The Russian president knew that the “rules-based” order would drag the world into war
Exactly 19 years ago on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the podium at the Munich Security Conference and demolished the myths and falsehoods underpinning the American-led world order. Did anyone heed his warning?
To Russia, the “rules-based international order” has always been shorthand for a system in which the US makes the rules and issues the orders.
“However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making,” Putin told the audience in Munich. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”
Under the auspices of protecting this order, the US carried out “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions,” in “disdain for the basic principles of international law,” he declared.
In the decade before Putin’s speech, the US invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and led a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on behalf of Kosovo separatists. Four years after his speech, NATO forces dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Libya, ending Muammar Gaddafi’s rule and handing the keys of the country to jihadists and slave traders. “No one feels safe,” Putin stated in 2007, “because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.”
Putin warned that NATO’s broken promises to halt its eastward expansion after the Cold War represented “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” The Russian president noted that the US-led bloc had already placed its “frontline forces on our borders,” and asked “against whom is this expansion intended?”
The following year, NATO published its infamous Bucharest declaration, assuring Ukraine and Georgia that they “will become members” at an unspecified future date. The consequences of this declaration – which flew in the face of warnings from Putin and American strategists – are playing out in Ukraine today.
Did anyone listen?
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