Is the Long Peace Over?
For the span of the lives of most of us, we have lived in what has been called the Long Peace. This period is marked by the end of the Second World War and spans until the present day, throughout which time no wars or bloody conflicts have broken out among the Great Powers of the 20th century (Great Britain, USA, Germany, Russia, France, etc.). While conflict was still ever-present, with the Cold War bringing decades of near-catastrophic brinksmanship, proxy wars, and economic struggle, not once did these great nations truly clash on the battlefield.
Many of us may look at this fact and say, “Of course there have been no wars, we have developed past that stage. And besides, we all understand that war is purposeless violence, and the territorial needs and expansionist desires of the past are just that — the past!”, but that is an oversimplification of our world. When the European nations have fought incessantly for thousands of years over conflicts of culture, religion, race, resources and all sorts of other real or self-rationalized reasons, is it right to assume we live in just the right time where that has all ended for good? Is it not possible that our conceptions of how the world works are shortsighted? Or that we are unintentionally projecting our own values onto others who do not share them? As someone raised in the West, these are some of the questions I ask of our leaders in foreign affairs.
The recent war in Ukraine, instigated by Russian president Vladimir Putin, has weighed heavily on my mind. His actions in invoking the first conventional land war on the continent involving a Great Power since 1945 has led me to wonder of its implications and possible outcomes. In the West, we have feared a land war for decades, creating numerous supranational organizations and military defense pacts, such as NATO, to ward off such occurrences. Ukraine, unlike former Soviet targets, like Poland and the Baltic states, is not currently part of NATO and is not privy to its “an attack on one is an attack on all” Article 5 protocol, leaving it open for Russian aggression. The Russian invasion of sovereign Ukraine, in my view, shatters the notion that a land war between nuclear powers in the 21st century is an impossibility.
While many had expected the West’s passivity towards Putin’s historic aggression towards Ukraine to continue — myself, and likely President Putin, included — mind-bendingly broad and severe sanctions have been imposed on the Russian Federation by governments and private companies alike, ranging from their banning from SWIFT to the widespread divestitures from their businesses and markets to even the banning of their sports teams from international play. As I am continually floored by the shattering of the Russian economy that has taken place and is still ongoing. While I believe that retribution against Russia is necessary, I am concerned that these measures have eliminated the lowest-impact options for President Putin to withdraw from the situation. With a ruined currency, roiling domestic protests, a failing war effort, and a unified world intent on destroying him personally, he does not have many options left at his disposal for a next move.
President Putin appears to have been backed into a corner and it is unclear what his next move will be. If left without the ability to extract himself from the situation he created, Putin will be left only with the options of lashing out further, or death. The facts of current situation in Eastern Europe have been changing day by day, but we must be cautious of the growing pressure placed on Russia. While I have no sympathy towards Putin and welcome his destruction, I feel it necessary that we remember he is may — correctly — see his world crumbling around him and that he is only a phone call away from breaching the borders of a NATO nation and either triggering a new global war or proving the flimsiness of the alliance and emboldening future aggressors. All of this is farfetched if Putin is rational actor, but it is becoming increasingly uncertain that he will remain that way as he faces the might of the unified world with no one but Alexander Lukashenko to help shoulder the burden.
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Please note that the facts on the ground have changed quite quickly over the course of my writing this article and still continue to change. Please forgive my use of any information that may be irrelevant by the time of your reading.
