THE NEW YORK TIMES: The worldview behind Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following premises: The West and America are declining, decaying and internally divided. The globalized world is becoming multipolar, with “civilization-states” re-emerging and competing to claim their spheres of influence. And Russia and China in particular represent potent alternatives to Western liberalism that stand ready to contend for global dominance.
As badly as the war has gone for Putin, some of this analysis still holds up. The world has indeed responded to the Ukraine War along multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s snub of the Biden administration’s plea to pump more oil is just the latest example of how the anti-Russian coalition is essentially a Western coalition, with India, China and the Arab world playing more cynical and complicated parts.
Meanwhile, the West’s unity, while obviously more impressive than Putin expected, is still a thin netting flung over deeper vulnerabilities. There has been no sustained post-Covid boomtime, no new era of good feelings. The populist wave is not receding; since the war in Ukraine began the European establishment has suffered political disappointments and defeats in Sweden and Hungary and Italy. Two of the governments most committed to the defense of Ukraine, Joe Biden’s administration and Britain’s Tory government, are well underwater in approval polls. Europe has only just begun to feel the cost of its naïve energy policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that feed inflation and solutions that might induce recession. » | Ross Douthat, Opinion Columnist | Saturday, October 8, 2022
