The End of the Post-Cold War Delusion

The post-Cold War unipolar hubris, Russia, and the Postmodern American Right

The spectacle of petty domineering to which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was subjected by the supposed “leader of the free world” in President Trump and his sycophantic dullard of a Vice President, J.D. Vance, was abhorrent. But it was also symbolic; it represented the quiet part said out loud, a public repudiation of the “liberal international order” that has dominated post-Cold War international relations theory. It wasn’t the fact that we witnessed America placing a weaker nation under duress or even the implications of the withdrawal of American support for the viability of Ukraine’s survival as an independent, sovereign state. In one sense, we simply saw a public display of what usually occurs behind closed doors in the corridors of American power. No doubt many countries around the world were looking at Zelenskyy thinking, “We know how that feels.”

Rather, what made the Trump/Vance remonstration so grotesque was that the performance amounted to the White House prostrating itself before a paramount geopolitical rival, America’s arch nemesis since the 8th May 1945. The irony is that the wannabe-strongman Trump and his lickspittle Vance no doubt viewed their harrying as playing tough; in reality, their performative display amounted to a transparent and naïve show of weakness towards Putin's Russia, for whom U.S. retreat from Europe would constitute a major geopolitical victory and, in Russian eyes, reset the balance of power in Europe in their favour. It is difficult to see where this course may lead. America is, and always has been, a self-interested power. It is the seeming loss of America’s calculus as to how its self-interest is served in a world where Russia and China seek the dismantling of American hegemony that is uncharted territory.

America has long publicly espoused idealist international relations rhetoric while pursuing a foreign policy of ruthless realism and self-interest. In the aftermath of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson publicly championed the right to self-determination, particularly of smaller nations emerging from the dominance of imperial rule, as the guiding principle upon which a new “rules-based international order” would be predicated. He also willingly sacrificed Montenegro’s desire for sovereignty to placate the revanchist, aggressive power in the Balkan region, namely Serbia. Under Wilson's direction, America, Britain, and France, all withdrew their representation with the exiled Montenegrin government and turned the other cheek while Montenegro was subjugated into Serbia.

In 1951 the Majles (parliament) of the Iranian government under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh voted to nationalise their oil industry; the U.S. orchestrated a coup in 1953, known as Operation Ajax, to overthrow Mosaddegh and his democratically-elected government and install the Shah (king) as the Western-aligned monarch, placing Iran's oil resources under the control of a multinational Western consortium spearheaded by the British. The 1953 coup sowed the seeds of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and America came to reap what it had sowed with its mindless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which paved the way for Iran to destabilise Iraq, extend their militias into Syria, and bolster Hezbollah's concentration of power in South Lebanon. Even allies have been subjected to American hard Realpolitik; by enforcing British Second World War debt under the Lend-Lease Act and the post-war Anglo-American Loan Agreement, the U.S. purposefully ensured that Britain did not have the economic resources to preserve its empire after the war.

For American liberals, incubated in the post-Cold War idealism of the “rules-based liberal international order” rhetoric, the Trump White House appears to be a seismic break with the past, heralding a uniquely Trumpian inversion of America's reality. Yet this narrative is a comforting delusion that doesn’t entirely fit with history. The Trump 2.0 White House may draw on historical precedent for reverting America to a “spheres of influence” form of foreign policy, evoking the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine held that the U.S. would not allow any European power to interfere in the Americas and that the U.S. was exclusively entitled to expand its territories in the region. The Monroe Doctrine provided the doctrinal justification for the 1898 U.S. war with Spain, which ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and saw the U.S. emerge with colonies in the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. We might thus infer that a Europe with a looming threat of constant Russian destabilisation and hybrid warfare is not a concern; America under Trump is concerned with its sphere of influence, evident in the rhetoric of “taking” Greenland and the Panama Canal, and incorporating Canada as a state. As ever with Trump, fantasy and real intent blend seamlessly.

This reversion to “sphere of influence” great power competition in recent years has been heralded as the end of the so-called “liberal international order”. But the order was always somewhat aspirational, and in the post-Cold War period, it was a charade. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, the institutions that came to define the “rules-based international order”, including the United Nations, International Court of Justice, and World Trade Organisation, were characterised by the orbiting of Western-aligned countries around American foreign policy and economic interests. In the Cold War period, the order was primarily defined by the bipolar ideological conflict between an American definition of liberal democracy and the Soviet Union, which championed third-world nations to reject a U.S.-led order and promote anti-colonial agitation. The fall of the Soviet Union was the moment the delusion washed over the West, the arrogance and hubris of the epoch predicated on the flimsy assumption that we had arrived at “the end of history”; that liberal democracy, globalisation, and free markets were the logical endpoint of the 20th Century’s socio-political convulsions. The 1990s and early turn of the 21st Century marked the brief period of total American global hegemony, a unipolar world in which the rhetoric of a “liberal international order” reached its zenith.

