End of Wilsonianism: Ukraine, Gaza wars will shape new global order

One hundred years ago, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and US President Woodrow Wilson died within two weeks of each other. The centennial is a good time to reevaluate the legacy of their geopolitical action plans—Leninism and Wilsonianism.

Amidst the Great War in April 1917, Wilson and Lenin articulated two competing messianic and universalist visions for a new world order.

They marked a tectonic shift in geopolitical thinking by injecting ideology into foreign policy with the aim of saving Europe from itself, and the rest of the world from Europe.

All profound geopolitical changes have come from wars—the Westphalian system after the Thirty Years’ War, the Congress System after the Napoleonic conflagration, and the bipolar system after the Second World War.

At each turning point, revisionist statesmen codified new geopolitical paradigms. In 2024, the Ukraine and Gaza crises are undermining Western global dominance and allowing the Global South to finally participate in shaping the world order. Are there world leaders like Lenin and Wilson who can give shape to the new international system?

In his famous address to Congress on April 2, 1917, Wilson reinterpreted the Great War as a struggle of “free and self-governed peoples” against “selfish and autocratic power.”

Calling for the world “to be made safe for democracy,” Wilson articulated the foundational principle of American foreign policy, known as “democratic peace theory” today.

Wilson’s assumption was that an American-led world order would break the European tradition of back-room deals, secret treaties, and espionage. Transparency would become the fabric of a new liberal world order.

Two weeks later upon arriving in Petrograd, Lenin delivered his famous “April Theses” which exposed the Great War as “a predatory imperialist” conflict fueled by “the capitalist nature” of colonial bourgeois governments.

He called for “a new International” of liberated worker and peasant democracies. The Bolshevik vision also contained the millenarian promise of a peaceful golden age.

Lenin treated internationalism as an integral component of socialism. In a move anticipating Wikileaks, the Bolsheviks discredited European diplomacy by publishing the secret agreements between the Russians and their allies, most importantly at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.

Seeking peace without contributions and annexations, Lenin envisioned a transparent revolutionary world order beyond traditional European diplomacy.

Both men shaped the world with narratives that structured and channelled widespread popular discontent.

Lenin and Wilson both believed that ideology could liberate mankind from imperialism and de-colonise international relations after three centuries of the Old World’s dominance. One knows a systemic crisis when alternatives emerge from geographic and political extremes.

Aiming to overcome the geopolitical legacy of the “long nineteenth century,” Wilson and Lenin assumed that the proliferation of ideologically similar regimes would ensure peace. Their visions’ competitive symbiosis would define the fate of the world down to our day.

After the dismantling of the USSR in 1991, Wilson’s vision prevailed during the US's unipolar moment, but the liberal globalist project is now unravelling due to self-inflicted wounds. A drift towards regionalism has increased the influence of small powers amidst the chaos of a profound geopolitical transformation.

The post-Western world looks to become post-ideological, too. In the absence of a coherent diplomatic strategy to manage the US’s hegemonic decline, President Joe Biden's administration has reverted to Wilsonian binarism.

Instead of interpreting the world through the lens of balance of power politics and seeking compromise with competitors, Washington has reinterpreted the Ukraine crisis as a battle between democracies and autocracies. The gains have been slim.

While NATO members (apart from Türkiye) and their Pacific satellites have sanctioned Russia, over 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries that have not.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladmir Putin has successfully appealed to the Global South with an anti-colonial narrative whose silhouette resembles Leninism in form.

But there is a crucial difference in content—not only is Moscow’s rhetoric completely devoid of socialist content, but the Kremlin champions capitalism and socio-cultural conservatism. So far this has worked, despite Washington’s persistent efforts to frame the Russian invasion as a colonial land-grab.

Although the Global South has condemned the invasion of Ukraine and will not recognise the Russian annexations of Ukrainian territory, it interprets this war as a reaction to a reckless NATO expansion that resembles colonial expansion.

The Western-supported regime change in Kiev in 2014 and the Biden administration’s blank cheque to Israel in its operation against Gaza have exposed a glaring Western double-standard about annexations, occupied territories, and civilian casualties.

The Wilsonian crusade to spread democracy would have been more difficult had it not been for the US dollar becoming the world’s reserve currency after the Second World War.

This gave the United States unparalleled power to influence both allies and opponents. But the crushing debt of $34 trillion that the US currently faces and the obsession with weaponising the dollar and Western financial institutions have catalysed the creation of economic and financial institutions independent of the West.

The fastest-growing international organisations these days are not NATO, but the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) group. Whether they will produce the economic welfare they envision remains to be seen, but the economic impact of blindly following American orders has become a handicap for Washington’s allies.

During the Cold War being in the Western ideological camp resulted in economic wealth—compare the ROK and the DPRK, West and East Germany. These days, however, hopping on the bandwagon of economic sanctions against Russia is de-industrialising and bankrupting Europe.

The Biden administration’s plan to confiscate $300 billion in Russian financial reserves frozen by Western institutions will only accelerate the evaporation of Western financial and economic dominance.

A century after his death, Wilson’s dream is on its last legs. To resuscitate it will take much more creative and charismatic American leadership than has so far been in evidence.