The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 has been seen as a critical turning point in world history.
But world history had already turned when Biden declared that America would no longer risk blood and treasure defending regimes- liberal or otherwise- which could not defend themselves. There is now no liberal world order whatsoever. Either a country- Ukraine included- can kick ass, or pay for ass-kickers, on its own or it is on its own. The big question is whether NATO still stands and, because its expansion was fairly judicious, the feeling is that it does still stand though, no doubt, the Germans will have to pay more for it.
Many have said that it definitively marks the end of the post-cold war era, a rollback of the “Europe whole and free” that we thought emerged after 1991, or indeed, the end of The End of History.
That ended with the financial crisis. It was obvious that different countries would adopt different fiscal mixes and have different immigration and other policies such that liberalism would not be univocal.
Ivan Krastev, an astute observer of events east of the Elbe, has said recently in The New York Times that “We are all living in Vladimir Putin’s world now”,
No we're not. The worst he can do is raise our gas prices or heating bills a little.
a world in which sheer force tramples over rule of law and democratic rights.
the same world, however in which Crimea was annexed or in which the Russo-Georgian war was fought.
There is no question that the Russian assault has implications that reach way beyond the borders of Ukraine. Putin has made it clear that he wants to reassemble as much of the former Soviet Union as possible, incorporating Ukraine into Russia and creating a sphere of influence that extends through all of the eastern European states that joined Nato from the 1990s onwards.
Putin is worried about a US anti-missile facility in Redzikowo in Poland and something similar in Romania. He is threatening to send nukes to Cuba and Venezuela to secure an equal threat point. What has this to do with 'liberal world order'? Plenty of liberal democracies were wary of each other before the First World war. National interest dictated the location of strategic bases and the maintenance of threat points. This had nothing to do with ideology. Both the US and Britain could be described as liberal democracies by the 1860s. However the British had to increase the size of its garrison. Only from about 1870 onward, after Canada had been united, did Britain withdraw troops specifically meant to contain possible American aggression.
Though it is still too early to know how this war will evolve, it is already clear that Putin will not be able to achieve his maximal aims. He expected a quick and easy victory, and that Ukrainians would treat him as a liberator. He has instead stirred up an angry hornet’s nest, with Ukrainians of all stripes showing an unprecedented degree of tenacity and national unity.
How long will it last? Civilian morale can collapse very quickly. Soldiers get rotated out of battle zones and so professional Armies have the advantage. What is significant is that Russia has achieved air superiority over 10,000 feet. Putin can afford to play a waiting game- sending millions of refugees across European borders in reprisal for economic sanctions. The question is whether such population movements will destabilize neighboring countries.
Even if Putin takes Kyiv and deposes President Volodymyr Zelensky, he cannot in the long run subdue a furious nation of more than 40mn with military force.
He can force a population exchange and take strategic territory. The bigger question has to do with criminal gangs and who will control black market operations in the region.
And he will be facing a democratic world and Nato alliance unified and mobilised as never before, which has imposed costly sanctions on Russia’s economy.
For the moment- sure. Things can change. The Serbs might stir something up in Kosovo. Focus might shift from Ukrainian Uniate Christians to the traditional bad guy- Muslims with bombs in their turbans or hijabs or whatever.
Liberalism seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics.
I think Liberalism creates mechanisms which allow cooperative solutions to dominate. I suppose this lowers the sights of chauvinism because it is obvious that playing nice yields mutual profit. Expressing hatred for furriners marks you as a knuckle dragging Neandertal whereas showing a bit of sophistication in dealing with frogs, wops, krauts, nips, chinks, etc. marks you out as a guy who can bring prosperity to your region.
It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things At the same time, the current crisis has demonstrated that we cannot take the existing liberal world order for granted.
because it does not exist.
It is something for which we must constantly struggle, and which will disappear the moment we lower our guard.
It disappeared long ago. Maybe if the West had helped Russia become prosperous and secure back in the Nineties and if it was now a member of NATO and the EU and so forth, then we might genuinely speak of an ordoliberal world order.
