Critics of the Joe Biden administration routinely contrast the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, accusing the US of double standards in condemning Russian, but not Israeli attacks on civilians. What is striking about these conflicts, however, is not how differently Washington has been handling them but how similarly. In both cases, America opted for war rather than negotiations, leading its Western allies in supplying arms, funding, and diplomatic cover to Ukraine and Israel. Despite the carnage that has ensued, however, both wars have also reached a stalemate and are unlikely to achieve any of Kyiv’s or Tel Aviv’s stated military aims of complete victory and the enemy’s collapse. What does this double failure tell us about the changing international order and its possible future?
Taken together, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza show up the radical insufficiency of the political categories we use to understand them. A narrative about the revival of Russian imperialism, for instance, is countered by one about Ukraine collaborating with NATO to diminish Moscow. While a story about Palestinian terrorism in aid of Iran’s alleged mission to destroy Israel is opposed by one, the other side brings up the latter’s politics of apartheid and settler colonialism. And, of course, all sides accuse each other of genocide.
However true or false, none of these storylines can account for the direction in which these wars are going. Nor can they explain why the US has chosen to deal with them in exactly the same way, despite their very different histories and places within American foreign policy.
US’s globalisation strategy
The US has chosen to globalise these conflicts in the name of restricting their spread. It has done so by mobilising international support for Ukraine and Israel only to divide the world instead. For both Russia’s invasion and Hamas’s attack appeared to ignore the global contexts of these long-standing conflicts to focus on their regional dimension as border wars. Just as the Minsk Agreements do not now frame Russian policy on Ukraine, neither do the Abraham Accords and normalisation define Arab views on Gaza. And the world’s divided response to these wars only consolidates their regional character, since countries refusing to follow American instruction consider neither to be a global threat. Only the West’s support of one party over another threatens to turn each into a global conflict.
Astonishing about this refusal, especially from countries in the so-called Global South, is how many of them are US or Western allies and even client states. Also notable is the fact that most do not phrase their choice in terms of siding with one party or another in the style of the Cold War. Turkey can be part of NATO and sell drones to Ukraine while still refusing to sanction Russia. Similarly, it can oppose Israel’s war in Gaza while maintaining its diplomatic (and until recently, trading) relations with the Jewish State. Instead of seeing such behaviour as erratic and hypocritical, we should acknowledge that Turkey is one of many such state actors which seem to have brought neutrality back to geopolitics for the first time since it was banished from the international order during the War on Terror.
What is called neutrality in the case of Ukraine is manifested in calls for a ceasefire in the case of Gaza. In either case, the effect is to recognise and reinforce each war’s regional character and thus reduce its potential for expansion. But this can only happen at the expense of Ukraine as much as Israel, both of which would be forced to accommodate themselves to a new regional order. The irony of this for the latter, of course, is that the Abraham Accords were also meant to set up a regional order, but one for which Israel would be the linchpin. But such regionalisation would render the unipolar international order in which America conducts itself as a global power irrelevant. This explains why the US insists on re-globalising both conflicts by intervening and further militarising them. Defending Ukraine and Israel might be deeply-felt commitments, but they do not exhaust the meaning of such intervention.
The fact that the US possesses no rival has regionalised geopolitics by removing the possibility of great-power competition from it. While we tend to date economic and cultural forms of globalisation to the end of the Cold War, this event paradoxically led to the collapse of global politics as well. With the world no longer divided into two blocs and a few non-aligned countries, regionalisation has emerged after the last American effort to re-globalise politics in the War on Terror. It has been focussed throughout on heading off all potential rivals and forestalling the emergence of another bipolar or even multipolar international order. But while preparing to counter China, the US has been faced by many different challenges, from militant networks incapable of posing it an existential threat, to a Russia incapable of becoming a real economic or military competitor to the West.
The return of regionalism
If geopolitics is not working in the way the West expected, this is because the rest of the world is moving in a different direction. The real threat to a unipolar international order comes not from a bipolar or multipolar future in which politics remains global, but instead from the latter’s collapse in the face of regionalisation. Rather than seeking to replace the Cold War’s remaining pole in a logic of great-power competition, America’s rivals are trying to circumvent its might without necessarily reducing it. In doing so, they are treating it not as a model for their own future but instead as a remnant from the past. Whether or not any country entertains the ambition of succeeding the US, for the foreseeable future its politics can only be one of evading the latter’s power.
Middle powers like China, Russia, India, and Brazil are all actors in regional political arenas and cannot project military force much beyond them. Most do not even exercise hegemony over their own neighbourhoods. China may be economically integrated in its region and even with an enemy like Taiwan, but it only has North Korea and occasionally Pakistan as allies. India, similarly, finds itself in a largely hostile neighbourhood in which it lacks even economic integration. And it is to escape the limits of its regional influence that India reaches out to powers outside it. Only Russia appears to enjoy some kind of regional hegemony in Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, in this way serving as the poor cousin to America’s transatlantic hegemony over the West.
While the United States has been focussed on a global threat to its unipolarity, the real danger it faces comes from the loss of global politics. This threat does not arise from isolationism but globalisation itself. It is because economic and technological relations have moved beyond the reach of states, as the failure of sanctions on countries like Iran and Russia demonstrates, that politics can now become regional. America’s response to this development is to attempt their re-globalisation, but it can only do so by supporting war in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Its deployment of force to re-establish the status quo ante, however, has not succeeded and is doing little more than collapsing US hegemony and so its own global role in the international order.
What does this shift mean?
The regionalisation of the international order does not mean it will be any more peaceful than the global one built to contain the Cold War. The latter’s fragmentation became possible through the destruction of the UN-led order in the Cold War’s aftermath, especially with the War on Terror and it became unworkable because of unilaterally-imposed “rules-based international order”. The task before the US today is to do what it has already done twice following each of the World Wars, and create a new international order founded on a balance of power. But this time that balance must be struck not between empires as with the League of Nations, nor between superpowers as with the United Nations, but among the regions and middle powers which now define geopolitics.
Devji is Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford
