The USA, Ukraine, Russia, and the Global Balance of Power
By Jon Eden Khan
To understand the complex relationship between Putin and Trump, we need to look deeper at what is happening with Ukraine currently than the surface narrative.
The narrative held by much of Western media at the moment is of Trump abandoning Ukraine as he horrifyingly makes friends with Putin again, with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine basically being seen a land grab fuelled by historical delusions of grandeur.
If we explore what’s happening here at a deeper level though, we start to see what has been unfolding in Ukraine is essentially a battle between East and West over a unipolar or multipolar balance of power on the planet.
Specifically, and in a way that has been tragic for the Ukrainians, Ukraine became an ideological, political, and economic battleground between the USA and Russia around 2014.
In broad terms, the USA’s international agenda since the end of the Second World War has been to maintain a world order of increasing globalisation and economic interdependence, all with the USA holding the main balance of power.
Nations who wanted in to this global order have faced pressure to buy into the political, social, and economic ideology and geopolitical infrastructure behind it. Many aspects of this have created significantly greater freedom, interconnection and prosperity for much of the world. Some have resulted in cultural erosion, widening wealth inequality, imbalances of power, and the dominance of big business.
Opposing this have been alternative approaches held by nations such as China, Russia, and Iran, amongst others. These ideologies have radically different perspectives on individualism vs. collectivism, human rights, transparency, freedom of speech and information, the practice of power, and the preservation of culture and tradition.
A Global Clash of Powers
At the heart of the tensions between Russia and the United States is a clash of ideologies and geopolitical interests — including security concerns, spheres of influence, and economic competition — and this clash has divided much of the world.
In the post-war period, those willing to play ball with the political, social, and economic ideology and infrastructure of the USA have been allowed into its world order. Those who are not, or who have been deemed to operate in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with its values have been marginalised or frozen out (China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela).
The USA’s public position has been that it stands for and defends the basic principles of Western liberal democracies: freedom of speech, a free press, social mobility, the separation of church and state (mostly), and neoliberal capitalism.
In many hugely significant ways people in the West have enjoyed far greater freedoms to live a fulfilling, self-determined life than those in totalitarian nations. And the USA’s moral high ground has been severely compromised by the shadows of political corruption, economic hegemony, and the tendency for covert USA forces to attempt or actually engage in regime change in nations that are not playing ball from time to time so that they get new leaders who are.
On the other hand, it’s critical to get a sense of just how differently Putin sees the world.
Putin sees Russia as not just a nation state among others, but one of the world’s great civilisations with over a thousand years of history.
As a leader, he likely sees himself serving the historical continuity of Russia as a great civilisation, through what has been a period of massive instability since the fall of the Soviet Union, which has described as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century - one that he stepped in to salvage. It’s likely that Putin sees ‘great civilisations’ (like Russia, China and India for example) as superior to nation-states, and the world as a multipolar domain of great civilisations, with nation-states as pretenders to civilisational superiority, yet without the historical gravitas to truly justify that pretence. He likely sees the USA and European nations in this manner.
He also holds the historical awareness that lesser empires and other nation-states, in their attempt to rise, have often attempted to destabilise Russia, from Austria-Hungary who attempted to bolster Ukrainian national identity and sovereignty to lessen the power of Moscow, through to the USA in the Maidan Revolution.
Perceiving himself as a protector of Russian civilisational continuity, he likely sees the silencing of dissent and killing of opposing voices like Alexei Navalny as part of necessary civilisational defence, guarding the stability of Russia in a time of great threat.
Consider how vastly different this worldview is from that held of Russia in the West. Owing to the gap between them and the tension it has created over the last decades, Russia has been frozen out of contact with the West, much to Vladimir Putin’s resentment, while the nations buffering Russia with Europe have been increasingly invited into NATO. And this despite previous promises that they wouldn’t be.
The 2014 Maidan Revolution saw the Ukrainian people overthrow the pro-Russian government, with Western governments offering political support to the protest movement. As Ukraine subsequently moved closer toward NATO, Putin saw this as the United States advancing too far east.
That, plus his perspective that Ukraine should never have been separated from Russia given them being part of the same civilisational lineage, and his sense that now Russia’s position had become existential, he invaded Ukraine.
The recent years of tragic war have followed.
America First
Cue Donald Trump being elected. And as all the noise being made currently points to, this is a major game changer to the whole dynamic.
What Putin likely realised in the phone call Trump recently posted on his social media that they shared was that Trump stands for a fundamental shift of the main thrust of USA foreign policy that Russia has felt so existentially threatened by for the last decades.
While Biden and the presidents before him (minus Trump in his first term) were driven by the ideology of an increasingly globalised world with the USA in pole position, Trump stands for an approach that could be described as transactional nationalism. His America First ideology perceives the USA can reduce its assumed global responsibilities while maintaining its power in the world based on economic and when necessary military coercion, as well as playing hardball in the domain of international trade (e.g. tariffs).
While Biden and those before him feared the rise of a multipolar balance of power in the world that could emerge in the vacuum left by a USA that didn’t fight to maintain its centralised place in global affairs, Trump seems to find this acceptable as long as American interests are protected, which he is willing to use coercive and military levers to ensure.
A New Balance of Power
It is utterly heartbreaking to sit with considering the massive loss of life on the battlefields of Ukraine.
With the shift of the USA’s role in the world, we have entered a fundamentally new phase in the global balance of power.
It’s critical to acknowledge that this new balance of power will still be between separate nations, sometimes as allies and sometimes adversaries, competing for their own interests in a paradigm of separation that is fundamentally at odds with the needs of the global crisis humanity now faces.
That paradigm of separation cannot provide sustainable solutions to the planetary challenges we face, whether in a unipolar or multipolar world.
In Singularity we perceive that the crisis of our times is demanding the emergence of a radically different political paradigm that starts with a recognition of the Earth as one and a culture of planetary responsibility that enacts that orientation at the national level.
What is needed is a planetary scale process of governance that is neither unipolar nor multipolar but rather anchored in a true synthesis that can balance the essential unity of humanity with the vibrant diversity of our nations, cultures, traditions, and communities.
The new balance of power on the planet must be based in that.
Singularity’s work is dedicated to this emergence.