Truth may well be the first victim of war, and in the current crisis provoked by events in Ukraine, fair-minded and dispassionate accounts are rare. In this regard, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order by Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer is all the more to be welcomed. This book is a genuine attempt to engage with some of the more difficult issues, and avoids some of the pitfalls of which so many contemporary accounts have fallen foul. Conflict in Ukraine is an excellent account of some of the main threads which have combined to bring the world to the brink of one of the most dangerous confrontations of the post-war era, and reflects many of the lacunae and limitations of standard Western interpretations of how we have moved towards the edge of the abyss.
This is not a blow-by-blow account of the ‘crisis’. Many elements are barely discussed, such as the nature and character of the Maidan protest movement, or the rise of the extreme-right (as evidenced in their electoral breakthrough in the 2012 parliamentary elections). The book’s main theme, instead, is the ‘unwinding’ of the post-Cold War order, and although the notion of ‘unwinding’ is not defined, some of the structural contradictions of that ‘order’ are.
Above all, the authors note that, after the Cold War, Europe faced a number of fundamental strategic choices about how to create a mechanism to overcome the logic of conflict on the continent. They note that the Great Powers had learned from the failure to integrate Germany after the First World War and, following the Second World War, ensured that West Germany became part of the new European security system. They do not mention that this move was part of the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, and thus did not reflect any grand strategic wisdom, but instead a tactical response to the new challenge. With no major strategic threat to concentrate the mind, the ‘victorious’ powers after 1991 imposed what Sergei Karaganov has called a ‘soft Versailles’ on what was considered the losing power.
