Translated from Spanish by Oded Balaban balaban@research.haifa.ac.il
If there is an expression in vogue in international politics, it is: turning point. It means change of paradigm, change of strategy, change of orientation, in any case, radical change. This turning point has been present at the two major international conferences in June 2022: that of the EU and, above all, that of NATO. This is no coincidence.
The turning point can be seen as an adaptation to a change in the military and political structure that the world has undergone in the last two decades of the 20th century. In brief terms, the strategic lines approved at the NATO summit have to do with orders generated at the global level.
There are indeed three great powers, but these powers are not equivalent. China, Russia and the West. The first is defined in economic and military terms. The second in territorial and military terms. And the third in economic, political and military terms. The only point where there is equivalence then - and this is the decisive point - is in the military. Hence the importance of NATO and its change of orientation. According to the words of its President Jens Stoltenberg, it is a matter of creating guidelines to limit the other two powers in the only area common to all three: the military. This explains the main objectives of the new NATO paradigm.
On the one hand, Russia, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, is seen by NATO as the immediate danger and, therefore, as the main one. On the other hand, China will be considered as an enemy only if a Sino-Russian alliance can be established. Now, for such an alliance not to take place, it will be necessary to weaken one of its links as much as possible, and the weakest link is, for now, Putin's Russia. These are the reasons that led NATO not only to expand its size with the addition of Finland and Sweden, but also to strengthen its eastern flank militarily, while maintaining its military support effort in Ukraine. Do these changes mean a weakening for Putin, as most interpretations of NATO's strategic shift have argued? Apparently, yes, but there are also reasons to think otherwise.
The triumphalist thesis that NATO's turning point is a major setback for Putin is based on the assumption that Putin's actions in Ukraine, as the "American realist school", later used by Putin as a means of propaganda, has argued, are due to NATO enlargement. However, it has been Putin himself who has contradicted it. Putin has stated, and not only once, that it is no problem for him that Finland and Sweden are members of NATO. There is no reason to contradict him.
As we have noted in other texts, Putin's geopolitical intentions are not affected by the fact that NATO is larger or smaller. His objective, at least the immediate one, is to reconstitute the original space of the former RUS, that is, the pre-Soviet Russian empire. Even Putin seems to have given up, at least during the first stage of his advance, the reconquest of the Baltic countries, since this action would require a much greater reaction from the West than the one he has shown towards Ukraine. Putin -as he demonstrated in the case of Ukraine where in months of offensive warfare he has only managed to seize a few cities in the Donbas- is not in a position to wage war on two or more fronts at the same time. Its purpose for now can only be limited to securing the phase of reconsolidation of the empire in the zone it considers "natural", to which, according to its mythology, Ukraine belongs. Afterwards, according to the conditions - Putin seems to think - he will see what he will do. For the moment the decisive thing seems to be to reintegrate Ukraine, and if that is not possible, to destroy it completely (evidently, he is doing it). However, so far his balance sheet is meager: he has annexed Belarus via Lukazensko, destroying the civil society of that country and the war in Ukraine is far from being won. Moldova could also be annexed although for him it seems to be a minor piece. In short, Putin is stuck in the first step of his imperial project. The second step, as Putin announced in St. Perterburg, is to defeat the West, by which he means weakening it politically and economically.
The war on Ukraine is seen by Putin as a decisive factor to weaken militarily, politically and even morally, if not the West, at least its European part. He counts for this, as Stalin also counted on, on potential inter-European allies, among them Orban's Hungary, Erdogan's Turkey, Vučic's Serbia. He counts on the neo-fascist ultra-rightists emerging in all the countries of Europe. He is counting on the possibility of a war-induced economic crisis that, according to his calculations, could collapse European economies, unleashing social unrest and weakening governments. It is counting on the effects of world hunger caused by its military blockades and by the energy crisis which will multiply the migratory masses, especially those coming from Africa. And, not to be forgotten, he is counting on the possibility that in 2024 the national-populist alternative of Trump will triumph in the USA, who, for the sake of the economic recovery of his nation, could offer Putin the whole Eurasian space so that he can do there what suits him best. In short, Putin is counting on a weather whose winds, according to his political meteorologists, are blowing in his favor.
Putin has already declared at the international congress of dictatorships held in St. Petersburg that the war in Ukraine is only the beginning of a crusade against the West. In the framework of that war Putin would try -in fact he is trying- to become the political-military vanguard of all the autocratic, dictatorial and therefore anti-Western nations on earth. Stalin's old dream, the capitulation of democratic Europe, he wants to make it come true, but in other forms and by other methods.
To reconstitute the old Russia would mean, in his feverish but not impossible utopia, to turn Russia into the central axis of a new continent called Eurasia. Well, in order to achieve this goal, he has already taken the first steps. Precisely in the days when the EU and NATO conferences were taking place, Putin embarked on a trip to nations in the process of being dominated by Russia. To some observers it appeared to be just an attempt to demonstrate to the West the extent and strength of his zone of territorial influence. But Putin is not interested in media spectacles. Everything he does, he does according to a purpose, often hidden. And in this case, more than a show of force, the dictator was more interested in securing his internal front for the sake of an expansion that escapes the area of Western military competence: towards the Caucasian region and Central Asia.
Let us look at the countries Putin visited: first of all Tajikistan, where he has strong economic connections and several military bases. Tajikistan also maintains economic and religious relations with the Taliban of Afghanistan who, in need of material assistance, would not hesitate to join the Russian empire on condition that their sovereignty, traditions and religious order are respected. It is symptomatic that after the earthquake, Afghanistan asked for help from the West, and after the trip to Putin, refused it without explanation.
