Three months after what the scholar Timothy Garton Ash called “the greatest street party on earth”—the night in November 1989, when tens of thousands of people, armed with “pickaxes and candles, flower bouquets and champagne bottles” flooded onto the streets of Berlin to bring down the concrete wall that marked the frontline of the Cold War—a secret manifesto for building a new world order began to be circulated among top officials of the United States government.
America’s strategic aim, the draft Defence Planning Guidance for 1994-1999 read, was to prevent the “re-emergence of a new rival”. It concluded: “We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger global role.”
For weeks now, upwards of 100,000 Russian troops have been massed along the country’s borders with Ukraine. Although some of these troops have begun to pull back, in the wake of intense diplomatic efforts, there’s a wider issue of grave concern to countries like India. Like China, a resurgent Russia is laying claim to a sphere of influence, or control of the affairs of nation-states, on its peripheries.
The end of Cold War was supposed to have brought down the curtain on such claims—but it’s clear that the age of Great Powers didn’t end with the great Berlin street party. The secret document helps understand how we got here and why finding a durable solution isn’t easy.
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Promises that shaped the post-Cold War era
Even as the Berlin Wall fell, the United States and former Soviet Union began negotiations over the limits of their power in post-Cold War Europe. Eager to bring about the unification of Germany, the US seemed willing to address Soviet concerns over the disintegration of their east European bloc. “I very much want you to know neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages,” a declassified document records President Ronald Reagan’s emissary, James Baker, telling Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Then came the money line: “Not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
For generations, the Great Powers had managed the world thus. In 1823, President James Monroe claimed the Americas as the United States sphere of influence. Franklin Roosevelt, after the Second World War, called for “Four Policemen” to secure the world. Even during the Cold War, they stood aside as Soviet forces crushed uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, though, led to hubris in Washington. The author of the Defence Planning Guidance, aspiring mathematician-turned-neoconservative ideologue Paul Wolfowitz, believed that the limits the Cold War had placed on American power no longer existed. It was now the sole hegemon.
Even though the leak of Wolfowitz’s draft provoked sharp accusations of imperialism—a watered-down version was eventually adopted—the text informed American thinking in the new era. The US invaded countries like Iraq, overthrew Panama’s military ruler, Manuel Noriega, and bombed Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal regime in Serbia.
For many in the US, what came to be known as the liberal world order seemed a moral one: each country had the right to make its own foreign policy, and to be held to account for violations of shared norms. But, as the scholar Robert Kagan has argued, “A liberal world order, like any world order, is something that is imposed, and as much as we in the West might wish it to be imposed by superior virtue, it is generally imposed by superior power.”
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The eastward drift of NATO
From the mid-1990s, pushed by the United States, NATO began to drift eastwards, encompassing former Soviet satellites in eastern Europe, like Poland and the Baltic states. For many Russian leaders, this represented an existential threat to the country’s status as a regional power. The anxieties were fuelled by the long and brutal war against Islamists in Chechnya, which raised the spectre of the splintering of Russia.
Wolfowitz’s Guidance document had called for Washington to be “mindful that democratic change in Russia is not irreversible, and that despite its current travails, Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States”. To Russia’s leaders, NATO’s actions seemed part of a project to dismantle whatever remained of their power.
Liberal opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky argued: “Talk that this is a different NATO, a NATO that is no longer a military alliance, is ridiculous. It is like saying that the hulking thing advancing towards your garden is not a tank because it is painted pink, carries flowers, and plays cheerful music. It does not matter how you dress it up; a pink tank is still a tank.”
Events came to a head in 2014, when a mass movement deposed Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovich. The Kremlin believed that the US had sponsored the uprising against Yanukovich. In response, President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and Donbass regions of Ukraine.
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Putin’s power play in Ukraine
The US has warned that, this time around, it will respond to an invasion “decisively and impose swift and severe costs.” President Joe Biden’s dislike for Putin is well known: he famously described the Russian president as “a killer”, and warned he would “pay a price.” What’s less clear, though, is if the US has the appetite for actual war to defend its small European partners.
Likely, Putin believes European leaders have already got the message: Russia has hundreds of thousands of troops on hand around Ukraine; the US does not.
For several reasons, this power-play is likely right. Ever-more dependent on Russian gas—it will switch off its last nuclear reactor this year, and ban coal-fired power by 2038—Germany has pushed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project in the face of sanctions threats. French leaders, for their part, worry America is pushing Russia further into China’s embrace.
Even though European Union and United States sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, moreover, it shows no signs of collapse. Indeed, Russia has grown its foreign exchange to record levels, in preparation for a long crisis.
Stepping back from this confrontation, though, will also have real consequences for the US. What will failing to confront Russia mean for the credibility of American power for allies in Europe and Asia? How far westwards might Russia seek to push forward its sphere of influence? And what lessons will China—already seeking to bully smaller nation-states along its peripheries—draw from this crisis?
There’s no telling how the distant power-struggle in Ukraine will end, but one way or the other, it will shape India’s world for decades to come.
The author tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)