conomic Sanctions, repositioning military forces, and public rhetoric highlight the West’s response to the slow-simmer escalation of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. As the situation develops, a weakness in the West’s approach is becoming clear. Moscow has been able to elicit predictable responses from NATO through its exercise of hard power. For the West, however, a flaw in liberal theory is manifesting into stark reality – there are few (if any) levers of influence which allow them to compel a realist power broker to engage peacefully within the rules-based international order.
Liberalism and democratic institutions favor international cooperation, shared prosperity through interdependence between states, and adherence to a higher order of international norms. Realism posits a more individualistic approach to international relations. State motivations can be understood as pursuing their interests by accumulating power – and as one must assume your neighbors do the same, a state can only assure its security by dominating weaker rivals and neighbors without respect or recognition of a higher order of influence in the international system.
History suggests the realist approach often proves more accurate, from the conflagration of World Wars to the Berlin crisis in 1948 through to today in Ukraine. Ideally, a group of states dedicated to a liberal ordering of the world could collectively achieve a balance of power against hegemonic actors such as the revanchivist Russia – which is pursuing what it perceives as its security interests by dominating weaker neighbors.
This begs the question; why have the varied tools of national influence – which the West possesses in abundance – failed to deter Russian aggression? A second, related question is this; how is it that at times liberal ideals fail to drive Western strategic behavior?
How Liberalism Fails to Deter Russian Aggression
Conflict is driven by the pursuit of national interest. Yet potential gains – a compelling definition of interest – from shared prosperity has had no impact on the long history of rollercoaster-relations between Moscow and the West. This is because Russia has a different articulation of its own interest – that being tied primarily to its own autonomy and freedom from influence by external institutions. NATO, meanwhile, wants to secure states’ right to self-determination with its open-door policy to any and all prospective alliance applicants. These interests naturally collide – Ukrainian membership in an expanding NATO is an outcome which Moscow cannot tolerate.
Taking these differing articulations of interest as a given raises another question. Why has liberalism failed to incentivize Russia to turn away from its realist inclinations? The answer seems to be that liberalism as practiced simply lacks the levers of interest to compel or persuade power-focused realist states to integrate into a rules-based international order. This is a weakness inherent to liberalism, and that lack of tools for compelling is perhaps the biggest weakness of liberalism when contrasted to the power-focused practices of realist authoritarian regimes. Liberal theory harbors such idealism as to persuade the greater integration of states, yet nothing replaces hard power motives in history and international relations. It is not preferable that the international order is driven by this type of ruthless competition but remains the reality of our time.
How the West Strays From Liberalism
What liberalism does offer is the interdependence of state cooperation and shared prosperity. Yet this crisis in Ukraine demonstrates that the notion of interdependence and state cooperation is at times employed as a neorealist gambit, escalating the potential for conflict after the terms are dictated by realist actors. For example, the West has cooperatively redeployed military forces, and levied economic sanctions – coercive tactics more associated with realism than liberalism. Foregone is combining a persuasive press to integrate aggressors into the prosperous coordination of states and thus change their behaviors while offering consequences for intolerable behavior from a unified liberal order.
In the 21st century, more tools of national influence exist than ever before – including the likes of information and space as domains of competition or cooperation, cyber, economics, and human longevity. Yet the West continues to prefer old tools of power angling, as if there were no lessons to be learned from history when aggressors push the limits of acceptable behavior. For example, NATO is an outdated tool of international influence, whose existence was centered on countering the threat of the Soviet invasion of Europe during the Cold War. The alliance now is only able to justify its existence when a crisis is at its doorstep. How, though, can we justify its continued place within a liberal articulation of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Its continued existence echoes old Cold War understandings of the world and may well be complicit in bringing the region to its current inflection point.
The West certainly struggles to fully comprehend Russian geopolitical thinking, but we are able to understand the use of hard power very well. Thus, there is the basis for some understanding. What the West is failing to do, however, is turning that basis into a way to incentivize what we see as acceptable behavior within a liberal order. Instead, the West is attempting to coerce Russia through threats of force while claiming to march under the banner of liberalism. Actions surrounding Ukraine today prove that liberalism exists largely as a theory, and not a method or practice in international relations.
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Limitations of Liberalism on Display with Ukraine Crisis
Photo by JR Korpa via Unsplash.
