La Belle Epoque and the Unipolar Moment

With the looming November election, Harris has backed herself into a corner on Ukraine.

Owen Lee is an undergraduate at The Catholic University of America, where he studies American politics.

“To choose the right moment in which to act is the great art of men. What one can do easily in 1807 perhaps cannot be done under any circumstances in 1810,” said Napoleon Bonaparte.

When Napoleon said these words he was specifically referring to his troublesome Iberian Campaign. However, it is especially applicable to the United States’ capacity in the world today. What one could easily do in 1994 perhaps cannot be done under any circumstances in 2024. Rather than learn from the wisdom of history, the Biden-Harris Administration elected to learn this through its own painful experience.

The blame for most of the pain being felt by America due to the war in Ukraine falls squarely at the feet of Harris’s diplomatic failings as Biden’s point person in Europe before the outbreak of the war in winter 2022. The United States’ diplomatic mission, led by Harris, and lack of deference for Russia as a great power created the dangerous circumstances that are prefiguring a great power conflict. 

To truly grasp the sheer arrogance with which the United States treated the Russian concerns prompting the American special military operation in 2022, it will be necessary to go back in time almost three years ago to November 2021 and look at what was being said by both sides concerning the escalating situation on the Ukrainian border. 

As documented by The Washington Post, for months prior to the invasion, Putin made clear the assurances necessary for peace: “The demands for a new European security pact come after Putin has suggested for months that U.S. and allied military activities in Ukraine and near Russia’s borders are crossing a red line for the Kremlin. Russia needs ‘precise legal, judicial guarantees because our Western colleagues have failed to deliver on verbal commitments they made.’”

CNN at the same time reported that the United States could not have been more arrogantly dismissive of Russia’s diplomatic offer: “Biden has signaled that the U.S. will not make any concessions on either NATO or Ukraine’s future.” 

This rhetoric by the United States continued to develop at the February 2022 Munich Conference where Kamala Harris shook hands with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and then the next day at a press conference all but issued support for Ukraine’s NATO aspirations.

“Let me start by saying I appreciate and admire Zelenskyy’s desire to join NATO.  And one of, again, the founding principles of NATO is that each country must have the ability — unimpaired, unimpeded — to determine their own future, both in terms of their form of government and, in this case, whether they desire to be a member of NATO,” said Harris.

Harris clearly has no talent in discerning the right action for the right moment, as it was in this moment that she sparked war by cementing Ukraine on an invited path toward NATO membership. Russia was left with no other choice than to invade, as a NATO militarized border with Ukraine, mere miles away from Moscow (Russia’s proverbial jugular) is an existential and unacceptable security posture for Russia to be subjected. 

This gradual breakdown of diplomacy and intensification of rhetoric is an interesting parallel to the actions of Great Britain prefiguring the First World War; in an almost one-to-one repeat of history, the United States was totally and unyieldingly disinterested in any meaningful diplomacy to create an off-ramp from war.

Great Britain perceived a strong Germany as a threat to the balance of power in Europe, but in reality, Germany was a reconstitution of said balance acting as a check against Russia and France. Those being allies of Britain, objectivity went out the window in viewing Germany as a balancing force versus as a threat.

Authors Roy Bridge and Roger Bullen put it this way in their book The Great Powers and European States System 1814-1914, saying: “A large Germany strengthened a balance which had been weakened by the restless policies of Nicholas I in the Near East and Napoleon III in Italy and on the Rhine.” 

The British and French view of the situation and their diplomatic hostility towards Germany is what allowed all the traditionally discussed causes of World War I to ferment and snowball; neither Great Britain nor France were interested in a diplomatic resolution via the Concert of Europe. In this stubbornness to accept a shifting political landscape, there exists many not-so-subtle similarities to the conflict between the United States and Russia, with Russia acting as today’s ascendent power contributing to the United States’ relative decline.

Surprisingly, American decline started almost immediately after one of our country’s greatest triumphs. In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States in a posture of power unmatched by any other in the world, thus marking the beginning of the “Unipolar Moment.” Despite a historically unprecedented gap in power between the United States and the next greatest world power, now thirty-three years on from our triumph we are left wondering where everything went wrong. 

In response, many would point to the political rise of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. However, American decline was already well underway. Putin’s understanding of this is why he felt confident enough to take such bold action. This was a major event to cement Russia as a rising great power, growing in its capacity to resist and outright confront American polarity, disrupting the global balance of power in a similar manner as the German Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

In the wake of the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and the balkanization of traditionally Russian lands, Russia was left humiliated and debilitated, helplessly floundering about in corruption and anarchy for the remainder of the 1990s. It was only with the ascension of former Putin to the presidency in 2000 that order was restored and the long process of rebuilding began.

