Countdown to war – how populism grew while democracy fell silent

Publishing house devastated by Russian missile attacks on Kharkiv in May 2024. Photo: Yakiv Liashenko / Presidential Administration of Ukraine

In the immediate wake of Vladimir Putin’s decision to carry out the all-out invasion of a sovereign European country in February 2022, numerous commentators pointed fingers squarely at US President Joe Biden’s chaotic and humiliating August 2021 decision to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. After all, the United States, with a bloodied nose, had failed after twenty years and hundreds of billions of dollars to bring democracy to the country that had harboured the attackers of 9/11. Surely the sight of America essentially surrendering to the Taliban, critics argued, had emboldened the increasingly COVID-19-isolated Putin to conclude that the West’s moment had truly passed.

Indeed, if we view the countdown to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a ticking clock of western failures to deter an aggressor, Afghanistan was likely one of the final, decisive ticks. But what set off this hitherto unthinkable countdown in the first place? How do we get from the late 20th century and its inevitable spread of democracy to ascendant populism, isolationism and authoritarianism? Such an unnatural trend did not materialize out of thin air. Far from it.

But just how far back do we look? Setting aside Russia’s inherent, centuries-long imperialist and expansionist tendencies, do we, for example, begin more than a century ago, in 1918, when US President Woodrow Wilson decided to limit and ultimately withdraw from the international alliance fighting against the Bolsheviks on Russian soil? British, French, Czechoslovak (the famous Czechoslovak Legion), Polish, Romanian, Canadian and even several thousand American soldiers were, in fact, fighting very successfully against the communists during the Russian Civil War. Abandoning the anti-Bolshevik Whites (admittedly only marginally less thuggish than the Bolsheviks) turned out to be a hugely consequential decision that placed a significant dent in the Wilsonian mantra that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” By 1920, the resulting false peace had condemned Russia to decades of communist gangsterism, and inevitably set the clock ticking down to the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the German-Russian dismemberment of Poland, and the start of the Second World War.

That unwanted sequel to the Great War might be another easy starting point for our countdown. Specifically, the highly questionable Allied decision to join forces with the devil himself in the shape of the formerly Nazi-allied Soviet Union, after 1941. Allying with one of the two countries that had embarked on yet another campaign of neo-imperialist expansion (see Karelia, the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine), and thus jointly caused the Second World War, would surely come back to haunt the Allies. It did, as Russian-occupied Eastern Europe was soon to learn. By 1949, Winston Churchill was lamenting:

“I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.”

But what if the real ticking clock to February 2022, and what is seemingly becoming a Third World War, began after the proverbial slate was wiped clean – for better or for worse – from 1989 to 1991 – that is to say, after the end of the so-called Cold War? If we start our countdown from this point, then five key moments bring us to the hellish prospect of another all-out war in Europe.

Five – forgive and forget

The “human face” of Glasnost and Perestroika espoused by the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, made talk of punishing Russia for its decades-long oppression of its “Soviet” and “Eastern Bloc” colonies almost seem in bad taste by 1991. The Cold War was over. Europe was free again. And Russia’s ever more inebriated new president, Boris Yeltsin, made all things Russian seem almost comical or even pitiful – a kind of Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. But there was nothing funny happening in Georgia, Transnistria or Chechnya.

In the subsequent years, the cruel history of Russian 20^th century neo-imperialism would largely end up attributed to “communism” or to an equally nebulous “Soviet Union”. As if Russia had suffered in that dysfunctional family as much as anyone else.