February 25, 2022
CSPC Senior Fellow Ethan Brown examines the ongoing Ukraine Crisis through the lens of the IR theories of liberalism and realism. The West's failures on Ukraine display both the limitations of liberalism in practice and a propensity of Western powers to stray from its principles, argues Brown.
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conomic Sanctions, repositioning military forces, and public rhetoric highlight the West’s response to the slow-simmer escalation of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine. As the situation develops, a weakness in the West’s approach is becoming clear. Moscow has been able to elicit predictable responses from NATO through its exercise of hard power. For the West, however, a flaw in liberal theory is manifesting into stark reality – there are few (if any) levers of influence which allow them to compel a realist power broker to engage peacefully within the rules-based international order.
Liberalism and democratic institutions favor international cooperation, shared prosperity through interdependence between states, and adherence to a higher order of international norms. Realism posits a more individualistic approach to international relations. State motivations can be understood as pursuing their interests by accumulating power – and as one must assume your neighbors do the same, a state can only assure its security by dominating weaker rivals and neighbors without respect or recognition of a higher order of influence in the international system.
History suggests the realist approach often proves more accurate, from the conflagration of World Wars to the Berlin crisis in 1948 through to today in Ukraine. Ideally, a group of states dedicated to a liberal ordering of the world could collectively achieve a balance of power against hegemonic actors such as the revanchivist Russia – which is pursuing what it perceives as its security interests by dominating weaker neighbors.
This begs the question; why have the varied tools of national influence – which the West possesses in abundance – failed to deter Russian aggression? A second, related question is this; how is it that at times liberal ideals fail to drive Western strategic behavior?
How Liberalism Fails to Deter Russian Aggression
Conflict is driven by the pursuit of national interest. Yet potential gains – a compelling definition of interest – from shared prosperity has had no impact on the long history of rollercoaster-relations between Moscow and the West. This is because Russia has a different articulation of its own interest – that being tied primarily to its own autonomy and freedom from influence by external institutions. NATO, meanwhile, wants to secure states’ right to self-determination with its open-door policy to any and all prospective alliance applicants. These interests naturally collide – Ukrainian membership in an expanding NATO is an outcome which Moscow cannot tolerate.
Taking these differing articulations of interest as a given raises another question. Why has liberalism failed to incentivize Russia to turn away from its realist inclinations? The answer seems to be that liberalism as practiced simply lacks the levers of interest to compel or persuade power-focused realist states to integrate into a rules-based international order. This is a weakness inherent to liberalism, and that lack of tools for compelling is perhaps the biggest weakness of liberalism when contrasted to the power-focused practices of realist authoritarian regimes. Liberal theory harbors such idealism as to persuade the greater integration of states, yet nothing replaces hard power motives in history and international relations. It is not preferable that the international order is driven by this type of ruthless competition but remains the reality of our time.
How the West Strays From Liberalism
What liberalism does offer is the interdependence of state cooperation and shared prosperity. Yet this crisis in Ukraine demonstrates that the notion of interdependence and state cooperation is at times employed as a neorealist gambit, escalating the potential for conflict after the terms are dictated by realist actors. For example, the West has cooperatively redeployed military forces, and levied economic sanctions – coercive tactics more associated with realism than liberalism. Foregone is combining a persuasive press to integrate aggressors into the prosperous coordination of states and thus change their behaviors while offering consequences for intolerable behavior from a unified liberal order.
In the 21st century, more tools of national influence exist than ever before – including the likes of information and space as domains of competition or cooperation, cyber, economics, and human longevity. Yet the West continues to prefer old tools of power angling, as if there were no lessons to be learned from history when aggressors push the limits of acceptable behavior. For example, NATO is an outdated tool of international influence, whose existence was centered on countering the threat of the Soviet invasion of Europe during the Cold War. The alliance now is only able to justify its existence when a crisis is at its doorstep. How, though, can we justify its continued place within a liberal articulation of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Its continued existence echoes old Cold War understandings of the world and may well be complicit in bringing the region to its current inflection point.
The West certainly struggles to fully comprehend Russian geopolitical thinking, but we are able to understand the use of hard power very well. Thus, there is the basis for some understanding. What the West is failing to do, however, is turning that basis into a way to incentivize what we see as acceptable behavior within a liberal order. Instead, the West is attempting to coerce Russia through threats of force while claiming to march under the banner of liberalism. Actions surrounding Ukraine today prove that liberalism exists largely as a theory, and not a method or practice in international relations.
