This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 25, 2022 - July 31, 2022

The Russia-Ukraine war is portrayed in the Western media as David versus Goliath, the righteous Ukrainian president (ex-comedian Volodymyr Zelensky) fighting the evil Russian president Vladimir Putin. Coincidentally, both have the same first name “Vladimir” (Volodymyr in Ukrainian), which comes from the Proto-Indo-European word meaning Great Power or Peace.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) is a military alliance of 12 countries forged after World War II as a bulwark against the Warsaw Pact of Soviet countries. Today, it comprises 30 members, with Sweden and Finland about to join. Nato considers the Russian invasion of the sovereign state of Ukraine a gross violation of international law and human rights, whereas the Russians see their intervention as a response to Nato expanding eastwards that threatens Russian security. The Russian views are rejected outright by Nato allies, who consider their stance as a matter of principle that allows no compromise. The majority of UN members condemn the invasion but more than 80% of the UN membership by population declined to ratify the sanctions against Russia.

The leading Western exponent of the thesis that the West was responsible for creating the conditions for the Ukraine War (a distinctly minority view in the West) is University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer.

Mearsheimer made his name with his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, an “offensive realist” counterview to the optimistic neoliberal view that when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, America won. His view is that China’s rise will not be peaceful, because the US as the incumbent hegemon will do all within her power to prevent China from dominating East Asia. This was prescient since the US has now de facto recognised China as an existential rival, if not enemy.

Mearsheimer argued against neoliberal thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, who think that with democracy and free markets, there will be peace under America’s leadership. His 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities reasoned that the trichotomy of liberalism, nationalism and realism combined to result in continuous failures in US foreign policy in the post-war era. The US was so powerful that she sought to make the rest of the world in her own image. This idealistic “liberal hegemonism” was bound to fail against the realism of nationalism in the rest of the world. 

“Great powers are rarely in a position to pursue a full-scale liberal foreign policy.” They must “pay close attention to their position in the global balance of power and act according to the dictates of realism”. They may dress up as liberals, but they have to act as realists in what the Chinese call “Outer Confucian, Inner Legalist”, namely a realist iron fist inside a velvet glove. In a unipolar world, the US may be able to enforce liberal ideals, but in a multi-polar world, everything can and will be challenged. 

At the core of liberal ideals is the concept of inalienable rights of individuals, so liberals feel the need to intervene in any country that interferes in such rights. But such interference in another country’s sovereign rights violates the principles established in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, whereby European countries agreed realistically to non-interference in other sovereign countries’ affairs. History showed that such interference meant fighting endless wars overseas, exactly like what the US did since 1945. Such overseas militaristic behaviour would be “almost certain to end up threatening its own liberal values” at home. 

Mearsheimer’s trichotomy reminds me of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik’s globalisation trilemma: “Democracy, national sovereignty and globalisation are mutually incompatible.” Globalisation realistically means that we live not in separate islands but a one world of limited resources. Nationalism splits the world into parts; doomed to either fight or cooperate with each other. Thus, where an ideology like liberalism creates its own opposite reaction (in physics, every force meets an equal and opposing force), conflicts occur. When two incompatible forces clash along civilisational, religious, national, ideological or racial lines, without a neutral arbiter, we end up inevitably with Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the resolution of policy conflicts by armed means. 

The idea that one side is good and the other evil smacks of the 11th century Crusades, which were first called by the Pope in 1095 AD to help defend the Byzantine Empire against attacks by the Seljuk Turks. In their armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem and liberation of the Holy Land, the first batch of People’s Crusaders massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland in 1096, but were defeated by the Turks in the battle of Civetot. The Crusades had complex origins, but arose partly because of religious differences within Christendom. The Roman Catholic papal supremacy conflicted with the Eastern Orthodox Church view that the pope was only one of five Christian patriarchs based in Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem respectively. Thus, the Roman Catholic Church sought supremacy over Christendom if it could reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Saracens (Muslims).

From 1095-1291 AD, there were at least seven Crusades to the Holy Land, driven by different European lords with their own agendas. It was not just for the church, but also personal glory, power and wealth. In 1099, the First Crusade conquered Antioch and then Jerusalem, sacking and pillaging the city, thereafter creating the first Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Second Crusade was beaten back by the famed Muslim warrior Saladin. The Fourth Crusade (1198) ended up with the disgraceful sacking of Constantinople. The last Crusaders were driven out by the fall of Acre in 1291 AD.

There was thus a religious streak in Western thinking that drove their belief in fighting the non-Christians, ending up in devastation for the Holy Land. In reaction to the Crusades, the Muslim leaders under Imad ad-Din Zengi began their first jihad (Arab word for righteous struggle). They united under Zengi’s son, the famed Saladin. From the European side, defence of the Holy Land and Jerusalem legitimised local lords and kings, since they were blessed by the Pope for their efforts. Religious military sects, such as the Templars, attracted those interested in both fame and fighting for God. It took two centuries of bloody devastation on all sides before the Crusades finally faded away. By this time, it was no longer clear who was right or wrong, only exhaustion. 

War, once started, more often than not ended up in attrition. Europe was at war for most of the last millennium, fighting either barbarians or each other, because Europe, unlike China or India, was never united wholly. Seen from the long lens of history, the Crusades enabled the Europeans to get out of feudalism and the hold of religion over politics to emerge into technological states that created scientific rationalism. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) between the Protestant states (Britain, Holland, Prussia, Sweden) against Catholic Spain, France and Italy finally clarified legal principles along rationalist lines. After fighting each other for God, the maritime states used their superior arms to conquer colonies in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and then they fought each other over “property rights” in these colonies, which had to be defined secularly and constitutionally by the state. Once a state conquered and enjoyed rights from might as discoverer or colonial master, the principles of “freedom of the seas” and “free markets” were invented to “grandfather” all rights by law. No one consulted the conquered and colonised peoples whether they had any rights other than the pity and mercy of missionaries and those who had a conscience. 

The costs of European conquest over the rest of the world was never calculated until recently. Indian economist Utsa Patnaik estimated that Great Britain took roughly US$45 trillion from India during the colonial period, reducing Indian gross domestic product from one quarter of the world’s total in 1750 to less than 4% by the time of independence in 1947. The human rights costs from slavery, pillage and genocide of colonised natives due to neglect, disease and exploitation were shameful. Rich Europeans, Americans, Canadians and Australasians have only recently started to show some remorse over these historical crimes. Thus, for the West to demand human rights from their former colonies and victims of their imperialist ambitions is hypocritical. Deep down, the need to contain non-believers in free markets and democracy reflects an underlying unwillingness to treat the Rest as equals. Some fear that when the Rest overtakes the West, some form of revenge or retribution will occur.

Consequently, war is never fully rational because it is spurred by an emotional or religious need to hate and then overpower the enemy. As Prussian war philosopher and strategist Clausewitz (1780-1831) noted, “War is an act of violence to compel our opponent to our will”. Generally, it is to achieve political aims, which can be rational or irrational. Because war involves more than one party, its outcome once started is often unpredictable. 

But once emotional outbursts are exhausted, rational realism returns. Like the Crusades, ultimately, wars require cease-fires or political negotiations for peace. 

That is what we shall discuss in the next article. 

Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues that affect investors

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