The World After Ukraine: Over two dozen international policy strategists offer their views. More bifurcated? The status quo? China wins? Or even a return to Pax Americana?

• Position: A SYMPOSIUM OF VIEWS

To what extent will the war in Ukraine, and the overwhelming global support for debilitating economic sanctions against Russia, lead to, first, a further decline in globalization, and second, a sharp turn to the bifurcation of the industrialized world powers? On one side would be the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan and other Pacific allies, and others. On the other would be Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and (maybe) India. Bifurcation of the global system could, for example, entail amove to separate currency systems, trading systems, SWIFT-like communications systems, technological infrastructures, and separate rules for space technologies, ocean navigation, even for accepted rules for warfare.

Is this theory of a sharp turn toward bifurcation compelling? If so, where does India, with its large navy, fit in? In the United Nations vote on the Ukraine issue, India voted on the side of Russia and China.

To what extent has Vladimir Putin's handling of the war forced China in the direction of global bifurcation a lot sooner than Beijing would have preferred? Could this move lead to the potential return of Pax Americana with the West now seeming to believe in the American democratic ideal perhaps more than many Americans do? Or when the war is over, will the world simply return to the status quo? Or, as some are arguing, could China end up the long-term winner?

SCOTT BESSENT

Founder and CEO, Key Square Group

The world is on the cusp of a Great Reordering. Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman's extensive writings on the bias of individuals and nation states to maintain status quo systems reveal an overwhelming inclination to preserve the current state of affairs. Retaining the current global trading systems and economic supply chains are clearly no longer plausible. Global bifurcation is imminent. Initially, this ambitious rearrangement will be largely drawn along developed and emerging lines.

Western leaders achieved a bittersweet victory in a recent United Nations resolution calling for complete Russian withdrawal from internationally recognized Ukrainian borders: 141 out of 193 countries voted for the resolution. Countries voting against or abstaining represented more than 50 percent of the global population. Those countries abstaining were overwhelmingly emerging economies, including China and India. Heavily dependent on Russian oil, wheat, and vital commodities, they cannot survive immediate disconnection from Russian products.

The world population's twenty-four-month strife with Covid and the Russian assault on Ukraine have roused officials and citizens in Western democracies from complacency to action. In what may be the most important speech in her distinguished career, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen outlined in clear and bold terms the early framing of anew U.S. doctrine, calling for "friend-shoring."

This crisis could not have come at a worse time in both the debt and inflation cycle for the global economy. Having substantially increased government debt levels to support households and businesses for the past two years, Western leaders must now come to terms with balancing rising inflation and debt service costs with additional defense and energy spending.

The fall of the Berlin Wall yielded what came to be known as the peace dividend: military spending was diverted back to domestic priorities. Should we not expect that heightened geopolitical tensions will have a high price tag? Will governments transition from the increased Butter spending to combat Covid to increased Guns outlays to protect against the rising threats of autocracies? Given the current environment, should they attempt both?

As the U.S. and Western allies implement friend-shoring, they should apply a muscular form of trade and economic statecraft to other countries--making it clear that qualifying as a most-favored-nation provider in the new supply chain paradigm will require adherence to a code of Western democratic values, regardless of a nation's internal governance system.

Naturally, as trade splinters along these lines, the role of the U.S. dollar in global payments and reserves will decline. However, no other currency alone will likely match the dollar's central role. Rather, as new trading and security blocs coalesce, the invoicing currency of choice and the composition of foreign exchanges reserves will shift in kind.

In conclusion, these shifts are bound to carry shortterm costs in the form of higher prices and less abundant product availability. However, the Covid-19 shock demonstrated the incredible resiliency and adaptability of free, democratic societies.

The views presented in this article are purely the opinions of the author and are not intended to constitute investment, tax or legal advice of any nature and should not be relied on for any purpose.

DANIEL SNEIDER

Lecturer in East Asian Studies, Stanford University

Outside of Europe, the impact of the war in Ukraine is most visible in northeast Asia. Naked Russian aggression, carried out with the strategic backing of China, has reinvigorated the Cold War architecture forged by a similarly brutal war fought on the Korean peninsula more than seventy years ago.

The Korean War offers a compelling historical precedent for the war now embroiling Europe. In the late 1940s, U.S. policymakers clearly grasped the strategic importance of Japan, both as an economic power and as a frontline for the American military presence in the region.

Korea, on other hand, was a matter of debate. With the formation of rival states in the north and south in 1948, the United States had moved to reduce its military presence in South Korea. While some American policymakers argued that South Korea was key to the defense of Japan, the U.S. military disagreed. They had their eyes on Europe and the Middle East, where the Soviet challenge was manifest.

The Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949 bolstered the view that U.S. interests lay only in defending an offshore chain of islands that ran from Alaska through Japan, including the military bastion on Okinawa, and down to the Philippines, a view famously articulated by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson in a January 1950 speech. The American defense line pointedly did not include the island of Taiwan, where the defeated Kuomintang had fled.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave the green light to the North Korean invasion of the south in June 1950, convinced that the United States would not defend it and was preoccupied with Europe. Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung, focused on gaining control of Taiwan, reluctantly agreed to support the invasion.

It was a profound strategic miscalculation. President Harry Truman, seeing the invasion as the start of a global challenge from Moscow, made the fateful decision to intervene in Korea. The West and its allies rallied to the defense of Korea. When General MacArthur's troops neared the Yalu river border with China, Mao took the equally portentous decision to send a massive army into battle. The United States put the 7th fleet in the Taiwan straits and Chinese plans to finish the civil war were shelved.

The result of these events was the creation of the Cold War security system in East Asia that remains remarkably intact to this day. Ukraine offers an eerie repeat of those events. The Russians have again miscalculated about American and Western will. China has again become a partner to this strategic disaster.

Doubts about American staying power, fueled by the rise of China, are fading. In Korea, the Ukraine crisis clearly aided the narrow victory of a conservative in the presidential election in March, one committed to a closer security alliance with the United States, improving relations with Japan, and confronting North Korea. Japan has responded even more intensely to the Ukraine war, seeing it as a global struggle with clear reverberations for northeast Asia in the need to defend Taiwan and significantly increase defense spending in response to the challenges from China and North Korea. The Japanese public has embraced the Ukrainian struggle with surprising emotionalism.

Ukraine has tightened the alliance system that stretches from Korea, Japan, and Taiwan down to Australia. The Japanese, with an emphasis on careful diplomacy, are working to bring India and Southeast Asia out of their currently non-aligned status, though it may take time.

Whether China comes to regret its decision remains to be seen. Xi may be too locked into his bet on Putin to retreat. But what seems certain is that the war in Ukraine has given new life, and new purpose, to the security system in East Asia that arose out of the destruction of the Korean war.

JAMES A. LEWIS

Senior Vice President and Director, Strategic Technology Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Globalization ebbs and flows with the tides of conflict. The highwater mark for last round of globalization was a decade ago. It has been receding ever since, as Russia and China assert themselves, as countries extend sovereign control over technology and trade, and as nations rejected the U.S.-centric world created in the 1990s. This is not the Cold War with two camps glowering at each other across an Iron Curtain. There are too many interconnections and too many other countries involved for globalization to be easily unraveled.

This is not an end to globalization, but a temporary check. The Ukraine crisis accelerates globalization's retreat as sanctions broke links in finance and trade and as countries like China quicken their efforts to become independent from the United States. Ukraine highlights decision points in a new competition. For China, its ambitions have received a temporary check. It, like Russia, assumed the West was in decline and could be challenged with impunity. The quick Western response and damaging sanctions on Russia were unexpected, since Xi, like Putin, is not presented with contrarian...