The problems facing today’s liberal societies did not start and do not end with Putin, and we will face very serious challenges even if he is stymied in Ukraine. Liberalism has been under attack for some time now, from both the right and the left.
and the center and the bottom and the top and guys who zigzag all over the place- right? Not right. Liberalism was just lazy and stupid pi-jaw cretins like Fukuyama vomited up from time to time to earn a bit of money or to sell their latest book.
Freedom House in its “Freedom in the World” survey for 2022 notes that global freedom has fallen in the aggregate now for 16 years in a row.
Which suggests that its metrics for the pre-2006 period were utter shit. Prosperity may rise or fall but Freedom is about the ability to maintain a level of prosperity under existing conditions. If it has fallen, it is because 'depreciation' was not properly accounted for in previous periods. What changed in 2006? The answer is that financial markets started to sense that the war on terror would be a money-pit and that real income would be squeezed because expected capital gains were phantasmal. In other words, the West hadn't really become richer, it had just fooled itself into thinking the world wanted to reward it munificently for talking worthless shite about freedom and right to protect and so forth.
The Weimar Republic may have looked more liberal than what followed but it was a Ponzi scheme based on borrowing more money than the country paid in reparations. Once that bubble burst, there was no alternative but to back the General Staff and their maximal program of grabbing land to the East. Why? Keynes himself had said Germany would starve unless it grabbed Ukraine. True, Keynes was wrong- he thought America would become a net food importer- but what he said made sense to a lot of Germans.
It has declined not just because of the rise of authoritarian powers such as Russia and China, but also because of the turn towards populism, illiberalism and nationalism within longstanding liberal democracies such as the US and India.
Very true. In US, the President is normally the son of a previous President who in turn tends to be the son of a previous President. The difference is that in India, the first President only had a daughter so that daughter became President.
How the fuck is dynasticism a hallmark of 'liberal democracy'? On the other hand, it is true that Gerald Ford jailed all his opponents and declared a State of Emergency.
What is liberalism?
The view that neither the Church nor the Monarch should hold absolute power in an sphere whatsoever. They must be made answerable to representative institutions. There must be a separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. The King must not have total control over the Army and the Navy nor should he be allowed an unfettered right to conclude treaties or receive subsidies or alienate territories.
Liberalism is a doctrine, first enunciated in the 17th century, that seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics.
Rubbish! Liberalism had not difficulty with increasing violence to the max so as to bring about a Revolutionary change in regime. George Washington could be considered a liberal. He chucked out Mad King George's troops as well as the loyalist segment of the population.
Liberalism raised the sights of politics even above the Pope or the Archbishop or whoever it was who claimed to speak for God in our vale of tears. Liberalism held that no law was so ancient, no custom so venerable, that it could not be abrogated or utterly changed by an act of Parliament.
It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things — such as which religion to follow —
Fukuyama is wrong. You can be a Liberal and demand the suppression of sects believed to be hostile or primitive or simply repugnant in some particular. A Liberal Democracy may have an Established Church. It may severely limit what 'dissenters' or those of foreign sects can do. Furthermore, Liberalism permits the establishment of Nation States on grounds of language, religion, or some other shared trait. Population exchange on this basis is perfectly compatible with Liberal thought.
but that they need to tolerate fellow citizens with views different from their own.
Nonsense! Parliament can pass laws such that those with objectionable views are dealt with by the police. We don't have to tolerate them at all if we have a parliamentary majority behind us. True, in some liberal regimes, there is a Supreme Court which may decide that some specific measure is unconstitutional. But this is not invariably the case. In the middle to long term, Courts yield on the basis of 'doctrine of political question'.
It does this by respecting the equal rights and dignity of individuals,
No. A liberal regime may grant constitutional 'due process' but that is only with respect to justiciable matters. It is not the case that any liberal regime respects the rights and dignities of crazy pedophiles. However, there may be some limit on cruel and unusual punishment.
through a rule of law and constitutional government that checks and balances the powers of modern states.
Only in justiciable matters. If the thing is not justiciable, you are shit out of luck.
Among those rights are the rights to own property and to transact freely,
which were also provided by Absolute Monarchs who wished to grow their economies
which is why classical liberalism was strongly associated with high levels of economic growth and prosperity in the modern world.
