(also via the link as a podcast: Ukraine war: Do we want diplomacy or world war? (deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de)
from the German business news: Ukraine conflict: We have a choice between diplomacy and world war (übersetzt mit deepl)
17.03.2024 13:00
The war in Ukraine should not be viewed in isolation, but against the backdrop of an emerging new multipolar world order, says Glenn Diesen, an expert in geopolitics and professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway. And that is precisely what makes this conflict so dangerous.
(also via the link as a podcast: Ukraine war: Do we want diplomacy or world war? (deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de)
DWN: Before we turn to Ukraine and a new world order, a fundamental question about geography: What does access to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea mean to Russia? And is the current war in Ukraine not also about control of the Black Sea?
Glenn Diesen: Reliable access to maritime corridors has always been a key feature of the security competition with Russia. When Kievan Rus' fractured in the 13th century, the Russians lost their position on the Dnieper, meaning that rival powers could weaken Russia by restricting its access to key maritime corridors necessary for trade and security. Sweden succeeded in denying Russia independent access to the Baltic Sea in the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo. After Russia defeated Sweden in 1721, the British and later the Americans took on the task of weakening Russia by restricting its access to the sea. Containing and weakening Russia by restricting its access to the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Arctic remains a central task of NATO even after the Cold War. The 2014 West-backed overthrow of Yanukovych was largely about turning the Black Sea into a NATO lake. Similarly, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced that ‘after Finland and Sweden joined NATO, the Baltic Sea will now be a NATO inland sea... If we want, we can block all entry and exit routes to Russia via St. Petersburg’. The expansion of US military bases in Scandinavia also sets the stage for US confrontation with Russia in the Arctic. The US has found eager supporters in Europe who have revived the Intermarium project, the Polish plan from the period after the First World War to contain and confront Russia by uniting the countries between the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the Adriatic. The revived Intermarium project is now being renamed the Three Seas Initiative to push Russia out of Europe.
DWN: Who would be the winners and losers of such an ‘Intermarium’ project?
Glenn Diesen: Like any other regional integration project, the Three Seas Initiative can be a source of prosperity if it is coordinated and connected with neighbouring regional players. However, the revived Intermarium project is a zero-sum bloc policy in which region A seeks to weaken region B. In the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in 1990, we committed ourselves to overcoming zero-sum bloc politics and dividing lines in Europe, but this agreement has been broken. Europe will end up as the loser, because the militarisation of the new dividing lines on our continent will weaken us economically and make us overly dependent on the USA in terms of security.
DWN: Your new book is titled ‘The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order’. Why did you choose this title?
Glenn Diesen: The war in Ukraine can only be fully understood as the result of a collapsing world order and a struggle to define the next world order. Post-Cold War efforts to create a world order based on liberal hegemony manifested itself in NATO expansion. This put on hold agreements to eliminate dividing lines in Europe and create a pan-European security architecture based on indivisible security. The basis for European security and stability was created by moving NATO's military infrastructure ever closer to Russia's borders, which obviously triggered the war in Ukraine that leading American officials have been warning about for three decades. The war has since become a broader struggle of a hegemonic world order against multipolarity, which is why both NATO and Russia are willing to escalate to the point of risking a nuclear exchange. NATO hopes that a victory over Russia will also weaken China and thus revive the liberal hegemony of the 1990s, while Russia sees victory as a necessity to end NATO's expansionism and establish a fairer multipolar world order.
DWN: So this would mean nothing less than that the decision as to whether the world order remains unipolar or becomes multipolar will be made in Ukraine?
Glenn Diesen: Exactly, and this is reflected in the statements of both the West and Russia. Furthermore, the position of the rest of the world can also be explained by the struggle between hegemony and multipolarity. The world outside NATO does not support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but nor does it support NATO's proxy war against Russia, as it has no interest in reviving a world order based on Western hegemony.
DWN: Let's play this out: What would happen if NATO won the war in Ukraine?
Glenn Diesen: That's a hard question to answer, which is probably why NATO hasn't defined what victory would look like. The goal of defeating the Russian army and expelling Russia from Crimea in order to make Sevastopol a NATO naval base will never be achieved. This is an existential threat to Russia, and we will most likely perish in a nuclear war long before NATO soldiers march into Crimea. However, as numerous leading American politicians openly declare, if the U.S. defeats Russia with the Ukrainian army, it could then focus its resources on confronting China. The goal of restoring hegemony and returning to the 1990s requires the rival great powers to be defeated, either by economic or military means.
DWN: And what would it mean if Russia won the war?