However, such an order was, during American unipolar dominance, a mirage; it was easy to espouse the existence of a “rules-based order” in a world dominated by American-led global institutions and, more importantly, in the absence of any countries powerful enough to break the rules and challenge the existence and ideals of a liberal international order. In the early 1990s, China remained a poverty-stricken backwater, and Russia was reeling from the disintegration of its post-Second World War imperial project; Iran was crippled by the near decade-long calamitous war with Iraq. Thus, while the lofty rhetoric of the immediate post-Cold War period claimed the existence of an integrated liberal international order, in reality, it was simply an interregnum in the law of the jungle while the ambitions of other powers that have no interest in liberalism, internationalism, or order, were germinating. Once countries like Russia, China, and Iran were in a position to seek the realisation of their respective ambitions, the delusion of the “liberal international order” was revealed as the world regressed to great power competition for dominance.

The hubris underpinning the delusion was, as a final insult, exposed when the countries at the forefront of the “rules-based order” rhetoric, the U.S. and the UK, falsified their theory by fabricating evidence to the UN and launching an illegal invasion of Iraq, upending the Middle East and providing Iran with the opportunity to assert its destabilising influence on the region. Yet the entire post-Cold War delusion was riddled with hubristic assumptions, grounded in the ignorance of economic dogma, that paid no heed to history, culture, and ideology in shaping the fate of nations. The assumption, for example, that China ascending to the World Trade Organisation would tilt it inexorably towards democratisation or that Russia only needed a few McDonalds’ to open in Moscow and the very taste of freedom would induce a dopamine hit of what life could be like as part of the West.

Nowhere was the delusion of the unipolar moment more blinding than with regard to Russia. The assumption that democracy and markets would fold Russia into the arms of the West disregarded Russia’s self-conception as, in the words of the philosopher-king of contemporary Russian nationalism, Alexsandr Dugin, “a dialectic argument...against Western culture, the struggle for upholding our own...Russian truth.” Russia could never be part of the West because, fundamentally, the intellectual roots of the West are grounded in the sanctity of the individual, freedom of conscience, and social progress. Russia represents the diametrically opposed vision of the West, a socially and culturally atavistic nation whose defining characteristic is the cheapness of its human life. A people incubated in servility, pathetic in their plight and apathetic in the face of the genocidal tyrants, drunks, and megalomaniac despots that are all this revanchist, backwards-looking country has ever known as leaders. The late politician, Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015 for his opposition to Putin and leading protests against Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014, spoke of the duality of Russia when he stated that the country:

“...for the most part are divided into two uneven groups. One part is the descendants of serfs, people with a slavish consciousness. There are many of them and their leader is V.V. Putin. The other (smaller) part is born free, proud, and independent. It does not have a leader, but it needs one.”

The “dialectic argument” against the West and the anti-intellectualism in which Russian nationalism is steeped is not an accident. They reflect “the Russian Idea”, a concept originating from 19th Century Russian nationalists, which exalted the Orthodox religion as the religious vocation through which the power of the Tsar becomes transcendent. Authoritarian rule was not only sanctified; it was necessary for national self-expression and renewal. The anti-intellectualism derived from the Slavophile movement, which, in seeking to distinguish Russia from the West, rejected what they perceived as European ideals and principles of liberalism, progress, and rights, particularly insofar as these ideals were associated with French intellectuals (specifically Voltaire, who was influential in Russian aristocratic circles in the 18th Century). In the Russian Idea, Russia has its own Manifest Destiny, and where the West articulated its vision in terms of Enlightenment values of progress, freedom, and individual rights, the Russian Idea defined itself juxtaposed to those ideas. The core tenets of the Russian Idea were thus articulated as a strong, centralised state, pre-Enlightenment Christianity, and, in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, a “true Faith” and “true Kingdom”.

The Russian Idea also translated into remorseless expansionism. The list of countries invaded and occupied by Russia within the last century renders hollow the contention that Russia only acts out of defensive interests: Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, then Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Ukraine. It has brutalised Chechnya, Syria, and multiple Central African countries. Russia’s self-conception - the Russian Idea - is why, for several of these countries, Georgia and Ukraine in particular, their recent leanings towards Europe and the West elicit predictable Russian savagery; when these nations attempt to chart their course, it represents a repudiation of the “true Kingdom” in favour of Western values and liberalism. Where Ukrainian civil society is active, Russians are passive and resigned. Where Ukrainians stood up for their democratic process and to a Russian stooge in Yanukovych, Russians are compliant under their tyrant. When Ukrainians looked to Europe, Russia sought to erase Ukraine. The cognitive dissonance engendered in post-Cold War Russia is particularly acute given that opposition to liberalism is a raison d'être of Putin's regime.

