Professor of the Department of Business, History and Social Sciences at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Glenn Diesen has produced a meticulously documented, nuanced, and balanced account of the long march towards the Ukrainian catastrophe. The book’s accessible writing style and manageable length makes it an excellent assignment for both undergraduate and graduate classes in a range of disciplines from history to international relations.
Diesen approaches the conflict in Ukraine from a realist perspective: “While the Westphalian world order seeks a balance of power to avoid conflicts, the unipolar order necessitates perpetual conflicts to ensure allies are dependent and rivals are weakened” (5). The first chapter explains the advantages of the Treaty of Westphalia, which accepted multiplicity as a starting point, embraced procedural over substantive law, and thereby ensured the sovereign equality of all states. Diesen points to the US Constitution’s checks and balances as an eminently rational obstacle to the hegemony of any one branch of government and asks why this same system would not work on the international level. He contrasts this with idealism in foreign policy, which foments “moral crusades” and “nationalist universalism” instead of “practical considerations and compromise” in diplomacy (32).
The next two chapters set the grand historical canvas upon which the Ukraine conflict is an acute manifestation of the de-Americanization and de-Westernization of geopolitics. Diesen rapidly brings the story up to the post-Cold War era when “Washington’s decision to pursue Pax Americana according to the views of Fukuyama” set the stage for the fulfillment of Huntington’s thesis about the clash of civilizations (73). Through “the veil of obscure semantics” Washington maintains the “rules-based international order” by “using international humanitarian law selectively to enable exceptions in international law reserved for U.S. aligned liberal democracies” (97–98). He also explains that domestic US polarization runs along the nationalism-cosmopolitanism, not isolationism-internationalism divide.
Diesen sees NATO expansion as the root cause of the Ukraine crisis and marshals copious evidence to support this, including US ambassador to Russia William Burns’s February 1, 2008 cable that explained to the State Department that “the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership … could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war” in which “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face” (167–68). He is even more stark in his analysis of the conceptual contradictions of Washington’s policy of bringing Ukraine into NATO’s sphere of influence: “Liberal hegemony introduced a paradoxical world order for Ukraine as Western hegemony and liberal democratic values were in direct competition. The West was willing to subvert Ukraine’s democracy and constitution by toppling the government” (177). The possibility of a conflict was even welcomed by some Ukrainian politicians. In February 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky advisor Oleksii Arestovich explained in an interview that “the price for joining NATO would be a major war with Russia,” which he predicted would probably happen between 2020 and 2022. “In this conflict, we will be very actively supported by the West—with weapons, equipment, assistance, new sanctions against Russia and the quite possible introduction of a NATO contingent, a no-fly zone etc. We won’t lose, and that’s good” (209).
The result has been not only a tragedy for Ukraine, but a catalyst for tectonic geopolitical changes as Russia shifts from Gorbachev’s idea of Greater Europe to Greater Eurasia. And this transformation of Russia’s global role is attracting increasing numbers of countries because the “geoeconomics of multipolarity” supports “rules of civilizational distinctiveness as the foundation for sovereign equality” (247). Together with China, the Russians have begun to decentralize “the international economic infrastructure” by establishing “new financial instruments of power in terms of development banks and de-dollarization” (255). “By creating alternatives to the Western-centric international economic system,” Diesen argues, “the BRICS has turned economic coercion by the West into its surrender of its market share” (264). He sees BRICS+ as “anti-hegemonic, not anti-Western” because its “objective is to create a multipolar system and not to assert an alternative collective dominance over the West” (264). He concludes that the Ukraine crisis “was a predictable consequence of an unsustainable world order” that tragically made the country “a battleground for charting a future world order of either global hegemony or Westphalian multipolarity” (272).
