After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Western world entered a strange interlude in which we forgot about the realities of the policies of the great powers. In a sense, the 79-year-old president Joe Biden embodies this oblivion.
In the 1990s, the West closed its eyes to the genocide in Rwanda and woke up to the Balkan War only after much anxiety. In Bosnia and Kosovo, belated US intervention saved Europe.
After 9/11, we have become laser-focused on the threat of ideology – political or radical Islam or Islamism – rather than a great power. We went to war on terror. The United States led, and Europe followed.
In the end, we succeeded and failed.
We managed to prevent a new 9/11, killed Osama bin Laden and crushed Islamic State. Above all, we have failed to create a stable Iraq, and we have completely failed to create a stable Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden has abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban, writes Nile Ferguson.
But the real failure was to ignore the revival of two of the old great powers, China and Russia. Not just to ignore, but to allow them to rise.
The Americans helped China’s rapid growth, especially after the Beijing government was admitted to the World Trade Organization. The Americans have told themselves a story that China will liberalize.
As for Russia, its return to military power was made possible by Europeans who bought Russian natural gas and oil and turned a blind eye to Putin’s increasingly despotic rule. Europeans have told themselves a story that Russia will liberalize.
We had enough evidence that we were making a mistake.
First, Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, which followed Barack Obama’s absurd declaration in 2013 that “America is not the world’s policeman.”
Then came Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Ukraine’s first war in 2014, to which the West responded with weak sanctions.
The vice president at the time was Joe Biden. Didn’t he escape how this happened?
There was a brief break in this story of collective amnesia under President Donald Trump.
Europeans were disgusted. But did Russia invade somewhere between 2017 and 2020?
Unfortunately, despite strong claims that the Biden administration would be a transformative presidency on a par with Roosevelt’s, this quickly became a repeat of Jimmy Carter’s weak presidency, with added dementia.
INTERNALLY, the administration is in turmoil with inflation higher than ever since 1982, rising crime and the southern border crowded with illegal immigrants.
The only thing that would make Putin think twice is the availability of significant military equipment in Ukraine, but the Biden administration has delayed arms supplies to Kiev.
But the picture abroad is worse.
Last year, Biden abandoned the Afghan people to the Taliban. This year it is the turn of the people of Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves.
There has never been the slightest chance that the threat of sanctions will deter Putin from invading.
It didn’t help when Biden seemed to suggest that he wouldn’t necessarily sanction a “minor” intrusion.
The only thing that would make Putin think was the availability of significant military equipment in Ukraine, but the Biden administration has delayed arms supplies to Kiev.
Last year, it lifted sanctions against companies building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, designed by Russia and Germany to bypass Ukraine. Moreover, Biden found that China and Russia went hand in hand after trying to get President Xi Jinping to dissuade Putin from invading Ukraine.
Naivety would not believe it if Biden was clearly not in his second childhood.
What happens next? First, despite vigorous defense, the Ukrainian army looks likely to be overwhelmed. There is heroic resistance, but the Russians will certainly control the country’s capital for days.
Second, the EU and the United States appear likely to impose sanctions that cost them the least and therefore hurt Putin the least.
Instead, Europeans must reduce energy imports from Russia, and the United States must strike at Russian banks and arm Ukraine to the teeth. But that can’t happen fast enough.
Inevitably, Putin will ask himself: Who’s next? Because the restoration of the tsarist empire, which is the work of his life, will not stop with the conquest of Ukraine.
NATO will have to work seriously and quickly to strengthen the defense of the Baltic states and Poland.
Putin is already reminding the West of the old reality that only “tactical” nuclear missiles can reliably test Russia’s conventional forces in the event of a full-scale war – and they, in turn, would call for Russian nuclear revenge and the possibility of Armageddon.
Then we could see Biden’s desperate struggle to revive a nuclear deal with Iran in the hopes of re-accepting Iranian oil on the world market and easing pressure on gasoline prices.
Finally, and most importantly, if Putin succeeds in triumphing in Ukraine, it greatly increases the likelihood that China will seek such a triumph by invading Taiwan.
The illness often takes the form of a cascade of reversals, as Jimmy Carter learned in 1979, when the Iranian revolution was followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
I’m afraid we’re at an early stage of just such a cascade today – and as he watches it unfold, Joe Biden will helplessly wonder why he looks a little familiar.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, managing director of Greenmantle and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.