Putin Accidentally Revitalized the West’s Liberal Order
The Russian president thought he sensed an opportunity to take advantage of a disunited West. He has been proved wrong.
Updated at 8:20 a.m. ET on March 1, 2022.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed a chorus of despair—beyond the cost in Ukrainian lives, the international order that the U.S. and its allies built after World War II is, we are told, crumbling. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has declared that the liberal order is already dead. The Indian journalist Rahul Shivshankar has argued that “in the ruins across Ukraine you will find the remains of Western arrogance.” Even the brilliant historian Margaret MacMillan has written that “the world will never be the same. We have moved already into a new and unstable era.”
The reverse is true. Vladimir Putin has attempted to crush Ukraine’s independence and
