Critics accuse Donald Trump of destroying a rules-based world order with his no-nonsense approach to those threatening the security of the Western world. There is just one problem: it is a liberal fantasy that never existed.
The late 1990s were the high-water mark of liberal globalism. Academics like Francis Fukuyama rambled on about the “end of history.” In the Balkans, multilateral intervention seemingly redefined war as a legalistic humanitarian effort. In the quest for a borderless world, the West opened its doors to cheap Chinese imports.
In 1996, columnist Thomas Friedman reassured his readers that conflict would become a thing of the past in the world of liberal, free-trade globalism: No two countries with McDonald’s fast-food outlets could want to wage war against each other, Friedman opined.
All of this rested on the assumption that human beings are driven by material considerations rather than by ancestral identities, cultural behavioral patterns, or internalized historical grievances. Give people a McDonald’s burger and some cheap gadgets from China, and they’ll conform to whatever globalist norms come with this offer, so the logic went.
After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Bill Clinton and his alcoholic pal Boris Yeltsin tried to force “shock therapy” on Russia. In their view, laissez-faire capitalism could be successfully rolled out overnight in a country still defined by Soviet-era, collectivist ways of thinking. Without a pre-existing culture of entrepreneurship, meritocracy, and respect for property rights, the scheme unsurprisingly ran aground. As mafia-style oligarchs scrambled to loot Russia’s resources, anti-Western backlash grew among ordinary Russians.
Within the Western world itself, liberal globalism’s misunderstanding of human nature led to a toxic experiment with state-enforced multiculturalism. Tried-and-tested policies of assimilating new immigrants were abandoned.
Originally, this wasn’t due to radical “postcolonialist” wokery, but rather because mainstream, predominantly white, 1990s liberals thought that insisting on individual assimilation was obsolete. A shiny, freshly printed passport is all it takes, they reasoned. Then again, they also believed that the whole world had just assimilated into their globalist monoculture.
The liberal-led West became so blind to reality that it could no longer even recognize its enemies. Appeasement became the new policy consensus towards the radical Shia-Islamist regime ruling Iran.
When the first mass protests since the Iranian regime’s founding were violently crushed in 1999, liberal elites shrugged it off entirely, keen not to upset the Ayatollahs. Later, under Obama, Western diplomats treated Iran’s terrorist rulers as just another quarrelsome-but-rational autocracy: They assumed Iran’s ayatollahs could be disciplined with a few financial sanctions or tempted back into compliance with some wads of cash.
If they had been humble enough to read Ayatollah Khomeini’s words for themselves, they would not have made this mistake: “Patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
When Khomeini attained power in 1979, the prominent European leftist philosopher Michael Foucault called him a “saint.” Devoid of any myth, beauty, or tradition of its own, postmodern globalism leads its spiritually starved adherents to hungrily embrace even its enemies’ most fickle, invented mythologies.
Iranians today don’t call the dictators running their country holy men; they call them ‘Zahhak,’ after the name of a power-obsessed, snake-shouldered tyrantfrom ancient Iranian mythology. Trump has an even clearer term for Iran’s uranium-obsessed rulers: “lunatics.” Now, Trump is taking decisive action to protect the free world from the nuclear menace these lunatics represent.
Truly irrational, megalomaniac dictators like Khomeini, Hitler, or Stalin are, fortunately, quite rare. Today, the West faces a different structural challenge from more rational authoritarian strongmen such as Putin and Xi Jinping. These rulers have no desire to spark nuclear Armageddon, start World War Three, or burn down their own countries. They are pursuing a far more sophisticated strategy: exploiting the self-destructive hypocrisy inherent in post-Cold War globalism to build up their own regimes and eventually outstrip the West.
In the early 1990s, many Russians, tired of the privations of communism, were briefly well-disposed to the West. But Russia would never become a democracy. Democrat rule has little precedent in Russian history, existing only for a few months in 1917. Nonetheless, many ordinary Russians were ready to give up on Russia’s imperial ambitions in exchange for more prosperity and less isolation.