But so was killing or enslaving darker skinned people, or discovering a valuable mineral resource under your territory, or just having a lot of puritanical religious sects who were thrifty and who went in for high value adding work- e.g. watch-making. At a later point, having a good education system which permitted those talented in STEM subjects to rise up was an even bigger determinant of growth and prosperity. This may or may not have been associated with 'liberalism' or 'socialism' or this religion or that linguistic culture.
In addition, classical liberalism was typically associated with modern natural science, and the view that science could help us to understand and manipulate the external world to our own benefit.
But Soviet Russia could rise very quickly in STEM subjects precisely because nobody was wasting their time on 'classical liberalism'. China appears to have overtaken the US in some high tech areas. This is not because it is more liberal.
Many of those foundations are now under attack.
Why do 15 year olds in China and Singapore score better at reading in PISA scores than kids from Sweden? Is it because Sweden is more authoritarian?
The truth of the matter is that Liberalism has no magic power. Hard work matters. Talking bollocks is a waste of breath.
Populist conservatives intensely resent the open and diverse culture that thrives in liberal societies,
But that 'open and diverse culture' thrives even more in the brothels and opium dens of the Red Light district. Populist conservatives who patronize these places may deny that they enjoy what goes on there but they don't resent it all- unless they don't have enough money to spend there.
On the other hand, some people who represent 'diversity' in its more visible and exotic aspect may kick the shit out indigenous people displaying some other type of diversity. In an open society, we should be able to talk about this.
and they long for a time when everyone professed the same religion and shared the same ethnicity.
Nationalism is a thoroughly liberal ideology. Exchange of population on the basis of language, religion or whatever, was a known consequence of the creation of new Nation States though, from the 1870's onward signing some sort of 'Minorities treaty' was part and parcel of gaining diplomatic recognition. The League of Nations was supposed to have an enforcement mechanism for this but none materialized. After the Second War, talk of that sort was quietly dropped.
The liberal India of Gandhi and Nehru
witnessed the biggest pogrom and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Indian history. Only Muslims who were on the wrong side of the border in 1948 were barred from citizenship or the right to dispose of their Indian property. Affirmative action of every type was withdrawn from Muslims. Cow protection became a Directive Principle of the Constitution. Sheikh Abdullah, the popular leader of India's only Muslim majority state was thrown in jail. By the way, Nehru was not a Liberal. He was a Socialist. He admired the Soviet Union but admitted that since the INC had not conquered the country, it could not use Stalinist methods.
is being turned into an intolerant Hindu state by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister;
No. It became a Hindu state in 1947 and initially expelled Muslims. Only after the '65 War, where Kashmir stayed loyal, did Muslims begin to breathe a little freer. However, save in the South where there was no Islamic separatism, Muslims remained politically at the bottom of the heap.
The big mistake Congress made was to paint Modi as diabolically anti-Muslim. This secured him Hindu votes without getting Congress any Muslim votes. Why? The answer is that Rahul is a moon calf. Akhilesh is the guy Muslims pin their hopes on.
meanwhile in the US, white nationalism is openly celebrated within parts of the Republican party.
Because lots of Americans are both White and Nationalist. Celebrating anti-White anti-Nationalism might not win a Party many seats.
Populists chafe at the restrictions imposed by law and constitutions:
I'd have thought they'd be delighted with the current Bench
Donald Trump refused to accept the verdict of the 2020 election, and a violent mob tried to overturn it directly by storming the Capitol.
Did they though?
Republicans, rather than condemning this power grab, have largely lined up behind Trump’s big lie.
What should they do instead? Hand themselves over to the authorities and confess to having abetted treason? But why stop there? Qanon may accuse them of abducting little kiddies so Extra-terrestrials can have anal sex with them. Why are Republicans refusing to own up to this vile crime?
The liberal values of tolerance and free speech have also been challenged from the left.
The liberals lost that challenge long ago. That's why we have progressive taxation and a welfare safety net and guys who want to get elected have to pretend they like eating hotdogs and watching baseball. The odd thing about America is that it could only be said to have had a Social Liberal elite after McCarthyism fucked up the free speech of the Commies once and for all.
