Is the West Triumphant Again?
Even if the Russian invasion of Ukraine fails completely, the West will still have to deal with a messy world.
By Kishore Mahbubani
Published on 7 July 2022
The National Interest
A
new tsunami of triumphalism is sweeping across Western capitals,
particularly in Washington and London. The illegal Russian invasion of
Ukraine has been thwarted. The Ukrainians are putting up a glorious
fight to defend their freedom. A new solidarity has been forged between
America and Europe. The joint Western sanctions have crippled and
isolated the Russian economy. Surely China is quaking in its boots at
the thought of similar sanctions being imposed on it.
The
above description of Western triumphalism may be an exaggeration, but
not by much. There’s only one fundamental problem with a triumphalist
mindset: it leads to sloppy geopolitical thinking. And just as the West
wasted its post-Cold War “End of History” moment, it could do so
again—unless it (especially the United States) recognizes that some hard
geopolitical realities haven’t changed. Here are a few.
First,
the West still makes up only 12 percent of the world’s population. The
rest make up 88 percent. It’s true that a majority of UN member states
voted to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as they should. But
the countries that abstained made up more than half the world’s
population. Equally importantly, most of the 88 percent don’t see the
Ukraine issue simply as one of good versus evil, democracies versus
autocracies. Instead, they also see a parallel Western project to bleed
and cripple Russia. U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin admitted this
publicly. For many countries in the world, including friends of the
United States, like India, bleeding Russia doesn’t serve their national interests.
Second,
the bullets fired by the West against Russia, especially the economic
sanctions (and the seizure of Russian Central Bank assets) were truly
awesome. They were powerful. The Chinese are now under no illusion that
similar sanctions will one day hit them. It would be foolish, if not
downright irresponsible, for China not to plan its defenses against
similar sanctions. Hence, if similar bullets are fired against China,
say ten years from now, they will be blanks. The Chinese dependence on
the U.S. dollar will progressively diminish. In one way or another, a
parallel universe of countries tied more closely to the Chinese economy
will emerge.
Third, it would be unwise for most counties of the world not to follow China in
buying some insurance from potentially devastating sanctions. Even
friendly countries like Saudi Arabia and South Africa will want to hedge
their bets. The West’s myopia in dealing with Russia is also revealed
by the unwise efforts to try and exclude Russia from the forthcoming G20
summit. The countries of the G7, which support the exclusion of Russia
from the G20, make up about 11 percent of the world’s population. The
countries that don’t support the exclusion of Russia make up over 40
percent of the world’s population. As Ambassador Ngurah Swajaya of
Indonesia said recently, “putting significant pressure on Indonesia is
simply unfair when it is trying to salvage the G20 and its relevance to
all, particularly developing countries.”
In
short, instead of the West winning a clear-cut victory, even if the
Russian invasion of Ukraine fails completely, it will have to deal with a
messy world, where most countries of the world will buy insurance, from
both the United States and China.
Many still have memories of having suffered from perfidious Western
colonial ventures. Few in London or Paris would remember that they tried
to colonize Thailand. Thailand remembers that the Russian tsar helped
Thailand navigate this treacherous period of Thai history.
The
wisest thing for most policymakers in Washington to do is to abandon
this triumphalist mindset and do some cold and hard geopolitical
calculations. Any cold assessment will
show that the American-British effort to totally weaken and topple
Russia is unwise. At the end of the day, Russia will not disappear. A
totally angry and alienated Russia is not in European interests. Russia
will be a neighbor of Europe for the next thousand years. And it will
have reasonably good relations with most countries in the world, outside
the West (the 12 percent).
Winston Churchill once wisely advised, “In victory, magnanimity.” A compromise solution in Ukraine, based on Henry Kissinger’s formula of
Ukrainian political independence, international neutrality, and
national reconciliation would still be the best way out. It’s important
to add here that most of the rest of the world (the 88 percent) is
genuinely shocked that no major Western voices are advocating peace in
Ukraine. Instead, they only hear loud war drums. They would agree that
Putin should be condemned for invading Ukraine. But they also believe
that a total effort to defeat and eliminate Putin is unwise. The bottom line is that a messy peace that preserves world order is preferable to the instability of a protracted conflict.
Kishore
Mahbubani, a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the
National University of Singapore, is the author of Has China Won? The
Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (2020).