Ukraine Marks End of Post-Cold War Liberal Order Thesis — SkimNews
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- The Ukraine war enters its fifth winter with Washington explicitly pivoting from arming Kyiv to brokering a territorial freeze, and recent diplomatic initiatives collapsed.
- NATO's eastward expansion drew warnings from inside the Western establishment: George Kennan called it "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era" in 1997, and then-ambassador William Burns cabled in early 2008 that Ukrainian NATO membership was the "brightest of all red lines" for Russia's elite.
- The 2008 Bucharest summit declared that Ukraine and Georgia "will become members" of NATO — a decision the article identifies as a turning point in the security crisis now playing out.
- Russia's economy bent but did not break under sanctions: Moscow redirected oil east, India became a major crude customer, and Russia-China trade hit record levels.
- China's backing of Russia is described as strategic self-interest — Beijing sees a fragmented Russia as opening its long northern border to Western presence.
- The European Union now runs a goods trade deficit with China approaching 1 billion euros per day, as European industries struggle against Chinese electric cars, solar panels and batteries.
- Donald Trump's second term "destroyed the project's international face" with sweeping tariffs on allies, public questioning of NATO's mutual defense commitment, and a push for defense spending toward 5% of GDP.
Why it matters: For three decades, Western policy rested on the assumption that economic integration and alliance expansion would moderate rivals and spread liberal democracy. The Ukraine war is presented as the place all three of those bets failed simultaneously — with the material consequence that the U.S. has shifted from arming Kyiv to brokering a territorial freeze, Europe is absorbing deindustrialization costs, and voters in Germany, France and Britain are now turning to nationalist parties.
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