Many progressives feel that liberal politics, with its debate and consensus-building,
does not exist. What we have is log-rolling in Congress and virtue signalling every where else.
is too slow and has grievously failed to address the economic and racial inequalities that have emerged as a result of globalisation. Many progressives have shown themselves willing to limit free speech and due process in the name of social justice.
I suppose Fukuyama means 'cancel culture'.
Initially celebrated,
by porn addicts
the internet has come to be used by malevolent actors from Russia to QAnon conspiracists to spread disinformation and hate speech
so that porn addicts can take a break from fisting themselves.
Both the anti-liberal right and left join hands in their distrust of science and expertise.
As does the center. The American CDC was counter-productive during the pandemic.
On the left, a line of thought stretches from 20th-century structuralism through postmodernism to contemporary critical theory that questions the authority of science. The French thinker Michel Foucault argued that shadowy elites used the language of science to mask domination of marginalised groups such as gay people, the mentally ill or the incarcerated.
To be fair, there was a lot of pseudo-science around.
This same distrust of the objectivity of science has now wandered over to the far right,
Who were always against Darwin
where conservative identity increasingly revolves around scepticism towards vaccines, public health authorities and expertise more generally. Meanwhile, technology was helping to undercut the authority of science. The internet was initially celebrated for its ability to bypass hierarchical gatekeepers such as governments, publishers and traditional media. But this new world turned out to have a big downside, as malevolent actors from Russia to QAnon conspiracists used this new freedom to spread disinformation and hate speech.
But Fukuyama gets an equal opportunity to spread his stupidity.
These trends were abetted, in turn, by the self-interest of the big internet platforms that thrived not on reliable information but on virality.
Which is why Fukuyama is telling stupid lies. He hopes this shite of his will go viral.
How liberalism evolved into something illiberal
Evolution responds to the fitness landsape. Changes in the fitness landscape caused guys who were supposed to be smart, like Fukuyama, to turn into stupid liars so as to compete with other stupid liars.
How did we get to this point? In the half-century following the second world war, there was broad and growing consensus around both liberalism and a liberal world order.
Nonsense! Back in the Seventies, the conventional wisdom was that there would be convergence between Capitalism and Communism with more and more prices being administered. Indeed, Nixon himself introduced a price and wage controls. Liberalism was considered old hat. The realists dominated I.R discourse.
Economic growth took off and poverty declined as countries availed themselves of an open global economy.
No. There was immiserizing growth for many primary producers unless their commodity had high income elasticity of demand. On the hand getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories always paid off. But this happened whether or not the global economy was open.
This included China, whose modern re-emergence was made possible by its willingness to play by liberal rules internally and externally.
No. It was made possible by incentivizing agricultural households as well as regional party bosses to take surplus girls out of the countryside and get them into giant factory dormitories. Boys could work construction or go into the Army.
But classical liberalism was reinterpreted over the years, and evolved into tendencies that in the end proved self-undermining.
Nobody gave a shit about 'classical liberalism'. They did care about financial markets- till they crashed.
On the right, the economic liberalism of the early postwar years morphed during the 1980s and 1990s into what is sometimes labelled “neoliberalism”. Liberals understand the importance of free markets — but under the influence of economists such as Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School”, the market was worshipped and the state increasingly demonised as the enemy of economic growth and individual freedom.
Because the public sector suffered from cost-push inflation and had low productivity growth. Doing simple things like releasing Government patents which weren't being used and redefining intellectual property rights and getting STEM subject Uni Depts to partner with high value adding local industries restored dynamism to the economy. Workfare proved popular because it was better for family integrity than Welfare.
Advanced democracies under the spell of neoliberal ideas began trimming back welfare states and regulation, and advised developing countries to do the same under the “Washington Consensus”.
Which worked. 'Iron rice bowls' meant you got shitty rice. Removing them meant you got lots of pork and beef and instant noodles.
Cuts to social spending and state sectors removed the buffers that protected individuals from market vagaries, leading to large increases in inequality over the past two generations.
As opposed to everybody getting poorer and more frustrated
While some of this retrenchment was justified, it was carried to extremes and led, for example, to deregulation of US financial markets in the 1980s and 1990s that destabilised them and brought on financial crises such as the subprime meltdown in 2008.
