How the Ukraine War Might Shift the Global System
By: George Friedman
War is agony for everyone involved.
Wars are bloody affairs that have consequences not just for the soldiers who fight them but also for the governments that decided to wage them.
In fact, an uncomfortable and thus overlooked fact of war is that sometimes these consequences are more significant than what the war was fought over.
I believe this to be the case in Ukraine.
It’s nearly impossible to properly analyze a war in its first few days.
The misinformation and disinformation, propaganda and supposition are simply too much to overcome.
But what I’ll say is this.
If Russia loses this war, or if the war proves to be a long and grinding affair, the Russia that President Vladimir Putin wished to create will never materialize.
He once said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes in history.
Ukraine, then, may be his way of proving that the collapse has been overcome, that the boundaries of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire have been restored, and that Russia is now in the first ranks of great powers.
In any case, one of the most consequential events so far is that the invasion of Ukraine has galvanized NATO, the alliance originally meant to counter Soviet attacks.
Moscow had hoped to pit the alliance against itself, with some members ignoring retaliation action in favor of maintaining their strong commercial ties with Russia.
The striking example is Germany, which had deep trade relations with Russia and, thanks to NATO, has been able to ignore its military needs in favor of its economic interests.
But even Berlin chose to accept the economic costs.
(To this I should add Japan, which has been overlooked I suspect because it isn’t European.
Even so, Japan chose to act in concert against Russia – no small development, considering it is the third-largest economy in the world, one that has serious territorial disputes with Russia.)
And important though the global economic response has been, it is weak insofar as it is not a military response, and is therefore not a substitute for war.
As of now, the commitment to Ukraine does not include military action in the event the sanctions regime fails.
The coalition, then, is partly a group bound by treaty obligation and partly a group of separate players, none of which is prepared, or able, to wage war.
In that sense, NATO has not been resurrected at all; there is a coalition in place to employ sanctions to force Russia out of Ukraine that leaves no room for escalation.
Russia, meanwhile, seems undeterred by sanctions.
The measures will indeed hurt the Russians, but, knowing that sanctions would inevitably come, Moscow figured that having Ukraine as a buffer is worth the economic pain.
This means that NATO and its allies may have to resort to military means to achieve their desired results.
That clearly isn’t going to happen.
But neither can Russia withstand sanctions indefinitely.
It seems that Russia needs a rapid Russian victory just as badly as NATO needs a rapid Russian defeat.
Put simply, while NATO members seem to be unified only in theory, we can’t say their alliance has been “resurrected” by the Ukraine war because the alliance as a whole has not chosen to wage war, as was its original purpose.
And since NATO was created to manage Russia, I’d argue that doing the job it was meant to do doesn’t represent a fundamental shift in the international system.
More interesting is China, which had signed a “love is forever” treaty with Russia before the war broke out.
Reports had circulated in Chinese media that invading Ukraine would be a mistake.
If Russia thinks it can survive, China, which would be subject to sanctions if it helped Russia, knows it cannot.
China is far more the economic animal, basing its internal system on financial and productive systems.
As such, it is the largest exporter in the world.
The United States' imposition of some tariffs was troubling.
The imposition of a sanction system could be catastrophic.
What Beijing would like to do is to solidify agreements with the United States on dollar-based investing to stabilize China’s economy.
(And here there is an opportunity for China to influence Russian actions.)
This could create an opportunity for an entente with the United States, something China needs and something the U.S. wouldn’t mind on certain terms.
And that might be the most interesting outcome of the Ukraine war, if it happens.
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