Two months into the Ukrainian war, let’s assess how the West is doing. Have the democracies shown themselves tougher than their autocratic rivals imagined? Or are they losing their hegemony as the world slides into a more brutal and illiberal age? Perhaps the answer to both questions is “yes.”
First, the good news. The West’s military supremacy is so total that it can win wars without directly engaging. There is a joke doing the rounds in Russia in which a wife asks her husband what the conflict in Ukraine is about. “It’s a proxy war between us and NATO,” he tells her. “How are we doing?” “So far, we have lost 15,000 troops, eight generals, and our Black Sea flagship.” “And NATO?” “They haven’t shown up yet.”
In classic, kinetic wars, the Atlantic alliance remains unbeatable. Putin is losing for some of the same reasons that Bonaparte and Hitler lost, not least the superiority of the Anglosphere’s money markets. Britain and the United States are better than their rivals at financing wars. Russia, put bluntly, will be bled dry before Ukraine gives up.
Yet if the West has again demonstrated its military-industrial might, it has also revealed its geographical limits. We can usefully define “the West” as countries that have imposed sanctions of any kind on Russia, and the list is a short one: the U.S., Canada, Britain, Europe (minus Germany and Hungary, and with a question mark over France), Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan.
The rest of the world is being studiously neutral.
“We do not consider that the war concerns us,” said Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
“Argentina does not believe that sanctions are a mechanism to generate peace and harmony,” said Argentina’s foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero.
“The UAE believes that taking sides would only lead to more violence,” said Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to United Arab Emirates President Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan. Sure enough, the Emirati airline is continuing to fly in and out of Russia.
During the Iraq War, the U.S. was able to strong-arm various Latin American, Asian, African, and Pacific states to back it, as well, naturally, as several Arab countries, which had their own reasons for wanting Saddam gone. This time, though, the global south is sitting on its hands — to the palpable delight of the Russians.
“These days, our Western colleagues would like to reduce any meaningful international issue to the crisis in Ukraine,” said Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister. “We appreciate that India is looking at this situation in its entirety, not just in a one-sided way.”
Think about that for a moment. India is a law-governed society. Its rulers are changed peacefully at elections, without anyone being exiled or shot. Its army has never overthrown a civilian government. Those attributes led Western leaders to see it as a natural partner against the autocracies. The U.S. recognized its nuclear status and drew it into the Quad, the four-way democratic alliance that also includes Australia and Japan. Boris Johnson, who is in India as I write, has sought to widen G-7 meetings to include India as a democracy. Yet, when the moment came, Delhi did not distinguish between an aggressive dictatorship that had attacked a sovereign state without provocation and the admittedly imperfect democracy on the receiving end of that attack.
I had hoped that the largest democracy on the planet would condemn the invasion, not as a favor to the West but because of its own values. But this has not happened, either in India or in other developing states.
More shocking than India’s position has been that of Israel, which has similarly refused to criticize Putin. I am prepared to cut Israel a lot of slack. It must make its way in a tough neighborhood, faced with dangers that most of us are spared. It cooperates with Russia against extremist groups in Syria. At the same time, though, Israel’s cause is partly a moral one. We applaud it precisely because it has remained a law-based democracy in hard circumstances. That is why it is shocking to see Israel, of all nations, unmoved by war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and deportations.
If Israel is one country that should have “never again” in its DNA, Germany is another. Yet no European state except Hungary has been so unwilling to arm Ukraine or to stop buying Russian oil and gas.
The West, in short, turns out to be a small collection of rich nations grouped around the Anglosphere. Many of us had assumed that, after the fall of communism, our values would spread, as people recognized that open societies based on individual freedoms were happier as well as more successful. Boy, were we wrong.
