Seven Glimpses of the Multipolar World

The West, Ukraine and the Ruin of a Nation

Mar 10, 2023

The tragic war in Ukraine is becoming a 21st century Ruin and Deluge. It demands a mindful approach to history that dispels the Western Mind’s illusions, which obscure the defeat, catastrophe and suffering of Ukraine.

In the Burning Archive weekly newsletter I share seven glimpses for seven days into the history, culture and diplomacy of the emerging multipolar world. Thanks for checking it out. I follow the same format each week to share my work to make sense of our time of troubles.

1. Gratitude

First, I am grateful to my teachers of the Russian language, which I am learning at the moment. I am learning from a teacher Elena, and from other sources, including the fine poet from St. Petersburg, Elena Shvarts, who long distributed her work in samizdat, but who I can now read in a bilingual Russian-English edition of her poems.

2. What I am reading

I read an important, lengthy essay on the Donbass War by Nemets, Peter Nimitz. You can read it here on Substack. It lucidly explains the complex strands of historical, cultural, geographical, ethnic and ideological identities within the terrain of ‘Ukraine’ over the last 2,000 years. It is highly recommended. In 6,000 words Nemets sets out a deep insightful understanding of how many strands of the past are neither dead, nor past in this Donbass War.

You might also want to check out my podcast episode 78. Kievan Rus and the origin stories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (December 2022) that I also released as a Youtube video, The beginnings of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in the history of Kievan Rus - myths, saints and epics.

3. Governing the unruly multipolar world

Many articles have offered anniversary assessments of the Ukraine war, and in the last fortnight there have been many diplomatic events. I would point to one article, in particular, by Stephen Walt ‘The Conversation About Ukraine Is Cracking Apart’ in Foreign Policy magazine, that reveals the tempers of the unruly multipolar world.

Stephen Walt is a professor of international relations at Harvard University, and has criticised American foreign policy from a ‘realist’ perspective for over two decades. He argued in 2005 (during the 'W' years, when criticism of the American aggression was still attractive to Western progressives) that America ought to "make its dominant position acceptable to others – by using military force sparingly, by fostering greater cooperation with key allies, and, most important of all, by rebuilding its crumbling international image."1 American Presidents have not heeded this advice to accept a humbler role in the multipolar world, and Stephen Walt has learned to mask his disappointments.

Stephen Walt reported on his conversations at the Munich Security Conference in February 2023. He highlighted two gaps in the ‘narratives’ about the war being recounted among the West’s leading foreign policy, defence and security emissaries.

The first gap opened between the perceptions of the Global South and the Euro-Atlantic World about the Ukraine war. Walt noted:

“states outside the trans-Atlantic coalition (including important powers such as India, Brazil, or Saudi Arabia) have not joined Western-led efforts to sanction Russia and do not see the conflict in the same apocalyptic terms that most officials in the West do.”

What is more, Western diplomats are puzzled about this. They claim there is no moral ambiguity in this war. But, as Walt says, the Global South see hypocrisy in the West’s outrage about military interventions in other states, and believe the fate of the world will be made by the emergence of the multipolar international system, not this war to push Eastward the borders of the Euro-Atlantic sphere of influence.

The West is losing the diplomatic struggle between the American ‘rules-based order’ and the multipolar world, secured by the United Nations Charter and international law. As the USA loses pawns, knights and rooks on the diplomatic chessboard, China is becoming more assertive. It has published a critique of USA hegemony, a Ukraine peace plan, and a concept paper for a Global Security Initiative. Former Foreign Minister and member of the Politburo, Wang Yi, who Walt would have heard at the Munich Security Conference, has commented that

“on the Ukraine issue, China stands by principles. China is committed to promoting peace talks and has played a constructive role. … We do not accept the US’s finger-pointing or even coercion targeting China-Russia relations. The US, as a major country, has every reason to work for a political settlement of the crisis instead of fanning the flames or profiting from it.”

Walt could have referred in his article to the kinship between his earlier proposals to tame American power and the Chinese stance, but that would have confronted his American elite audience with too much realism. Instead, what appears to be occurring is an escalation by America of military confrontation with China.

The West continues to spin illusions of military invincibility, even while it is losing the war in Ukraine militarily. This is Walt’s second gap in the narratives reported at Munich. In public, Western officials pumped up Ukrainian heroism, its triumph of the will, and its imminent counter-offensive with Western remaindered weapons. But, there was a different story that emerged in the private conversations with Walt in this modern hall of mirrors.

In private, however, the conversations were much more somber. None of my private meetings included officials at the very top of key governments, but nobody I spoke with expected the war to end soon and no one thought Ukraine would be able to retake all of its lost territory (including Crimea) no matter how much aid it gets in the next year.

Walt goes on to say:

The Biden administration’s rhetorical support for Ukraine keeps increasing, and it continues to promise us some sort of happy Hollywood ending. If Biden can’t deliver what he’s promised, then what looks like a compelling demonstration of U.S. leadership today will look a lot less impressive a year from now.

There is something cruelly narcissistic about this remark, typical of so much from the American elite. Ukraine’s defeat in America’s proxy war matters because of American electoral optics. What this conceals is the utter devastation of the nation of Ukraine.

The final sentence of my article, ‘The West’s Grand Illusions in Ukraine’, was

Tragically, the Grand Illusions and careers of this [Western] leadership elite are dying more slowly than the suffering conscripted soldiers of Ukraine, that dispensable nation that betrayed itself in search of American glory.

In an 800-word piece I could not detail, of course, the full horror of the ruin of Ukraine. Even here I can only present some highlights from this black ledger.

Its population has fallen to 18-25 million, with many working age and child-bearing age people fleeing to both Europe and Russia.