And it is in this opposition, indeed revulsion, of Western liberalism that we can understand how sections of the Western Right have become Useful Idiots for Putin’s Russia and Russian disinformation warfare with its decade-long war on Ukraine, Ukrainian history and culture, and Ukrainian people. This segment of the Right deserves a name, but attempts to label it have proved elusive. Konstantin Kisin termed it the “Woke Right”, which seemed fitting and amusing given that so many people who appear in this region of the Right-wing world start as “anti-Woke” crusaders. However, the problem with this description is the word itself, which is unserious and provokes unnecessary semantic arguments. A better term is to call this corner of the Right exactly by the epistemic taxonomy to which it belongs: the Postmodern Right. It takes postmodern hyper-relativism to invert the reality of Putin’s revanchism and Russian aggression into a myth of valiant, justified self-preservation. It takes postmodern amorality to ridicule a figure like Zelenskyy, whatever his past or public presentation may be, against the reality of a man who has led his embattled country with quiet dignity for three years as Russia, once again, proves how cheaply it values human life.

This definition also captures the irony of those who revile the Progressive Left adopting and exhibiting, whether consciously or not, the very same ideological underpinnings of Progressivism. The Postmodern Right shares with the Progressive Left the belief that their oppression exists everywhere, that the current social order is rotten and must be overthrown, and that extreme measures are a justified means to the end of societal renewal, shaped in their image. The Postmodern Right, like the Progressive Left, sees its oppression as a result of hegemonic power structures, only for the Postmodern Right, this is the amorphous “elites”, the “legacy media”, the “globalists” and, of course, “the libs”. The Postmodern Right shares with the Progressive Left its rejection of liberal values and “the West”, albeit from polar opposite positions; the Progressive Left rejects the West as a racist, imperialist project, while the Postmodern Right rejects the West as decadent and weak. The Postmodern Right embraces the hyper-subjectivist epistemic standards of the Progressive Left that allow the focal point of their ire - their identity and perceived prejudice - to be seen everywhere and assumed to be present in all circumstances.

Perhaps most strikingly, the rhetorical devices that the Postmodern Right employs are distinctly similar to the pseudo-academic postmodern “studies” upon which the Progressive Left is built. Academic postmodernism and the Progressive Left attempt to hide their irrationality and lack of substance from scrutiny by drowning their ideas in obscurantist prose and verbose narratives. The Postmodern Right employs similar tactics, drowning essays and arguments in a tsunami of supposed “facts”, which amount to little more than a multitude of information points ranging from the tendentious to the irrelevant woven into a narrative to provide an illusion of rigour and depth. The intent of both strategies is clear: to simply drown the reader or any potential interlocutor and induce apathy - then claim victory for their relativist worldview. Just as the Progressive Left brandishes any criticism of its ideas as “phobic”, the Postmodern Right tarnishes criticism of Russia as “Russophobic”.

The Postmodern Right shares with the Progressive Left their deep cultural nihilism. Putin and Russia are to the Postmodern Right what Hamas and Islamism are to the Progressive Left. The mental gymnastics which the Progressive Left deploy to justify and excuse Islamist terrorism and the slaughter of Jews are identical to how the Postmodern Right parrots Kremlin talking points to justify and excuse the invasion of Ukraine, systematic attacks on civilians and executions of Ukrainian military prisoners, and the forced deportation of Ukrainian kids.

And in Trump, we have the first genuinely postmodern President, an administration openly hostile to liberal values, characterised by gross relativism and inversions of reality. In this respect, one cannot help but think just how comprehensive the triumph of the postmodernists has been, the dominant construct of contemporary Western society. How ironic that the epistemic revolution started and embraced by the academic Left would find its way to the White House with the political Right. Dialectic is a cruel mistress. Trump represents a distinctly postmodern political culture where anything can mean everything, and everything means nothing; he is the logical political consequence of the amorality and relativism of Foucault et al.

Up until our recent political fragmentation, a term such as “liberal” could, in its classical definition, equally have described a centre-Right conservative or centre-Left progressive. They shared a vision of a “liberal international order”, valued constancy and predictability in American leadership, and believed in the power of the trans-Atlantic alliance and international institutions. Their world may have existed in the realm of idealism and required the juxtaposition of the threat of the Soviet Union to hold it together. But at its centre was an America which, despite its tendency to lurch into hubristic self-interest and Realpolitik, was fundamentally aspirational in its vision and consistent in the articulation of that vision. It expressed a culture and values rooted in the epistemic traditions of the West. Perhaps nothing better represents the epistemic breakdown of our times than the fracturing of America’s understanding of itself. Writing recently in the Financial Times, the political scientist Joseph S. Nye observed that:

“A nation’s soft power rests upon its culture, its values and its policies when they are seen as legitimate by others. That legitimacy is affected by whether a nation’s actions are perceived as congruent with or contradicting widely held values. In other words, attention to values enhances a nation’s soft power.”

A country at war with itself over culture, with no stable sense of its values, is reflected in its policies. This is America over the past three administrations. That the mirage of the “liberal order” has now disappeared is not in itself surprising, given the emergence of a multipolar power dynamic that includes Russia, China, India, and Iran. What is surprising is that this multipolar landscape now has a capricious, incoherent America that has lost all sense of itself and, consequently, its sense of place in the world.