
Meanwhile, China is watching and possibly recalculating its confidence in the decline of the West. That recalculation has also prompted Beijing to forge closer ties with Moscow — but Beijing also wants to make sure it doesn’t help Russia to the point where China becomes subject to even more Western sanctions and to the point where Russia can win enough in Ukraine to challenge China’s strategy to dominate the Eurasian landmass, which is underway in the form of infrastructure alliances created by the giant Belt and Road initiative.
How does the war end?
In countries that have suffered from Russian imperial rule in the recent past, including Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine, the most popular view is that everything can only end with the collapse of the Russian Federation. Ukraine and the West must keep the Russian military bogged down and sanctions in place until the disaster in Russia becomes sufficient to build enough support – with Western help – for the separatist movements to split the federation.
Others, including Ukrainian President Zelensky, say the war can only end with Ukraine returning all territories annexed by Russia, including Crimea, and of course removing Putin. This goes hand in hand with the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine and other countries along Russia’s western and southern borders.
The third broad position says that the West and the Ukrainian government should accept an outcome in which Russia does not win, Ukraine does not lose, the war does not expand beyond Ukraine, both sides agree to something like the Minsk agreement, and there will be no need to change regime in Moscow. This “realistic” scenario is the most likely, especially since the US and other NATO countries are themselves under acute economic pressure, quite apart from the financial, military equipment and personnel demands of the war in Ukraine.
The effects of the economic rift with Russia have been felt acutely in Europe in the form of rising prices, energy shortages, food shortages, lost jobs, the admission of many millions of Ukrainian refugees and the admission of even more refugees from starving countries that previously relied on Ukrainian and Russian grain and fertilizers. The costs are significant even in the US, where inflation is high and President Biden’s approval ratings are fragile.
At some point, the US and other Western nations will have to abandon any aspirations they may have for regime change. They would have to push for a compromise: for Moscow to abandon its intention to annex much of eastern Ukraine, and for Kyiv to settle for less than all of its land. Negotiations starting soon in 2023 may avoid more casualties (already hundreds of thousands) and Ukraine from being reduced to rubble. The West will have to learn from the past and not treat Russia as a blank canvas on which to etch Western-style capitalism and democracy, as it tried to do after the collapse of the Soviet Union and later in Iraq.
