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What are the new rules for the world after the conflict between Russia and Ukraine

Posted by on 2022/03/09. Filed under Breaking News,Headline News,International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

The fighting in Russia and Ukraine has entered its 14th day in what’s being described as the end of the post-Cold War era. That’s not quite accurate. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we have lived through three different eras. Each era lasted about a decade.

The 1990s were the era of the “end of history”, when Washington believed that the main task of foreign policy was to steer the world to a more democratic, free-market and rules-based order. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, those priorities faded, and no international issue was more important to policymakers than the fight against radical Islam. A decade later, Mr. Obama effectively declared the war on terror over, saying it was time to “focus on nation-building here at home.”

The dynamism of the past decade can be seen in the two presidents’ responses to two crises — both involving Ukraine — that are telling.

The first was Mr. Obama’s tepid response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, after which he refused to provide vital military aid to Kiev on the grounds that the future of Ukraine was a core interest for Russia, not the United States. The second was Trump’s attempt to blackmail Zelensky in 2019 when he tried to block security assistance to Ukraine in exchange for the Biden family scandal.

In other words, Mr Obama looked at Ukraine and asked: “What’s in it for us?” Trump looked at Ukraine and asked, “What’s in it for me?” For both presidents, the priority was not to prevent another Russian invasion, much less to encourage democratic development in Ukraine.

Putin, meanwhile, looked at Ukraine and concluded: “All this is good for me.”
The Russian president could have a variety of motives for invading Ukraine. But it would be foolish to assume that he was not tempted — for we seem indifferent to the fate of Ukraine; Because American presidents have been willing to keep doing deals with him even as he has invaded his neighbors, poisoned his dissidents, hacked our networks and interfered in our elections; Europe’s diminished military power and growing dependence on Russian energy; For an axis of despotism bent on overthrowing the US-led liberal order is taking shape.

All of this makes Putin’s Ukraine strategy look like a good bet — except that he fails to take into account the courage of the Ukrainian people, their great president, and the ineptitude of his own military. That courage gave the West time to regroup and help save Ukraine. It should also be an opportunity to rethink the way we look at foreign affairs over the next decade. We need new rules for a new world

What should the new rules look like? Here are a few ideas:
Free trade in the free world. Economic nationalism never works. The decoupling of Russia’s economy from the rest of the world is already painful. And the only long-term hope for decoupling from China is through deeper economic integration between free nations and Allies. That means a revival of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and free trade agreements with the European Union and Britain.

Help those who help themselves. If the lesson of the past 20 years is that we cannot fight for freedom for those who are not willing to fight for it themselves, the lesson of Ukraine is that we can at least give those who are willing to fight for freedom the tools to get the job done. One model is the nuclear-powered submarine deal the US and UK signed with Australia last year, which the government needs to speed up if it is to act as a deterrent to China. The other model is Israel, we arm Israel with American warplanes so we never have to defend it with American troops.

Parallel global institutions. China has undermined the World Trade Organization by refusing to live up to its commitments. Russia has undermined Interpol by using it to persecute dissidents. The Biden administration may not want to withdraw from these traditional institutions, but it could invest in new or nascent organizations that use democracy as a criterion for joining, thereby reducing their importance.

Be honest about energy. The world will need carbon-based fuels for decades to come. It is far better for us to drill more oil in North America, including on federal lands in the United States, than to ask Saudi Arabia to increase production or hope to get more oil from Venezuela and Iran by lifting sanctions. The result of not increasing domestic oil and gas production is not just switching to cleaner alternatives, but also using dirty petro-state energy.

Get serious about national defense. In foreign policy, the silliest debate is about which is the more serious threat, China or Russia. The real answer is that we have no choice. But we do have room to increase defense spending, which at less than 4 percent of GROSS domestic product is about half what it was in the boom years of the 1980s. A navy of 500 ships — that’s 200 more ships — should be a national priority.

A belief in victory. “This is my strategy for the Cold War,” Reagan once told his adviser Richard Allen. “We win, they lose.” He said this in 1977, and it seemed like a pipe dream at the time. Twelve years later, it is. Let’s aim for a world free from the likes of Putin.

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