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Is war in Ukraine splitting the world into two camps again? Luc= an Way on the emerging competition for global supremacy.

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A New Ice Age

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Is war in Ukra= ine splitting the world into two camps again? Lucan Way on the emerging com= petition for global supremacy.

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Pavel Neznanov

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Since = Russia first invaded Ukraine on February 24, Vladimir Putin has sp= oken of the attack as part of a civilizational conflict with the West&mdash= ;like the Cold War—while he and = his military leaders continue to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Today= , the Russia of Putin looks far weaker than the empire of Stalin and Brezhn= ev ever did, with Moscow having failed to achieve almost all its goals in U= kraine—and many of the Soviet Union’s old satellite states now = NATO members. At the same time, Russia has become much closer to China than= it was in the communist era, as Xi Jinping pursues his declared ambitions = to counter the global power of the United States. The U.S. and the EU have = meanwhile moved to break off economic = relations with Russia and halt the development of Chinese tech industries. From the end of World War II throu= gh the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world was fundamentally split into two = hostile blocs. Is it happening again?

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=09=09=09=09=09=09To Lucan Way, it is. Way is a professor = of political science at the University of Toronto and the author of three b= ooks on authoritarianism. Much of the globe, he says, has been dividing int= o two camps, democratic and authoritarian—“the free and the unf= ree”—and the conflict between them is deepening. But the nature= and contours of this new division are different. Now, the two sides aren&r= squo;t fighting over an ideology, as the democratic and communist blocs of = the Cold War were. Also, there are regionally powerful countries today that= can challenge the goals of the democrats or the authoritarians—or co= operate with either. In the absence of an organizing ideological dimension,= and with the presence of other powerful actors, Way sees the new era of gl= obal conflict becoming more chaotic—and ultimately more unpredictable= —than the Cold War ever was.

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——= —

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Michael Bluhm: Putin has framed the Ukra= ine war as a proxy conflict with the West and NATO. Even after the fall of = the Soviet Union, he says, NATO has never stopped aggressively expanding it= s borders and threatening Moscow.

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But now the wa= r seems to have made Russia much weaker—even weaker than the Soviet U= nion was toward the end of its history. What has Putin done to Russia&rsquo= ;s position in the world here?

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Lucan Way: First of all, Russia is much = richer today than it was in that time of the Soviet Union. Until very recen= tly, it had a dynamic market economy.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09The main difference between the eras is that, during the = Cold War, the Soviet Union had a universal ideology that could be applied t= hroughout the world: communism. It was the Soviets’ counterpart to th= e also-universal liberal-democratic ideology of America and its allies. =09=09=09=09=09=09

The Cold War i= nvolved a distinctive, global competition for influence. Every local confli= ct around the world became infused with this broader great-power conflict&m= dash;in no small part because of these competing ideologies.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Today liberal democracy has had its setbacks around the w= orld, but there’s still a global liberal-democratic ideology. There i= sn’t a global authoritarian ideology. There are just a lot of parochi= al nationalists with authoritarian playbooks. The movements supporting them= don’t speak to any global ideology. In that sense, Russia’s be= en reduced from a country with global ambitions, based on a global idea, to= a corrupt dictatorship based on the power of a single person.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Bluhm: The historian Tim Sayle said in March that the invasion of Ukraine ha= d brought a period of newfound unity and shared moral clarity to the West.<= /div> =09=09=09=09=09=09

=09=09=09=09=09=09How do you see this today—with persistent inflation= and rising energy costs triggering protests across so many European countr= ies?

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Way: I was impressed early on by the remarkable unity we were seeing in = Europe. I did feel somewhat apprehensive about the possibility of European = fatigue with the war—just because most conflicts that initially spark= widespread outrage tend to get normalized fairly quickly; we’ve seen= this in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But polls in Europe still show overwhel= ming support for Ukraine, now nearly 10 months after the invasion. The resi= lience of the sentiment has surprised me.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Back in March, French President Emanuel Macron and German= Chancellor Olaf Scholz were arguing= that the West should negotiate with Putin. But they’ve completely ab= andoned that rhetoric—and the biggest reason is the simplest: Russia = has just behaved so atrociously that Europe is more unified now than it was= at the outset of the war.
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=09=09=09=09=09=09Also in March, there was a conflict between the United St= ates, on the one hand, and Macron and Scholz. The U.S. was saying, We h= ave to fight the Russians, give Ukraine weapons, and win the war. Macr= on and Scholz were saying, No, we have to reach out. There has to be a = negotiated solution. But Putin has shown such a complete unwillingness= to compromise or adjust his fundamental goals, despite multiple military l= osses, that he effectively ended that debate.
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=09=09=09=09=09=09And then, since March we’ve seen a tremendous decou= pling between Europe’s economy and Russia’s. In January, the Eu= ropean Union relied on Russia for more than 40 percent of its natural gas. = Now that number’s down to 17 percent.
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=09=09=09=09=09=09To be fair, there are elements of Ukraine fatigue, but th= ere are also now structural reasons for long-term unity in Europe against R= ussia. Until recently, Russia had deep ties with the European elite. The fo= rmer German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was even on the board of Gazprom, = the main Russian gas provider, until the invasion of Ukraine. Those days ar= e over. Putin has completely broken these ties. And there’s no way Eu= rope’s going to re-establish them—at least in the medium term.<= /div> =09=09=09=09=09=09
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Jingshan Park

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More from = Lucan Way at The Signal:

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=09=09=09=09=09=09“We’re seeing a starker divide between the free and the unfree in the world today than we’ve ever= seen before. During the Cold War, you had communist and anti-communist blo= cs. The communist world was completely autocratic, but the anti-communist w= orld included many military dictatorships, which were propped up by democra= tic countries precisely because these dictatorships were Cold-War allies. T= oday, with Hungary and Poland, we do have autocracies on the Western side, = but this is much more exceptional now than it was then.”

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=09=09=09=09=09=09“China is much more powerful than = the Soviet Union was. It has both a very powerful military and an extremely= powerful economy. The Soviet Union was quite poor, but it had massive conv= entional forces in Europe, and that was its main source of power. Beijing h= as many more resources to challenge the United States with. But there are t= wo problems: One, China doesn’t have a globalizing ideology. Two, it&= rsquo;s much more integrated into the global economy than the Soviet Union = was—so it’s much more constrained in its behavior. There are so= me Cold War elements in play today, then, but there are other elements that= balance out the conflict on account of mutual dependence.”
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=09=09=09=09=09=09“In the Cold War, militaries in ma= ny non-communist countries were inherently anti-communist, because they kne= w they’d be the first to suffer in a communist takeover. But militari= es in developing countries today are often more comfortable with a country = like China—which doesn’t make human-rights demands and doesn&rs= quo;t interfere in domestic governance to the same extent that the West doe= s. And this could make them more open to an alliance with Beijing.” =09=09=09=09=09=09
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The Signal explores urgent que= stions in current events around the world—to support it and for full = access:

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