Bring Back Realism

Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine is due to a failure of the West to adequately respect the international order it built, and recognize that other countries have interests of their own.

Liberalism emphasizes cooperation via international institutions and norms, such as the United Nations or international customary law. It sees this as a means to reduce conflict. Realists, on the other hand, have often seen the world as anarchical and self-interested, with cooperation potential limited.

World War II changed all that. In its aftermath, the victors gathered together to create the United Nations, after several other failed liberal experiments such as the League of Nations.

But in its establishment, there lies an inherent contradiction. Liberalism never truly valued cooperation and respect for individual sovereignty among states. It simply created a clique of great powers — the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and China — who divvied up the world and decided amongst themselves what was and was not permissible.

Without having created a truly democratic order, liberal internationalists simply the created the façade of liberal international order where institutions more or less maintained global peace and reduced conflict.

Indeed, the Cold War, for example, has cast its shadow over most of the post-World War II order. The United States and the Soviet Union clashed for supremacy, each following what they perceived to be their own interests.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the world’s singular and unchallenged super power. The pax americana meant that the world was, relatively speaking, at peace.

But this was not due to some international order liberal internationalists had created. All of that was a Potemkin village disguising the fact that the world retained individual states with their own interests, and not always aligned with those of the United States.

Talk of state sovereignty and territorial integrity was a rhetorical device, as was that of democracy and human rights, as the United States, in true imperial fashion, interfered or overthrew regimes across the world to achieve its own interests.

This was most salient in March 2003 when, despite lacking United Nations authority or even evidence implicating him, the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew its dictator, Saddam Hussein ostensibly for holding weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists.

That, of course, turned out to be a lie, and the truth was simply that the United States — or those running it — had interests of their own, and acted upon them.

When another state acts in the same way as the United States, however, the response is usually some sort of condemnation and economic sanctions. That is what made Saddam a pariah to begin with: he acted in a way that pursued his own interests, while violating the United States’ preëminence.

It became clearer and clearer that the United States was, through the guise of liberal internationalism, yet another imperialist power. Cuba, Iran and Venezuela could also testify to this.

While our rhetoric usually condemns these countries for grotesque violations of human rights, which are usually valid, their true crime is in their refusal to submit to American hegemony. When taking this into account, the world order starts to look a lot more realist — “might makes right,” they say — than liberal.

American hegemony has recently, and more seriously, been challenged by China and Russia. For this reason, the United States has sought to “contain” China — much as it did with the Soviet Union — but has also been challenged by Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, to reassert itself.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia found itself in shambles economically, politically and even socially. To make a long story short, it was in dire straits and had little choice but to submit to the new American-led order.

But that is changing.

Russia never ceased to have interests of its own — nor did China or any other country on the planet — and only recently has it felt the need to reassert these interests, even if it violates the liberal internationalist tenets of respect for state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

For a long time, it felt unable to do this — but a combination of factors has given it renewed courage. To be clear, what Russia is doing today in Ukraine evidently out of weakness. It feels completely cornered, and as such is lashing out.

First, NATO expansion eastward has always been, for Russia, a question of its own security, or insecurity for that matter. Its sphere of influence consisted of countries in the former Eastern Bloc that served as a bulwark to potential invasion from the West.

Secondly, after a series of blunders abroad — Afghanistan, Iraq — leading to turmoil back home, the power of the United States seems to have begun to wane. Russia has seen an opening.

Thirdly, American willingness and that of its allies (despite some dissension) to intervene abroad — such as in Serbia in the 1990s or Iraq in 2003— in order to obtain what it wants, sent Russia a signal that it could do the same.

Russia saw this as a blatant attempt by the West, led by the United States, to pull Ukraine into its own sphere of influence. Given those aforementioned desires for a buffer, President Putin moved in. After all, Ukraine is more important for Russia than it is to the West.

If anything, Ukraine is a liability. It has little to offer to NATO economically or militarily speaking, but it is corrupt, lacking in natural defenses, and far from a full-fledged democracy even before Russia took Crimea in 2014.

For this reason, not all NATO members are even on board for its admission to NATO. And yet, the “open door” policy of NATO, holding a carrot out to Ukraine to encourage it to cozy up to the West, was enough to cross Russia’s red lines concerning its own national security interests or imperatives.

In the United States, we often like to think that we, as heroes in our own story, are always right. We see our country as a beacon of freedom and prosperity, a model for the rest of the world to follow — by force if necessary. But this ignores firstly a less rosy history of the United States working to undermine democracies and disregard human rights, but secondly that other states have interests of their own.

Expanding on this latter point, it takes the world to be governed by international law and norms, and to some extent this may be true, but only insofar as other great powers think those laws and norms will also be respected; institutions only work when all are on board.

Yes, the “might makes right” school might at least show us that other states have their own interests, and that they will defend them whether we like it or not. As such, it might allow us to make more rational choices next time such as consolidate our own dysfunctional democracies rather than use a military alliance to half-heartedly promote them abroad and antagonize nuclear-armed powers.

It is very much a realist world, no matter how liberal or ideal we make it out to be. It is not nice, it is not palatable, but that is the reality we have been dealt.

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