Lessons From The War
(excerpted from his book The Museum)
The world order born of WWII, and given renewed life after the First Gulf War of the 1990s, is crumbling.
The Breton Woods Agreement of 1944 ushered in a rules-based global community, creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The founding of the United Nations in 1947 aimed to make armed conflict less likely and indeed, less feasible. Non-intervention in the affairs of others was its underlying principle. The UN’s peace-keeping initiatives, one of its major instruments.
The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, the consolidation of international law, making war crimes and crimes against humanity punishable and finally, the birth of the International Criminal Court, all nourished the hope that aggressors would be held accountable. Ultimately, the dream was that aggression itself would fade from the landscape of history.
Every one of these institutions was fatally undermined, in the space of a few hours, when Russian president Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine. This solitary man, a dictator who shares power with no-one, has shaken the geo-political-economic foundation of the modern world.
It will take decades if not the better part of a century for these institutions to regain their credibility. It was long thought that they served to keep the specter of world war at bay. We had no idea how fragile they were.
Humanity must now ask itself a very serious question. How long will we continue to allow power to accumulate in the hands of individuals to such a degree, as to enable one man to utterly derail the course of human history?
How much longer will we allow ourselves to passively witness the territorial designs and appetites of leaders who, like children in a sandbox, have large armies, navies and air forces to play with? Whose only morality is one that melds their personal grandeur with their country’s, for whom history is nothing more than a propaganda exercise, and for whom the truth only serves to camouflage their lies?
It has been said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One wonders if the time has come when this maxim ought to be applied to the presidents of Russia and China. Judging by their behaviour, the desire to extend power through territorial expansion overrides all other considerations of governance and international citizenship.
Since he came to power, the Russian president Vladimir Putin has sent troops into Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas region of Ukraine. Over the course of the past few decades, the Chinese régime has swallowed Tibet, repressed the Uighurs, appropriated international waters in the South China Sea and stripped the citizens of Hong Kong of their rights and democratic institutions. And now, it threatens Taiwan, a “break-away province”.
We have seriously, naively misread the intentions of our adversaries. Our commitment to peace is interpreted as weakness. Our freedoms are interpreted as softness. Our virtues, as a sign of a decadent society. NATO’s lack of response in Ukraine is being treated with contempt. We have let, and are letting, too much aggression go unanswered.
We need a change of focus. Our priority must no longer be the avoidance of war. Rather, we need to put the survival of democracy above all else. The post-WWII assumption that democracy will prevail, because it is better, no longer applies. The assumption that deterrence will prevent war is equally out of date.
There is nothing automatic or inevitable about democracy. We are reminded of this time and time again. Venezuela, once the lone beacon of democracy on an otherwise repressive continent, is now its worst dictatorship. Turkey, once the great modernizing force in the Islamic world (its current leader Erdogan, was elected as a reformer) has now seen freedom crushed. Senegal, formerly the great economic and political post-colonial success story of west Africa, is now sliding into authoritarian leadership.
While democracy does not guarantee peace, nor dictatorship war, is anyone prepared to insist that a democratic Russia would have embarked upon this war just as easily? With such uncontested brutality? What if there were a democratically-elected Duma, one that were accountable? What if there were a genuine, vocal, media-savvy opposition? What if all Russians, from oligarchs to taxi drivers, had the freedom to speak? Would they not question their elected officials? Would they not criticize? What if Alexey Navalny were alive today and had unfettered access to a camera and a microphone? Would these massacres not be denounced? In other words, what if the Russian people were given the same chance as their Ukrainian cousins to react to these barbaric acts?
NATO must be strong and made stronger. The question is not can we afford to raise spending to the 2% of GDP benchmark its members are expected to reach. The question, in the face of naked aggression from one of the world’s largest military powers, is can we afford not to. Not how much is this costing us, but rather, how much will it cost us if we do not. Quite simply: are we properly defended. In our case, Canada shares its northern border with an adversary. Between us there are rich mineral deposits as well as one of the world’s most important commercial maritime lanes. Amazingly, we barely patrol this area at all. And we cannot expect the U.S. to do this for us, nor should we wish them to: not if our sovereignty matters. And it does.
In fact, NATO must be expanded. If we want small countries to take the courageous step and adopt democratic values and institutions, we cannot then punish them by leaving them outside the defense perimeter. If we do not stand with them, they will be left with no choice but to become, once again, satellites of the very imperialistic power they had been trying to distance themselves from. And to those who argue that NATO expansion eastward in Europe was the cause of Russian aggression today in Ukraine, you are wrong. Had NATO never expanded, Putin would likely have invaded sooner.