The alternative was no bull markets and everybody putting their savings into gold bullion. The fact is, volatility is good provided 'shakeouts' are allowed to happen in which case 'shocks' have no hysteresis effects. Overall allocative and dynamic efficiency improve. You have quicker technological progress.
Worship of efficiency led to the outsourcing of jobs and the destruction of working-class communities in rich countries, which laid the grounds for the rise of populism in the 2010s.
It is wrong to worship efficiency. We should seek spiritual wealth by being as lazy as fuck. Working class communities soon succumb to opioids or whatever because, to be frank, it sucks to be blue collar.
The right cherished economic freedom and pushed it to unsustainable extremes.
Like what? Hiring people to act as living furniture? Paying hobos to knife each other for the entertainment of Wall Street bankers?
The left, by contrast, focused on individual choice and autonomy, even when this came at the expense of social norms and human community.
Very true! The Left was constantly persuading your wife that she was actually a lesbian dolphin and that she should sue you for alimony so as to finance her getting a condo at Sea World.
This view undermined the authority of many traditional cultures and religious institutions.
No it didn't. Only Leftist nutters listen to other Leftists. They can bang on about individual choice all they like but you know what they really mean is that they want to marry their pussy-cat. As for 'autonomy', it means you were sacked and are barely getting by as a free-lancer.
At the same time, critical theorists began to argue that liberalism itself was an ideology that masked the self-interest of its proponents, whether the latter were men, Europeans, white people or heterosexuals.
Then it turned out those critical theorists were about as black as Rachel Dolezal.
On both the right and the left, foundational liberal ideas were pushed to extremes
but nobody noticed coz that shite was boooooooring.
that then eroded the perceived value of liberalism itself.
It had no value. What is the point of banging on about liberalism or socialism or whatever?
Economic freedom evolved into an anti-state ideology,
But Goldwater and Reagan had that before I was born!
and personal autonomy evolved into a “woke” progressive worldview that celebrated diversity over a shared culture.
again, this was scarcely new. There were hipsters or 'hepcats' back in the Forties and Fifties.
These shifts then produced their own backlash, where the left blamed growing inequality on capitalism itself, and the right saw liberalism as an attack on all traditional values.
This could have been said about the Thirties. Not just the Nineteen Thirties, the Eighteen Thirties
The global context Liberalism is valued the most when people experience life in an illiberal world.
Just as guys who wanna go join ISIS most are guys who live in depressing suburbs of post-industrial Societies.
The doctrine itself arose in Europe after the 150 years of unremitting religious warfare that followed the Protestant Reformation.
No it didn't. Germany had the hundred years war. At its end there was no fucking Liberalism anywhere to be seen. England hardly had any religious warfare but Liberalism was soon well entrenched there.
It was reborn in the wake of Europe’s destructive nationalistic wars of the early 20th century.
Europe had a big war between Empires which then resulted in the birth of various more or less unviable or indefensible nation states. The German General Staff made the same mistake twice and then Russia and America restored peace because either could fuck up the entire continent on its own. That's it. That's the whole story. Liberalism does not feature in it at all.
A liberal order was institutionalised in the form of the European Union,
Nope. A common market gave birth to an institution dedicated to fiscal policy harmonization and monetary integration. This was purely economic. It had nothing to do with Liberalism. In Britain, traditional Liberals, for whom Free Trade was an article of faith, opposed it because it represents 'trade diversion' as much as 'trade creation'. But so did some old fashioned Socialists who want to Nationalize everything.
and the broader global order of open trade and investment created by US power.
There's some truth to that. There was an ideological continuity between Bush Snr and Clinton which people like Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder could get on board with. Clinton, it must be said, greatly expanded global trade and set the stage for China's rise. But if you ask the question 'which political philosophers or economists inspired Clintonism?' what answer would you get? With Dubya, you can name neo-cons from the stable of Leo Strauss but for Clintonism you draw a blank.
Come to think of it, it may have been Strauss who steered Fukuyama to Kojeve- the Eurocrat Hegelian for whom, I suppose, History might indeed end with ordoliberalism, but only because the guy was hopelessly Eurocentric.
It received a big shot in the arm between 1989 and 1991 when communism collapsed and the peoples living under it were freed to shape their own futures.
