Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: After Ukraine, imperialism is now the norm

The grotesque spectacle of an inverted narrative, where the victim Ukraine is blamed for its own condition, did not capture the significance either. Even if the US was duplicitous about its stance on NATO expansion, Russia had no casus belli to invade Ukraine. The invasion was a momentous transformation of the international order. It was only the second time since World War II that one country had claimed an entire other country. This was not a war over a territorial dispute or even regime change. It was a war to erase a country. That Putin did not succeed in his objective should not blind us to this fact. Ukraine’s tragedy lies in the fact that seeing it simply through the framework of competing US and Russian hegemonic ambitions made it doubly invisible. Now that Russian and American imperial ambitions are temporarily coinciding, one would have thought that it would be a reason for anti-imperialists of all stripes to at least recognise the injustice being meted out to Ukraine. But once again, Ukraine has become about Trump or Putin.

Trump was, in principle, right that the war over Ukraine would require, at some point, a negotiated settlement, though he presumptuously seemed to arrogate to himself the authority of what a half-just settlement should look like. There is truth to the claim that Ukraine would have to accept some compromise; it was in the interests of the US to force a peace or back out. But Trump’s retelling of the history of what happened to Ukraine has a far deeper significance.

The significance is that the Ukraine episode may prove to be the single biggest impetus to the nuclearisation of the world in recent memory. Ukraine gave up what was one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons in 1994. Those who fret about the threat of NATO expansion towards Russia forget that this act by Ukraine was premised on security guarantees by the international community, including the West and Russia. In 1994, it would have been reputationally and economically expensive for Ukraine to hold onto its nuclear arsenal. But the fact that the invasion of Ukraine happened at all was a profound failure, not of Ukraine as Trump suggests, but of the international community which failed to uphold its security guarantees to a country that had willingly given up its nuclear arsenal.

The only possible conclusion to be drawn from the needless humiliation of Ukraine is this: It is now clear that imperialism, the outright claiming of whole countries without cause, is being reestablished as a norm in international relations. It was a remarkable feature of the post-1945 order that wars for full territorial conquest had significantly disappeared. In the book The Internationalists, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro had documented more than 150 territorial wars in the century preceding 1945; this number was down to a handful. Trump was not slapping Ukraine; he was legitimising imperialism. This is going to have serious consequences.

The relative stability of the global order depended upon a delicate nuclear equilibrium with a number of pillars. The first was the stability of the deterrent effects of the principal dyads among nuclear adversaries, especially the US and Russia. The second was, despite the nuclearisation of Israel, Pakistan and India, the relatively small number of nuclear states. This was, in part, premised on various security guarantees given by the great powers to their allies or client states. However it was achieved, the small number of nuclear states made stability easier to achieve. The norm against territorial imperialism helped. There was also something of a norm, even if imperfectly realised, against contemplating the use of nuclear weapons. The message from the Ukraine fiasco is that it would be foolish for any small to midsize country with security challenges to give up its nuclear ambitions if it is to earn respect. In an era of new nuclear technologies, will the world be safer if there are a lot more nuclear weapon states?

There is schadenfreude over the fact that the mask came off the international order. But at the end of the day, the public fiasco in the White House was not about Zelenskyy or Russia or the hypocrisy of the West. Nor was it about how countries like India navigated between Russia and the United States. It was about the fact that, coming on the heels of Gaza being reduced to a piece of real estate, the world had just legitimised more direct imperialism and nuclear proliferation. The joke is not on Trump. It is on the international community.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express