The second stop on Putin's tour was his visit to the governments of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, most of them of Islamist orientation. Interesting approach: at the historic UN assembly where Russia was condemned by 141 votes, none of these governments voted in Russia's favor. Most abstained. It was a warning to Putin that none of these countries wants to suffer the fate of Chechnya and Ukraine. But Putin is not interested in annexing those nations for the time being either. What is important for him is to incorporate them into a common strategic line: the fight against the West populated by anti-Islamic infidels. His declared objective is to form a front of anti-Western nations, whether Orthodox or Muslim. It already exerts control over Syria, which it has turned into a colony, in the same way as it is boldly seeking a closer alliance with Iran, that is, an alliance of the orthodox civilization with the Islamic civilization against the "obscene" Western civilization, something that did not even cross Samuel Huntington's mind. Now, in the fulfillment of this project, NATO would be totally out of the game. After all, it is not its war space.
By the way, forming such a huge anti-Western alliance would demand a high price: the incorporation of China as an economic power. Russia would place its energy sources, gas, oil and armies at the disposal of the Chinese project of world economic domination. China, its capital and its markets. In this projection, the world, according to Putin, would be subject to China's economic domination and Russia's military domination. A new world order? If we want to, let's use that name.
But all this, for the West, gloomy project, can only be realized on one condition, and that is that the West remains undaunted and unmoved. However, this will not be the case either.
It is true that NATO's new strategy has for the moment a strictly defensive objective. Through the incorporation of Finland and Sweden, plus other nations to come, the aim is to draw a demarcation line forbidding Russian expansion. A territorial and military "no trespassing".
The Kremlin probably reckons that in the West there will be defections, hesitations and the fall of democratic governments. And of course, there surely will be. There is nothing more unstable than a democracy in times of economic crisis or war, and even more so if these two catastrophes appear at the same time. But, at the same time, the West is also confident that Putin's international alliances, especially with a war-impoverished Russia, are not as stable as they appear at first glance. While the vast majority of people subject to the Russian or Chinese empire yearn to live like in the West, very few in the West, even if they claim to be anti-American, want to live like Russians or Chinese.
To compete economically with China in world markets and at the same time war with Russia in territorial spaces would certainly be a titanic task. However, political democracy has an advantage that anti-Western autocratic orders do not possess. Democracy is not only a form of government and not only a way of life, it is also, strange as it may seem to many, an economic force.
Democracy, in order to be so, presupposes the valuation of the human being, and that valuation presupposes in turn increasing the capital of all the capitals there are and to be: the intelligence of inventiveness. Intelligence that not only leads to philosophical thinking but also to the world of science. In other words, the West has a capacity for creation that cannot be fully developed under the weight of dictatorial states.
China's great economic capacity is based on low wage prices and a technology that imitates the predominantly Western technology of its origin. Russia, under Putin, has become a military giant, but economically it is doomed to subordinate itself to China or the West. Both China and Russia could certainly have the same or better creative capabilities. But for that to happen, productive forces, of which human capital is the original source, would have to be liberated. That would mean freeing human beings from state, autocratic and dictatorial yokes. In other words, both nations should deny themselves as dictatorships or autocracies. This is far from being possible at the moment.
Perhaps it was with this in mind that, on a day of rare inspiration, Joe Biden declared that the great contradiction of our time is between democracies and autocracies. We do not know if Biden realized the tremendous truth he spoke. For that truth implies, among other things, placing war and the economy under the hegemony of politics (autocracies and democracies are political orders, not economic or military), a truth that must not only be realized abroad but also within each nation.
There is no doubt that the West will be injured by the war in Ukraine. But it could also happen that Russia will not be strengthened and its alliance with China will be hindered, among other reasons, by NATO's decision to invest efforts not only in the North Atlantic area, but also in the South Pacific. It was therefore very important that, for the first time, cooperating countries that are not part of the original treaty, such as South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, attended the NATO summit. Xi Jinping and his central committee must have taken note of this new orientation.
NATO has definitely entered the third phase of its history. In the first, it served as protection against the advance of the USSR. In the second, it was engaged in a diffuse and sordid war against an international terrorism that knows no homeland. In the third, which has just begun, it has already decided to serve as a retaining wall against Putin's imperial Russia and then become the military organization of all Western democracies.
If the West manages to convince China that a commercial and financial but not military war can be more profitable than a military war into which it would be dragged by Russia, it would be a great political success. Naturally, in that case the West, particularly the US, will have to make economic concessions to China. But that would still be a small price to pay if an evil anti-Western military alliance between Russia and China is to be avoided. If such an alliance failed between the USSR and Mao's China, there is no reason why it should succeed this time. The task of the West should in no case be to provoke but to negotiate with China. Russia, without China, would be just an underdeveloped military giant, destined to succumb for the third time under the weight of its own history.
In short, the much-vaunted new world order is not yet in place. Like everything else in this life, it will be shaped on a day-to-day basis, where contingencies tend to prevail over forecasts based on deterministic logics. Of course, it is necessary to foresee and prioritize. But that is as far as we can go. For the moment we only know that Russia is the main enemy and China the possible enemy. Hence, the forthcoming meeting between Xi Jinping and Biden will be of fundamental importance for the course of the history of the 21st century.
The world depends not only on missiles but also on words. Churchill and Stalin knew this in their time (we could also say Kissinger and Mao Zedong) when, threatened by the same danger, they abandoned their fears and hatreds for a moment and set out to talk.