Ukraine Crisis: Putin Destroyed 3 Myths of America's Global Order - Bloomberg - 0 views
www.bloomberg.com/...yths-of-america-s-global-order
crisis putin myths progress great power rivalry democracy optimism world order post history international relations
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Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.
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Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.
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In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace.
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In the 20th century, a collection of fascist and communist leaders showed how rapidly the world could descend into the darkness of repression and aggression.
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In 2007, as Western intellectuals were celebrating the triumph of the liberal international order, Putin warned that he was about to start rolling that order back. In a scorching speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin denounced the spread of liberal values and American influence. He declared that Russia would not forever live with a system that constrained its influence and threatened its increasingly illiberal regime.
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Putin’s policies have assailed three core tenets of post-Cold War optimism about the trajectory of global affairs.
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To see Putin publicly humiliate his own intelligence chief on television last week was to realize that the world’s vastest country, with one of its two largest nuclear arsenals, is now the fiefdom of a single man.
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He has contributed, through cyberattacks, political influence operations and other subversion to a global “democratic recession” that has now lasted more than 15 years.
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Putin has also shattered a second tenet of the post-Cold War mindset: the idea that great-power rivalry was over and that violent, major conflict had thus become passe.
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Violence, Putin has reminded us, is a terrible but sadly normal feature of world affairs. Its absence reflects effective deterrence, not irreversible moral progress.
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This relates to a third shibboleth Putin has challenged — the idea that history runs in a single direction.
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During the 1990s, the triumph of democracy, great-power peace and Western influence seemed irreversible. The Clinton administration called countries that bucked these trends “backlash states,” the idea being that they could only offer atavistic, doomed resistance to the progression of history.
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“International norms” are really just rules made and enforced by states that combine great power with great determination.
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Which means that history is a constant struggle to prevent the world from being thrust back into patterns of predation that it can never permanently escape.
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Most important, Putin’s gambit is producing an intellectual paradigm shift — a recognition that this war could be a prelude to more devastating conflicts unless the democratic community severely punishes aggression in this case and more effectively deters it in others.
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he may be on the verge of a rude realization of his own: Robbing one’s enemies of their complacency is a big mistake.