In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani, then director of the French daily The worldpublished an editorial titled “We are all Americans”.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
He expressed fear in the face of these attacks experienced in mondovision. It also reflected a certain vertigo in the presence of events which revealed a disturbing vulnerability of Western countries in the face of radical Islamism and which were to have a profound and lasting mark on international relations.
Just six months ago, the disorderly US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the face of a resurgence of the Taliban closed an important chapter in a two-decade war on terror. The errors in the conduct of the latter, its consequences on American power and its effects on the political evolution of the Middle East have already been, and will continue to be for a long time to be, the subject of numerous debates and analyses.
It is obviously too early to accurately assess all the political, geopolitical, strategic, economic and even social consequences of the aggression decided by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine less than a week ago. The fog of war is too dense, the dynamics of conflict too vivid and uncertain. The fact remains that in terms of systemic upheaval, and therefore of risks, what is playing out before our eyes in Ukraine is potentially more significant, dangerous and decisive for the future of the international scene than was the September 11th.
An existential threat
From 2001, the fight against groups claiming to be radical Islamists was indeed a necessity to thwart a real threat to security.
Despite the abject suffering they may have inflicted, these groups like Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or other surrogate, were not able to alter the liberal international order built on the rubble of the Second World War. .
An admittedly imperfect provider of stability and prosperity for eight decades, this order appears to be under an existential threat. That of an alliance between autocrats whose “winning” dynamics prompted, for example, a warning from journalist Anne Applebaum in an article published in December 2021 in the journal The Atlantic. This league of strong men brings together, among others, the Chinese Xi Jinping assuming the ambitions of power of the Middle Empire, the Turkish Erdogan dreaming of reconstituting the Ottoman Empire, the Belarusian Lukashenko and the Venezuelan Maduro, arched on their power even if it means turning their countries into failed states, and obviously Putin, who seems driven by the desire to reconstitute a greater Russia by denying the very existence of Ukraine and plunging Europe – and, by extension, the world – in the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.
A fight for liberal values
Sometimes prosperous, often considered formidable in cyberspace and the manipulation of public opinion both at home and among their adversaries, these authoritarian regimes have been seen to be on an upward slope for half a dozen years. Facing them, the frail democracies seem to be undermined by various and serious ills such as concerns about migratory movements, distrust of institutions, dilapidated infrastructure, the inequitable distribution of wealth or even the feeling of downgrading in a world whose center of gravity is moving inexorably from the West to Asia.
Moreover, plagued by populism, these democracies are threatened from within by sordid apprentice fascists enamored with a strength and a courage that they do not have, but ready to do anything to flout liberal values.
Faced with tragedy, the heroic people of Ukraine fight first and foremost to defend their nation and their country. Fighting against a despot disconnected from reality, he is on the front line of a fundamental fight for the preservation of democracy, the rule of law, the institutionalization of dissensus within free societies. Democracy is not perfect. She is not a destination. It is an epic, an aspiration, a requirement. Ukrainians are dying for her, for us.
The mobilization of the Western community with the adoption at an unprecedented rate of unprecedented sanctions and the dazzling emergence of a European Union with the power long fantasized about are proof that we are witnessing a major event. The stakes are colossal, resolutely historical. The war in Ukraine will either be the one that will prevent the rebirth of an old world structured by the rivalry between democracies and autocracies, or the opening salvo of this new “cold war”. In this sense, we are all Ukrainians.