The World after the Ukrainian Invasion

Two weeks and a half into the Russian invasion of Ukraine and political analysts and commentators are already asking a very important question that may seem concerned with a future that is not yet imaginable given the flow of videos and updates of the ongoing onslaught in the Eastern European nation.

However, considering where the world – the by-product of the Western civilisation and the Eastern civilisation – founds itself today, economically, technologically, geopolitically, religiously and ideologically, the question that is being asked, albeit right now only tacitly, is of crucial importance.

What we are hinting to is speculating on how the world will look like after the Ukrainian war is over. As Martin Kettle wrote in The Guardian, “after this war, the West must learn how to live with Russia”, highlighting that the “larger reformulation of relationships with Russia will not be simple” for reasons that go deeper than the current invasion of Ukraine, such as Russia’s attitude towards the rule of law and its system of governance. However, as Kettle pointed out, Russia is not going to disappear into the nether – the rest of the world will need to find a way to engage with it after the conflict is over.

There are other publications that echo these points, such as the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Financial Times and even Nature (a science-focused magazine).

All of these publications, through analyses or opinion pieces, are posing the same question, directly or indirectly: given that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a destabilising event for every global player, including the Slav nation’s most powerful ally, China, major corporations, global banks, Western governments and millions of people who are either displaced or killed (in the case of Ukrainians) or who are heading towards a strict and coercive military economy (in the case of Russians), what will the world that shall emerge from this dark fog look like?

This is an existential question for everyone to be asking themselves, even though for the moment, due to natural reasons, most of us are focused on whom and how will win the war, hoping for a negotiations to prevail and for the massacre and hardships to end. Nevertheless, we must look beyond the grim reality of today and face what is potentially an ever greater threat that lies ahead. We may be witnessing the death of the age of individual freedom, as short lived as it was, and is narrowly confined to some Western nations as it might have been.

War and the forces of civilisation

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America observed that war kills democracy. In times of war, laws, customs, economic relationships, diplomatic ties and other facets of peaceful and civilised cohabitation are suspended as the state bestows upon itself greater powers to direct, through some form of centralisation, the nation’s resources (including the manpower) towards fighting the armed conflict.

We have already seen that the Russian government has taken multiple steps in this direction. From making it illegal to use words that can describe the invasion of Ukraine as anything else other than a special military operation, arresting about 5,000 anti-war protestors some of whom have reportedly been subjected to torture and increasing censorship across the board to maintaining an aggressive propaganda programme that seems to be forming a new ideology around the symbol “Z”, introducing martial law, banning grains exports to Europe until August and taking Cold War-type measures regarding its economic relationships with the West.

Meanwhile, China – Russia’s most powerful ally – has maintained a safe distance from the conflict, for now at least. So far, the Chinese government has juggled pro-Russian propaganda at home with a seemingly liberal position abroad, stating that “China respected the sovereignty of all nations”. Although, on the day the war began, the Chinese Communist Party stated what appears to be an agreement that Russia’s invasion was justified: “China says US disrespects nations’ sovereignty after sanctions against Russia for Ukraine troop deployment”, reported the South China Morning Post. This sort of sophistry, sickening as it may be, veils nothing: China, as other “Eastern nations” like Iran, are on Russia’s side.

As Konstantin Kissin explained in a recent discussion on the war in Ukraine, historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his book called A Study of History, highlighted that over historic periods of time measured in centuries, geopolitics are best understood as a battleground or theatre between civilisations, rather than kingdoms or nations.

Broadly speaking, in the Eastern civilisation’s side today there are nations such as Russia (spanning Europe and Asia), China, the Mongols, and North Korea (in Asia) and Middle Eastern decedents of Persians (Iran) and the Arabs (which span over twenty countries). However, this delineation is not clear cut.

For example, Israel (a country in the Middle East) is likely regarded as Western because of its religious heritage to many Western nations and of its socio-cultural values. In fact, it is the Abrahamic religions of Israel (especially Christianity) and the legal, cultural and artistic heritage of the Greco-Romans which are the two pillars of what we call today Western civilisation. However, this is a crude way of looking at things as Japan and South Korea have been “Westernised” since the end of World War II, mostly by adopting financial practices and a corporate work ethic (not necessarily positive aspects, if you ask me), but also due to their military alliances with countries like the US.

The country which seems to be most divided between East and West is India, however. In recent years, India, a British colony until 1947, has been looking increasingly West in terms of its values (although not in a linear fashion), but its economy and military interests remain caught between Russia and China.

