Beyond Ukraine: Demilitarization or a New Cold War?

by Brian D’Agostino

I will conclude by addressing whether a demilitarized world order is really possible, and if so, what a pathway to it might look like.  This relates to the objection of hawks that “it’s a jungle out there” and that the US and its allies need to utilize “superior power,” not international law, “on behalf of their vision of a desirable world order,” as Robert Kagan (2023) put it.

First, given our militarized status quo, the world can at best expect a new Cold War, and possibly a “hot” nuclear war if worst case scenarios for Ukraine materialize (Mearsheimer, 2022, and Benjamin and Davies, 2022.).  Under Robert Kagan’s Manichean view of the world, which is apparently shared by the Biden administration, the US and NATO should be willing to use force to defend “liberal democracy” from “aggressive” and “autocratic” great powers, particularly Russia and China.  The role of such policies in provoking Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine (or at the very least their failure to deter the invasion) constitute in my view a compelling reason to reject this conventional paradigm of security.  But it remains to be shown how a viable alternative can be crafted, which is the subject of this concluding section.

The alternative that I propose, which is well-defined and supported by the peace studies literature (Butfoy, 1997; Global Action to Prevent War and Armed Conflict, 2008; Benedict et al, 2016), is the path of verifiable security agreements.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, this path does not require all signatories to be liberal democracies, since violations of the agreements can be detected by all parties, triggering remedial actions.  Bilateral US-Soviet successes, relying on satellite verification (Day, 2022), include the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, SALT I, and START I treaties.  Multilateral successes include the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).  (To be sure, North Korea withdrew from the NPT, and Iran was possibly in violation before the JCPOA.  But these failures were small for a treaty with 190 states parties, especially compared to the nuclear-armed signatories’ non-compliance with their NPT disarmament obligations; see Deller, et al, 2003).

In short, governments know how to negotiate verifiable security agreements and have done so successfully in this and the previous century.  Autocratic governments, which have participated in these agreements, are not an obstacle.  Rather, the obstacle is the stranglehold that defense contractors, military bureaucracies, and other special interests have over foreign policy, particularly in the United States, currently the world’s only superpower.  (The US, a liberal democracy, actually has a poor record of compliance with security related treaties; see Deller et al, 2003).

As for Ukraine, negotiations to end the war can build upon and update the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements.  To be sure, full diplomatic resolution of the status of Crimea and other territory annexed by Russia may not be possible in the near future.  However, a long-term cessation of hostilities, such as the 1953 armistice that indefinitely suspended the Korean War, is certainly a possibility.  For other regional and global demilitarization initiatives, see Global Action to Prevent War and Armed Conflict (2008), Benedict et al (2016), and Butfoy (1997).

Far from being an untried, utopian experiment, the path of threat reduction through verifiable agreements is a practical and tested paradigm of international security.  Given its record of success, and the militarists’ record of failure culminating in the current Ukraine war and looming New Cold War, the burden of proof is not on doves to show that demilitarization can succeed, but on hawks to show that it cannot.