Ukraine's defeat and the fall of Western power

The big story of the 21st century is the precipitous decline of Western power

What has just happened with regards Ukraine, Russia, the US and Europe, is absolutely seismic. It’s seismic in terms for what it means for Western power and for the global order.

What needs examination is both the criminal responsibility of Putinism - and also how the West, high on its own triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, also helped pave the way for catastrophe.

It’s been well over 1,000 days since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and we have no idea how many people have been slaughtered, but it’s easily in the many hundreds of thousands - predominantly Ukrainian and Russian young men slaughtered in this meat grinder.

Donald Trump has announced that there will be a negotiated peace settlement - but with that settlement already baking in drastic concessions to Russia, such as significant swathes of Ukraine’s territory being handed over to its enemy. We should be clear that this would represent a straightforward Russian victory, with Ukraine now brutally defeated, and facing being de facto dismembered and exploited by two foreign powers.

You have to see this in the context of what is the biggest single story of the 21st century, which is the fall of Western power. I should declare an interest - I’m currently writing a book entitled ‘The Fall Of The West’, and the central thesis gathers more and more evidence each day.

To be clear, Trump declared he’d spoken to Russia’s ruling autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to begin immediately negotiating an end to the war. New US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine, which the West had been dangling for a long time, as well as any return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders, which would include Crimea, which was of course annexed that year.

There would be no US troops deployed as a peacekeeping mission, which would be entirely European troops.

Crucially, Hegseth declared he was “here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

It is difficult to understate the significance of this. What has been dismantled here, in a few sentences in a speech, has persisted since the end of World War II. It is a central pillar of Western power, which is now fragmenting, with the US declining to a great power competing among other great powers, rather than being the world’s superpower. That needs interrogating, but first we need to digest what Trump said.

When asked if Ukraine would be an “equal member” of the peace process, Trump’s non-committal answer made clear that, brutally speaking, it would not be.

Two great powers are going to decide what happens, and Ukraine is going to be landed with a fait accompli.

Then, asked if Ukraine’s President Zelensky should give up territory, Trump undermines him by claiming he’s domestically unpopular and suggests “he’s gonna have to do what he has to do”, clearly alluding to giving up land, which is clearly defeat for Ukraine.

Some general points here. Firstly Russia launched a completely unjustified war of aggression against Ukraine, which had every right to self-defence, like any country which comes under attack, and I supported its defence from that aggression.

I don’t support NATO: for those who call it a defensive alliance I’d point to the NATO-led war in Libya, which clearly became a war of regime change contrary to its original claims, which led to the virtual destruction of Libya.

But equally people like myself have to engage with why so many in Eastern Europe look at Russia from their past and present lived experience as their key source of oppression, of domination, which is why they end up in the arms of NATO.

Ukraine used to be a country divided relatively equally between those who leaned more towards Russia or Europe, and it’s totally legitimate to talk about Western intervention in that country which sough to diminish Russia’s sphere of influence. To be clear, a socialist I don’t believe in “spheres of influence” for either the West or Russia, and undoubtedly Russia systematically interfered to keep Ukraine under subordination.

The fact is Putinism is not - as it’s often portrayed - a throwback to the Soviet Union, which it detests partly because Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik allies promoted the idea of national self-determination, and supported the right for Ukrainians to have their own identity. Putinism essentially sees Ukraine as an invention of the Bolsheviks.

Putinism has increasingly evolved in the direction of straightforward deeply reactionary Russian ethno-nationalism and chauvinism. Some of Putin’s allies simply erase the very concept of Ukrainian and Ukrainians, treating them against their own as somehow Russians who are in denial.

And Russia is guilty of grave war crimes which it has committed in Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin should be tried for those crimes.

Yes, Western imperialism is the main evil on a global scale. That’s because of history - the European powers in particular invaded much of the world, divided up the spoils, enslaved their people, stole their resources, committed multiple genocides. Today, even after those people won their freedom often at huge cost, the global world order has remained rigged in favour of those great powers at the expense of those who were once directly formally colonised.

But that doesn’t mean Western imperialism is always responsible for all the horrors in the world - it isn’t, and Putin’s Russia is one example of that.

Nonetheless, Western triumphalism after the Cold War proved a catastrophic error - it proved strategically disastrous for Western elites, but more importantly humanity has suffered greatly as a result. Back then, in the early 1990s, Western elites believed in their military invincibility - that the West could intervene militarily as it so wished. Those elites believed the Western economic model was the holy grail all should aspire to - which had become at the time under Thatcherism and Reaganism rampant unfettered capitalism, which conveniently those elites benefited from. Those elites also projected claims of moral supremacy - that the West was about “freedom” and “democracy”.

We saw how that economic model fell into crisis, not least with the 2008 crash, which itself helped drove right-wing authoritarian movements which threaten even the caveated forms of democracy existing in the West.

Militarily the West was utterly humiliated in Iraq, Afghanistan indeed Libya.

And its moral claims, however dubious they always were, destroyed first by the overt horrors of the so called war on terror but clearly buried forever in the rubble of Gaza. indeed we’ve seen how Western powers will rail against the war crimes of Putin - bombing civilians, bombing hospitals - while not only failing to do so in Palestine and Lebanon, but arming and facilitating those crimes. That vile hypocrisy has been noted the world over.

The point about Russia is after the Cold War not only did the West lord it over Russia - acting as thought it had brought the Russian bear to heel for good - it promoted neoliberal economics, with so called shock therapy. Russian elites lapped that up voluntarily, sure, and became very rich, but it was a catastrophe for the people of Russia who suffered an unprecedented economic collapse, social crisis, a dramatic fall in living standards - we could go on.

And whatever one might think about NATO’s advance in the east, with people in those countries feeling aggrieved at Russian domination and seeing NATO as protection, that combination fed a sense of humiliation in Russia, not least given economically it was on its knees.

And Putinism exploited that sense of humiliation. That Western hubris was a disaster.

There is another point too. There is no question that much of the US elite did not see support for Ukraine as about prioritising Ukraine’s interests, but about weakening a historic enemy. Let me quote from a Washington Post piece about Jake Sullivan, who was Joe Biden’s national security advisor. It discusses Sullivan’s strategy and says:

It was a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill. That’s not how Sullivan would have described it, but this was the practical effect. Kissinger would have approved.

Well that is truly disturbing as a motive, because it means flinging huge numbers of Ukrainian men to their deaths, not for the interests of Ukraine but the perceived interests of the US. And even if you oppose Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - as you should - and support the right of Ukraine to defend itself against an outrageous invasion, consider this. If we were always going to end up at a point where Russia was going to take land, and Western leaders thought that, but claimed otherwise and made promises to Ukraine to keep the war going to achieving what they believed to be unachievable - well, what that means in terms of countless wasted lives is truly hideous.

What is also deeply alarming now is that Trump is demanding de facto reparations from Ukraine - in the form of $500bn worth of its rare earth materials and other resources. Clearly the US consistently acts in accordance with what it sees as its economic and strategic interests, but normally pretends not to, and Trump is being open and honest about it. Nonetheless, it really is naked imperialism.

Overall, this is a catastrophic blow to Western power which was already in precipitous decline because of the calamities of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya; because of a broken economic model defined by crisis, stagnation and decline; because of moral disgrace, not least Palestine; because of the retreat of Western democracy, with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism as Trump embodies.

But the problem is for those of us who object to Western imperialism the question is what comes next. A world in which great powers, including those led by autocrats such as Vladimir Putin, battle it out amongst themselves, carving the world up between each other - and to hell with the people who live in their spoils - well that is a dystopian reality. And that’s the reality we’re now heading towards.