Yahoo News reported recently that “India has avoided taking sides even though Russia finds itself increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, particularly Western nations, which have been imposing a slew of sanctions since it launched its invasion of Ukraine.” One clear factor in this difficult position is that the country still gets more than half of its weapons from Russia – military firepower used to deter China.

Not that India is the only tensioned spot in the so-called Eastern civilisation. The ongoing war in Yemen, a conflict between the Saudi-led coalition and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, is a dark reminder of the instability of the Middle East. However, in terms of civilisation vs. civilisation, in other words, geopolitically speaking, the fate of India, a country with nuclear warheads, is more important.

Meanwhile, the Western civilisation, consisting of all nations such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany Australia and New Zeeland (in the Eastern hemisphere) and others that have inherited the set of values which derived from the two pillars mentioned above.

Although the West has rallied against the current aggression of Ukraine, this unity is thin and, if we are cynical, we can argue that only war demanded such a tight cooperation: the Germany’s domination in the EU of its periphery members in the wake of the financial crisis, Brexit and the animosity from the EU towards the democratic decision taken by the United Kingdom to leave the bloc, the tensions regarding energy supplies from Russia and so on, all highlight that the close cooperation of Western nations may be forced by the war.

On the border between the two forces of civilisation, at least in Europe, we have the Baltic – Balkan nations and, this “line”, on the global stage, is represented by Africa – the continent being a battle map of commercial, military and political interests of the biggest superpowers from the Western and Eastern civilisations. People on this frontier, be it in Europe or Africa, have long been in the crossfire of battles between the two forces. In this context, the Ukrainian conflict represents the Eastern civilisation ceasing an opportune moment to push towards the West by expanding its borders, if Putin’s intentions are as simple as that.

Although many have compared the invasion of Ukraine with that of Poland by Nazi Germany, making all sorts of parallels between Putin and Hitler, some justifiable while others less so, there is an important element to consider going forward in terms of personal freedom, prosperity and peace: during and after World War II, many victims of the Nazis and of the Soviets ran towards the West, seeking not just refuge but a society based on certain values.

The West of today however is not the West of the 1950s. In some respects, there have been improvements, such as the reduction of discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. However, in many other aspects, the West today is far more authoritarian than seventy years ago.

We need only to look at the last two years and see how governments from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand (to mention just a view) have enacted laws based on bizarre reasoning that claimed to be rooted in science which could not be questioned or which changed every week or so, censored dissidents regarding the governments’ healthcare policies, allowed brutal crackdowns of protestors and for mass media manipulation of facts about the pandemic or, in the US, about the election itself, enacted financial sanctions of citizens that were typically used for terrorists, the US attack on Assange and the freedom of the press, on top of which we can add very powerful technology corporations that act as censors for politicians and ideologues, dangerous Marxist-based ideas such as critical race theory, “hate speech” laws that are a clear threat to freedom of speech and of expression, digital currencies controlled by the central banks that can result in less financial freedom and so on.

All of those factors make the West of today far less friendly to individual freedom than it was in the middle of the last century.

Now, because we in the West are essentially in a high alert state of a potential war, the governments’ eyes are focused on Eastern Europe. But what Tocqueville observed about war killing democracy applies to Western civilisation as well: we are very close to the governments of these nations increasing their powers maybe permanently. Recent history tells us that this is a real possibility. For example, following the 9/11 terrorist attack, many of the powers that the US government got through the Patriot Act never gave back.

Nevertheless, for all its faults and the dangers these ills pose to individual freedom, the Western civilisation untied against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and placed what it appears to be an increasing number of harsh sanctions on Russia. These are effective in crippling the Slav nations’ economy, but it may also widen the chasm between West and East.

There are already reports that the ban from the Swift system will push Russia to work with China and fast track an alternative interbank messaging system to ensure smooth transactions. Moreover, as Zoltan Pozsar from Credit Suisse has argued in a recent note entitled Bretton Woods III, the Chinese central bank (PBoC) may be the one entity that will backstop the disruption in the world’s commodities markets, leaving the US central bank (the Fed) to backstop the rest of the system. This, Pozsar argued, will be the beginning of the Eurorenminbi market and “China’s first real step to break the hegemony of the Eurodollar market”. In other words, the war in Ukraine may usher in a new monetary order.

As such, the world that will emerge from this conflict is likely to be a more divided one between Western civilisation and Eastern civilisation. However, unlike the last time it happened (both World War II and the Cold War), it is not clear if the West is going to be carrying the clear banner of freedom and prosperity. From all of this pain and suffering the undisputed loser will be the individual.