Add to that a retrospective post-Cold War over-emphasis on America’s numerous blunders and missteps during its fight against the “Evil Empire” (especially its support of right-wing dictators over left-wing dictators, in particular in Latin America). Additionally, a fallacy emerged of a multi-decade war between communist (Marxist) and capitalist (free market) economics; or between “East” and “West”. The more accurate concept of authoritarianism versus democracy was underplayed at best. Subsequently, as the new “Russian Federation” fully embraced capitalism (however chaotic and oligarchic), economic reforms very quickly triumphed over democratic reforms. If the Cold War really had been just a battle of economic ideologies and nothing more, then trade alone would seemingly solve everything. The West was officially naïve…

Four – a blind eye

Tiananmen Square in 1989. The democratic revolutions sweeping across the world did not, alas, see a happy end in China. The mirage was that China would slowly transform into a democracy, in its own way, and on its own terms, post-Tiananmen. Just end the economic isolation. But predictably, a period of economic liberalization was soon followed by a hardline crackdown under the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Via Putin and Xi, in a clever case of political Jujutsu, the western belief that contact with freedom would rub off on autocracy was reversed. Now, the West’s contact with autocracy would instead begin to erode the Free World – through money, corruption, dependence, naïveté and simple greed. Yes, during the 21st century, Russian and Chinese raw materials, oil, cheap goods, electronics and labour have corrupted the West far more than democratic values have “corrupted” the authoritarian world. Oligarchs bought real estate across Europe, holidayed, and were now apparently entirely unaffected by exposure to democracy. After all, the malls in the West now looked just like the malls in Russia and China. In another telling sign, China’s egregious and repeated breaching of agreements over maintaining the freedoms of Hong Kong after the handover of 1997 led to nothing more than empty words from Britain. The West was officially weak…

Three – Murdoch and propaganda

The third fateful event is of an entirely different nature. In 1996, the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch decided to take the rabble-rousing angry format of US right-wing talk radio and bring it to television screens as a kind of live tabloid TV. But Fox News was not just harmless fun or entertaining sensationalism. Its increasingly sophisticated use of manipulative propaganda began to resemble old-fashioned KGB tactics (ironic indeed, given Murdoch’s political affiliations). Putin’s Russia noticed – and then noticed some more, until the country’s entire propaganda machine had modelled itself on American right-wing media. Forget the class struggle, now the propaganda tool of choice would have a religious-nationalist culture war tinge. From Vladimir Solovyov’s Rush Limbaugh-style microphone, to Olga Skabeyeva’s “southern American dame” hairstyle. Yes, it turned out that the American right was a far more useful idiot and template for Russia than the American left had ever been. Hence, a cynical reframing was carried out, inspired by Fox News , of Russia as a Christian nationalist state, even casting a KGB agent in the role of a “Patriarch” blessing Russia’s now holy war.

All the while, foreign-language Russian outlets like RT stoked the same anti-establishment (i.e. “maybe Russia has a point?”) propaganda abroad designed to both sow doubt about the Free World and to legitimize Russian authoritarianism. Many of those comfortably living in democratic countries – and used only to a post-Cold War narrative of “Everything is and was the West’s fault” and “Free Palestine” – were easily duped, far more than any caricature of the left-wing hippies of the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the incessant Fox News-led propaganda machine began to seriously radicalize and destabilize the political scene in the United States, from the Supreme Court on down. Extremists grew louder, resulting in a direct trajectory from the staggering “conservative” divisiveness and incompetence of George W. Bush (from to the new president’s failure to detect another growing form of radicalisation that would culminate in the events of 9/11, not to mention the deception over the subsequent invasion of Iraq), to even lower with the malicious corruption of organized crime boss Donald J. Trump. Today, Twitter’s (X’s) Elon Musk has taken this Fox-inspired radicalization to a new level, creating an online swamp in which every extreme voice supposedly “questioning authority” has equal standing with the voices of reason. And that is how we get to the stain of a radicalized, propaganda-soaked fringe in the US Congress blocking aid to America’s allies for months (before thankfully coming to its senses). The West was officially at war with itself…

Two – Obama and the normalization of inaction

President Bill Clinton faced down the ever-petulant and shameless Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich’s famous 1995 tantrum and won. But when Barack Obama (2008-2016) came to power with staggering majorities for his party in both chambers of Congress, the now increasingly radicalized Republicans plotted to thwart absolutely everything. This obstruction was the birth of modern-day trolling. The notion of being obstructionist, shameless, proud of being shameless, and indifferent to any form of reason or argument (and to actively seek praise and attention for such delinquency via partisan media), would ultimately yield monsters both in the US, and far more dangerously in Russia, which went all-in on the creation of an alternative reality under Vladimir Putin.