Glenn Diesen: A Russian victory would mean, at best, a severe weakening of Ukraine or, at worst, the destruction of Ukraine as a nation state. It didn't have to turn out that way. Russia would have been satisfied with a neutral Ukraine and had no territorial claims on Crimea before the West overthrew the government in Kyiv in 2014. After the West sabotaged the Minsk Peace Agreement for seven years, Russia moved in to impose neutrality on Ukraine. How did the West respond? The US and UK sabotaged the 2022 peace negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv, all prospects for a diplomatic solution were taken off the table, and the NATO Secretary General announced that weapons were the way to peace. Even now that NATO recognises that Ukraine is losing the war, it still refuses to discuss neutrality and instead speaks of a post-war NATO expansion. What Russia has been told is that the territory it does not capture will fall into the hands of NATO. With neutrality not an option, I expect Russia to take the entire territory from Kharkov to Odessa.
DWN: Would the existence of NATO – and the EU in its current form – be threatened in the medium to long term in the event of a Russian victory?
Glenn Diesen: Yes. Both NATO and the EU have thrown almost everything into this fight, and unity depends on the prospect of victory. As soon as defeat looms, NATO's ability to provide security and the EU's ability to create prosperity will be called into question. Moreover, a blame game seems inevitable, as uncomfortable questions will be asked, such as: Who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline? Who is to blame for the decoupling of the EU from Russian and, to a lesser extent, Chinese markets? Who allowed Europeans to develop an excessive security dependency on the US? Why is the US government encouraging weakened European industries to move across the Atlantic? Why was the Minsk Agreement sabotaged and why was the peace agreement torpedoed in early 2022? Many lies have been spread about why this war started, how it is going and how it will end. I don't think hatred of Russia will be enough to cement unity.
DWN: It seems that the actual strategic and economic interests of Western and Central Europe do not play a role in the war in Ukraine. Is this impression deceptive?
Glenn Diesen: The Americans will be pragmatic at the end of the day and focus on asserting their national interests, while the Europeans have acted extremely irrationally and will increasingly lose importance as a result. The Europeans are deeply ideological and believe that their security and liberal ideals can only flourish under the collective hegemony of the West. They seem to have little grasp of the fact that Europe's economy and security will depend on the US, which also entails a loss of political autonomy. European leaders are fuelling the conflict because there is no political vision of a world order that is not based on hegemony. A completely new world order will emerge, one based on multipolarity and in which Western powers cannot dominate, even if Europe's leaders cannot get beyond the mentality of bloc politics and insist that Ukraine must be on our side of the dividing lines. EU leaders like Borrell recognise that the era of Western dominance is over, but they cannot formulate visions for multipolarity.
DWN: In your book, you repeatedly allude to the Westphalian order. Can you briefly explain to our readers what this is all about and to what extent this concept can be applied to our time?
Glenn Diesen: The modern world order is based on the Westphalian system that emerged in 1648, in which the hegemonic system and universalism of the Holy Roman Empire were replaced by a balance of power between sovereign equals. The foundations of the Westphalian world order have been preserved to this day, as evidenced by international law under the UN Charter, in which sovereignty is the fundamental principle. When the Cold War ended, we were at a crossroads: we could either develop an inclusive Westphalian order, based on the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, encompassing multiple poles of power, or a hegemonic world order, legitimised by liberal universalism. We chose to reject the Westphalian principle of sovereign equality and to abolish the pan-European security architecture, instead pursuing hegemony and sovereign inequality because liberal democratic values legitimised a system in which ‘all states are equal, but some are more equal than others’. That system has now collapsed, leading to the terrible war in Ukraine, and we should focus on reviving diplomacy to build consensus around what we can build together.
DWN: And now a ‘Eurasian Westphalian order’ is emerging? Will the US accept it?
Glenn Diesen: This is not just a return to the past. In the new multipolar Westphalian order, some of the most powerful poles of power are not Western. The US has made it clear that it will not accept the loss of global supremacy and has made it its strategic goal to weaken Russia through European proxies, to weaken China through Asian proxies, and to weaken Iran through Middle Eastern proxies. This new Cold War is being sold to the world as an ideological struggle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, though this is an extreme and dangerous oversimplification that prevents a sustainable peace.
DWN: What do you think the world order will look like in ten years?
Glenn Diesen: The international system will be characterised by chaos as long as the West attempts to lead the world back to unipolarity, while the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction towards multipolarity. This chaos will be characterised by wars between major powers and an economic decoupling that will inevitably be accompanied by a restriction of freedoms in order to maintain political and social cohesion. I hope that people will reject the current mantra that arms are the path to peace, while diplomacy and negotiations have become swear words. Hegemony has already been lost. We therefore now have the choice of either adapting to the multipolar realities with the help of diplomacy or continuing down the path to another world war.
Info on the person: Glenn Diesen is a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) and editor of the journal ‘Russia in Global Affairs’. Diesen is the author of 11 books on the Russian geo-economy and Eurasian integration.
His latest book is ‘The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order’.
more:
European irrationality in Ukraine - Michael von der Schulenburg, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen (substack.com)
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