From Constantinople to Moscow... What happens when a great empire cracks?

Historical junctures can be fatal, especially for empires, and wars usually embody the climax of historical junctures.

In recent European history, the empire of Austria-Hungary known as the "Habsburg" state, which ruled central Europe for hundreds of years, fell due to its defeat in the First World War.

The same is true of the Ottoman Empire, which has been consistently referred to since the mid-nineteenth century as the "sick man of Europe", and despite the decades-old struggle of the Ottoman sultans for the survival of their state in the heart of the Islamic world and their many rounds of administrative and military modernization, and even the reshaping of the Ottoman Empire entirely by the reformist and revolutionary elites in the mid-nineteenth century;

The empire met the same fate of final demise after its defeat in the First World War.

Empire and chaos

Just as in states of collapse, empires and new states arise out of chaos, but in their infancy they are chaotic and unstable.

The states that arose from the ruins of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were often turbulent and unstable as a result of their ethnic heterogeneity, with numerous ethnic and religious groups suddenly finding themselves facing each other in the midst of unstable nascent regional systems.

Nazi and fascist ideas inspired many of the fighting factions of those groups in Central Europe after the Habsburgs and in the post-Ottoman Balkans, as well as some Arab thinkers who studied in Europe and returned these ideas to their homelands that recently appeared on the map of the Middle East and were colonized for a few decades before being conquered. Independence in the fifties and sixties of the last century.

This was embodied mainly in the ideology of the Syrian and Iraqi Ba'ath parties, which was based on extremist Arab nationalism in the Arab Mashreq.

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In the aftermath of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill speculated that had the imperial kingdoms in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in the world not been overthrown after the peace conference in Versailles after World War I, Hitler might not have come to power In Germany on the ruins and wounds of a defeated and wounded empire, perhaps the Second World War did not break out in the first place.

It represented the demise of dynastic empires in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the geopolitical turmoil that ensued in subsequent decades;

A decisive factor in shaping the nature of the twentieth century to its end.

Although progressive intellectuals dislike empires and dynasties, imperial collapse sometimes leads to a more dangerous and reactionary anarchic reality than traditional and sultanate empires.

The Arab Mashreq has witnessed violent fluctuations over the past hundred years as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and it seems that it continues to pay the bill for its collapse without resulting in its theoretical “independence” a better social contract than that under which different ethnic and religious groups lived under the umbrella of the Ottoman Empire.

We must bear this in mind when trying to understand the historical turning points that followed the fall of empires, especially at the present time when the conflict between China and Russia on the one hand and the United States and the West on the one hand is intensifying. Its foreign policies, and consequently its fall or rapid decline, may produce signs of chaos worse than those that existed under its auspices.

The two most prominent countries in the Cold War era, Russia and the United States, began to ignite self-destructive wars. Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and before that, the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively.

As for China, its obsession with the invasion of Taiwan may lead it to policies that will eventually regress against it, although the scenario of the invasion of Taiwan is relatively far away due to the complexity of its trade relations with Western countries and Taiwan itself.

The three existing superpowers in recent years have shown an ill-advised strategy when they engage in military efforts that pay off in the short term, while threatening their long-term survival without being fully aware of it.

Today, if the major powers are weakened without a clear alternative in sight, chaos and confusion will reign in different parts of the world, which is what we are already witnessing in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as the United States partially withdrew from its political and economic commitments, and left the region to its unknown fate.

Moreover, the weakening of the current great powers will lead to the inability of the United States to adequately assist its allies in Europe and Asia, and if its role in these two pivotal regions of the global economy declines or weakens, it will only result in prolonged periods of instability.

Although Russia is institutionally weaker than China, the weakness or complete collapse of its authoritarian political system may also lead to an image similar to the nightmarish image of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a manifestation of this, as ethnic conflicts have been erupting since the retreat of the communist power internationally, from the Balkans. The Caucasus and even the border problems in Central Asia.

Likewise, any economic or political turmoil in China will cause major turmoil within the country, and will likely encourage India and North Korea to adopt aggressive policies in their surroundings.

Confused Great Powers in the Era of Globalization

Both Russia and China bear the hallmarks of great powers that equal the great empires that dominated various regions of the world nearly a century ago, although they are not empires in the traditional sense.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for example, is based on geopolitical motives similar to the motives of the Tsarist and Soviet empires in their interest in Eastern Europe, and China's hostile intentions towards Taiwan are also due to the desire of the ancient Chinese emperors to control the coasts of East Asia.

In turn, the global hegemony of the United States after World War II endowed its role with many exceptional features that were only found in the great empires of history.

Today, these three great powers face an uncertain future, the collapse of any of them or a degree of constitutional and social disintegration of each cannot be ruled out, and while the United States and China have enjoyed a degree of social stability and economic prosperity, Russia, on the contrary, faces even the most immediate danger today. If it somehow wins its war on Ukraine, Russia will have to face the economic catastrophe of breaking away from the economies of the European Union and the Group of Seven major industrialized countries with its inability to find alternatives to the economic prosperity that it enjoyed during the first two decades of the new century.

Therefore, we can say that Russia today is the sick man of Eurasia, just as the Ottoman Empire was in Europe about a century and a half before it.

