Dionisis Pantis: What Does an Era of Global Revisionism Mean? Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine? 8 June 2022

D. Pantis: What Does an Era of Global Revisionism Mean? Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine? 8 June 2022 video

Dionysios Pantis: What Does an Era of Global Revisionism Mean? Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine?After the war in Ukraine, we have entered a period of heightened international revisionism. We have said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine functions as a geopolitical accelerator. What does that mean? It means that the factors of power over the previous decades (from bipolarity and the unipolar moment) have changed at a pace and in a manner that does not correspond to the existing institutional structure of the international system. As a result, the revisionist countries—those that have increased their power in the economy, in technology, and in military strength—are not accommodated by the previous institutional arrangement. That is how we define revisionism at this moment. This is revisionism: they want a different settlement that corresponds to the new global distribution of power, including at the institutional level.A previous comparable period was the pre-war era before the Second World War. We saw that after the Second World War new global powers emerged, such as the United States and the USSR, whereas before the war the dominant powers in the world were the Western European states. We will see, for example, that the war in Poland brought to the surface the activation of other revisionist powers around the world—I would specifically mention Italy and Japan. If we correlate the revisionist dimension of the two eras, 1939–41 and today— BT: It resembles that period. DP: It resembles that period. In what way do they resemble each other? In the changes in the factors of power relative to the previous institutional structure. That is, within thirty years we moved from bipolarity to unipolarity (the unipolar moment). That did not bother us, but it shattered some people in Eastern Europe. We may have been fine here for eighty or ninety years, but that does not mean it had no consequences for a series of countries and societies. And now we are moving from unipolarity to multipolarity—possibly a “2 + 1 + something” system, or tripolarity.In an article I published a few days ago in Militaire, where I addressed the question of why Russia launched this attack at this particular moment, my view—put very broadly—is that, pressured by the West, which was not offering it space or a modus vivendi of cooperation, the remaining option was to turn toward China. But that second option was not good for Russia either, because the danger of Sinicization is very great, especially in the extremely sparsely populated eastern Russia, which also faces development problems.So my view is that this invasion, this attack, was chosen at this point in time in order to overturn the situation somewhat and so that Russia could set the temporal framework—to hold the initiative in timing the developments we mentioned, the geopolitical and revisionist ones, and so on. To “push China a bit faster” into confronting its competition with the United States, whereas China might have preferred this to happen in five or six years, once certain developments had taken place in technological, military, and economic readjustment and in a possible decoupling from the West, and to highlight its own (Russia’s) strong element, which is its military power.In other words, Russia chose the attack and the invasion after a great deal of deep thought, because it faced a very serious problem: if it allowed the situation to evolve “on its own”—that is, shaped by others—it would be swallowed either by the West on one side or by China on the other. I am putting it very simply so that it can be understood. They think geopolitically and geostrategically, because that was their situation. Neither is their economy that strong, nor is their technology—apart from certain areas mainly related to military technology, such as ballistic missiles and other systems that give them this deterrent capability—so advanced. But the Russian economy cannot be compared with that of the United States or China, and this created a problem of survival over the longer term, together with the demographic problem that Russia also has. BT: Yes. Add the national characteristics as well, because they say that the Russian nation began here, in Ukraine. DP: They are turning to “Russianness.” They are carrying out a conservative restructuring internally, toward the conservative nationalist ideology that Dugin also refers to.8 June 2022 Transla