The day the music stopped

2 March 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February marks the “turning point of an era”, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz put it. He likely intended for his words to grasp the complete breakdown of diplomatic efforts and the beginning of the first conventional war in Europe since 1945. Geopolitically, however, the repercussions of this attack will reach far beyond any territorial conflicts between Russia and its neighbours or the fight for Europe’s security architecture.

With Russian troops entering Ukraine, the punchline was drawn to end all speculation on democratic recession and the rise of autocrats. And while NATO and EU partners finally demonstrated resolve and unity four days into Ukraine’s heroic resistance, the immense costs of really any of the options at their disposal shows: the music has stopped playing for Western strategic hubris. The arrival of the Chinese era has become manifest.

From unwillingness to inability

What started as the West’s unwillingness to walk the talk during the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, the infamous ‘red-line’ drawn in the Syria conflict, or the annexation of Crimea in 2014, has transformed into an unmistakable inability for the entire world to see. The main drivers of this vary on both sides of the Atlantic. Two decades of sacrificing blood and wasting money on illegal regime change, ill-advised interventionism, and the flawed idea of counterterrorism through military campaigns and nation-building have left the American people war-weary, sceptical of a soundly guided military projection of US power and prone to market criers on behalf of isolationism.

The Western strategy has reached its limits: switching between realpolitik and moral superiority at one’s own discretion no longer comes without massive costs.

In Europe, the prolonged meandering in the sideshows of international security, accompanied by overstretched political rhetoric has produced societies that are not war-weary but indifferent to any cause potentially worth it. Democracy and the rule-of-law have come to share a common fate with countless merchandise or services in the modern globalised economy — devalued by consolidated democratic societies that are situated comfortably enough to merely pick the cherries

The loss of external credibility of the Western value system over the past 20 years can hardly be overestimated. The ultimately most crippling factor, however, turns out to be the internal loss of credibility and trust among transatlantic partners during the Trump presidency. Western states thus failed to close ranks early and sufficiently enough on Russia’s policies of aggression and expansion. Besides decade-old arguments over NATO members not paying their fair share, the arguably most prominent point of contention was the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project — with the US accusing Germany of undercutting the very alliance it was freeriding on.

Germany, unwilling to bow to the US’ own hypocrisy considering energy imports from Russia, insisted on the project’s strictly commercial nature and, like a sleepwalker, refused to acknowledge its geopolitical dimension. Western intelligence services were already predicting the invasion to be close when Scholz and President Biden continued their display of disunity in early February. And it took the actual crossing of Russian troops into Ukraine for the United Kingdom’s reputation as a playground for Russian oligarchs to finally come under scrutiny.

Morals, money, and the Russian honey trap

Locating responsibility for the West’s total loss of strategic instinct across political camps is a less-than-clear cut undertaking. Prominent voices on both sides have acted as Putin’s apologists with some of them continuing their spiel despite Russia’s war of aggression well underway. In Germany, the Left has time and again solicited Russia’s demand for ‘security guarantees’ – stuck in nostalgia about Willy Brandt’s ‘Ostpolitik’ or motivated by personal financial incentives. In the US, Republicans with their grievances against democrats and a progressive world have increasingly been lured in by Putin’s strongman, law-and-order stance back home.

The failure to acknowledge Vladimir Putin’s metamorphosis into a full-fledged autocrat is also shared across generations of Western decision-makers. There is a group of millennials who grew up estranged from the parameters of geopolitics. They appeared to be either naively shocked or feeling betrayed by the exposure of their ideological pipe dreams’ irrelevance in the face of an adversary who dismisses the rules-based international order with breathtaking nonchalance. And there is a huge squad of political veterans who should have known better, including former German chancellors Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder, and Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban.

Schröder now faces calls to return his privileges as ex-chancellor and critics have characterised Orban’s boasting about his frequent meetings with Putin as "roughly rubbing against a qualified case of treason". These people can hardly be accused of an excessively moral agenda. If anything, they campaigned for democratisation through trade relations or for themselves. Blinded by the post-1991 hubris that Russia could only become more democratic, they ended up caught in the honeytrap of closing deals along the way.

The West’s strategic cul de sac

The Western strategy has reached its limits: switching between realpolitik and moral superiority at one’s own discretion no longer comes without massive costs. Military intervention in the form of a no-fly-zone over Ukraine cannot reasonably be considered in the face of an enemy who issues blatant threats of nuclear war. Europe’s nuclear deterrence is an also-ran and Putin had an ally in the White House long enough to sow division and damage the US’ resolve.

Watching Ukraine being grabbed from the sidelines, with the Baltic states fearing to be next, however, would constitute more than a declaration of moral bankruptcy. Along the frontline in the South China Sea, the West’s political and military choices in Ukraine are being closely monitored. And the systemic conflict with China will be propelled to the next, crucial stage by the response NATO and the EU have now managed to settle on: Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT system.

While certainly warranted, this measure would come at a smaller risk for the international system as we know it, if a change of mind had already taken place in 2008 or 2014. Russia’s economy, fortified after the annexation of Crimea, will be able to withstand Western sanctions at least for the short term. Furthermore, sanctions may be offset by Russia being able to handle international payment traffic via its own system SPFS and China’s rapidly growing CIPS. A scenario where Russia teams up with the Chinese for global payment alternatives represents a tectonic shift as the control of money flows seamlessly translates into influence in world politics.

A blueprint for the annexation of Taiwan?

Up until the start of the invasion, China consistently acted as a defender of the Russian narrative, shifting the blame of escalation on NATO’s “waves of expansion”. Since Russian troops have entered Ukraine, China’s officials are refusing to call the operation an invasion. As a prophylactic to a future prolonged struggle for Taiwan, they are also dressing down Western sanctions as ineffective. However, the longer the fight in Ukraine drags on, the more uneasy China seems to become with balancing the support for its closest geopolitical partner and not damaging the ties with its closest economic partners in the West. China’s vote to abstain in the UN Security Council is exemplary for this. Therefore, we cannot be sure whether Beijing considers the invasion of Ukraine to have opened a ‘window of opportunity’ in the Taiwan Strait for further blindsiding the already stunned West.

If China were to pursue ‘reunification’ with Taiwan in the foreseeable future, it is highly unlikely that its narrative to justify the move will sound anything like what we have heard from Russia about Ukraine. But no matter which shape a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would ultimately take, the war in Ukraine has made the alarmingly low level of Western strategic manoeuvrability painfully obvious. What happened last Thursday has shown that Western efforts to deter autocrats’ attacks on democracy will require an honest, much higher price. The years of plenty are over.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Jana C. von Dessien is a doctoral researcher at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) in Switzerland and Co-Head of the International Law Program at FORAUS, a Swiss foreign policy think tank headquartered in Zurich. Her research focuses on ‘alternative’ legitimation requirements for targeted killings in asymmetric conflicts and their configuration with established international humanitarian law. Image credit: Flickr/Mirek Pruchnicki (image cropped).