The new democratic alliance may not outlast the Ukraine war

Russia has invaded and devastated Ukraine without the smallest provocation. Most North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations, led thank goodness by the US — two years ago, we could have expected nothing from the White House — join in condemning President Vladimir Putin's aggression. Some are supplying military aid.

Yet there is nothing like unanimity in Europe, never mind elsewhere, about appropriate policy responses. The old Cold War certainties, the meticulously prepared plans to make common cause in confrontation scenarios between the Soviet Union and the West, no longer exist.

France seems dangerously close to electing a president, Marine Le Pen, who has openly admired Putin and last week called for rapprochement with Russia once the Ukraine war is over. Heading into a runoff election with President Emmanuel Macron, she has reportedly talked of removing France from NATO's integrated military, and refuses to endorse Western claims of Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

Hungary's newly re-elected prime minister, Viktor Orban, is fiercely critical of the Kyiv government. Germany claims to back NATO action, but has yet to provide meaningful military aid, and is funding Putin's war effort by continuing to buy his gas and oil.

Elsewhere, Israel conspicuously distances itself from NATO because it deems its defense relationship with Russia too important to hazard. India is enthusiastically buying discounted Russian energy and refuses to take a stand alongside the West, despite its alleged adherence to the US-led Quad alliance to contain China.

Pakistan, which seldom agrees with India about whether it is Monday or Tuesday, likewise rejects the NATO line. Imran Khan, now the ex-prime minister, had demanded stridently of Western ambassadors, "Are we your slaves, to follow your orders?"

South Africa has defended Russia. Brazil and Mexico have declined to join in imposing sanctions, with the latter's president offering the anodyne justification "we want to have good relations with all the governments in the world."

China, wholly unwilling to break with Russia, has never wavered in its declared commitment to the option of using force to pursue core national interests.

The old global order hinged upon two superpowers exercising an influence over a host of clients, which trended toward authority. The US had an armlock on most of Latin America, as the Soviet Union did on its Eastern European empire and some Middle Eastern states. Until the late 20th century, such middle-ranking powers as Britain and France could count on the governments of many of their old colonial possessions to support their foreign-policy objectives.

Today, such influence and even dialogue are drastically diminished. The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the odious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is disgusted by Western criticism of his human-rights record, and refuses to increase his country's oil production to assuage the energy crisis.

Another autocrat, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supported the United Nations condemnation of Russia for invading Ukraine, but declines to participate in sanctions. In part, of course, this reflects the complex Turkish relationship with Russia in handling Syria, and the Turks' purchase of Russian S-400 ground-to-air missiles.

The message of all this equivocation is that the pack of cards, the array of nations that stacked up tidily on either side of the Cold War, today drifts on the wind. It is difficult to anticipate which nations will adopt what attitudes on any given international issue.

Though our politicians and media emphasize "the world's" condemnation of Russia's latest aggression, far more nations than we like to admit dislike and resent perceived Western arrogance — we prefer to call it confidence, founded upon achievement. More than a few care nothing for Ukraine and admire Putin for defying Western hegemony, just as they are happy to traffic with China, indifferent to its dreadful human-rights record.

The world has moved a long way, and not in a direction most of us welcome, since the White House's 2002 National Security Strategy. At that high point of post-Cold War hubris, the US declared that there was "a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise."

President George W. Bush's administration urged that the promotion of free institutions offered "the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually preparing for war."

That aspiration was admirable. We have since discovered, however, that while it suited those societies that prosper mightily from freedom, technology, entrepreneurialism and liberalism, it has absolutely not suited those that lack such skills or reject such liberties.

Statisticians tell us that the world is becoming a less-violent place, measured by the toll of people dying in conflicts. This may be true, but such numbers take no account of the hundreds of millions obliged to bow to oppression by an institutionalized threat of violence.

We have entered an era of global disorder, a multipolar universe, as was the norm for much of history before World War II but vanished amid the adversarial nuclear stability created by the Cold War.

The great Yale historian Paul Kennedy, author of "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers," observes in a new book on the 1939-45 struggle at sea that there has never been such a kaleidoscopic period of change in international relationships as that which occurred between June 1940 and December 1941.

