Foreign Policy Spring 2022

Melinda Liu is a Beijing-based foreign-policy commentator, Newsweek’s Beijing bureau chief, and the co-author of Beijing Spring. John-Baptiste Oduor is an assistant editor at Jacobin magazine. He covers contemporary politics, philosophy, and culture. Natia Seskuria is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and the director of the Regional Institute for Security Studies, a Tbilisi-based think tank. Andrew J. Nathan is a professor of political science at Columbia University. He has written and co-edited several books, including Chinese Democracy and China’s Search for Security. Amy Mackinnon is an award-winning national security and intelligence reporter at FOREIGN POLICY. She was previously based in Moscow and in Tbilisi, Georgia, as a senior editor at Coda Story. Rebecca Davis is a New York-based writer who covers contemporary Chinese cinema, culture, and politics. From 2018 to 2022,…

RUSSIA’S HORRIFIC INVASION OF UKRAINE has already had a historic impact on geopolitics. Several commentators have called it “Europe’s 9/11.” Others have declared “the West is back” and announced an end to the post-Cold War era, pointing to a rejuvenated NATO and Germany’s dramatic change in defense and foreign policy as evidence. With all the talk of the West coming together, it has been interesting to see how countries outside its orbit have responded to Russia’s aggression. Belarus, North Korea, and Syria, for example, unsurprisingly voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution in March demanding an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The list of countries that abstained was more revealing: From Algeria to Zimbabwe, 35 countries chose to sit on the fence. The most important of these were India and…

On the morning of Feb. 24, as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, German army chief Alfons Mais got up and wrote on LinkedIn that he had “never ever expected to experience war again” in Europe. After years of budget cuts, he observed, the Bundeswehr, Germany’s military, “stands naked. The options we can offer our government to support the [NATO] alliance are extremely limited.” Only three days later, on Feb. 27, after Putin had put his nuclear deterrent forces on alert, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz committed an extra 100 billion euros (around $112 billion) to his country’s 2022 defense budget. In another major turnaround, he also authorized third countries such as the Netherlands to ship German-made defensive weapons to Ukraine, and he supported a call for the…

There are plenty of economic and security explanations for the war in Ukraine. And they’re useful, but they’re not enough. The cultural, historical, and religious underpinnings of the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv go back to fundamental questions of what Russia even is, what it means to be Russian, and who gets to own the myths of the past. On July 12, 2021, the Kremlin’s official website published an article by Russian President Vladimir Putin called “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” It’s a key guide to the historical stories that shape Putin and many Russians’ attitudes—ideas that were echoed in the Russian leader’s angry speech shortly before he declared war. Firstly, Putin and many Russians believe that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, “brother nations,” with one group…

The lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bore a chilling resemblance to its approach to Georgia in 2008. Five days prior to launching its operation in Georgia, the Kremlin concluded the large-scale Kavkaz 2008 military exercise in the North Caucasus and announced a pullback. The Georgian example clearly shows that Russian rhetoric cannot be trusted. Apart from heavy military mobilization near the Ukrainian border, Russia sought to construct a casus belli by spreading disinformation and accusing Ukraine of planning military provocations in its eastern Donbass region. Throughout eight years of ongoing war, since Russia invaded Donbass and seized Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian government has never attempted to escalate the situation and retake control of the occupied parts of the east. It is hardly believable that Kyiv would have taken such…

Sometimes we cannot know what principle we are prepared to defend until it is challenged. In There Is a North, the historian John L. Brooke argues that only after the American South coalesced around the defense of slavery post-1850 did the North discover its own identity in the opposition to slavery. Similarly, in the aftermath of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—and of the startlingly, almost thrillingly, unified response by major democratic states—we can say, “There is a West.” We do not yet know quite what that means or whom that includes or just how binding that sense of common purpose will prove to be. We do know, however, how deep and widespread the reaction to Putin’s violation of international law and norms has been: Germany has agreed to increase…