For the past thirty years the Western strategy towards Russia and China was to try and incorporate them into the global, liberal, democratic order by developing deep economic ties with the two countries. That strategy has failed. Russia and China became richer, but they also became more authoritarian, imperialistic, and anti-Western. They are now using the West’s interdependence with their economies as a weapon, attempting to coerce their democratic trading partners. China and Russia seem ready for a new period of intense and aggressive rivalry with the West. The question is, is the West prepared for it, asks Aaron Friedberg.
Vladimir Putin may not be a sentimental man, but he evidently has a special affinity for anniversaries. So, as his Soviet forebears might have said, it is probably “no accident” that the Russian dictator chose the closing days of 2021, exactly thirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union, to set in motion his plans for finally conquering all of Ukraine.
Putin has famously described the fragmentation of the Soviet empire as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” In the West, by contrast, these events were seen to mark the end of over four decades of ideological conflict and geopolitical tension and the start of a new, more hopeful phase of peace, prosperity, and stability. Whatever else it may accomplish, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has buried these dreams once and for all and brought the post-Cold War era to a bloody and conclusive close.
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