Some analysts have speculated that China will be the biggest beneficiary of the sanctions on Russia as countries reorient their financial exposure away from the West, but I think other possibilities are also likely. Turkey didn't abandon its effort to diversify arms sources after the US sanctions, it doubled down on its efforts to develop its own arms production. For individuals, sanctions prompted interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a way to reduce vulnerability. The world is wider than it was during the Cold War, and the Ukraine war will not solidify the "free world" but only accelerate the move to diversify financial and defense dependencies.
A Plague on Both Your Houses
Exasperation with the Western hypocrisy on display doesn't translate to support for Russia; the Turkish memory goes back much further than the Cold War duality that the West favors. It is no surprise that the West would like to think of the war as an encore to the moments of shining clarity of the Atlantic alliance heyday: the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the fall of the Iron Curtain . . . what could be more flattering to recall?
In Turkish history and in popular Turkish television dramas of the moment, however, different memories are on display. It is the memories of the catastrophic long nineteenth century that shape the Turkish sentiments on the Ukraine war: memories of the British aiding the Greek and Arab independence movements against the Ottomans to serve their own imperial interests, of Russia expelling millions of Muslims in its ruthless conquest of the Black Sea shores, and of Habsburg Vienna promoting nationalist movements in Ottoman lands before moving shamelessly to their annexation.
That is the long history that the West would rather forget: a history where European great powers, including Russia, shared a common interest in dismembering the Ottoman Empire, calling out each other's fouls in the imperial game only when they interfered with their own goals. Those are the memories that shape current apathy toward the Ukraine war and explain why Turkey sees the war as a family struggle in its closing act.
The West After Ukraine: United in Denial
The war has created a moment of clarity for many around the world, but Western allies refuse to acknowledge the unflattering history that provides the context for the world's apathetic response. For much of the world the tone-deaf call for solidarity is symptomatic of the declining relevance of Western power. My students regularly preface remarks with "now that the US is in decline . . ." or "in the post-Western age . . . ." Their assessment has nothing to do with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it has everything to do with the arrogance and ignorance that brought about the invasion. Choosing to use a legal strategy (an option the US rejected in favor of an invasion) to bring Bin Laden to justice in 2001 would have made all the difference twenty years later. The US might not have captured or eliminated Bin Laden any more quickly, but the US probably wouldn't have created the world of wrecked lives and landscapes we have become associated with.
The West would like to use Ukraine to rehabilitate Atlantic solidarity, but if it is the same solidarity that has brought racist policing of the globe, my students aren't buying it. This doesn't mean that people are not horrified by Russia's invasion, but they see the Russian brutality as part of the violent Western tradition they have experienced themselves. My students see Ukraine through the context of drone wars, European anti-immigrant populism, US police murders of African Americans, and the violent storming of the US capital. Who has the high ground here? This war has unleashed a wave of anger over past and present interventions that are still unacknowledged by their perpetrators, and led to profound reconsiderations of attitudes toward the West. My students wonder what else the world has to offer.
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