OpinionCan we step out of the metaverse long enough to achieve peace in the real world?

For too long, Western media has painted the shift in global power dynamics as a battle between ‘good’ democracy and ‘bad’ autocracy.

The further we retreat into this ideological ‘metaverse’, the more blind we become to the real-world advance of war and its immense costs

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Members of the media raise their hands to ask a question as US President Joe Biden speaks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 3:30am, 26 Feb 2022

Have we psyched ourselves up for a war already? Moving from a unipolar world to a multipolar world was always likely to be messy and risk-prone. But few saw how fast we had moved from beating war drums to actual armed conflict between the Great Powers. Are we on a march to World War Three or have key players lost sight of reality?

Lest we forget, the first and second world wars were fought to keep down rising powers Germany and Japan. Russia and China suffered the most casualties in World War II, and both were allies against the German Nazis and Japanese militarists.

The real winner, the United States, then embarked on a war to contain communism in both the Soviet Union and China. Fifty years ago in 1972, US president Richard Nixon set aside enmity against China, restored US-China relations, and in one strategic stroke isolated the Soviet Union, leading to its collapse two decades later.

The great achievement during the Cold War was the avoidance of nuclear conflict, with the 1961 Cuban missile crisis being a live test of brinkmanship. Both sides climbed down when the USSR removed missiles from Cuba and the US quietly removed missiles from Turkey. President John F. Kennedy understood that grandstanding on moral issues should be restrained because in a nuclear war, mutually assured destruction is madness.

After seven decades of peace, the Western media has begun painting the multipolar world as a black-and-white conflict of good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, without appreciating that the other side may have a different point of view that needs to be heard. By definition, a multipolar world means that liberal democracies will have to live with different ideologies and regimes.

Today, the internet provides a wealth of alternative views to those of mainstream media outlets such as CNN or the BBC. John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of the influential book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, offers the insight that it was the Western expansion of Nato which caused Russia to feel threatened.