How will the outcome of this conflict affect ongoing geopolitics, shaping the wars to come, both cold and hot?
I think that whether or not a Western-oriented, democratic government in Ukraine survives this war, we can already say with a fair degree of certainty that among states, the losers will be the United States and Russia, and the winners will be China, India, Saudi Arabia, and other mid-range states. And among capitalists, aside from the obvious observation that arms companies will make a killing, we can single out energy companies—both fossil fuel and renewable—as the big winners.
Russia will lose any of its remaining sparkle as a superpower and nearly all of its regional leverage if it fails to oust the Ukrainian government, though if it manages to take Odessa and with it the entirety of the Ukrainian coast, it will have acquired a significant consolation prize. But even if Russia wins in Ukraine, it will have accelerated the expansion of NATO along its borders and isolated itself from most other states and international bodies. It will also hasten the decline of its major economic lever on the world stage, its fossil fuel output, second only to that of the US but a much larger portion of its GDP (over 50%, in fact, which is to say Russia has no economy without fuel exports).
The economic sanctions levied by Western institutions will not bring the Russian government to its knees. As
effectively detailed here they have not accomplished that goal in Iran, and Russia is much better insulated against such sanctions. But they do serve to limit Russia’s possible global alliances and economic leverage, and they might even encourage some of Russia’s capitalist class to imagine a government without Putin.
The cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was set to bring more Russian gas to Germany and the European market is a far greater loss than a friendly government in Ukraine could ever make up for. My only guess is that Putin made this miscalculation because he was spooked by the recent uprising in Kazakhstan, another country Moscow sees as its backyard. As a statist and, what’s more, one with a background in intelligence services, Putin is prone to the paranoid and unrealistic view suffered by government leaders everywhere, that people are not smart enough to rise up on their own and only ever do so as puppets. He probably misread the Kazakhstan uprising as Western interference, a step towards the final dismantling of the Russian Empire, created by the tsars in centuries of bloody warfare against hundreds of Indigenous peoples, expanded by the state capitalists of the USSR, and inherited in diminished form by Putin, who is an explicit revanchist.
The reason the US government will be a loser is more subtle but extremely important. First, though, let’s look at what the US has won. The US has positioned itself in a conflict with relatively little direct risk, in which it is all but guaranteed to play the role of good guy. What’s more, this is a conflict that drastically increases European unity, reviving Euro-nationalism, and plying Germany and France away from their budding friendship with Russia. This can only be a good thing, from NATO’s point of view. What’s more, the US has increased its credibility, much damaged after the years of Bush and Trump.
A week before the invasion, I was sure that Russia would not attack Ukraine, almost entirely because the US government said it would. The daily reports quoting anonymous intelligence officials seemed lifted from the playbook used to prepare for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It turned out, though, the US government has multiple playbooks, and this time they were telling the truth. In a less typical use of information warfare, the US government seems to be broadcasting accurate intelligence culled from the communications of the top echelon of the Russian government in order to spook Moscow with how much they know.
This faulty prediction was a big error on my part, because it constituted falling back on a liberal critique of government. As anarchists, we don’t oppose governments because they lie, we oppose them because their very existence is an assault on all of us, and whether they lie or tell the truth, it is based on a calculation of their interests to maintain power over everyone else.
So, for now, the US gets to be the poster boy of honesty, decency, and peace; a huge change from its media image since the end of the Clinton days.
However, the new gleam on the much tarnished brand of the US government can do nothing to reverse the most important result of this war, in geopolitical terms. And that is the acceleration of the emergence of a multipolar world in which no one state exercises hegemony. Because of their need to still access Russian energy and pay for those transactions, and their awareness of their own potential vulnerability to sanctions, countries like China and India are quickly developing alternatives to Europe’s SWIFT system for bank transactions and alternatives to stock and commodity markets that rely on the dollar as the common currency.
Even if Russia loses this war or becomes a total pariah, the US is quickly losing its perch as the world superpower. This is in large part because US hegemony was never based primarily on its military power, though that was a necessary ingredient. But raw US military power was only ever enough to maintain allied/occupied governments in western Europe and Latin America. Washington’s force projection was hit or miss everywhere else in the world, as demonstrated in China, Korea, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan…
It is the fact that nearly all economic activity in the world, even in so-called socialist countries, has relied directly or indirectly on its currency and its financial institutions, that made the US the most powerful country in the world. And that reality is coming to an end. It was already ending, as I pointed out in
Diagnostic of the Future, but all the sanctions around the ongoing war are speeding things up rather than slowing them down. The US is using its most potent economic weapons at a time when it is in a state of diplomatic tensions with many of the world’s mid-range powers, motivating those governments to create effective defenses even as the bulk of world economic activity shifts out of NAFTA and the EU.
As far as capitalist winners, this war gives us another tragic reminder of how renewable energy and fossil fuel energy are by no means opposed; on the contrary, they have always grown in tandem and what is good for one tends to be good for the other.
Case in point, Europe is being forced to realize how dangerous its high dependence on Russian gas is. Fully half of Europe’s gas comes from Russia, and between a fifth and a quarter of Europe’s total electricity generation comes from gas, with many homes also heating themselves and supplying cooking stoves with gas.
The response of European governments has been to simultaneously accelerate the shift to renewable energy, with a 40% reduction of fossil fuel use by 2030, while also increasing their importation of gas to be stored before next winter and pushing for new pipelines to bring non-Russian gas into Europe. These new pipelines would probably carry north African gas through Spain. Incidentally, the Russian military, through the Wagner Group, is engaged in several bloody wars in northern Africa, as is France, one of the longtime colonizers of the region.
And though the US remains the world’s number one oil producer and is not dependent on Russian production, it is dependent on a world economy that relies on cheap fuel and can be thrown into a tail spin by a sudden rise in prices. We have yet to see if the war in Ukraine will have any effect increasing the push for renewable energy, given how backwards the US is in both politics and infrastructure, but we have already seen how Washington is lobbying OPEC to increase oil output.
