Ukraine's Grand Strategy: Navigating a New Era of Transatlantic Relations

• In Event: Ukraine's State Resilience: Navigating War, Peace, and Changing International Norms

Abstract

The supporters and critics of international liberal order (Mearsheimer 2018; Ikenberry 2018; Lake, Martin & Risse 2021) in recent years have pointed out visible signs of degradation of once well-accepted norms of post-WW2 global affairs. As a new set of norms has still been evolving, arguably, it was not until the start of the 47th term of the US president in office and the reinvigorated assertion of 'America First' as a guiding foreign policy principle that both international relations scholars and practitioners have rushed to herald the final eclipse and disintegration of transatlantic democratic alliance underpinning the global liberal consensus for nearly eighty years.
Viewed as a game of cards – a metaphor often employed by the US chief executive in relation to global affairs – the new approach of transactional global politics by the US, a 'player' with the 'strongest cards,' includes disavowal of proactive democracy support and promotion, insists on hard economic bargaining with former allies and foes alike, and adopts selective ideological alliances with right-wing populist forces around the world, against the backdrop of a generally isolationist stance on conflicts raging in geographically distant and therefore geopolitically peripheral regions.
In this context, as new norms are promoted by US soft, hard and sharp power tools across the globe, Ukraine, war-torn and resisting an economically and militarily asymmetric clash with Russia, now also confronts a new set of foreign policy challenges. The current paper examines how Ukraine’s emergent grand strategy can re-evaluate such shifting contours of global norms and institutions, including the norms of sovereignty, free trade, ‘security guarantees’ (including nuclear umbrella and non-proliferation taboo) as well as other key building blocks of post-1945 liberal world order; and identify strategical resources and opportunities to achieve its goals of peace and prosperity.

Author

• Lidiya Zubytska, Ave Maria U