Despite fierce opposition from a few old Soviet hardliners, Russia mostly ended its occupation of Eastern European, Caucasian, and Central Asian nations, pulling out its forces. Clinton and Yeltsin’s failed globalist ‘shock therapy’ experiment undercut that reconciliation sentiment. That lone, though, wouldn’t have propelled a fundamentally anti-Western, ex-KGB agent like Vladimir Putin to power.
It took a far more emotionally-piercing betrayal to do that: A devastating Islamic insurrection in Chechnya, a north-Caucasus region located inside Russia’s internationally-recognized post-Soviet borders. For centuries, there had been fierce ethno-religious conflict between the Muslim Chechens and their Russian rulers. It culminated when the Soviets, in 1944, “deported” Chechens en masse to the Central Asian steppe, a genocidal crime that killed over one hundred thousand Chechens.
Amidst the economic chaos of the early 1990s, a ragtag coalition of Chechen ultra-nationalists and jihadists seized power in Grozny, Chechnya’s regional capital, to exact barbaric revenge for their ancestors’ historical suffering.
Tens of thousands of ethnic Russians lived in the city of Grozny, alongside their Chechen neighbors. Some survivors recounted,
In 1991, Russian girls began disappearing in broad daylight. Then Russian guys started getting beaten up on the streets, then they started killing them. In 1992, they started kicking out the wealthier ones from their apartments... By 1993, life was already unbearable... Another six months, and the most popular Chechen slogan would be, ‘Russians, don’t leave: we need slaves.
By the late 1990s, several large-scale slave markets operated in Chechnya, selling captured Russian women and children. To justify it all, the Chechen jihadists introduced an Islamist, Sharia-based legal code, which legitimized execution methods such as stoning.
The West offered Russia little assistance in fighting these terrorists. There was no public outcry, and not even a single virtue-signaling campus occupation. For the liberal establishment, events in Grozny were simply too politically incorrect to talk about. It risked upsetting their multiculturalist fantasies. So, they cloaked themselves in silence and denial.
For Putin, all this was a godsend. Ex-KGB apparatchiks like him couldn’t credibly promise Russians prosperity or liberty. What they could certainly offer was ‘security’ in the face of jihadism and Western indifference.
By 2000, under Putin’s leadership, the Russian Air Force had launched a no-holds-barred carpet bombing campaign that flattened Grozny. Russian soldiers retook the ruined city, block by block, ending the jihadist nightmare as brutally as it had begun.
Putin’s regime, never one to pass up on the services of thugs, offered many of the defeated Chechen terrorists amnesty and integration into Moscow’s armed forces, in exchange for absolute loyalty. Meanwhile, naΓ―ve officials in Europe offered something altogether different to some of the most unrepentant surviving Chechen radicals: “refugee status.” This added insult to injury, alienating even the last pro-Western holdouts in Russian society.
Winning the war in Chechnya ended up giving Putin something no rigged election ever could: the primordial legitimacy of a war victor. He used it to rebuild the Russian state according to the anti-Western, authoritarian designs of the Soviet past, minus the failed Marxist economics.
These days, Putin coaxes young Russians to fight in Ukraine with made-up tales of Western-backed forces committing “crimes against ethnic Russians” there. When Western liberals hushed up real anti-Russian crimes in Chechnya, this primed Russians to find fabricated ones believable, fueling a forever war of vengeance.
Chinese leaders watched all this with glee, but from afar. They themselves have little need for war. Tariff-free global trade gave them a more potent vulnerability to exploit. By over-subsidizing their own strategic export industries, they made entire industries unviable in the West, causing deindustrialization and social decay.
Liberal globalism is wishful thinking. It does not fulfil its utopian promise of creating a “rules-based international order.” Instead, it generates only chaos, blowback, and decline. By tearing up this dysfunctional ideology of self-imposed Western weakness, Trump is securing lasting peace for generations to come.
