Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
What would be the impacts and repercussions of an imagined surrender of Ukraine for the world? This war of aggression that Russia has started against Ukraine has become the epicenter of a global debate.
Russia claims that Ukraine is a fascist regime with territorial claims on its nation. However, it is Russia that is invading Ukraine, not the other way around. And it is Russia that, with its invasion of Ukraine, is killing Ukrainians, children, women, and men. The reiteration of facts is essential for analyzing what a possible surrender of Ukraine will mean.
All of Europe has mobilized in support of Ukraine because it sees Russia as a threat to its own countries. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine is legitimized, Europeans perceive their countries as in danger because Putin, the leader of Russia, would feel legitimized to invade other countries, based on the principle that the surrender of Ukraine demonstrated the justice of his territorial claim to rebuild the former Russian empire. More importantly, the United States will not necessarily object to a Russian incursion into European soil.
The United States’ position in the face of these events has been extraordinary and surprising: instead of supporting Ukraine and European concerns, it has sided with the Russian aggressor. Trump’s defense of the aggressor has rethought all the world’s alliances and offers regimes with territorial appetites the green light they have never been offered before.
The other European countries, members of NATO, are preparing for new Russian aggressions after the United States abandoned them. The traditional protective wall has vanished. They are preparing for the wars of the future.
The global system of self-containment and acceptance of the balance of power between large and medium-sized powers, in force since the end of the Second World War, is collapsing at an unprecedented speed. Nothing credible or with the necessary power of containment can prevent the replacement of the current arrangement with one where the strong subjugate the weak.
It is possible to think that the new position of the United States is because Trump has his own territorial pretensions. By legitimizing Russian pretensions, he legitimizes his own. He has already said what he wants: to create a “fortress North America.” He wants to annex Canada and Greenland directly to the US political structure to achieve that goal. In addition, he wants to control (not annex) from the Panama Canal to the northern border of Mexico. To achieve this, it must legitimize the right of the dominant powers to annex new territories under their rule. Mexico will be just another domino.
Thus, legitimizing Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territories opens the door to the annexation of new territories under US rule.
But territorial ambitions continue. China will be able to annex Taiwan without objection from the United States. The annihilation of Gaza will be seen as a consequence of the new world territorial distribution between powers that do so because they can. The only requirement is a sufficient military force to impose themselves on the weaker.
Everything will be justified by the logic that the hegemonic powers have a “sacred” right to power, which allows them to build their “national security belts,” invading the areas, regions, or countries that fall within their supposed scope of national security.
This opens up the specter of a new way of dividing areas of influence in the world, regardless of international organizations or laws of global application. It will be a world where the powerful have the “right” to impose themselves on the weak. A new world order is coming if an international order based on shared laws and norms is not achieved.
And all this will be the direct consequence of Ukraine’s imaginary surrender to Russian territorial claims, in complicity with the United States and China.
@rpascoep
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