The First Era of Superpowers
When Napoleon came to power, Europe finally got a master, and, as it usually happens, the master was reviled. However, the endless wars for succession among the underlings of all the various Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Romanovs, and Hohenzollerns were finally put to rest with his reign. Two factors kept people from celebrating. First of all, the French Revolution that had given rise to Napoleon had also brought national patriotism to the forefront, which could have been a good thing, except that it has the tendency to turn into its opposite – national egotism.
Secondly, the new master was a predator. He would redraw borders arbitrarily, destroying old territories and creating new ones on whims, then ceding them to his brothers and sisters. Soon, Europe began to resemble a jungle all over again. Only a coalition of all the European states was able to overthrow him. The coalition took 15 years to form, and the English had to pay for it.
Sadly, further developments continued in a vicious cycle. New predators emerged one after the other – Nikolai I, Napoleon III, Wilhelm II – always to rise and be overthrown, until the national egotism of the European nations, together with German aggression, led to a world war that buried an entire generation of European youth.
The multipolar world that Europe had seemed to have left behind suddenly reared its head once again. There was no superpower anymore, and a new war was looming on the horizon. It was then that Nikolai Berdyaev wrote his famous The New Middle Ages. Ideologies took the place of the religions that had ostensibly caused the wars of the 17th century: Bolshevism reigned in Russia, Fascism in Italy. America went into deep isolationism. No one seemed to know how to live anymore. Everyone waited for Apocalypse, and their expectations seemed justified.
The Second Era of Superpowers
Nazism conquered Berlin and soon transformed Germany into a new predatory superpower. If it hadn’t been for a fateful mistake, Hitler's alliance with Stalin and the USSR could have overturned Hegel’s intuitive understanding that history of humanity is the history of freedom. But Hitler invaded the USSR. Germany's ally, Japan, attacked the U.S., and finally, America was fored to enter the war. By that point, the USSR had fatally weakened the Nazi military machine, leaving America to finish it off.
It seemed like a great victory was achieved, promising a cloudless future. But the vicious circle prevailed: a predatory superpower led to a multipolar world, and the latter, in turn, led to the creation of the next predatory superpower.
This is Putin's revanchist mentality: if Russia is no longer a superpower, then the U.S. shouldn't be one, either.
Stalin’s monster, with its victor’s laurels, swallowed Central Europe whole, enslaving 111 million people in addition to its own 180 million. With Western Europe lying in ruins, the monster had no rivals: if Stalin would have decided to repeat Hitler’s journey, marching through the continent up to the English Channel, he could have done so unhindered.
A miracle was in order. A superpower of an entirely new breed that could not only stand up to the monster, but would also not take over Western Europe in return for liberating it (unlike the way USSR treated Central Europe.) A superpower that would pay to restore Europe from the ruins and then to leave it to its own devices. If it weren’t for America, this precedent in the history of international relations would never have happened.
The Guardian of the World Order
United States, to be sure, have plenty of faults. The greatest among them is the absolute belief in its exceptionalism, inherited from its Puritan forefathers. This belief would make the country forfeit its sense of proportion and lead to inexplicable fits of madness (after World War I; in its intervention into the Vietnam civil war; during George W. Bush’s presidency.) However, surprisingly enough, unlike its predecessors, America has never been a predator. It didn’t appropriate Western Europe, nor Japan, nor the military base in the Philippines, oil fields in Iraq, nor opium plantations in Afghanistan. America genuinely feels its duty to protect the world from the chaos of the multipolar order. On top of that, it is faithful to the principle of freedom.
As far as Russia is concerned, America's merits are priceless. With all of its shortcomings, the U.S. never gave up its duty of standing up to the Communist monster that was fiercely suppressing freedom across the world--first and foremost in Russia.
It is really amazing to watch skeptics who ask the same question every June 12th: what kind of independence should Russia be celebrating on this day? The answer is actually quite clear. First of all, independence from its imperial past. Secondly, independence from Communism. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that tantamount to liberation from a foreign overlord? Who knows what Russia would have become if the U.S. hadn’t overwhelmed and exhausted the Communist empire. To see how we return the favor!
Here, I am not referring to the conscious anti-Americanism of Putin, the diplomats working under him, or the vengeful ideologues at large. I am addressing Russia’s technological and academic intelligensia, who don’t seem to grasp what the world would look like if there were no superpower guarding it from chaos. Could it really be that nobody has explained it to them?
