Would the world be a better place without US power propelling the Western global order? That is the question which has been exercising the minds of policymakers as America’s inability to back its talk with action vis-à-vis Ukraine has iterated a fundamental, underlying truth about Washington’s strategic thinking ~ despite all that stuff about promoting democracy, protecting human rights, and encouraging the free market, the USA nearly always acts out of self-interest and has historically partnered with the most repressive of regimes, premised on the “lesser evil” thesis, to construct the contemporary West-dominated international order.

Some argue that the Ukraine crisis has underlined that there is no moral equivalence between the policies of Moscow and Washington, and a world without American power would not be a better world. Writing in The Atlantic, foreign policy expert Shadi Hamid says: “Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power ~ or, for that matter, Western power ~ is not a better world. For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks, the world the USA had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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In West Asia and earlier in South America and South East Asia too, America had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. The point these experts make, however, is that blaming America became all too easy as its power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered made it convenient to focus on America’s faults while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.

The argument goes that the narrative of a feckless and divided West has solidified over the past 25 years or so as the post Cold War world was ‘reconstructed’ and in recent years the highly disruptive Trump interregnum in the USA resulted in Americans putting a premium on restraint and limited engagements abroad.

As evidenced from Syria to Ukraine, Washington has held back from getting directly involved militarily. But there are those who think that America’s withdrawal from the world outside of North America and Europe (Australia-New Zealand and Japan-South Korea being the exceptions for historical reasons) may not be such a bad thing ~ for the rest of the world and, indeed, for America itself.

It would make nations think independently about their ~ hopefully enlightened ~ self-interest, and take the sting out of allegations of imperial overreach by the USA. What that means in the real world is that major non-Western global powers such as China and Russia as well as regional behemoths like India will have to engage with America as well as each other sans a pre-decided template.

The nature of that engagement will determine how stable the emerging multipolar global order will be. To illustrate the point, imagine, if you will, that USA-Nato was not in the mix in Ukraine; not only would the Russians have no excuse to invade a neighbouring country, but countries such as China and India would have been hard-pressed to remain neutral when the territorial integrity of another nation was being wantonly and violently violated. Water verily would find its own level.