Serhii Plokhy: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s zoom out on the world. We talked about the war in Ukraine. How does the war in Ukraine change the world order? Let me just look at everything that’s going on. Zoom out a bit. China, the Israel-Gaza war, the Middle East, India. What is interesting to you, important to think about, in the coming years and decades? As a historian, and I’m trained that way, I have a feeling of deja vu. I see the Cold War is coming back in many of its features. And the war started, and we discussed that, in 2014, at least in my interpretation, with Russia trying to really reestablish its control over the post-Soviet space and Ukraine was crucial for that project. The more global Russian vision since 1990s was that they didn’t like the American monopolar world. They knew and realized that they couldn’t go back to the bipolar world of the Cold War era. So the vision was multipolar world. Again, it wasn’t just academic exercise, it was a political exercise in which Russia would be one of the poles on par with China, on par with European Union, on par with the United States. That’s very broadly speaking the context in which the war starts in 2014. Where we are now? Well, we are now in Russia certainly trying to regain its military strength, but no one actually believes that Russia is the superpower it was imagined before 2022. We see certainly Russia finding the way to deal with the sanctions, but we don’t see certainly Russia as an economic power with any sort of a future. So it is not an implosion of the Russian military economic and political power, but it’s significantly… actually it’s diminished. So today, very difficult to imagine Russia emerging as another pole of the multipolar world. Not impossible, but the war certainly made that very problematic and much more difficult. On the other hand, what the war did, it basically awakened the old West. United States and Western Europe transatlantic alliance. On the top of that, there are East European countries that are even much, even much stronger proponents of assistance for Ukraine than is Germany or the United States of America. So it is the replay of the Cold War story, the Return of the West, one of the chapters in my book, the Russo-Ukrainian War is called that way. We also can see the elements of the rebuilding of the Beijing-Moscow alliance of the 1950s, which was a very important part of the Cold War. It was extremely important part of the Korean War that in many ways launched also the Cold War globally. So I see a lot of parallels of going back to the time of the Cold War and the bipolar world that emerges, it’s not anymore the world focused on Washington and Moscow. It’s more like world focused on Washington and Beijing. And then there are countries in between. There are countries in between that join one bloc or another bloc that is emerging that is not fully formed. This, in my opinion, makes the task of us historians to really go back to the Cold War and look through new perspective on the history of that conflict because there is a lot of things that we can learn. So in some ways, history does repeat itself here. So now it’s a cold war with China and the United States. What’s a hopeful trajectory for the 21st century for the rest of it?…

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