In the American mentality, the Ukrainian crisis was intended to rearrange the new international order to tighten the US’s grip on Russia, strengthen its hand in the global system, and enable it to focus on China.
To curb the Russian rebellion, the US fell back on the tools of the Cold War, so it used the economic card, one of the most important tools of the Cold War that enabled it to tighten the screws on the Soviet Union leading to the deterioration of its economic capacity at the global level, its collapse, and removal from the equation of international power.
This in turn gave birth to a new unipolar world order, however, political and economic consequences indicate that Russia has not lost much and that the sanctions that the US imposed failed to achieve their goal and “destroy the Russian economy”, revealing that there is no room for re-shaping the new international order according to American political desire, which aspires to remove Russia from the political and economic equation of the global system and thus isolate China.
Despite the American propaganda regarding the importance of economic sanctions in destroying the Russian economy, it is just a “failed psychological war”, because the results of the sanctions in the Ukrainian crisis did not yield the same results as sanctions in the Afghani crisis.
While the US succeeded in the international mobilization against the Russians in Afghanistan, it failed in Ukraine, because the most affected by these sanctions are Western countries, as the 18 largest importers from Russia are the ones imposing the sanctions, as the European Union alone accounted for 71% of Russian fuel purchases, and its total energy imports from Russia amounted to about 44 billion euros in the first months of the Ukraine war, compared to about 140 billion euros for the whole of 2021, which only reinforced the division among European countries that found that they will be punishing themselves if they succumbed to the American request.
Through the change that Russia has made in its strategy by engaging in the capitalist system and abandoning communist ideology, Moscow has become a major source of natural gas, and exports 40% of the natural gas consumed by Europe, therefore, the international world has changed a lot and is no longer unipolar under America’s control politically and economically, as the US is no longer as strong as it was during the post-1945 era.
These are all factors that made America lose one of the most important tools it used to dismantle the Soviet Union and led to the reduction of American political influence in the European countries and the entire world in the Ukrainian file in the mobilization against Russia.
