How a new world order is emerging from the ruins of Ukraine — and India is at the heart of it

There’s a long list of Western foreign policy disasters and each new disaster looks worse than the previous one. But thanks to skewed world order, the West has got away with it each time. That is, until now. With the Ukraine conflict, it appears, finally, to have run out of luck as it struggles to canvass support for its proxy war with Russia. Whatever the ultimate outcome of this crisis, it is shaping up into a watershed moment in post-War European history.

The once seemingly ironclad West-centric world order is teetering — upending many of the cosy Western assumptions about its hegemony over international relations. For all the brave public rhetoric of Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron, there’s real concern among Western leaders over their failure to build a broader coalition against Russia — and alarm over the anti-West sentiment across large swathes of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Even traditional Western allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, among others, have refused to fall in line.

India’s neutral stand has hit them particularly hard, prompting talk of an “anti-Western coalition”, quietly taking shape as The Times (London) noted in a lengthy editorial. High-profile American and European leaders have been lining up in Delhi in recent days to persuade it to harden its line towards Russia, but so far the West has failed to deflect India from its principled neutrality.

As the conflict grinds on amid meandering negotiations in search of a mutually acceptable face-saving diplomatic fudge, the debate has shifted from how it would end to Western isolation over Ukraine. None of this of course detracts from alleged Russian atrocities in Ukraine, notably the large-scale killings of civilians. Which India has unequivocally condemned.

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But it is also a fact that the West was heavily complicit in stoking the crisis. So much so that at one point Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy felt compelled to tell Western leaders to lay off effectively accusing them of provoking Russia.

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So, where does it go from here? There’s a widespread view that the “Ukraine effect” could be as far-reaching in reshaping international relations as the chain of events following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Except that this time the power shift will be away from Western liberal democracies.

To put it in perspective, it’s worth revisiting the mood of triumphalism that prevailed in the West in the 1990s as dominos fell across the “iron curtain” signified by the historic fall of the Berlin Wall, and reunification of Germany. It spawned breathless predictions of “end of history” claiming that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the ultimate triumph of Western-style liberal democracy burying forever any prospect of an alternative system. We were told that hereafter the world order would run according to whatever the fashionable consensus in Washington, Berlin, Paris and London was at a given point.

Although the chief proponent of the “end of history” thesis, Francis Fukuyama, later tried to row back after the events didn’t quite follow his logic, by then it had become conventional wisdom in the West. The idea that the West was “back” and there was going to be no return to the bad old days of revolutions and anti-colonial struggles became the new orthodoxy in Western capitals with its roots in Washington.

Strange theories were invented to tout the soft power of Western symbols of democracy and consumerism. Remember American economist Thomas Friedman’s famous “golden arches theory of conflict prevention” according to which no two countries that have McDonald’s would ever go to war? The proliferation of McDonald’s outlets in post-Soviet Russia and other former Communist countries was cited as a confirmation of the triumph of the Western way of life.

That such outlandish theories were touted at all shows how deeply embedded the Western sense of triumphalism had become. In the intervening years, many, if not most, of the Western assumptions have proved wrong. History did not end with the demise of Soviet-style communism; and the spread of McDonalds’ garish arches failed to prevent host nations from going to war with each.

By the way both Russia and Ukraine are teeming with Mcdonald’s outlets. Liberal democracy itself — far from spreading — has shrunk across the world, not least in America. In other words, the contours of the post-1989 world order have been quietly shifting in recent years with the rise of new regional alliances based around the idea of strategic autonomy.

India, as an emerging new power, is active in a number of these groupings. These alliances are not explicitly anti-West but like to keep an arm’s length preferring to pursue their own national interests than act as Western proxies. But the West has been so self-absorbed that it seems to have missed the action, or not realised its significance. Remember Barack Obama famously dismissing Russia as a “minor regional power”?

Given this level of insularity, it’s no wonder that America and their European NATO allies have been caught napping by the non-Western world’s less than obliging response to the Ukraine crisis. There’s intense pressure on countries that have chosen to take an independent line to sign up to the Western agenda. There was a time when such pressure tactics worked. But not anymore.

In fact, the erosion of West’s monopoly of the world order has been going on for at least a decade but obviously Western policy-makers have been too busy elsewhere or too wrapped up in themselves to notice. Ukraine is a wake-up call for them. To wake up to the reality of a rapidly emerging new international order: Less weighed down by old loyalties or ideological hang-ups and more transactional and driven by national interests.

By all accounts, the West is in decline, but because it is still relatively wealthy and continues to control important institutions (financial, academic and cultural) it is able through these institutions, especially the media, to shape the popular narrative and deploy diplomatic and non-diplomatic means to get its way. But the going is becoming increasingly hard, as the Ukraine episode shows, with its trusted allies and even fellow NATO members such as Hungary refusing to oblige.

But Ukraine is also a cautionary tale for autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin. I’m struggling to recall when was the last time a leader at the height of his powers self-destructed himself the way Putin has done with his ill-conceived military invasion of Ukraine. In one reckless stroke, he has alienated millions of his supporters, damaged the Russian cause, brought a deeply divided Europe together, and strengthened the shaky trans-Atlantic alliance.

There’s speculation whether he would survive the crisis. Even if he does, he is unlikely to retain the same authority. Which is bound to affect his ability to rule effectively. Nobody — neither the West, nor Putin — come out of this looking good.

The writer lives in the West and has written extensively on Western foreign policy. Views expressed are personal.

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