Barack Obama, it must now be said, proved to be a staggeringly weak president. But in the midst of a far-right torrent of nonsense (“Is Obama a secret Muslim?” and “Is Obama a socialist”), the tendency was to defend the reasonable guy. Now, the “sane” side was spending all its time defending itself against far-right insanity (“Shut down the government!”, “Breach the debt ceiling!”). This trend continues with President Joe Biden today. Where are the voices of old-style conservatism criticizing Biden for his slow-walking, hesitant “crisis management” approach to helping Ukraine? Well, they do in fact exist (see this US House report on how to win in Ukraine). But they have received scant media coverage or attention in comparison with conservative obstructionists.

Republican cynical obstruction of Obama was not punished but actually rewarded by voters in the subsequent mid-term elections in 2010. Trolling had won. Obama’s remaining six years in power would yield no more major domestic achievements.

Then came the Syrian Civil War and Obama’s second-most consequential and disastrous decision – to leave the dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. To this day, autocrats talk of “red lines”. But Obama’s own 2013 “red line” – namely a devastating response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons (with Putin’s backing) to suppress an anti-regime revolt – led to no action. Obama the speechmaker had proved too beholden to the “disastrous Iraq War” narrative to have the flexibility to act against the grain. Almost more than any other, this decision served to discredit centrism and embolden extremism around the world.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin, reacting to the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and with evidently no fear of a response from Obama, annexed Crimea and parts of the Donbas, bombing a few apartment blocks, as ever, in the process. Ukraine had become yet another Russian-occupied, bleeding nation. Obama, in his most consequential decision (as the man who had once forced Ukraine to disarm), did almost nothing. And so Russia shot down a civilian passenger plane. Obama also did almost nothing about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under Obama, the Arab Spring died too. Libya was yet another example of the new trend of endless unsolved conflicts. Then, in 2021, under Trump, Myanmar’s democracy died. The West would always find a way to do nothing…

One – Merkel and the fall of centrism

It was not so long ago that populists were widely viewed as a joke, as exemplified by Italy’s eccentric PM Silvio Berlusconi. They were discredited and marginalized and certainly not emblematic of any kind of global political movement. But then, on top of Obama’s costly Syrian inaction, Germany’s Angela Merkel would make a series of even more consequential blunders, from which Europe and the world has yet to recover – ones that would tragically bring populism and far-right extremism into the mainstream. As chancellor, Angela Merkel had continued her predecessor’s naïve, greedy and morally bankrupt policy of courting an increasingly mafia-style Russian state (with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline about to flow to Germany directly). But there would be an even more catastrophic decision that would fan the flames of an ascendant far right.

In 2015, Obama’s inaction in Syria led to a huge migration crisis as tens of thousands of refugees flooded out of war-ravaged Syria (and other surrounding countries) into the relative safety of democratic Europe. Merkel, evidently motivated by a cocktail of post-war German guilt and naïve humanism (and also seeing a useful solution to her country’s staggeringly low birth rate) extended Germany’s open arms to these refugees while many neighbouring countries – particularly those of the former Eastern Europe – were left aghast. At first, Merkel’s “we will manage this” pragmatism made opponents of her decision look small, xenophobic and indifferent. But something very dangerous was brewing – an anti-institutional, seething anger.

