It Was Never About Ukraine
By Jon Eden Khan
We need to look deeper at what is happening with Ukraine than the surface narrative.
Despite what Western media is saying, this is more than Trump abandoning Ukraine as he makes friends with Putin again. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was more than just a land grab fuelled by historical delusions of grandeur.
The truth is that Ukraine became an ideological, political, and economic battleground between the USA and Russia around 2014.
At a deeper level, what has been unfolding since then is essentially a battle between East and West over a unipolar or multipolar balance of power on the planet.
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 behind it. Many aspects of this ideology 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, the dominance of big business, as well as the demand for new nations’ political and economic integration into the USA’s hegemony of power in the world.
Opposing this have been alternative ideologies 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 Ideologies
What’s critical to understand in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict is that at the heart of it is a clash of ideologies, and that this clash has divided the world.
In the post-war period, those willing to play ball with the political, social, and economic ideology 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.
Russia has been frozen out, much to Vladimir Putin’s resentment, while the nations buffering Russia with Europe have been increasingly invited in. And this despite previous promises that they wouldn’t be.
In the 2014 Maidan Revolution, as USA-backed forces contributed to regime change in in the Ukrainian government, and Ukraine moved towards becoming part of NATO, Putin deemed the USA’s advancement East started to come way too close.
Perceiving that 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 reversal 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 wants to withdraw from the USA’s global role and let other nations work out their own issues. His America First ideology perceives the USA can drop its assumed global responsibilities and maintain its power in the world based on its own economic resources and 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 prefers this, as he perceives it as liberation for USA from the geopolitical, economic and social obligations that have come with its international role.
A New Balance of Power
While Western media tell the story that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was some land grab fuelled by historical illusions of grandeur, the reality of the situation is that tragically, it is was never really about Ukraine. It’s about power.
This is utterly heartbreaking to sit with considering the massive loss of lives on the battlefields of Ukraine, and Ukraine must be a central part of peace talks as they are now beginning.
Given Trump’s impending reorientation, if the USA or its European Allies don’t push closer into Russia, Putin likely won’t push back with further threats towards Ukraine or other nations. And with the withdrawal of the USA from its central global role, we will 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, and the truth of Life itself.
That paradigm of separation cannot provide sustainable solutions to the planetary challenges we face, whether in a unipolar or multipolar world. It isn’t going to work.
In Singularity we perceive that the crisis of our times is demanding the emergence of a radically different political paradigm that starts with the Earth as one, Humanity as one, and Life as one.
What is needed is a planetary scale process of governance that is neither unipolar or multipolar but rather anchored in a true synthesis that can balance the indivisible One that is the source and essence of us all with the celebrated Many across the 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.