Its military losses are estimated to be over 220,000 killed-in-action, compared to approximately 15,000 to 20,000 Russian dead (as methodically estimated by the BBC and Meduza).

It has lost one-fifth of its territory, with the realistic prospect of losing access to the Black Sea and to ports. The four regions incorporated into the Russian Federation are realistically irrecoverable.

Its economy is ruined. It has lost its economically productive territory. It has devastated its workforce. Its energy and communications infrastructure are severely damaged. It is entirely dependent on Western aid for government payments.

Its democracy is totally compromised. Parties are banned. Media is controlled. Minorities are abused. Martial law prevails. Security services run riot. Lies control its rulers. Oligarchs are entrenched.

Corruption is a rare winner of this war. Ukraine’s pre-war reputation for corruption has been buffed by the flood of aid, money and arms into its failing state. Leading officals and their wives spend big in Paris and secure luxury Western homes to flee to. A short season of arrests and purges for corruption has stalled. Even its Defence Minister stands accused. The banditry of the steppe is spreading arms trading and human trafficking through Europe.

Decency has been abandoned. Ukrainians are press-ganged to die within 48 hours at Bakhmut. Prostitutes are awarded medals of military honour for their services. Russians are called ‘orcs’ and taped to light poles. Churches are raided.

Culture is devastated. The Russian language is banned. Russian statues are torn down. Books are burned, and writers forbidden, with nothing to replace them.

Its political elite has descended fully into terror.

In pursuing ethnic and ideological glory, Ukraine has even sacrificed to the Old Gods of America the sovereignty it claims to be defending.

Something larger than ‘cracks’ are appearing in the ‘narrative’ of the Ukraine War. A mindful, realist approach to world history, however, would go beyond concerns with ‘narratives’ spun at elite conferences. It would come to terms with the prospect of Western defeat, and start the reckoning with the leadership elite who drove Ukraine to destruction in pursuit of illusions. The tragedy of this war will be written from multiple perspectives over the years to come, but not by me. At least some of those historians will present the war guilt of the American and European Ukrainian elites. Those leaders will likely escape the fates of the soldiers and citizens they send to their deaths. But their escape into the next narrative should not obscure the tragedy of Ukraine, that ruined, dispensable nation.

4. Using history to live mindfully in the present.

Sadly one of the tragic, compassionate lessons of history is that sometimes people can destroy themselves. There are many examples in history where people become possessed by strange ideas, and when these possessed elites follow a path of ruin.

Students of the region known as Ukraine should know this. Readers of the Nemets’ article on the Donbass War will learn this. His article reminded me that there are periods in Ukrainian and Polish History known as ‘The Ruin’ and ‘the Deluge’. In the Ruin, Poland lost one-third of its population, and was ultimately partitioned. In the Deluge, ‘Ukraine’ succumbed to strife, riot and anti-Semitic, ethnic hatreds.

Nemets’ article refers only briefly to these periods. There are accounts of Ukrainian and Polish History that seek to shift the blame for these tragedies to outsiders, and make history nurse grievance and national pride. For example the Polish novelist and nationalist, Henryk Sienkiewicz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1905, wrote a trilogy historical novel of these periods that popularised the term, the ‘Deluge’. His writing is full of the kind of aggressive Romantic nationalism that has deformed America and Ukraine. It nursed grievances for the failures of Polish elites, which were blamed on outsiders, primarily Russians and during the early twentieth-century, the Jewish people of Eastern Europe.

But another Polish Nobel Laureate offers us a more mindful history of the Deluge and the Ruin. Olga Tokarczuk, who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a clinical psychologist who writes fiction about history. Her The Books of Jacob is, in many ways, a counter-statement to Sienkiewicz that celebrates complex strands of a multi-faith, multicultural Poland, Ukraine, Europe and world. It is such a brilliant book that I must commit a whole piece to it another day.

5. Fragments from the Burning Archive

Although tempted to quote Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob for my fragment this week, I have chosen instead a poem by Elena Shvarts, ‘Flora of Ukraine’, published in Birdsong on the Seabed (2008) trans. Sasha Dugdale.

I will include just a single stanza from this poem, but would encourage readers to seek it out, wherever you can.

You, my native Ukraine
You who are lost and drowned,
You warm me with your blood
And waving, lure me down.

6. What surprised me most this week.

There was a shocking series of front-page headlines in major newspapers in Australia claiming that ‘We Need to Prepare for War with China in Two Years.’ Such blood-curdling servility to the American war-mongering frightened me. Thankfully, former Prime Minister Paul Keating called it out, but the press gang kept marching to war. I fear we may be entering a very difficult, deadly decade in which America lures more nations down to drown in their own blood.

7. Works-in-progress and published content

My first paid-subscribers-only post will appear on Monday 13 March. It links Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and the Puritanical Commonwealth of Lockdown imposed on the world by Public Health from 2020.

This week my works-in-progress and published content were:

on the podcast I published Episode 91. Tragedy, Ruin and the Deluge in Ukraine.
On the YouTube Channel I published videos:
- History of China in a Weekend. Jaivin’s Shortest History of China , and
- Tragedy, Ruin and the Deluge in Ukraine.
I prepared course materials for my online courses on mindful history. I will be doing a preview video of this course on the YouTube channel shortly.
I edited some more of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and drafted some of my book on life after Western democracy. I share an excerpt in a paid-subscriber-only post on Monday.
I continued preparing transcripts of my podcasts over the last twelve months on the Russia-Ukraine-NATO War for publication.

Let me know if there are issues or topics you would like me to talk about on the podcast or the YouTube channel.

Burning Archive