That Volodymyr Zelensky gave the Americans his first visit abroad since the start of the war ten months ago will have been significant in more ways than one. By going to Washington on December 21, and having been received with open arms by Joe Biden and unfurling the Ukrainian flag in Congress, Zelensky symbolically sealed the alliance between kyiv and the United States, without military support. which, as we know, the Ukrainians could not have resisted Russian aggression for long. By extension, he at the same time found himself highlighting Ukraine’s subjugation to international dynamics too closely dependent, again and again, on rivalries between dominant powers.
From the long story (American responsibilities in what became of Russia after the breakup of the USSR) to the short story (the “special operation” launched by Putin on February 24), Ukraine is today engaged in a war of independence, already won, to which the united West brings, of course, an essential, necessary, exemplary support. Democratic development, defense of freedoms, the right of Ukrainians to self-determination are all fundamental principles animating the resistance against the unspeakable violence deployed by the Russian regime. Nevertheless, this conflict quickly turned into a fight led by proxy by the United States against Russia and, beyond that, against allied China. A kind of cold war bis — where the rest of the world, including Europe, tends to be relegated to observer status.
However, if the XXe century has something to teach us, says among other things a paper published in Foreign Affairs and titled ” Great-Power Competition Is Bad for Democracy is that the cold war and its violent conflicts were far from having been useful for democratic development. Neither politically, nor socially, nor economically. In the United States, the East-West confrontation has had deleterious effects on freedom of expression and on economic and racial equality. Job creation and the social safety net have been sacrificed on the altar of military spending, in particular to finance the Vietnam War. Wrapping himself in the moral and Manichean leitmotif of opposing “democracies against autocracies”, but only where the interests of the United States are not threatened, Joe Biden tends to ensure that history repeats itself.
This exacerbated competition between great powers is superimposed on a growing dysfunction of international and multilateral bodies, with countries, such as President Erdogan’s Turkey, which do not bother with principles and for which the time is “for unbridled opportunism “says the editorialist of the World Giles Paris. Instances that Biden nevertheless promised to value and which today seem to be stricken with anomie. If therefore Putin, reluctantly, has closed ranks behind the military alliance that is NATO, the fact remains that the invasion of Ukraine fits firmly for him in a project aimed at a “tectonic change of whole world order. An enterprise of geopolitical overhaul that Beijing shares for the most part.
“We make war when we want, we end it when we can” (The prince of Machiavelli). By drying up Vladimir Putin’s main source of foreign currency to finance his adventurism, the Russian oil embargo may end up encouraging him to negotiate a peace agreement. But when ?
The beginnings of peace negotiations are heard, but they are barely audible, as the camps remain on their maximalist positions. However, if the time is not yet for diplomacy, as everyone repeats, this is no reason not to seek by all means to get out of the “annihilation scenario”, as the argued President Emmanuel Macron. The Ukrainian people, resilient and combative and united as they are, have suffered enough. There will be no peace whatsoever without bitterness.
In the urgency of the heroic defense of freedoms in Ukraine, we forget that this conflict gives rise, as a result, to the massive militarization of a country which was already one of the poorest in Europe. And that this war and this militarization — by the United States, by Europe, by Iran which supplies the Russian army with drones, by North Korea which arms the mercenaries of the Wagner group — will long leave social wounds and deep human. At least five million internally displaced people, and even more Ukrainians in exile, a winter without water and electricity, food shortages: the longer we let the guns do the talking, the more the country will inevitably have difficulty in recovering.
Russia has shown no “significant” willingness to end the war, the United States says. We don’t doubt it. But what will to put an end to it has the United States expressed?