A growing illiberal international project is posing the biggest threat to democracy, people and peace in the world
Why has U.S. President Donald Trump thrown a public tantrum and refused to deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy? It is time to remember what is at stake for Ukraine. Who better to tell it like it is than John Mearsheimer, Realist advocate of a multipolar world order, who has consistently accused the U.S.-led West of provoking Russia to war.
Exactly a week after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s , Mearsheimer explained in a media interview that any peace deal with Mr. Putin would require Ukraine to give up not just some territory or hopes of North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership. It would be nothing short of its democracy. He told an interviewer that Mr. Putin “wants to install in Kyiv a pro-Russian government, a government that is attuned to Moscow’s interests….”
A Ukraine that was a liberal democracy, he said, was “from a Russian perspective… an existential threat.”
But would it not be imperialism, asked the interviewer, to tell Ukrainians that they cannot be a liberal democracy? Mearsheimer replied, “It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate.”
‘Democracy is not realistic’
Democracy simply is not realistic in a multipolar world, said Mearsheimer. “In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy. But in the real world, that is not feasible.”
Today, Mr. Trump is eager to give Mr. Putin the regime change he wants. He calls Mr. Zelenskyy a “dictator”with a “4% approval rating,” and has suggested more than once that peace is possible only if Mr. Zelenskyy steps down.
What kind of Ukraine do Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump want? Look at the other nations that “live next door to a great power like Russia,” and the answer is clear. Democratic protests in Belarus and Kazakhstan have been brutally suppressed with the help of the Russian military. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko declares, “It’s better to have a dictatorship like in Belarus than a democracy like Ukraine.” The Ukrainians obviously disagree.
It should be remembered that far from instigating Mr. Zelenskyy to stay and fight, former U.S. President Joe Biden had done all he could to force him to flee, hoping that it would appease Mr. Putin and avert a prolonged war.
In January 2022, Mr. Biden had declared that NATO would be divided in case of a “minor incursion”, and Zelenskyy had to “remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations”.
Mr. Biden had evacuated the U.S. embassy from Kyiv and said, days before the Russian invasion, that “it may be the wise choice for President Zelenskyy to leave Ukraine”. After the invasion, Mr. Zelenskyy had to again tell the U.S. that he was looking for ammunition, and not a ride.
The wider border of this project
Ukraine is not the only country where Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin want a regime in their own image. U.S Vice President J.D. Vance and Mr. Trump’s oligarch aide Elon Musk urged Germans to vote for the far-right anti-immigrant AfD. Mr. Vance told the European Union (EU) in Munich that Mr. Trump wanted to liberate European people from their “internal threat” — immigrants and the liberal democratic leadership that let them into Europe.
For the past decade, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared making his country an “illiberal democracy” as his goal, and to turn the EU into an illiberal project. Since then, Mr. Putin has put his weight behind that project in every way. And Mr. Vance made it clear that Mr. Trump, “the new sheriff in town”, wants the same: an EU aligned with Christian values, not universal human rights and democratic standards; an EU where member-nations will face no censure for passing Putin-style laws banning “gay propaganda”.
Mr. Orbán has the distinction of refusing to honour the International Criminal Court’s warrants issued against Mr. Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu voted for Mr. Putin in the United Nations. Mr. Trump treats Gaza and Ukraine as pieces of real estate at the mercy of the genocidal bully next door. Mr. Trump has branded ethnic cleansing in Gaza with his name, turning it into an obscene AI-generated Nero’s Feast. He turned peace talks in the Oval Office into reality TV where the most powerful man in the world and his henchmen and media bully an elected leader of an invaded and occupied nation.
The national bullies are acting in concert to create a “multipolar world” — a world safe for all bullies and bigots. It is high time we stopped imagining that multiple bullies make the playground safer, and that “multipolar” non-western tyrants are the lesser evil “regardless of the internal character” of the regimes involved.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared support for a multipolar world. Mr Putin has always insisted that there are “two Wests”, and that his quarrel is with the West of universal democratic principles and rules; an illiberal U.S., United Kingdom and EU are welcome to the multipolar world.
It is better late than never
It is the growing assertion of an illiberal international project (led by Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin, Mr. Netanyahu, and China’s Xi Jinping, and including Narendra Modi, Mr. Orban and European fascists) that poses the greatest threat to democracy, people, peace, and the planet today.
To insist that the rise of this new illiberal international is just the West versus the Rest “business as usual” is moral bankruptcy and suicidal folly — exactly as it is to quibble over the semantics of Mr. Modi’s project of an illiberal Hindu-only India.
It is better late than never to take on the illiberal international and defend universalist human rights, democratic solidarity. A good start would be for Indians defending democracy to show solidarity with Ukraine defending itself from the Putin-Trump tyranny.
Kavita Krishnan is a women’s rights activist and writer based in Delhi, India.
This article was first published in The Hindu.