AFTER the WAR
DRAMATIC ACTS OF aggression from a big country against outgunned independents defending their own turf can shock the world’s conscience and trigger fundamental changes to the international order.
The Soviet-engineered communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and subsequent military blockade of West Berlin led directly to the creation in 1949 of NATO. The 1956 joint invasion of Egypt by the U.K. and France (with an assist from Israel) permanently discredited European colonialism, hastening that foul institution’s already rapid demise. Iraq’s forcible annexation of Kuwait in 1990 prompted George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev to jointly declare that “no peaceful international order is possible if larger states can devour their smaller neighbors,” a principle they said would be woven into an emerging “new world order.”
That order turned out great for the Kuwaiti monarchy, whose rule was restored after a U.S.-led, 39-country coalition drove Saddam Hussein’s soldiers back into Iraq. But for the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, and even within pockets of comparatively stable Europe, the hoped-for settlement following the end of the Cold War has proven disappointingly disorderly—a missed opportunity to design fresh new international institutions around the imperial withdrawal of both superpowers and the concomitant reassertion of responsible self-governance across the rapidly expanding free world.
Russia’s illegal, unprovoked, and unconscionably brutal assault on its former imperial holding of Ukraine has, within its first month, precipitated head-snapping changes to existing geopolitical realities. Germany kiboshed a long-planned Russian gas pipeline and significantly increased its defense budget overnight. Long-neutral Finland and Sweden started making noises about joining NATO. More refugees were displaced from their homes in a matter of weeks than in all the 1990s Balkan wars combined. Moscow’s armies and armaments, while unforgiving on civilian populations, were revealed to be far less potent against actual combatants than virtually anyone predicted, scrambling conventional strategic calculations. European Union leaders fast-tracked Ukraine for membership, and for the first time agreed to take seriously France’s longstanding proposal to create a meaningful defense alliance separate from the United States.
That Washington was largely a bystander to these developments is neither accident nor trifle. Compared to even three decades ago, the countries on the continent that once produced the world’s most cataclysmic wars are in considerably stronger position to prevent new ones from metastasizing. The resolve of their response suggests a once-in-a-generation opportunity to retool the global order, especially America’s role in it, to make
