US seeks to reassert dominance over Nato and edge back toward a unipolar world

The war in Ukraine has become caught up in a struggle over whether its objective is military defeat and probable regime change for Russia, or a peace deal which will recognise Ukraine’s huge military achievements but freeze over the current dangerous escalation towards the possible use of nuclear weapons.

Those who support victory over Russia are inspired by the Ukrainian resistance to imperialist invasion and believe that the Ukrainian leadership should determine the conditions for a settlement. Their position is exemplified in a Washington Post report on October 12th dealing with the options facing the Biden administration:

“Privately US officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table. They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv. ‘That’s a decision for the Ukrainians to make,’ a senior State Department official said. ‘Our job now is to help them be in absolutely the best position militarily on the battlefield ... for that day when they do choose to go to the diplomatic table.’”

There is little evidence of the backdoor diplomacy that resolved the Cuban missile crisis in the present highly charged and polarised advocacy for Ukraine

Given that President Zelenskiy now says he will not negotiate with Vladimir Putin and wants Ukraine to join Nato after Russian’s formal seizure of the Donbas, this is setting the bar very high indeed. Irresponsibly so, say those who argue the US should be setting peace talks as a conditions for the $40 billion in military aid it is pouring into Ukraine. They include some former and some present Biden officials.

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Where is the political leadership and statecraft that should accompany such a large commitment and steer it towards a peace deal? There is little evidence of the backdoor diplomacy that resolved the Cuban missile crisis in the present highly charged and polarised advocacy for Ukraine which labels talk of a diplomatic agreement as appeasement of Putin. That is despite the horrifying normalisation of nuclear escalation in Russian-US exchanges and Nato commentary.

The case that this is in good part a proxy war run by the US to roll back and defeat Russia and reassert the US’s European role is thereby made more convincing. A long thread of policy running through the US Democratic Party in favour of such a hawkish line on Russia, Nato expansion and Ukraine, is well represented in the Biden administration.

It is articulated in the administration’s recent US National Security Doctrine, which talks up the consolidation of US leadership in Nato, transatlantic and Indo-Pacific relations after the Afghanistan debacle, despite diverging political and economic interests between the US and the European Union.

Russian atrocities during the invasion, alongside heroic Ukrainian resistance based on Nato training since 2018, saw US opinion swing in favour of unconditional support. But this Washington Post report also noted a Pew poll showing favourable US attitudes to Ukraine slipping sharply from summer highs. The issue is politically polarised in advance of the midterm elections, as Trump boasts the war would not have happened if he was still in power.

Powerful blocs

US positioning on Ukraine is recognised in Europe, Russia and China, as well in the wider emergent world of large powers such as Turkey, India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, as well as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Their analysis and commentary is often expressed in terms of a multipolar account of world power, an alternative to the Biden administration’s apparent efforts to re-establish US unipolar power in European, Indo-Pacific and Global South settings.

Putin’s Donbas speech of September 28th is an extraordinary exercise in reverse neocolonial rhetoric about US power, given his revival of Russian imperialism

In recent speeches, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has talked of a “messy multipolarity” involving these states which swing between the most powerful blocs. He said the EU’s “garden” was vulnerable to an outside “jungle” which must be engaged, not walled off.

Putin’s Donbas speech of September 28th is an extraordinary exercise in reverse neocolonial rhetoric about US power, given his revival of Russian imperialism. A more equal multipolarity is counterpoised to the West’s control. Xi Jinping’s speech to the Chinese party congress this week warned against western “hegemonism and power politics”.

The US security doctrine says “the world is now at an inflection point. This decade will be decisive, in setting the terms of our competition with the PRC [People’s Republic of China], managing the acute threat posed by Russia, and in our efforts to deal with shared challenges, particularly climate change, pandemics, and economic turbulence.”

Global multipolarity will increasingly challenge this US unipolar view of a changing world.