Between Russia’s war in Ukraine, a new conflict in the Middle East, and Chinese regional aggression, the global order of the past three decades appears finished. Stability in international relations may soon become a foreign concept from a bygone age – one that we did not fully appreciate until it was gone.
BERLIN – When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine at dawn on February 24, 2022, everything changed, not just for Europe but for the world. The historical clock had been turned back.
As soon as a major military power launched a war of conquest against a peaceful neighbor, we returned to a world in which power is asserted through violence and borders are drawn with blood. The defining geopolitical principle of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was overturned. Non-violent negotiations and peace were out; unilateral assertions of strength were back in.
Though there have been numerous wars in recent decades, they were mostly regional in scope and occurred on the periphery of geopolitical fault lines. There was no hint of a global Sarajevo – a war requiring international intervention, like in Bosnia in the 1990s, but on a much larger scale. The automatic stabilizers worked reliably, and the United States, the sole superpower, still served as the guarantor of order – or so it seemed, until that world splintered before our eyes with no better alternative in sight.
BERLIN – When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine at dawn on February 24, 2022, everything changed, not just for Europe but for the world. The historical clock had been turned back.
As soon as a major military power launched a war of conquest against a peaceful neighbor, we returned to a world in which power is asserted through violence and borders are drawn with blood. The defining geopolitical principle of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was overturned. Non-violent negotiations and peace were out; unilateral assertions of strength were back in.
Though there have been numerous wars in recent decades, they were mostly regional in scope and occurred on the periphery of geopolitical fault lines. There was no hint of a global Sarajevo – a war requiring international intervention, like in Bosnia in the 1990s, but on a much larger scale. The automatic stabilizers worked reliably, and the United States, the sole superpower, still served as the guarantor of order – or so it seemed, until that world splintered before our eyes with no better alternative in sight.