Ukraine, Europe, and the re-routing of Globalization

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dominant Western narrative—now virtually obligatory within its media and foreign policy establishments—asserts that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was unprovoked, deriving from domestic political imperatives and messianic imperial nostalgia. Yet, while these factors must be included within a comprehensive causal argument, a deeper and more satisfactory explanation for the invasion situates the predicament of the Russian ruling class—and thus government—within the context of the systematic, decades-long project of NATO expansion and a series of specific provocative actions and decisions taken by Kyiv and Washington in the second half of 2021. The United States has consistently opposed integration between Russia and Western Europe. The key parameter of U.S. neo-imperial strategy in Europe-Asia remains embedded in Cold War geo-politics, namely that U.S. hegemony in Eurasia rests on the exclusion of Russia from European affairs and the prevention of a geo-economic axis between Berlin, Moscow and Beijing. However, even as the war may result in a final settling of accounts in the U.S.-Russia relationship and beyond, it has also thrown into increasingly sharp relief the growing conflict of class interests and complex geopolitical asymmetries and contradictions in the transatlantic relationship.