Fair point. At last the Liberals could say 'look, Marxism is and always was a pile of shite. Ask the Rooskis. They had 70 years of it.'
The travails of liberalism will not end even if Putin loses. China will be waiting in the wings, as well as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and the populists in western countries However, more than a generation has passed now since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the virtues of living in a liberal world have been taken for granted by many. The memory of destructive wars and totalitarian dictatorship has faded, especially for younger people in Europe and North America. In this new world, the EU, which succeeded spectacularly in preventing European war,
Fuck off! Germany was partitioned and occupied! It couldn't start shit while France had no need to. Which fucking war did the EU prevent? That between Belgium and Holland over which country had the homelier prostitutes?
was now seen by many on the right as tyrannical, while conservatives argued that government mandates to wear masks and be vaccinated against Covid-19 were comparable to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. This is something that could only happen in a secure and complacent society that had no experience of real dictatorship.
Nope. It could happen anywhere. People talk stupid shit all the time.
Moreover, liberalism can be uninspiring to many people.
Because it is boring shite only senile professors gas on about.
A doctrine that deliberately lowers the sights of politics and enjoins tolerance of diverse views often fails to satisfy those who want strong community based on shared religious views, common ethnicity or thick cultural traditions.
It's like telling a bunch of kids who want to play football that they should be tolerant of other views- e.g the notion that they should dress up in frocks and hold a nice tea party for their dolls.
Into this void have stepped illiberal authoritarian regimes.
Fukuyama thinks Russia and China and Syria and so on were places ruled by very boring liberals who would keep saying to the lads 'must you play football? It's so...rough. Why not braid each others hair instead?'
Those of Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela, Iran and Nicaragua have little in common other than the fact that they dislike liberal democracy and want to maintain their own authoritarian power.
But none of those countries had any experience of affluent social liberalism under the rule of law. There was no fucking void caused by liberals being boring and stupid which led to a reaction towards Ayatollahs and such like.
They have created a network of mutual support that has allowed, for example, the despicable regime of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas to survive despite having driven more than a fifth of Venezuela’s population into exile.
Putin says he might put nukes in Venezuela and Cuba. That should concentrate American minds.
At the centre of this network is Putin’s Russia, which has provided weapons, advisers, military and intelligence support to virtually any regime, no matter how awful to its own people, that opposes the US or the EU.
The next step is nuclear proliferation. France and Israel probably cooperated to get the bomb. Pakistan and North Korea certainly did- presumably with some Chinese help. Putin is going to get into that game in a big way. Liberals don't want to be nuked in their beds so they'll keep their noses out of I.R.
This network extends into the heart of liberal democracies themselves. Rightwing populists express admiration for Putin, beginning with former US president Trump, who called Putin a “genius” and “very savvy” after his invasion of Ukraine. Populists including Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour in France, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, leaders of the AfD in Germany and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have all shown sympathy for Putin, a “strong” leader who acts decisively to defend traditional values without regard for petty things such as laws and constitutions.
I think the Serbs are his biggest supporter on the Continent.
The liberal world has brought about huge increases in gender equality and tolerance for gay and lesbian people over the past two generations,
Fuck off! LGBTQ peeps have done that by themselves. True a Liberal peer did help them a bit in the UK- because his brother had been gay and then had topped himself. But homosexual and trans people have done a lot to enhance life for everybody in their communities and in the arts and so forth. Nobody did them any fucking favors.
which has provoked some on the right to worship masculine strength and aggression as virtues in themselves.
Zelenskyy, of course, is dressing demurely in a frock and offering his back side for sodomy to all and sundry. Nothing wrong with masculine strength and aggression directed at fucking up those who wanna take our land.
This is why the current war in Ukraine matters to all of us.
If ordinary Ukrainians beat the shit out of the fucking Spetznaz then they will have changed world history. Even if they lose a bit of territory, they will be remembered as heroes for a thousand generations.
The unprovoked Russian aggression and shelling of the peaceful Ukrainian cities Kyiv and Kharkiv has reminded people in the most vivid way possible what the consequences of illiberal dictatorship are.