The images of thousands of people bleeding out of the Middle East and Africa into Europe deeply shook many countries with histories of their own national identities being under assault. Suddenly the EU lost its image as a protector of its own nations in the eyes of many. Its borders had effectively crumbled – in Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Denmark, Britain, France, Austria and elsewhere. The migrants just kept coming, no matter what (a situation dramatically different from 2022, when thousands of Ukrainian refugees – a neighbouring European and future EU state – sought shelter in the West in the wake of Russia’s invasion). Eastern European nations who had sought safety from Russia within the EU, suddenly felt unsafe again, seemingly part of some kind of new nightmarish “utopian” multicultural experiment. As a result, anger went mainstream. Suddenly, “Orban had a point” – and not just in Hungary. Even nine years later in Slovakia, the country, so weakened by brain-drain emigration, disinformation and nationalism, willingly voted in a pro-Russian mafia regime. And in Poland, with the rise and thankful fall of its horrendous Law and Justice Party. In the Czech Republic, old political parties, namely the Social Democrats, simply vanished from the political scene as the “decent” prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka was crushed in a 2017 election by a populist, communist-era collaborator and modern-day oligarch named Andrej Babiš. And even in Germany the Russian-backed AfD party’s support would skyrocket. A revolution was afoot – not just in Europe. When did India’s inept populist Narendra Modi come to power? Of course, in 2014! And Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? Yup, 2014! The West, far from being a beacon of light to anyone, or “managing” anything, now seemed to be collapsing under its own inaction, with Putin framed as an example of someone who “gets things done” (unlike our leaders).

The same radicalization that Fox News had stoked in the US had thus come to Europe. One result of this was the 2016 catastrophe of Brexit – Britain’s self-destructive (wafer-thin result) divorce from the European Union (the centrist, pro-European British PM David Cameron was also thoroughly discredited and humiliated in the process). Trump was elected soon after – naturally with non-stop talk of borders, borders, borders. He tweeted for four years, and then, unable to cope with the indignity of a populist being ousted by the people, mounted a violent insurrection against the US government, leading to previously unthinkable scenes of a rioting mob rampaging through the halls of Capitol Hill. This January 6^th insurrection seemed to be the final proof that the old order was indeed collapsing. The West was now thoroughly discredited…

Zero hour

On July 12th 2021, Vladimir Putin published his essay titled “On the [supposed] Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. The dictator was now undoubtedly calling for Lebensraum and Anschluss and preparing to feast on a neighbouring European nation via the pretext of “saving” the Russian speakers of Ukraine. A month later, President Biden pulled out of Afghanistan.

On April 1st 2022, the “multipolar world” sought by Putin was, symbolically, christened in Bucha, Ukraine. Not with a declaration of the inalienable rights of man, or a modern-day Magna Carta, or with an Emancipation Proclamation, or other such noble deeds or gestures, but with the slaughter of innocents, the rape of women and children, and a catalogue of other heinous war crimes so staggering that it will disgrace Russia and its people for generations to come.

Wither populism?

But what of the West’s response? In 2024 far-right populism is still ascendant, offering a myth of true action (even appeasement) as an alternative to the seemingly ineffectual half-measures of the centre on everything from the economy, to immigration, to Ukraine. Ironically, by any metric of reality, populists are almost universally incompetent as leaders (witness Netanyahu and his response to Gaza or Turkey’s Erdogan and his pre-earthquake building codes). And did Brexit reduce migration to the United Kingdom? No. The opposite has happened in fact. But populist supporters do not see that. All they see is the chance to vent their rage.

The damning lesson of centrism’s failures – principally by Obama and Merkel – has not yet been learned by the likes of Biden and Scholz: you do not get to define your own moment of greatness and you do not get to choose for what you get praise. In other words, you can point to every hesitant half-measure and still history will only remember the things you failed to do. Which is precisely why Obama, despite his “historic health care reforms” is largely forgotten today (unthinkable in 2008). Action is indeed the greatest antidote to extremism and populism. Extremists inevitably fall silent when the forces of freedom and democracy act strongly and decisively. Ukraine certainly does not need to learn this lesson. But its western supporters – well, that is another story…

Dominik Jun is a British-Czech English editor, translator and the former editor of Eurozine partner journal The New Presence. He previously contributed to publications such as Czech Position, the Prague Post and E15 Weekly, and for ten years was a regular contributor to Radio Prague. He has also directed a number of documentary films for the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre on the anti-communist resistance movement.

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fascism, imperialism, Putinism, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine at war