Putin destroyed three myths of the US global order.

By Henry Brands

Every era has a figure that strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person in the still young 21st century.

Over the last week, and over the last generation, Putin has done more than anyone else to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes that he has persuaded the main beneficiaries of that order to take seriously the idea of ​​saving it.

Putin is not the first individual to give the “civilized world” a reality check. In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression put an end to the widespread belief that trade and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new era of peace.

In the 20th century, a series of fascist and communist leaders showed how quickly the world could descend into the darkness of repression and aggression. More recently, no one has crushed the intellectual devotions of the post-Cold War era as forcefully as Putin.

It should come as no surprise: In 2007, as Western intellectuals celebrated the triumph of the liberal international order, Putin warned that he was about to start rolling that order back. In a searing speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin denounced the spread of liberal values ​​and American influence. He declared that Russia would not live forever with a system that restricted her influence and threatened her increasingly illiberal regime.

I wasn’t kidding. At home and abroad, Putin’s policies have attacked three basic tenets of post-Cold War optimism about the trajectory of global affairs.

The first was a cheerful assumption about the inevitability of the advance of democracy. In the 1990s, US President Bill Clinton spoke of a world where democracy and free markets “they would know no borders”. In 2005, President George W. Bush touted the ambition to “end tyranny in our world.” Putin had other ideas.

He reversed Russia’s unfinished democratic experiment and built a personalistic autocracy. Watching Putin publicly humiliate his own intelligence chief on television last week was a realization that the world’s largest country, possessor of one of the planet’s two largest nuclear arsenals, is now the fiefdom of one man. .

And Putin has hardly been content to destroy democracy in his own country. He has contributed, through cyberattacks, political interference operations and other forms of subversion to a “democratic recession” global that already lasts more than 15 years.

Putin has also shattered a second tenet of the post-Cold War mindset: the idea that great-power rivalry was over and that major violent conflicts were therefore a thing of the past. Russia has already fought three imperial restoration wars in the former Soviet Union (in Ukraine, Georgia and Chechnya).

Putin’s military used the Syrian civil war to practice tactics, such as the terrorist bombing of civilians, that seemed ripped from earlier and more gruesome times. Now Russia is waging Europe’s largest conventional war in 75 years, with amphibious strikes, aerial bombardments of major cities and even nuclear threats.

Violence, Putin has reminded us, is a terrible but sadly normal feature of world affairs. Its absence reflects effective deterrence, not irreversible moral progress.

This relates to a third taboo that Putin has challenged: the idea that history goes one way. During the 1990s, the triumph of democracy, great power peace, and Western influence seemed irreversible. The Clinton Administration had the idea that the States that opposed this trend could only offer an atavistic and doomed resistance to the progress of history.

But history, as Putin has shown us, does not go astray on its own. Aggression can be successful. Democracies can be destroyed by determined enemies. The “international standards” are actually rules made and enforced by states that combine great power with great determination. Which means that the story is a constant struggle to prevent the world from falling back into patterns of predation from which it can never permanently escape.

Here, however, Putin has done the US and its allies a favor, because that lesson is catching on. A week of Russian aggression achieved what a decade of American persuasion could not: a commitment on the part of Germany to arm itself in a manner befitting a serious power.

Democratic countries around the world are supporting the most devastating sanctions campaign ever directed at a major power; they are pouring arms into the Ukraine to support their surprisingly vigorous resistance.

More importantly, Putin’s tactics are producing an intellectual paradigm shift: a recognition that this war could be the prelude to more devastating conflicts unless the democratic community severely punishes aggression in this case and deters it effectively. more effective in others.

We are in the early days of what could be a long and brutal war. The Ukrainian resistance could collapse; Putin could become the owner of a very extensive empire. But early indications are that he may be on the verge of realizing a harsh reality: Wresting his enemies’ complacency from him is a big mistake.