(Image: Private Media)
(Image: Private Media)

If the response of Western governments to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was stronger than Vladimir Putin might have expected — with serious financial and economic consequences now ensuing for the pariah state — the non-government response has been just as harsh.

International bodies like the Olympic movement and the soccer body FIFA — both of which are on par with Putin’s regime for corruption, if not body count — have booted Russia out. Major international companies like BP and Exxon have severed ties with Russia; major retailers have pulled out; big manufacturers are abandoning production and sales; big logistics companies have cut Russia off.

In the US, at least, there’s popular appetite for even more sanctions, and pressure on companies to go further in cutting Russia off. In the UK, perceptions of the US have lifted significantly, and perceptions that Russia is hostile, unsurprisingly, have surged. In Finland — in defiance of Putin — there’s growing support to join NATO.

The contrast with the tepid response to Putin’s previous invasions and atrocities is significant. Russia, it seems, chose its moment for invasion poorly, eliciting an extraordinary response from the international community and Western opinion. What changed?

1. American information strategy It might be an unpopular opinion, but the Biden administration has handled the invasion very well. It warned for months that Putin intended to invade. It explained how he would fabricate a pretext and launch the attack, citing intelligence sources. The American narrative — mocked by many on the left and the right, and by large numbers of commentators in the media — ended up being confirmed in nearly every particular. It was virtually the exact reversal of the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The persistent US warnings placed the issue of Ukraine and Putin’s hostile intentions firmly on the international agenda before any tanks began rolling across the border.

2. American diplomatic strategy Washington has worked overtime to stay in lockstep with the Europeans and to prepare a suite of sanctions that were rolled out within hours of the invasion. Germany’s turnaround has been remarkable. If Donald Trump’s spectacularly unsuccessful strategy was to rail at a lack of German military spending and threaten to withdraw from NATO, Biden’s lockstep strategy has elicited an historic commitment by Germany to increase its military spending significantly and turn its back on further Russian energy supplies.

3. Ethnocentrism and racism “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan … This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city.” “These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East or North Africa.” “These are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine … These are Christians, they’re white. They’re very similar.” Plenty of journalists and commentators have been rightly castigated for the implied and often not-so-implied racism of their analyses. But the reasoning, even if unpleasant, has to be reckoned with. People are not purely rational machines — they are tribal, they react more strongly to people they identify with if the latter are in trouble. There is literally no one (except philosophers like Peter Singer) who does not, in some way, prioritise their own “people” — family, community, country, race — over the more urgent needs of those they see as not their kind. Geographical proximity to Europe — Lviv is closer to Vienna than Brisbane is to Sydney — further reinforces the sense that this is a local conflict for Europe.

4. Sinophobia The elevation of China — first under Trump, and continuing under Biden — to the status of an existential threat to the United States, and China’s bullying of smaller states like Australia and Lithuania, have restored, to a degree, a Cold War mindset. Vows of friendship between Xi Jinping and Putin have helped establish a narrative of a civilisational clash of democracy versus tyranny (we’ve all moved on from the last civilisational threat, Islamist extremism, apparently). This narrative has been seized on by both the right (why can’t we be more autocratic and thuggish like these dictators) and the left (Western democracy is the real ogre; China and Russia hapless victims pluckily resisting capitalism), elevating it still further.

5. And, maybe, the sense that it’s not business as usual anymore. The neoliberal decades commencing in the 1980s have been brought to an end by the pandemic, along with any number of cozy assumptions about the benefits of globalisation, open borders and unfettered economic links between countries. After the past two years of closed borders and supply chain crises, the world is more ready to retreat into armed, self-sufficient camps (dressed up as “resilience”, “sovereign capability”, etc) than at any time since the end of the Cold War. A decade ago, a wall of economic blockades against Putin would have been anathema to the international economic order. Now — why not blockade?