As Putin solidified political power he had to subjugate the Russian oligarchs and Western influences to the state. This reestablished Russian sovereignty but would cost Putin favor with the West, forever alienating him. Putin’s rise did not cause American decline, but was rather a symptom of an inevitable process by which power would equalize between Russia and America as Russia rebuilt. 

Putin’s bold notion that Russia should be an independent nation governed only by Russian influences and priorities was met with Western provocation by breaking the prior promises of no further NATO expansion. As Russia continued its ascension to great power status and tried to cement a sphere of influence among its former Soviet countries, it was checked by both NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and a series of Western-backed coup d’etats against pro-Russian governments in Ukraine. 

Russia first signaled an open challenge to American power by annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine following the 2014 Euromaidan Coup against the pro-Russian Yanukovych government. This is where we see our parallel to the rise of Germany, a challenge to the world order, and an assertion of sovereignty by the taking of hotly contested territory. Just as with Great Britain in the 19th Century, this action greatly challenged our world hegemon, the United States, resulting in the recklessly hostile Western-supplied arms buildup in Ukraine.

It is clear that while Russia made choices to rebuild, we made choices to allow decline. Put simply, the United States was not a good custodian of its prosperity and our leaders and experts have no one to blame but themselves for the world’s present state of affairs. They squandered and stole the nation's momentum and potential, allowing it to deteriorate while America’s once humiliated rivals recaptured their national spirits’ and made themselves great again.

This squandering occurred in a variety of ways, from the less tangible loss of international goodwill due to the War in Iraq and the 1990s bombing campaigns in the Balkans, to the more tangible nine trillion dollars flushed away since the start of the broader Global War on Terror after September 11th, 2001. 

It is irrational to ignore these obvious blunders or to believe they have had no bearing in affecting American capacity. However such has been the exact attitude of the Biden Administration, which has refused to engage with the question of waning American might or come to grips with the realities of its conclusions.

Biden and Harris, whether they acknowledge it or not, have backed America into a corner. With the looming November election, Harris has personally backed herself into her own corner, too. In response to the position they have placed themselves in, the Biden Administration has doubled down on their rash and dangerous policy towards Russia with their decision to send Ukraine another $150 billion in military aid this July.

On the heels of Biden’s departure from the 2024 race and Harris’s entrance, this action puts to rest for Americans any idea that a potential Harris Administration would seek any more of a rational policy towards the Ukraine conflict. If the outbreak of war was largely due to Harris’s failings as vice president and she still continues to support a rash policy towards Russia during a supposed critical transition time with her role growing inside the executive branch, then in no way can she be trusted as president to accept failure in Ukraine and make the very tough decisions necessary to salvage American foreign policy. 

The problems facing America internationally are not the fault of evil leaders of rival powers like Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea. They are not launching an attack on America because they hate America for our freedom, but rather they are, in what any other nation would recognize as a rational pursuit of legitimate foreign policy, asserting their national sovereignty while aggressively pursuing their people’s best interests. The problem facing America is that we no longer have a class or great statesmen who understand and respect our rivals, and thus we have no capacity to engage in true diplomacy that can balance our people and interests against theirs.

The recent death of the great American statesman Henry Kissinger symbolizes the completion of this shift or changing of guard within America’s ruling elite. Men like that are no longer being made, and thus a government that was designed to be run by them is ceasing to be able to articulate and pursue its goals. 

Kissinger once said, “In the end, peace can only be achieved by hegemony or by a balance of power.” For the deluded leaders running our foreign policy today, the immediate reading of the quote is that the end of American hegemony means the end of peace, and thus that hegemony must be preserved at all costs. One of such persuasion would support this by contending that it was something exceptional and intrinsic to American liberal hegemony that created a lasting peace after the Cold War, rather than an accident of history creating a vacuum in rival power. 

However, such a reading ignores the context of Kissinger's time, and the second half of the quote. Kissinger would have said this when no American hegemony existed. In fact, the world was divided into a bipolar balance of power predicated on the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Thus Kissinger’s quote serves as a warning against a reckless pursuit of hegemony within the context of the Cold War. 

In Kissinger’s time, American hegemony was not possible and could have only been the result of an immensely destructive war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The outcome of which was more likely to be the end of the world rather than an American victory. Thus, any push for hegemony would have necessarily been seen as suicidal war-mongering and not conducive to peace. 

With America finding itself in what many are calling a new Cold War, Americans would do well to heed Kissinger’s warning as they head into an election to choose between a candidate who has failed to understand America’s new posture or one who recognizes it and seeks to end the war while we can still have a decent peace.

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