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In 1992 political theorist Francis Fukuyama published his highly acclaimed text ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. The central thesis was that Liberal democracy had ultimately triumphed over Socialist communism. The victorious democratic capitalist state, he suggested represented the last ideological stage in the progression of human history. Capitalism and market forces were evidently superior and centrally planned command style economies had proven their inherent inefficiency.
To all intents and purposes claimed Fukuyama, history had ended and so was the Cold War. Europe and the Western World had entered a period of seemingly endurable peace. Someone joked that we should not make predictions, particularly about the future. As I write, Europe is demonstrably at war, the first major conflict in Europe since World War II ended in 1945 and it is in part ideologically driven. History has of course not ended.
The present Ukraine conflict is primarily the creation of one man. The liberal elites did not see it coming or chose to ignore it because they completely misread the man, Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin was the son of a member of the Russian Secret Service, Vladimir Sn. The son joined the Service right after leaving college in 1975 and remained there until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. As a young KGB officer, Putin witnessed the official dismantling of the old Soviet empire on 20 August of that year. He never forgot what he regarded as the ignominy of that collapse and resolved to put U.S.S.R together again. The old Union was no humpty-dumpty, it could be reassembled with a combination of guile, overt lies and tyrannical force.
The Western leadership by and large failed to understand the determination of the man and the seriousness of the vision. Successive U.S. Presidents failed to fashion an effective Russian policy. George W. Bush made the childishly ridiculous statement that he looked into Putin’s eyes and ‘saw his soul.’ Barrack Obama was only slightly less naïve as he appeared to believe that the Cold War was over, perhaps with the same naivete that some thought his election meant that America had entered a post-racial phase. When members of the then hawkish Republican Party criticised his ostensible policy of détente with Russia, he accused them of thinking in outdated Cold War ideological terms. For Putin, Donald Trump was the most useful of useful idiots. A retarded, gullible and corruptible American president came up against a seasoned, deadly serious KGB officer with a very muscular ego. Recently on Fox News Trump claimed that the Ukraine crisis was a consequence of the fake election that brought Joseph Biden to power. In embarrassment, even Laura Inghram of Fox News cut short the interview.
As Camilla Tominey of the Telegraph points out many liberal elites in the West seem to have forgotten that Putin rose to power on the back of a war in Chechnya that killed over 50, 000 people. They chose to ignore the downing of a civilian airline over Ukraine with 298 persons on board. They ignored the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, the Skripals in England and more recently the imprisonment of dissident Alexei Navalny who dared to expose the corruption of the Putin regime. In 2014 Putin annexed Crimea. Vladimir Putin is a KGB agent at heart. It was patently naïve of the Western liberal elites to think that he would have stopped at that point.
President Biden more recently seemed to have concluded that Putin would invade Ukraine but the notion held that he would limit the incursion to eastern Ukraine including Donetsk, Luhansk and the general Donbas region. This would be what Biden himself seemed to have concluded would constitute “a minor incursion”. Few thought that Putin would march so brazenly and quickly on Kiev and on Lviv in the western part of the country. This again is to ignore the fact that for some time he had reiterated that Ukraine was not a sovereign state, but a part of Russia.
Given the human costs of a possible nuclear war, it is not surprising that Biden and much of the Western powers have chosen to de-escalate the conflict. They responsibly turned first to economic sanctions as deterrent to Putin’s ambitions. There has been much debate about the effectiveness of sanctions in curbing Russian aggression. Russian Banks have been virtually excluded from the global financial system making it difficult for Russians to trade normally. Putin and supporting oligarchs have been personally targeted. Similarly steps have been taken to cut Russia off from the Society for Worldwide Inter-Bank Financial Telecommunications or SWIFT, the system of cross-border international payments. Some commentators contend that sanctions are unlikely to serve as an effective deterrent in the short term. For one thing Russia has built up cash reserves estimated in December 2021 to be around $ U.S. 630.63 billion. After the seizure of Crimea, in anticipation of a Western response, Russia began to develop its own alternative to Swift.
The seeming weakness of the Western response to Russian expansionism goals betrays some of the weakness in liberalism in responding to political authoritarianism and to social deviance generally. Modern liberal thought is based on an assumption of the inherent rationality of mankind. However it exaggerates the capacity of human beings for rational illumination and the notion of the perfectability of mankind. Vladimir Putin has stated that he has already placed Russia’s nuclear forces under high alert. The West and the whole world are facing the greatest threat since the Cuban missile crisis. The danger posed by a man like Putin should not be underestimated. The world must always stand guard against an egotistical leader with a manic dream in an age of moral insensitivity.
Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.
