After the War

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s time for Europe to step up and America to step back.

- By Matt Welch

DRAMATIC ACTS OF aggression from a big country against outgunned independents defending their own turf can shock the world's conscience and trigger fundamental changes to the international order.

The Soviet-engineered communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and subsequent military blockade of West Berlin led directly to the creation in 1949 of NATO. The 1956 joint invasion of Egypt by the U.K. and France (with an assist from Israel) permanently discredited European colonialism, hastening that foul institution's already rapid demise. Iraq's forcible annexation of Kuwait in 1990 prompted George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev to jointly declare that “no peaceful international order is possible if larger states can devour their smaller neighbors, a principle they said would be woven into an emerging “new world order.

That order turned out great for the Kuwaiti monarchy, whose rule was restored after a U.S.-led, 39-country coalition drove Saddam Hussein’s soldiers back into Iraq. But for the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, and even within pockets of comparatively stable Europe, the hoped-for settlement following the end of the Cold War has proven disappointingly disorderly—a missed opportunity to design fresh new international institutions around the imperial withdrawal of both superpowers and the concomitant reassertion of responsible self-governance across the rapidly expanding free world.