Ukraine Shock: Can Economic Considerations Stop War? Is peaceful development still the mainstream trend?

The Paper's special contributor Zhang Xunchao

On February 25, 2022, local time, Kiev, Ukraine, the Ukrainian army was waiting in a strict position on the ground. People's Vision Diagram

On February 24, local time, Putin announced military operations in Donbass and other regions, and the Russo-Ukrainian War broke out suddenly. Although the Russo-Ukrainian war is still a local war in Eastern Europe, the outbreak of the conflict will not only have an unprecedented impact on world politics since the end of the Cold War, but also highlight the fundamental problems of the assumptions of international relations analysis in the post-Cold War era.

The United States may invest more resources in Europe

First, the most important strategic impact of the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War was that the conflict held Western forces at bay. The US Biden administration has made it clear that it is unwilling to intervene militarily in any kind in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and even the possibility of military evacuation has been ruled out. Some hard-line US strategic circles also wrote a special article calling on the Biden administration to avoid getting involved in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and concentrate military forces on confronting China in the Taiwan Strait. In a recent interview, Biden also reiterated his reluctance to accept any risk of direct conflict between U.S. and Russian forces.

However, Biden cannot make decisions at will in a vacuum. As the Russian army invades Ukraine, the Western media will be broadcast to the United States 24 hours a day. Since the war took place in Europe, mainstream American society must also pay special attention to the war and sympathize with Ukraine because of the cultural ties between immigrants and European cultural groups. In addition, war is bound to shake the concerns of NATO allies and U.S. allies around the world about the reliability of U.S. security. Domestic hawks in the United States, especially Republicans, are bound to lash out at the White House for its "weakness" in the Ukraine crisis, "surrender to Russia" and "abandon American values."

In response to pressure from domestic opinion and overseas allies, whether willing or not, the Biden administration and its successor after 2024 are likely to invest more military and diplomatic resources in Europe, emphasizing the military and political presence of the United States. In the foreseeable future, the United States may not be able to achieve its strategic intention of fully shifting to the Indo-Pacific region, which may form a long-term situation of confrontation with Russia in Eastern Europe and containment of China in Asia. Some Western politicians and media know that they cannot do anything, and they still come to provoke and lobby China to sanction Russia, which is just a trick to try to influence international public opinion.

Two basic cognitions that have been tortured

The conflict in Ukraine has forced us to re-examine two basic perceptions of international issues. First, in the decision-making of countries, which are the strategic security interests and economic interests? In the more than three decades since the end of the Cold War, both public opinion and academic circles, including China, have tended to believe that in an era of globalization, the policies of all countries are based on economic interests. However, in recent years, in the game between China, Russia and Western countries, we can see that the basic understanding of "economy first" is increasingly divorced from the reality of international politics. First, even with close economic and trade interdependence between countries, conflicts can deteriorate rapidly. This has been true of U.S.-China relations in recent years, and it is also true of Russia's relations with the West today. Even as Russia and Europe are highly interdependent in energy trade, and even as Russia faces unprecedented economic sanctions, large-scale conflicts have erupted. Second, the Western countries, which occupy the key points of the world economy and are led by the United States, are not afraid to weaponize their own economic resources, suppress the development of other countries, and "punish" countries that hold different positions in international and domestic policies. At present, the West uses its control over the Global Banking Financial Telecommunication Association (SWIFT) and some links in the semiconductor industry chain to harm the interests of domestic enterprises, and the economic crackdown is the best example. These phenomena show that, contrary to past beliefs, in current international politics, strategic security interests and even ideological issues can override economic considerations.

Secondly, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict compels us to question whether "peace and development" is still the mainstream trend in world politics. In the post-Cold War era, the public and experts often face any international crisis with reflexive conclusions that "cannot be fought.". The general perception is that a specific geopolitical conflict: whether it is the Iranian nuclear issue, the North Korean nuclear issue, Georgia, Crimea, or Donbass, is not worth a costly war. Regardless of how military forces are deployed and what warnings leaders give, these words and deeds are interpreted as signals in the diplomatic game. According to this "worthless" calculation, neither world war in the twentieth century could have happened, is it worth fighting two wars that killed hundreds of millions of people for the death of the Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary and for the sake of the small baltic city of Danzig?

At the heart of geopolitics is the intricate question of historical national sentiment and national honor that cannot be reduced to the economic, resource, or strategic values of a region. Since the end of the Cold War, historical problems have existed all over the world, especially the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and due to nato's repeated eastward expansion and repeated color revolutions, historical contradictions have been intensifying. Now Ukraine's attempts to join NATO, even its threats to develop nuclear weapons, have become the final fuse of the conflict. Therefore, even if international development and cooperation is indeed a long-term historical trend, the world is now entering a period in which conflict and confrontation prevail. The future security of all countries, including China, and even life and death depends on whether a country can realize the seriousness and urgency of the deterioration of international conflicts in time, and prepare accordingly, and these preparations are not only military and economic preparations, but also psychological and cognitive preparations.

Two grippers to deal with the risk of conflict exacerbation

How do you prepare in an environment where the risk of conflict is so high?

The key is in the two grippers. The first is to significantly strengthen nuclear deterrence and compensate for the current imbalance in international conventional military forces. Why does Russia dare to challenge NATO, whose military and economic power far exceeds its own? This cannot be understood solely as the courage of The Russian leadership, or that the Western countries are "paper tigers" in the middle of the external powers. Russia's bottom card for gaining freedom of military action in Ukraine is nuclear power. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself admitted at a news conference earlier in February that he fully understood that the conventional military power of Russia and the NATO bloc was incomparable. But Russia has the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal. So, regardless of the progress of the war in Ukraine, in the worst case scenario Russia can always threaten to escalate the conflict to the nuclear level and thus create a stalemate. Therefore, the quantity and quality of nuclear weapons and their launch vehicles must reach a certain scale in order to break the illusion of pre-emptive and "disarming" nuclear strikes in some Western strategic circles and truly achieve stable and reliable nuclear deterrence.

Second, in response to the trend of Western countries to weaponize their economies, other countries need to establish parallel markets outside the existing international trade and financial system. For example, in response to western countries' control over the world's financial key points such as SWIFT, sanctioned and potentially sanctioned international market entities can experiment with the use of blockchain-based, decentralized cryptocurrencies for settlement, which can avoid traditional financial institutions and reduce the risk of trade being tracked by sanctioned parties.

(Zhang Xunchao, PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)

Responsible editor: Zhu Zhengyong Photo editor: Zhang Tongze

Proofreader: Liu Wei