The phraseology of homeostasis was revived in the era of the Cold War in the notion of the strategic balance of the military potentials of the US and the USSR. Catchy terms appeared at that time, such as “balance of fear”.

The world after World War II was far from the state of equilibrium. The United States had an unmatched economic advantage. The growing communist bloc, although territorially and in terms of population (taking into account only the USSR and China) was a globally significant conglomerate, was weaker than the West. Militarily the West maintained its strategic advantage for many years. Until 1949 it was based on the US nuclear monopoly. Until the end of the 1950s it was based on the relative sanctification of American territory from a nuclear attack. The West, and the United States in particular, did not consider this advantage sufficient to undertake a more active strategy against the expansion of communism in the world. The costs of the global war made it unprofitable (although allegedly some Western military commanders suggested the use of nuclear weapons in the context of the Korean war, as attributed, among others, to general MacArthur). From the late 1950s, the USSR already had strategic means of delivery that could penetrate American defence. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or the balance of fear, came into force. And at the end of the 1960s, the parity of strategic nuclear potentials of both superpowers was established, which could be treated as the main factor of the then global balance.

This balance ended with the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet Empire. Although Russia remained an equivalent nuclear player, its political influence shrank enough that it became common practice to describe the world as unquestionably unipolar, with the US as a lone superpower. Nobody ventured to postulate in those days to build stability on the basis of a balance of power. At best, there were calls for a balance of interests in the world.

Pax Americana, however, was regarded as a transitional phase of the international order. The postulates of a new balance were inspired by the process of the growth of China’s power and the emancipation of developing countries. Models of multipolarity were built (from the G2, i.e. the American-Chinese duopoly, to the G6, i.e. a wider system, also including the EU, Russia and India, and even Japan). However, dystopian descriptions of the future with a non-polar (G0) world, a world plunged into entropic dispersion and chaos, became more and more popular. Such world would be in a kind of balance not so much of balance of power as of balance of powerlessness.

Russia continues in the illusion of returning to a bipolar equilibrium. It wants to be treated on an equal footing with the US. It advocates global multipolarity and makes diatribes about the harmfulness of American hegemony. But when it came down to it, during the crisis in December 2021 and January-February 2022, it recognized only Americans as the right interlocutors about the new formula of European security, mutual security guarantees, etc. It openly disparaged the Europeans as American vassals. Back in 2014 it initially liked the “Normandy format” (because it did not include the Americans), but it brutally resected it in 2021 from strategic talks in the context of Ukraine, humiliating the Germans and the French. It agreed to come back to it at the advisory level at the beginning of 2022, but the strategic issues were intended to be discussed chiefly with the Americans.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine was treated in the Kremlin in a strategic sense as a war to establish a new division of Europe and the world that would sanction Russia’s superpower status. And with the failure of Russian military plans in Ukraine, desperate statements began to appear in Russia about the nonsense of the existence of a world in which Russia has no place. This was even treated in the West as a threat of Russia committing extended suicide (at least in political terms). And the recent gibberish statements by Dmitry Medvedev, and especially the allusion that the horsemen of the Apocalypse had started their move to fulfill the prophecy, have been interpreted as Russia’s readiness for extended suicide in the strict sense. De Gaulle used to say that either France would be great or it would not be at all. Putin seems to want to say that either the world will recognize Russia as great or there will be no world at all.

It is true that Pax Americana turned out to be an unsustainable formula and the Americans themselves understood it perfectly well. But attempts to recreate global directorates with the participation of countries belonging to the world of other values as China or Russia may only be a temporary tactical solution with no chance of long-term existence and the ability to solve global problems.

The war in Ukraine makes us realize how deep the division of the world is. For the West, it is a division between the world of liberal, democratic and human rights values and the world of dictatorship, oppression and enslavement of the human individual (or in the Neopopperian interpretation: a division between open and closed societies), but it is a deep division. The result of the war in Ukraine will not abolish this division, but in the event of Russia’s defeat, it may become a turning point in the reconstruction of the world, so that the political order in the global dimension is based on a solid foundation of common values. I will write about what such an order could look like in due course, in line with the general logic of describing the doctrines of foreign policy on my blog. So please be patient. And it will be a vision of order in which the concept of balance as a cure for fears of the dynamism of changes in the international environment will no longer be of fundamental importance.

However, balance remains an important paradigm for shaping bilateral relations of most states with their partners. States are sometimes faced with the need to avoid unilateral dependencies in their relations with a selected partner (or partners). Even larger countries often avoid a situation in which their policies would clearly favour one partner over the other. Drawing general conclusions from the individual manifestations of the equilibrium postulate would be, however, unjustified. Each case is different in its own way.

In March 1992, on the sidelines of the preparatory meeting for the CSCE Follow-Up Conference, intensive consultations on the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh took place in Helsinki. Putting the issue in the CSCE format was provoked by a sharp polemic on the conflict at the CSCE ministerial meeting in January 1992 in Prague. The main point of the debate was how and if at all the CSCE could be useful in resolving the conflict. The result of the deliberation was the decision to convene the so-called the Minsk conference (it has not yet taken place till today, but on the basis of this decision, the so-called Minsk group, whose co-chairmen have negotiated a solution to the conflict, was formed) and the CSCE took over the mediation role. At that time, I was the acting head of the Polish delegation (the nominal head, director Andrzej Towpik, was busy with managerial tasks in Warsaw) and I meticulously collected information before the meeting of senior officials, at which decisions were to be negotiated to prepare an additional meeting of the CSCE Council. I sent a long cable to the headquarters in which I described all the intricacies of the problem. And I asked for an instruction for a position to be taken. The instruction which came contained the most laconic answer I have ever experienced in my diplomatic career: “Please take a position between France and Germany.” Not between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as I could logically expect if we wanted to demonstrate full political neutrality in the conflict, but out of nowhere: “between France and Germany”. By the way, the positions of Germany and France were not yet known to the authors of the instructions. This was the first time I came across with the policy of balancing relations with main partners and keeping a healthy distance from leading European forces. And not the last time.