Frontpage Mag The sponsors of “moralizing internationalism,” as historian Corelli Barnett called it, are busy trying to spin the Russo-Ukrainian war as a crisis that has renewed European unity. For globalists, Russia’s return of Europe to its benighted past of invasions, destruction, and slaughters––horrors that the “rules-based international order” supposedly ended––has instead strengthened and highlighted two show-case institutions of that order, the European Union and NATO. Globalists claim that rather than an indictment of globalism’s failures, the war is restoring both institutions and confirming the superiority of supranational institutions in keeping order and creating prosperity.
But all the spin can’t hide the real lesson of the war: that the centrifugal, conflicting nationalist self-interests that wrecked the League of Nations and reduced the UN to an arena for maximizing those interests, remains the critical factor in interstate relations…