At the same time, China appears young and coherent, but the golden years of its economy are beginning to fade, as indicators indicate, as the country's economic growth has reached its peak years ago and has already begun to decline, and foreign investors have begun to flee the country by selling billions of dollars of Chinese bonds and stocks, At the same time, its population is aging and its workforce is decreasing in the coming decades.

This does not seem promising for internal stability, as most analyzes indicate that Chinese President Xi Jinping has begun to stifle the private sector that made the glory of the Chinese economy by invoking some hard-line “Maoist” practices that depend on the state, and this may lead in the long run to reducing standard of living in China, undermining social peace and popular support for the regime.

Most analyzes indicate that Chinese President Xi Jinping has begun to stifle the private sector that made the Chinese economy's glory by invoking some hard-line Maoist practices that rely on the state.

(Reuters)

In contrast, while democracies have more transparent systems, their current problems are not necessarily less severe.

After a long period of globalization since the collapse of Soviet communism, half of the US population is caught up in a battle between those who support a free and multicultural country and those who oppose those values ​​because of their desire for a more traditional and conservative life.

Here we find ourselves in front of 3 possibilities: The first possibility is that the United States will recover from internal turmoil and emerge as a unipolar power again, as it did immediately after the Cold War in the face of the slow decline of China and the rapid decline of Russia.

The second possibility is a return to a bipolar world in which China maintains its economic vitality even as authoritarianism grows alongside American power in conjunction with the decline of Russia.

The third possibility is that the three countries will retreat as a result of various and complex factors.

What creates a more chaotic international order, especially in the Middle East and South Asia, where the middle powers become less constrained in exercising their political and military power, such as India, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then European countries will not be able to agree on a clear system without strong American leadership, in When Russia's retreat and military adventures together will create a chaotic situation on its eastern borders.

Uncertainty in the age of nuclear weapons

The US policy of non-interference is gone. The US has shaped the post-World War II and post-Cold War world in a way that it cannot withdraw from.

(Getty Images)

The Byzantine Empire, which lasted from 330 AD until the plundering of the Fourth Crusade of Constantinople in 1204 AD, is an example of longevity, and it survived relatively since 1204 AD until the Ottoman Empire took control of Istanbul in 1453 AD, despite the difficult terrain and the multiplicity of enemies and their growing strength such as Catholic Rome in the West .

This is perhaps impressive, especially since Constantinople was more vulnerable than Rome in the West, but Byzantium relied on a wide range of means of persuasion and diplomacy, such as recruiting allies, dissuading enemies, and motivating enemies to attack each other, rather than coarse military force, as he describes The American academic "John Mearsheimer" The strategy of the Byzantines: "The Byzantines were less inclined to root their conflict with any enemy, because they knew that the enemy of today can be an ally of tomorrow."

This pragmatic realistic approach has become difficult to achieve today in the United States under the rule of the Democrats, who have been enthusiastic about spreading their version of liberalism since the rise of Barack Obama’s administration, and at other times under the rule of the Republicans, who were deceived by America’s power after the end of the Cold War and sought to extend the hegemony of the States The United States during the administration of "George Bush" Jr.

Republicans and Democrats alike contributed to the erosion of the US's pragmatic approach to the Cold War, with their successive administrations increasingly obsessed with spreading their version of democracy, human rights, and global peace around the world.

If we take a complex look at the world today, we will see that the American policy of non-interference is gone forever. The United States has shaped the post-World War II and post-Cold War world in a way that does not allow it to withdraw from it, and the most important thing is that the world itself has become more dynamic They are so interdependent that non-interference is not an option for any great power.

America's isolation once flourished in an age when ships were the only way to cross the Atlantic, and it took days to do so.

At the present time, and in the time of ballistic missiles, global supply chains, the Internet, cyber wars, and open migration for talent, withdrawal is almost impossible, and the attempt to impose it by force, as Trump did, is actually eroding the bases of American power globally.

The collapse of any empire, or the decline of any great power, however good it may seem to the haters of that great power or state;

It produces widespread chaos.

(Anadolu)

For these reasons, the United States will remain embroiled in the majority of foreign crises around the world, from Ukraine to East Asia and the Middle East, and some of these crises will have a military aspect that may develop into a war with middle or perhaps great powers.

In the end, all of this means that the world is on the verge of a radical historical turn. The conflict between empires - old and new - has always been tragic in most of its stages and results as well, and with the collapse of one or more empires, chaos soon spreads, the world becomes opaque, and our certainty of our political and economic future is less. Within our countries, which can no longer be separated from their regional and international surroundings.

The collapse of any empire, or the decline of any great power, no matter how good it may seem to the haters of that great power or state;

It produces widespread chaos.

While the power of Washington and Beijing seems to be able to withstand for some time, the almost certain demise of Russia, which has a small economy and a faltering army in Ukraine, means that the consequences of the demise of Russia will appear first, especially in its surroundings, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which we are already witnessing with the increase in wars and conflicts in the Soviet space.

However, the consequences of any retreat or stumbling within the United States and China, especially if the hostile policy of the two countries continues towards each other, will be broader and more catastrophic, and the world is heading towards the chaos of the middle power and the decline of the major powers or back to the American-Chinese bipolarity, is Something that will be revealed in the coming days.