Preface and Acknowledgements

The 'Decline of the West' - and the Emergence of a Russian Challenge

Until 2014, the idea of major, great-power war in modern Europe had become so unthinkable that it did not feature in discussion, even in fiction. Events that year in Ukraine changed all that. The language of war has returned to European politics, and officials and observers have begun to reflect on what it might look like. Euro-Atlantic officials and observers began to talk informally of the 'Eastern front', and the 'threat from the East'. In the media, documentaries have been screened debating the 'return of old enemies', even the eruption of World War III, and the conditions under which nuclear weapons might be used in the case of a Russian invasion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states.1

The war in Ukraine broke out at a time when the Euro-Atlantic community had long been suffering a crisis of confidence. The impact of the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent slow growth and prolonged economic austerity policies, the high-profile failures in Iraq and the problematic interventions in Libya and Syria have all contributed to an accelerating sense of weakness and an ebbing of the post-Cold War era, 'End of History' confidence.

Indeed, it has been a commonplace for some years to argue that the international liberal order is under threat from internal and external challenges. Sustained domestic political and economic uncertainty, combined with resurgent authoritarian powers, have meant that Western liberalism is seen to be in retreat, even 'under siege' - not only are the countries that built the liberal order weaker today than they have been for seventy years, but, according to the Financial Times's Edward Luce, since the year 2000, twenty-five democracies have failed, 'including three in Europe - Russia, Turkey and Hungary'. The 'West's crisis is real, structural and likely to persist', he lamented.2

This is part of a wider debate about a 'post-American world', the decline of the West, the 'rise of the rest' and the shift of power to the East.3 Richard Haass, a former diplomat and now the president of the influential US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, is among those who have argued that 'centrifugal forces' are gaining the upper hand, and there is a shrinking American ability to translate its considerable power into influence.4 And as one prominent journalist put it, the West's 'centuries long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close', and with the growing concentration of wealth in Asia, the West is losing its ability to function as a pole of stability and power imposing order on a chaotic world. Thus Gideon Rachman stated that the 'crumbling of the Western dominated world order' has increased the chance of conflict not just in East Asia but in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.5 This discussion has provided fertile ground for other debates about the decline of US and Western power and the challenges it faces, the rise of other powers and the possibility of this leading to war.6

The loss of confidence has two main roots. First, as John Bew, Professor of History and Foreign Policy at King's College London, put it, there have been 'profound failures' in the Anglo-American world's ability to anticipate, understand and come to terms with the complex problems it has encountered in other countries and regions. These 'shortcomings have contributed to a sense of loss of control, of being at the mercy of events and a general loss of authority in world affairs'.7 Reminding us that concerns about world order have permeated Anglo-American foreign policy thinking for over a century, Bew argues that they are simultaneously forward-looking, aspirational expressions of the desire to give the international system a destination point made in one's own image, and yet riddled with inescapable 'Spenglerian angst', the sense of 'civilizational vulnerability, sharpened by periods of technological change, fiercer international competition or confrontation with "The Other" from different parts of the world'.8

And ours is indeed seen as a state of permanent crisis, an 'age of anxiety', an 'unprecedented condition of vulnerability' and connectedness that makes the United States and its allies increasingly open to violent threats. Patrick Porter, Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham, has argued that the US, which ought to be one of the most secure states in history, is perpetually insecure, due to fears about the revolutions in communications, transport and weapons technology that have served to reduce frontiers and make the world dangerously small. US security is thus implicated everywhere, and this notion of insecurity in a shrunken world has lain behind the development since the early 2000s of a series of policies including pre-emptive war in the name of anticipatory defence, and other measures such as the development of the Ballistic Missile Defence programme (BMD).9

The second root is quantitative, reflecting concern about a sense of loss of material power. If China and Russia are seen to pose the main challenges to the 'relatively peaceful and prosperous' international order, the 'combined military power' of the US and its allies has served as the 'greatest check' on their ambitions.10 But as the BBC's Mark Urban argued in 2015, a series of long-term trends, including declining defence spending (from 2012 to 2014, thirteen of the twenty fastest-declining defence budgets were in Europe), mean that there is a 'qualitative as well as quantitative erosion' of Western superiority. 'The edge, the Western advantage and along with that the ability to deter people in parts of the world from doing desperate things, is going - if it has not already disappeared.'11 A year later, a leaked British Army report suggested that, on the basis of lessons learnt from the war in Ukraine, Russia 'currently has a significant capability edge over UK force elements', and NATO allies were 'scrambling to catch up'.12

Then in 2018, launching the new US National Defence Strategy, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis used much the same language when he stated that 'our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare - air, land, sea, space, and cyber space - and it is continuing to erode'. He argued that fast technological change and the long-running wars the US had waged had diminished US military capabilities: US armed forces had to cope with 'inadequate and misaligned resources'. Mattis emphasized that great-power competition was now the main focus of US security, and that the 'unipolar moment in which the US was the only superpower is no longer with us'.13

An important feature of the concern about the international order being in retreat is a widespread view that the post-Cold War goal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace' is under threat. If the range of challenges is seen to be broad, from Brexit to migration, many see Russia to be one of the most prominent. As one US commentator has put it, Russia, 'fresh from perpetrating the first violent annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II, forges on with a dizzying military buildup and casually talks about the use of battlefield nuclear weapons against NATO member states'.14 Along with many others, James Kirchick suggested that Russia was the most important of these threats because of the way that it supported and magnified the others. It is such a widely held view that he is worth quoting at length:

As Europe's political stability, social cohesion, economic prosperity and security are more threatened today than at any point since the Cold War, Russia is destabilizing the Continent on every front. . Fomenting European disintegration from within, Russia also threatens Europe from without through its massive military buildup, frequent intimidation of NATO members and efforts to overturn the continent's security architecture by weakening the transatlantic link with America.15

After many years of prolonged neglect in which Russia was not a priority, the shock of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine catapulted Russia to the forefront of the Euro-Atlantic policy agenda. Perhaps belatedly, the crisis emphasized for many that Russia was no longer a partner, but a challenger. It also generated much debate about what Putin would do next - was Crimea just the beginning of a new expansionist policy? - and the sources of Moscow's actions.

Some, such as Michael McFaul, an academic who also served as US Ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, frame the current crisis in immediate causes. Acknowledging that the questions of great-power competition and international order and US policies play a role, McFaul emphasizes instead the roles of Russian domestic policies and particularly the return of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency in 2012 as being the key factors in the current...