The worldview behind
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following
premises: The West and America are declining, decaying and internally divided.
The globalized world is becoming multipolar, with “civilization-states”
reemerging and competing to claim their spheres of influence. And Russia and
China, in particular, represent potent alternatives to Western liberalism that
stand ready to contend for global dominance.
اضافة اعلان
As badly as the war has gone for Putin, some of this
analysis still holds up. The world has indeed responded to the Ukraine war
along multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s snub of the Biden administration’s plea
to pump more oil is just the latest example of how the anti-Russian coalition
is essentially a Western coalition, with India, China and the Arab world
playing more cynical and complicated parts.
Meanwhile, the West’s unity, while obviously more
impressive than Putin expected, is still a thin netting flung over deeper
vulnerabilities. There has been no sustained post-COVID-19 boomtime, no new era
of good feelings. The populist wave is not receding; since the war in Ukraine
began in late February, the European establishment has suffered political
disappointments and defeats in Sweden, Hungary and Italy. Two of the
governments most committed to the defense of Ukraine, US President Joe Biden’s
administration and Britain’s Tory government, are well underwater in approval
polls. Europe has only just begun to feel the cost of its naive energy
policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that feed inflation
and solutions that might induce recession.
So in key respects, the world still looks as Putin
imagined it more than seven months ago, with clear opportunities for a potent
challenger to the liberal world order. But now we know something that he did
not when he ordered the invasion: Russia is not that potent challenger, and its
claims to represent an alternative to the liberal West have melted into
Ukrainian mud.
It is not only Putin’s regime showing signs of
illiberal meltdown. Beijing still looks much more powerful than Moscow, but
China’s early COVID-19 successes have given way to an insane-seeming attempt to
sustain a “zero COVID” policy at whatever cost to prosperity, domestic
tranquility and global influence.
Europe has only just begun to feel the cost of its naive energy policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that feed inflation and solutions that might induce recession.
At the same time, Iran, whose Islamic Republic
represents a different sort of rival to Western liberalism, is enduring a wave
of protests that, even if they do not topple the regime, are a reminder of just
how miserably unpopular the Islamic Revolution is today.
As right-wing gadfly Richard Hanania, usually a
critic of liberal pieties and American self-regard, acknowledged in a recent
essay, 2022 has been pretty good for the well-worn, Francis Fukuyama argument
that liberal democracy lacks plausible ideological competitors.
Liberalism has enemies aplenty, sure, and relative
to the origin point of Fukuyama’s “End of History” argument in 1989, the
liberal order is showing clear signs of internal decay. But a desire for
alternatives is not enough to bring them into being; instead, we are seeing
that a world system can weaken dramatically without its rivals being ready to
supplant it.
If Russia is the biggest, ugliest, flop, China is
the more interesting case. It was always clear that Putinism existed in an
imitative, parodic relationship to the West — as a pseudo-democracy, not a true
rival with a different source for its legitimacy. But China over the past few
decades seemed to be creating something more stable and self-legitimating, a
one-party meritocracy capable of managing peaceful transitions from one leader
to another, resistant to cults of personality and able to steward rapid
economic and technological progress.
But the combination of Chinese President Xi
Jinping’s Mao Zedong-lite consolidation of personal power and his government’s
conspicuous failures (on economic management and soft-power diplomacy, not just
the zero-COVID blunders) suggest that China’s system is reverting to an
authoritarian mean, that the idea of one-party meritocracy collapses back into
banal dictatorship the moment you get a mediocre leader.
Then the turmoil in the Islamic Republic is
interesting in a different way. As Shadi Hamid noted in a provocative essay for
First Things, the Muslim world’s various Islamist movements anticipated the
more recent Western fascination with (and fear of) “post-liberal” politics —
offering non-Western attempts to forge a political-cultural system that could
claim to be secular liberalism’s successor, not just a throwback to the past.
So their mixture of failure, defeat and, in the
Iranian case, corruption and stagnation stand as a sustained caution to Western
thinkers trying to imagine something after liberalism.
These imaginings will continue because liberalism
remains on a path to an unhappy destination — sterile, fragmented, stagnant,
dystopian. All the optimistic chest-thumping about the Ukraine war inspiring a
wider liberal revival has not altered that reality.
But in Moscow, in Beijing, in Iran, you can see other roads
available, and all of them run quickly down into the dark.
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