As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov admitted in April, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine wasn’t just about Ukraine, it was about ‘putting an end to’ America’s role as the democratic superpower. While the War-of-the-World Orders hot war Putin was aiming for did not materialize, his goal of disrupting the liberal world order has been triangulated to other dystopian narratives, including a manufactured global famine unleashed by his blockade of Ukraine’s ports. Veteran diplomat and foreign policy sage Jeremy Kinsman checks in on the geopolitical state of play.

Jeremy Kinsman

On June 4, the hundredth day of Vladimir Putin’s failing war to erase Ukraine, the New York Times summarized thus: “The grinding conflict in Ukraine rocked the global order, wrought destruction that ‘defies comprehension’ and shows little sign of ending soon.”

All true. Putin alone recklessly launched this war of attrition, whose destructive scale is ludicrously disproportionate to his grievances about the West. He covets projecting to Russians his vain act as the only one strong and hard enough to take the tough decisions in a long game of resilience. He counts on Western publics buckling in the end under inflation, impatience, and internal quarrels. 

But he has got just about everything wrong thus far, including about Ukraine itself. So, he may be deluded about the Russian people’s willingness to back him to the hilt of his sword of nationalist fantasy. If, and as, sanctions degrade their lives (their bite has been less than expected thus far); as the best and brightest emigrate; as the pall of national pariah status weighs on the collective psyche; the passive inter-generational PTSD from the mass trauma of Russia’s murderous last century could again click in.

In the 1990s, when Russians suffered the “wreckage of everyday life” wrought by the overwhelming challenge of overturning 75 years of communism, many people asked in despair, “Why can’t we be normal?” Ordinary people will ask it again, as they grasp the obscenity of Putin’s  mad-autocrat reversal of society back into the police state Russians thought they had finally ditched.

Once Putin’s portrayal of Ukraine as the improbable near-enemy fronting for the far-enemy – America – loses force, he risks being proven right that a successfully open Ukrainian society will prove contagious as an example of the road his more corrupt Russia didn’t take. 

We could then readily imagine a trajectory of public sentiment from today’s cynical indifference and ritualistic celebration of patriotic nationalism, into self-doubt over the “special military operation”, spreading collective shame, before becoming remedial anger, triggering the sort of upheaval from the street that seems to be Putin’s nightmare. But his strongman’s bubble of self-belief still resists seeking accommodation rather than doubling down.

It is to refute what Volodymyr Zelensky recently acknowledged as obvious that “the war will only definitively end through diplomacy,” while reminding that “every negotiation reflects the facts on the ground.” 

As Russian forces bear down to try to expand control in the east, Western state-of-the-art weapons, though belated and inadequate, do help Ukraine to hold most vital lines, permitting both sides to project ambitious military strategic conclusions more emotionally gratifying than realistic. There is no clear end in sight to ongoing damage and destruction that increasingly affect the wider world.

Eventual negotiation scenarios include a blueprint the Ukrainians themselves dropped on the table March 29 in Istanbul, at the last serious meeting of the two sides, a trade-off plan described by Samuel Charap in Foreign Affairs that combines Ukrainian neutrality (and EU membership) against guarantees of Ukrainian security by a group of key countries, including Russia, and incidentally, Canada. 

It would be a challenging negotiation, given opposition to rewarding Russia with any territorial gain – for Ukrainians, ceding territory means ceding people to criminal, murderous, and even genocidal Russian rule, as displayed in the suburbs of Kyiv and elsewhere. But when mutual exhaustion inevitably sets in, this framework is probably the only way out.

Meanwhile, the war’s material effects and costs are metastasizing economically and otherwise to the wider world. Putin is not wrong that global anxieties are increasing as his blatant aggression interrupts food and energy security trashing the current world order’s norms and rules, which plays to impulses of other anti-globalism nationalists. He puts at risk global security in its most fundamental elements. 

International attention needs to process these wider aftermath issues that go beyond the transient question of how we live with Putin, to how we manage international life, and recover the global cooperation required to cope with transnational threats to public health, climate, debt, migration, and nuclear proliferation.

Our media coverage is riveted by the action-narrative of the war’s drama, with rare diversions for America’s latest mass shootings, and the consequences of sharply rising inflation, rapidly becoming the adjacent story, as politicians try to strengthen short-term electoral defences against public impatience. From the West, Ukraine seems the hands-down winner in the intense parallel communications war, our media portraying the battle in Ukraine as between democracy and authoritarianism, which accurately depicts the two regimes involved. 

But for the 88 percent of the world’s population that does not live in developed democracies, the war is mostly Page 2 material, covered instead as a cyclical NATO vs. Russia event of less national concern. The disconnect partly explains why there have been more countries voting against, abstaining from, or not participating in, UN votes condemning Russia, than Western and other countries voting in favour. China’s influence at the UN, reflecting its economic leverage, is an influential factor.

Major democracies such as India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and the Philippines had already been “backsliding” from democratic standards under autocratic, populist, and nationalist leaders. It partly explains why they shy from seeing the Ukraine War through the “democracy” lens.