At its outset, France and Britain were at war with Germany, while Stalin was Hitler's effective partner in crime. Then France dropped out and Italy dropped in, to confront Britain. Then Germany attacked the Soviet Union, which abruptly became Britain's ally. Then Japan attacked the US and European empires, resulting in what Winston Churchill called "the Grand Alliance."

This uneasy partnership, which caused the old prime minister ruefully to observe that the only thing worse than fighting with allies was to fight without them, survived until Italy, Germany and Japan were defeated.

Then the Soviet Union became the enemy of the West, and remained so until 1991, accompanied in large measure by China. This situation could scarcely be described as happy or friendly, because the world lived in the shadow of Armageddon. But it generated a stability many modern statesmen and commanders view with nostalgia.

Today, old alliances wobble and new partnerships form, in a fashion less predictable and thus more dangerous than at any time since World War II. The greatest change since the Soviet Union's collapse is, of course, the decline in the acknowledged dominance of the US

Back in 1992, I mused to Ray Seitz, then the brilliant US ambassador in London, that I wondered how we were going to find life in a world with only one superpower. He responded presciently: "Your question presupposes that the United States is willing to fulfill that role."

Moreover, in the ensuing three decades, while US military strength has remained undiminished, other nations have grown dramatically stronger. Questions are asked that were unthinkable at the millennium, about both American means and will to prevail.

In 2018, the US National Defense Strategy committee acknowledged that "regional military balances in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific have shifted in decidedly adverse ways. These trends are undermining deterrence of US adversaries and the confidence of American allies. The US military … might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia."

Brad Roberts, director of the Center for Global Security Research, wrote in 2020: "The credibility of US promises to defend its allies from attack and to respond as necessary, perhaps even with nuclear weapons if the vital interests of those allies are put at risk, has eroded in recent years."

Yet while there is little good news to be derived from the Russian destruction in Ukraine, we can be cheered by the fashion in which it has awoken many governments to the indispensability of alliances.

Even some Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump, instinctive isolationists who have questioned the merits of NATO, seem more willing to acknowledge that our security — even narrowly American security — must hinge on relationships with other nations that share at least a modicum of US values.

Henry Kissinger has written: "World order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone … its components, while maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural and juridical … the goal of our era must be to achieve that equilibrium while restraining the dogs of war."

The British, since the Ukraine crisis began, are heartened by finding themselves once more holding conversations with their US counterparts, especially in the field of intelligence, more intimate than they have enjoyed since the Cold War. American Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency chiefs feel confident that the bosses of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service and Government Communications Headquarters will keep their secrets safe, and vice versa.

Three years ago, when Emmanuel Macron told an interviewer "what we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO," many of us agreed with him. No European nations save the U.K. and France were sustaining serious armed forces, and even those were losing mass at an alarming rate.

Today, almost every European power is clinging to NATO, pledging a drastic reinforcement of its defenses, with a fervor unthinkable before Ukraine. Finland and Sweden, after generations of neutrality, are considering joining the alliance, perhaps as early as this summer. The Germans, who effectively disarmed themselves after 1991, have hastily committed to a massive defense-budget increase.

All this is welcome to those of us who take security seriously, though it will require years to make Europe's armies battleworthy once more. The cash promised so far will suffice only to repair the most glaring deficiencies in existing establishments of soldiers, tanks, planes and other weapons systems. It will not increase capabilities.

Moreover, a big question persists about whether European unity and strength of purpose will hold up as the Ukraine conflict drags on and the global energy crisis persists. Putin views Western societies with contempt, because he believes us decadent, in contrast to the Russian virility so vividly displayed in the devastation of Chechnya, Syria and now Ukraine.

He seems thus far right, that many of us are spoiled. Unlike our forebears, accustomed to suffering and sacrifice, we have long regarded comfort, safety and prosperity as our birthrights. The idea of being obliged to struggle — worse still, to resort to arms in a great-power conflict — to preserve our way of life is outside modern Western experience.

We need once more to acknowledge the towering truth of the old saw that the price of peace is perpetual vigilance, together with a willingness to fight, kill and if necessary die — or at least commit others to do so — to defend our vital interests.

In the wake of World War II, a cluster of international institutions were created — the UN, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, later followed by the World Trade Organization — to assist the peaceful resolution of disputes, promote free trade and encourage global commerce. Looking back, it is remarkable how much these bodies have achieved, and for how long their moral and economic authority was exercised to do good.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.