The Ukraine crisis is the final nail in the coffin of the Western liberal order
For all its threats of “swift and severe” consequences, the West looks drained and compromised. Its citizens have little appetite for confrontation of any kind (only 13 percent support the deployment of American troops). Neither do European leaders, given their countries’ reliance on Russian gas. Nor can the West properly punish Putin and Kremlin-linked oligarchs without incurring enormous pain itself – pain that many Nato members are evidently unwilling to bear.
The implications are not just catastrophic for Ukraine – they are seismic for the world. The West is quietly abandoning its guiding mission since the end of the Cold War: to integrate the former Soviet Union – and ultimately the whole world – into the liberal order. The ecstatic story that once energised it – of the world’s long march towards liberal democracy – imploded in the chaos of the Iraq war. Ukraine confirms that ambition for such a cause is now definitively lost.
But the disaster afflicting the liberal order goes much deeper than that. A euphoric belief in the power of globalisation has also ended in a crisis of faith. For years, Western thinkers have subscribed to the doctrine of “just-in-time” supply chains, whose fragility became painfully obvious during the pandemic. They also followed the logic that Europe could hoover up the natural resources of developing countries like Russia, with the latter using the windfall to turbocharge their economic progress, in a win-win for freedom. Instead, the West only reinforced a dangerous dependency on energy supplies from rogue states, while the likes of Putin shored up their positions. …
One can only hope that the Ukraine fiasco is a wake-up call for Western elites. That they can finally accept that the old liberal order has failed and a new one must take its place. The evidence to date is that the penny has only partially dropped. The reluctance of Berlin to drop the Nord Stream 2 project is hardly a reassuring sign that it grasps the urgent need to start prioritising self-sufficiency in its energy supply. Europe’s botched net zero transition is another disaster area; our foolish attempt to ramp up renewables – rather than hedging our bets with massive and immediate investment in fracking and nuclear – will take up to 20 years to correct.
One thing we know for sure: Ukraine is not not an isolated story of Russian aggression or Western impotence. It is merely the first earthquake as the world’s tectonic plates begin to shift.