Cold War language about Western unity and the “long fight” against autocracy has become more rousing as Russia flounders in Ukraine. It is time to start worrying that the response to Vladimir Putin's aggression, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, might cause more widespread damage than even the Russian despot had planned.
One only has to recall the Western reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. After that atrocity, politicians and journalists freely indulged in the kind of spine-stiffening rhetoric Biden used in Warsaw last week. Those few dissenters who warned against self-congratulatory hawkishness — including the late writer Susan Sontag, who pleaded, “Let's not be stupid together” — were viciously attacked.
As it happened, the decision to declare an open-ended war on terror — quickly taken and fulsomely endorsed in that atmosphere of fervent unanimity — led to violence on multiple continents and helped unravel entire societies.
The fanatics of al-Qaida never posed a serious threat to Western political, military and economic power. Their suicidal attack was, arguably, symptomatic of the overall decline of militant Islam worldwide. Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine seems another sign of thwarted energies that have turned self-destructive.
Yet rhetorical overkill and thoughtless policy from Western powers might well accelerate their own loss of legitimacy while helping turn a regional crisis into a global conflagration.
Certainly, memories of the counter-productive response to 9/11 weigh heavily on the minds of those — a large part of the world’s population — who do not share the Western goals of isolating and punishing Russia through sanctions. Since 9/11, most people around the world have regarded the Western ideology and practice of humanitarian intervention, democracy-promotion and regime change with increasing distrust. Such skeptics are unlikely to be stirred by Biden’s denunciations of autocracy, broadcast from illiberal Poland of all places.
Russophobia, latent or manifest in a range of actions in the West today, is about as likely to bring about positive change as Islamophobia. There is little evidence that global isolation and humiliation can motivate a people to overthrow their oppressive leaders.
And Putin is more equipped than any Islamist demagogue to take advantage of his citizens’ anger at the West. He is adept at packaging his imperialism as a riposte to the real and perceived humiliations of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even if Putin is overthrown at some point, a more unhinged form of chauvinism may well emerge from a defeated, immiserated and still nuclear-armed Russia.
Those Western hawks comparing Putin to Adolf Hitler and lamenting appeasement at Munich in 1938 should go back a bit further in history and remember how the Treaty of Versailles after World War I made another global calamity inevitable.
They ought also to reflect on how the West’s talk of antagonistic and irreconcilable blocs undermines its own ideology of globalization. It was Western politicians, businessmen and journalists, after all, who claimed that the end of the Cold War had made possible a new world order in which market forces rightly prevailed over state sovereignty and soft power over hard, creating a “win-win” scenario for all nations and peoples.
This “flat world” was, of course, always an optical illusion. The West’s advanced nation-states deeply influenced transnational networks of trade and capital. The ownership, assets and intellectual property of multinational banks, companies and insurance firms remained largely in their home countries. And the global economy remained subject to regulation by Western-dominated organizations such as the G-7, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Most non-Western countries resented this “rules-based liberal order” even as they went along with it. When globalization seemed to empower a rival to the West, such as China, they were quick to note how quickly leaders such as former U.S. President Donald Trump moved to undermine it.
The swift abandonment of Russia by Western businesses has reinforced the idea that this new world order is controlled by and primarily designed for the benefit of a minority of Europeans and Americans. The weaponizing of globalization by its principal movers and shakers undercuts their claim to be creating a moral, political and economic universalism that transcends nation-state rivalries.
Western cold warriors would do better to direct their energies to negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. It is swift peace-making that can stave off, among other things, a bleak future of hunger and chaos, especially for the poor countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East that depend on Russia and Ukraine for energy, fertilizer and food.
Biden can’t seem to stop talking about the importance of Western unity. But unity in itself is not a virtue. As Sontag noted, it is always possible to be stupid together.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include “Age of Anger: A History of the Present,” “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” and “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
