At the end of World War I, American President Woodrow Wilson proposed the well-known "Fourteen Points", on the basis of which not only the Great War would be finalized, but also, if possible, a basis for international relations would be created that would prevent the emergence of further large-scale clashes. Therefore, the document in question includes points such as collective reduction of armaments, elimination of secret agreements and free trade on equal terms.
But even Washington's European continental allies reacted skeptically to these American ideas. Numb from the cataclysms of war and bearers of a pragmatic-cynical experience, the countries of the Old Continent perceived Woodrow Wilson's proposal as naivety dressed up in American idealism.
The reaction of the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau is proverbial, who said that even God limited himself to 10 points (God's commandments), unlike the American president with his 14. In the Italian press, Woodrow Wilson was portrayed in an Austrian military uniform, because due to some whims such as self-determination and democracy, he refused to satisfy Italy's claims to South Tyrol and Dalmatia.
However, Clemenceau's reaction at the time summarizes something not so much French as European. For the Old Continent - having stepped on the German understanding that "might is my right" (unlike the American one that "the law is my strength") - to create rules means to criminalize oneself in advance, because the creator of the rules will be the first to break them when they no longer serve his interests.
A little over a century later, we see how right the French Prime Minister was: today the world is in the process of breaking yet another set of rules that he had previously prescribed for himself.
In the context of economic interdependence based on shared benefits, it was accepted that if countries did not trade with each other, they would wage wars. Or, as the popular maxim states, if goods did not cross borders, soldiers would.
But before Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula in 2014, Moscow was Kiev's largest trading partner: Russia accounted for 23% of Ukrainian exports and 30% of Ukrainian imports. Even Eastern Ukraine, with its heavy industry supplying raw materials, including the Russian military-industrial complex, was already under Moscow's economic orbit anyway.
But despite its economic ties and trade influence over Ukraine, Russia chose the path of war - starting with the occupation of Crimea and ending with the occupation of the four Ukrainian regions of Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia. Apparently, the fact that goods crossed the border was not a sufficient guarantee of Ukraine's sovereignty; after the goods came the "little green men", the Wagner PMC and the regular Russian armed forces. With its aggression against Ukraine, Russia refuted another scepter of our time - that trade is the most direct path to prosperity.
It was precisely economic interconnectedness, which implies the distribution of production and the division of labor between individual countries, that was supposed to reduce the potential for conflict between them. When the COVID-19 crisis arose, however, we saw that the division of labor actually created extreme difficulties in supply lines.
Thus, the health crisis quickly created the conditions for a trade crisis, and hence for increasing tensions between individual countries. Then it turned out that countries with high-tech production cannot actually provide basic products: in 2020, the European Union (EU), according to its own data, imported protective masks worth 14 billion euros, 92% of which were purchased from China.
The Turkish Altay tank, which was supposed to roll out of our southeastern neighbor's factories years ago with a German engine and French armor, instead of serving as a stimulus to mitigate political tension between Ankara on the one hand, and Berlin and Paris on the other, fell as its victim.
Having learned its lesson, today Turkey is developing a military-industrial sector that relies increasingly on itself (well, and on South Korean engines and gearboxes, when it comes to Altay).
But we see the purest form of economic decomposition of trade interdependence in the tariff policy of US President Donald Trump.
Is he, as Vladimir Putin, hasn't he heard that trade is the shortest path to prosperity? Or the European Union (EU), when it cut off most of its imports of Russian hydrocarbons?
Another point that the world we live in took for granted was that progress and modernization increased people's well-being, and thus the amount of freedom and democracy in individual societies and the world as a whole.
But here too, practice refutes theory. If the middle class in China in 2000 was 3.1% of the entire society, then in 2018 it was 50.8% of it, according to data from the Pew Research Center. This is a quantitative increase of almost 40 million to 707 million people. The example of the middle class in Russia is also indicative: in the period in question it grew from 28.2% to 71.5%.
At the same time, however, in both China and Russia, the increase in people's well-being not only did not lead to their political emancipation from power - through freedom to democracy, but quite the opposite. Both countries demonstrate a continuing and intensifying authoritarianization of their political process.
Moreover, the application of modern technologies in these countries does not actually increase the freedom of their societies, but rather the capabilities of the respective regimes to control the population. In this aspect, the cases in some Arab monarchies, in which technological progress is also realized in favor of the consolidation of governance and the sanctioning of the human masses, are proverbial.
The last point of the fourteen such proposed by Woodrow Wilson concerns the creation of the League of Nations. The establishment of such a forum aims to institutionalize possible conflicts between states and provide them with a diplomatic platform for resolving their disputes.
This effort is actually a function of liberal idealism, which has set itself the goal of "the degeneracy" of an international community based on universal values and rules that will be protected by international institutions. Hence, liberals, as a well-known allegory in reception says, imagine the world as a zoo: yes, there are beasts in the world, but they are kept under lock and key and behind bars.
On the contrary, the world is a jungle, counter realists in international relations. Because the beasts are here, yes, but the lock is broken and the bars are open. Our time seems to be exactly like this: there is no barrier between humans and beasts, because the axioms that were supposed to provide one did not stand the test of time.
When Nietzschean Zarathustra "philosophizes with a hammer" in hand, he is actually testing the durability of the idols - which of them are true gods, and which are false idols.
This is a kind of test of values. Those of them that are solid will withstand the blow of the hammer. However, the false ones will bend under the pressure of the swinging tool.
If the world is distorted, then it was not a god, but an idol that deserves the open bars. And what comes from them.