Eurasia Rising

Ab Gietelink interviews Prof. Glenn Diesen

I was interviewed by Ab Gietelink about my book “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order”. NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the global primacy of the Political West as the foundation for a liberal democratic peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war by the West against Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy. The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism.

The economic architecture is being reorganized as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, commodity exchanges, insurance systems, currencies etc. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civilisational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, imposition is replaced by negotiation, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favour of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics