Kremlin, 4/11/24

The presidents continued consultations at a working lunch.

* * *

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Lukashenko,

Thank you for coming in time for Cosmonautics Day, especially because we have a major event – our cosmonauts, including the first female cosmonaut from Belarus returned safely to earth.

We have another good event – our new heavy missile flew from a new spaceport. This is yet another stage in the development of the space industry in Russia.

And, of course, in addition to all other things, we have something to discuss. I am referring to our economic ties that are making steady headway. Last year, we demonstrated good economic growth rates and now everything is on the upsurge.

Overall, we see even bigger growth in the first months of the current year than we had in the past year. We are developing diversification, cooperation and interoperability. So, everything is on the upsurge and we are very happy about this.

Naturally, we will talk about security issues in the western borders of both Belarus and Russia. I know that you have information on everything taking place in Ukraine. Nevertheless, I will certainly use your visit to tell you in detail about what is going on.

In general, as you know, we have never rejected a peaceful settlement of disputes. Moreover, this is what we were inclined to do. It was not Russia that started this war in 2014. Everything began with a coup d’etat in Ukraine. Later, when everything moved to a hot phase, you initiated the conduct of peace negotiations in Belarus. We launched them in two cities.

Later, the negotiating teams moved to Turkey, to Istanbul.

We largely completed this work there, which took us much time and effort. We initialed it on both sides. Ukraine also initialed it. This paper, this document was initialed.

As you know, later, under pressure from the West, the Ukrainian side opted out of these agreements. I would like to remind you that at the time we were told that we could not sign the document in this manner, that Ukraine could not sign the document “with a gun to its head,” that we had to withdraw our troops from Kiev. So we did. Immediately after we did that, our agreements were discarded.

Now, as you know, the idea of holding some kind of conference in Switzerland is being promoted. We are not invited there. Moreover, they think that we have nothing to do there, and at the same time they say that nothing can be solved without us. Since we are not going there (it has now turned into a kind of nonsense), they say that we refuse to negotiate. We were not invited, but they say that we refuse.

It would be funny if it were not so sad. Once again, I would like to emphasise that we are in favour of talks. But not in the format of being imposed any schemes that have nothing to do with reality. Why do I say that? Because if the need arises, I will allow myself to turn to you, and maybe we will continue consultations with you in this area.

As for other matters, you are also well aware that, unfortunately, we have recently seen a series of strikes on our energy facilities, and we had to respond. I would like to emphasise that in winter time, guided by humanitarian considerations, we did not launch any strikes on energy facilities. I mean, they wanted to have our social institutions, hospitals and so on left without power supply. But after a series of strikes on our energy facilities, we had to respond.

I repeat once again: if everything gets down to solving the issues we talked about from the outset, and in the energy sector they are related, among other things, to solving one of the tasks that we set for ourselves, which is demilitarisation… Above all, we proceed from the fact that in this way we directly impact the military-industrial complex of Ukraine. But if we do get to the point where I started, if we move on to talks about resolving all the issues in other ways, then of course, as I have already said many times, we are ready for that.

You and I will talk about it in greater detail, I will tell you everything in detail.

President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko: Mr Putin, thank you for your updates. I can confirm everything you have said, because you and I revisited these issues on numerous occasions – a year ago, and several months ago – and discussed them, including the peace settlement. They are planning to hold what they call a peace conference in Switzerland. But if they want to talk about peace in Ukraine without us, let them do it.

Once again, we believe that the only thing they can agree on there is how to intensify the escalation of this conflict. Without Russia, what peace process are we talking about? No peace settlement is possible without Russia.

Maybe they are right in choosing not to invite us, because there is actually nothing to talk to them about when they try to invite more than 100 states and dictate something to us or enforce something on us. This does not sound like a proposal for peace talks.

Vladimir Putin: I think they – or at least the opposite side – has driven itself into a corner, to a certain extent, by refusing to negotiate, expecting to defeat Russia on the battlefield, to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Now, having understood that this is impossible and having refused to negotiate, they have found themselves in a predicament.

Alexander Lukashenko: Indeed, they have found an ingenious way out.

Vladimir Putin: But our goal is not putting everyone in a tough spot. Just the opposite: we are ready for constructive efforts. But clearly, nothing detached from reality can be imposed on us.

Alexander Lukashenko: What I wanted to say is that I wholeheartedly support, absolutely wholeheartedly, the Russian authorities and you personally when it comes to the peace process in this conflict.

There are all the conditions for sitting down and negotiating the issue. If they do not want it, the reason is clear to us; we have answered that question. If those across the ocean choose to talk about peace, Ukraine will hear their voice. Ukrainians should know, especially the ordinary people, that the issue does not depend on us. Speaking plainly, the ball is in their court.

I remember the process that began in Belarus. We hosted three rounds of talks, and the fourth round was held in Istanbul. You later sent the photocopies to me. First you showed me the document, which I read, and then you forwarded the copy to me, just as we had agreed. It was the initialled document. It registered major concessions from both Russians and Ukrainians. And then a visitor called them [Ukrainians] down and ordered them to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian.

In other words, we wholeheartedly support the peace process, which Russia never refused to discuss, including today.

If we can contribute to this, you are aware of our capabilities. We will always stand together and act in the same spirit as you.