But reluctance to support the West against Russia’s aggression is also due to the fact that so many countries are challenged by fundamental threats closer to home from transnational forces on which the international community’s support is pretty scant. At the June 6-9 Summit of the Americas that excluded Cuba for the kind of self-involved short-term domestic political calculations Putin counts on Western leaders to make, several Latin American leaders told President Joe Biden they don’t want to be drawn into signing up with one geopolitical team or the other, when they need financing and other support from all.

Their priorities implicitly defer to the time-worn “hierarchy of needs” for basic human survival that behavioural psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed in 1943 when world democracy was at a territorial low and carnage at a high. He identified the most basic essentials for people and societies as “physiological……. deficiency” needs, without which individuals and societies fail – food and clean water, overall health, shelter, predictable income and welfare, etc., in addition public safety and security. 

Democracy is still a stirring ideal but is portrayed by illiberal adversaries as chaotic, disorderly, and inefficient in delivering needs to the people. Recent revolutions against democracy-denying regimes, such as the Arab Spring, were more explicitly conducted in the name of “fairness,” and “dignity,” and against impunity for widespread endemic corruption, and a ruling autocratic elite.

Greater global buy-in against Russia’s attack on Ukraine is more apt to rally behind the bedrock issue of the protection of national independence, and defence of sovereignty, against outright aggression. It is the ultimate rule-of-law issue, the defence of an essential norm meant to protect all countries. 

However, a problem Thorsten Benner of the Berlin-based Institute for Global Public Policy identifies is that many countries ask “whose rules? And to whose benefit?” 

Many leaders in the global south cite hypocrisy in Western descriptions of a rules-based order, including in prior Western interventions, unilateral US sanctions, and the inequity exposed by self-centered Western responses to the pandemic and other crises. 

David Malone, rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo and a UN Under-Secretary-General, points out that struggling developing countries see their worst fears about the constancy and priorities of Western commitments confirmed by recent slashes to official development assistance budgets of previously reliable aid-givers, and this at a time when Southern economies have been devastated by two years of the COVID pandemic and ensuing trade disruptions. Distressingly, Britain, Norway, and Sweden announced such cuts to accommodate the sharply increasing budgetary costs of supporting Ukraine’s urgent humanitarian, resettlement and defence needs.

The “America First” isolationism of Donald Trump and belligerence he exhibited toward the international community, and the possibility they haven’t disappeared, have further undermined confidence in a positive forward-looking global consensus. 

But the effort to build it cannot cease. It was the perception in 2018 that “America First” and truth-denying impulses of President Trump threatened the health of both democracy and rule-of-law international cooperation, that prompted a project, “Renewing our Democratic Alliance” (RODA), partnered by the Canadian International Council and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation that over the past two years has brought 150 Canadian and German scholars and practitioners from civil society together on how to protect both. (It assessed interactive international crises in public health, climate change, food security, migration, debt, finance, and trade, and the rampant contribution to polarizing disinformation from communications platforms, as stress tests of essential rules-based international governance, and concluded the system is in near-failure. The main victims are the “silent majority” in the vulnerable global south, countries that aren’t international deciders, so described in a RODA panel by Louise Frechette, the UN’s inaugural Deputy Secretary-General (1998-2006).

The communications task is to vaunt convincingly the vital merits of globalism (if not “globalization” per se) and commitment to an international rules-based order that is fairer to all, over competitive nationalism which so devastated the world in the 1930s.

No question, the world is again a dangerous place, as both China and Russia exhibit aggressive hostility, including to liberal democracy. But the spectre of a new Cold War with China and Russia can impede the global effort to agree on a set of reformed rules.

Cybersecurity and NATO defences will need shoring up for some time, but the driving motif cannot be to preserve and protect America’s status as world “Number One.” The growing drumbeat in Canada for “five eyes solidarity” and NATO alignment needs to be accompanied by policy emphasis on building support for universal essential action. 

Canada lost over the last decade its vocation for working our connections to the wider world to promote the strategically necessary goal of international coherence on rules of behaviour, though Justin Trudeau made a start in his outreach at the Summit of the Americas.

Transformative creation of the rules-based order in the wake of the Second World War began in earnest in 1943, as the Allies landed in occupied Europe, in Sicily. The Bretton Woods Conference that created the World Bank and International Monetary Fund was held over three weeks in July 1944, just weeks after D-Day June 6. Aftermath planning is essential even in the heat of conflict. As an example, in 1991, when the US and others began to fashion an inclusive global alliance to evict Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, planning and bargaining simultaneously began for postwar mediation of Arab/Israeli issues that became the – sadly unfulfilled – Oslo Accords process. 

So, the New York Times is right to judge that Putin’s war against Ukraine has “rocked” a world order that was already contested and corroded. Our focus needs to be on helping to ensure Ukraine’s resistance and survival. But this crisis which has affected the wider world can be, with leadership, an opportunity to address the need of systemic reform to ensure the survival of global cooperation on which our long-term collective security most fundamentally depends.  

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canadian Ambassador to Moscow, as well as Ambassador to Rome, High Commissioner to London and Ambassador to the EU. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.