Nonsense! They have reminded us of the Serbs and the Georgians and the Armenians and so forth. Go up against a super-power and, once it establishes air-dominance, your cities turn to rubble. But if you come out from under that rubble and kill the invader you gain immortal fame. Stalingrad was a turning point in History. Kyiv or Kharkiv could be more glorious yet. Sadly, they may be more gory yet and without any sort of happy ending. That's the trouble with war. Fine words butter no parsnips and bombastic phrases avail little against thermobaric bombs.
Putin’s Russia is seen clearly now not as a state with legitimate grievances about Nato expansion but as a resentful, revanchist country intent on reversing the entire post-1991 European order.
Putin may succeed. If he really can put ICBMs in Cuba then Biden should scrap the anti missile shield bases in Poland and Romania.
Or rather, it is a country with a single leader obsessed with what he believes to be a historical injustice that he will try to correct, no matter the cost to his own people. The heroism of Ukrainians rallying around their country and fighting desperately against a much larger enemy has inspired people around the world.
For the moment. What if Ukrainians start running away? Today's courageous resisters could become tomorrows unwelcome refugees. The Palestinians were once greatly loved and admired in the Arab world. Now they are seen as stupid and a nuisance.
President Zelensky has come to be seen as a model leader, courageous under not metaphorical but real fire, and a source of unity for a previously fractured nation.
But, in a couple of weeks, he may be seen as a clown who brought disaster down on his country by his stupid intransigence. He should have agreed to a territorial adjustment rather than let his people be ground down by aerial bombardment
Ukraine’s solitary stand has in turn provoked a remarkable upwelling of international support. Cities around the world have decked themselves in blue-and-gold Ukrainian flags, and have promised material support.
This is perfectly sensible. If Ukrainians can defeat Putin's Army then we can all afford to cut our defense budgets. Instead of a standing army we could just distribute Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails when an invasion is imminent.
Contrary to Putin’s plans, Nato has emerged stronger than ever, with Finland and Sweden now thinking of joining.
NATO gets stronger when new members can do much more than defend themselves. They can contribute to force projection. An alliance gets weaker when there are members which can't pull their own weight. Germany, I'm looking at you.
The most remarkable change has occurred in Germany, which previously had been Russia’s biggest friend in Europe. By announcing a doubling of the German defence budget and willingness to supply arms to Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has reversed decades of German foreign policy and thrown his country wholeheartedly into the struggle against Putin’s imperialism.
But he may reverse himself this winter when suddenly Russian gas starts looking very attractive once again.
Although it is hard to see how Putin achieves his larger objectives of a greater Russia, we are still facing a long and dispiriting road ahead. Putin has yet to bring to bear all of the military force Russia has at its disposal. Ukraine’s defenders are exhausted and running out of food and ammunition. There will be a race between Russia resupplying its own forces, and Nato seeking to bolster Ukrainian resistance. As Russia doubles down, Ukrainian cities are suffering indiscriminate shelling, and tragically are coming to resemble places, such as Grozny in Chechnya, that suffered similar Russian bombardment in the 1990s. There is also a danger of escalation of the fighting to direct clashes between Nato and Russia as calls mount for a “no-fly” zone.
Which NATO won't heed.
But it is the Ukrainians who will bear the cost of Putin’s aggression,
Which is why, whichever way you look at it, Zelenskyy is a clown.
and they who will be fighting on behalf of all of us.
or running away on behalf of all of us.
The travails of liberalism will not end even if Putin loses. China will be waiting in the wings, as well as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and the populists in western countries. But the world will have learnt what the value of a liberal world order is,
empty words while Ukrainians die- or run away
and that it will not survive unless people struggle for it and show each other mutual support.
Why not bomb our own cities? We mustn't expect Putin to do it for us.
The Ukrainians, more than any other people, have shown what true bravery is, and that the spirit of 1989 remains alive in their corner of the world.
The protest at Tiananmen Square was crushed in 1989. Since then China has risen immeasurably. Ukraine however was foolish enough to give up its nukes in return for worthless guarantees from the UK and the US.
For the rest of us, it has been slumbering and is being reawakened.
It was cruel to reawaken Fukuyama just for the sake of this warmed up sick. Put the fellow back in cryogenic suspension. His time will come when the Lizard People from Planet X invade. Till then, sleepy bye-byes Fuku baby! Have sweet dreams
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