Thank you for the space mission. It is clear that it would not be held without your decision. We agreed that we would send a Belarusian woman.

Continue reading here.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 2/6/24

New Polish Defense Minister Wladysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, who’s a political appointee with absolutely zero military experience, said in an interview with local media that “I assume every scenario, and I take the worst ones most seriously” when asked about the possibility of Russia attacking his country. This is nothing but shameless scaremongering aimed at justifying Poland’s subordination to Germany last week after it informally rubbished its reparations demands and agreed to form a “military Schengen”.

Here are some background briefings for those who haven’t been following this all that closely:

* 24 November 2023: “NATO’s Proposed ‘Military Schengen’ Is A Thinly Disguised German Power Play Over Poland”

* 17 January 2024: “Leaked German War Plans Against Russia Are Aimed At Advancing The ‘Military Schengen’ Proposal”

* 19 January 2024: “Germany Is Rebuilding ‘Fortress Europe; To Assist The US’ ‘Pivot (Back) To Asia’”

* 22 January 2024: “The ‘Baltic Defense Line’ Is Meant To Accelerate The German-Led ‘Military Schengen’”

* 1 February 2024: “Poland Subordinated Itself To Germany On Two Fronts Over The Past Week”

They’ll now be summarized for the reader’s convenience.

German-backed Donald Tusk’s return to the Polish premiership emboldened the bloc’s de facto leader to implement the next phase of its hegemonic plans whereby it sought to expand its military influence across the continent. To that end, it proposed the “military Schengen”, which it clinched with the Netherlands and Poland last week to facilitate the shipment of troops and equipment to its new tank base in Lithuania. This corridor will likely be expanded up to Estonia and possibly Finland in the future.

The resultant “Fortress Europe” that’s being built at an accelerated pace nowadays ominously resembles its World War II-era counterpart in terms of structure and the strategic intent of preparing for war with Russia, which Poland is now scaremongering about to justify subordinating itself to Germany. The domestic context within which Kosiniak-Kamysz claimed that he’s taking seriously the scenario of Russia attacking it was addressed in these two analyses below:

* 10 January 2023: “Poland Is In The Throes Of Its Worst Political Crisis Since The 1980s”

* 14 January 2024: “Tusk’s Appeal For Patriots To Support Ukraine Is A Distraction From Poland’s Political Crisis”

In brief, Tusk has resorted to totalitarian means for imposing his envisaged German-inspired liberal–globalist model onto this traditionally conservative-nationalist society, which provoked its worst political crisis since the 1980s. He feebly tried to distract the public from this on a faux patriotic basis by hyping them up about the false threat that Russia poses to their country from the east, but this narrative was easily discredited after remembering that Poland borders the Russian region of Kaliningrad in the north.

With this in mind, both his and Kosiniak-Kamysz’s claims are discredited since Russia could already attack and invade Poland from that direction without having to first storm through Ukraine, not to mention via Belarus which has a much larger border with Poland. Whereas the first peddled this lie to distract from Poland’s political crisis, the second is reviving them to justify last week’s “military Schengen” deal that’ll see German troops freely transit to and from Poland for the first time since World War II.

Even more concerning is Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejn extending a “herzlich wilkommen!” (“warm welcome”) to German troops in the middle of last month if they want to permanently deploy in his country like they just agreed to do in neighboring Lithuania. The only possibly chance of preemptively mitigating public anger at this unprecedented violation of Polish historical memory and sovereignty is to play the Russia card that regrettably appeals to a lot of conservative-nationalists.

Be that as it may, the opposition is well aware of the Tusk Regime’s narrative tricks and is unlikely to fall for its scaremongering about a Russian invasion of their country from Ukraine, though it should also be said that the former government relied on similar such rhetoric to justify arming Kiev. Nevertheless, they and their base soured on that country late last year amidst the Polish-Ukrainian grain dispute, and the premier at the time even accused Germany of cutting a deal with Ukraine behind Poland’s back.

For these reasons, the latest scaremongering isn’t expected to reap the desired results, and the opposition would do well to maximally expose how the Tusk Regime subordinated Poland to Germany via the “military Schengen” on a faux anti-Russian basis that’s really about him repaying favors to Berlin. The previous government’s planned military investments were supposed to lead to Poland becoming the leader of a Central European coalition for containing Russia centered on the “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI).

That would have then in turn enabled Poland to restore its long-lost Great Power status with time, all with the grand strategic purpose of creating a new center of influence between Germany and Russia, which Warsaw could then leverage for multi–aligning between them, the US, China, and Turkiye. These plans have since been scrapped under Tusk, who preferred to subordinate Poland to Germany by having Berlin take over Warsaw’s 3SI through the “military Schengen” and turn Poland into its largest vassal.

His country’s new geostrategic role is to support Germany’s leading position in containing Russia in Central Europe, to which end Berlin will probably let Warsaw continue with its planned military investment program, but with the intent of it supporting German interests instead of Polish ones. Even if Poland participates in an extended “military Schengen” up to Estonia, it’ll be as Germany’s sidekick, not as an independent pole of influence in the region like its previous government envisaged.

In the modern-day “Fortress Europe”, Poland is playing a similar role vis-à-vis Germany as fascist Italy played with the Nazis, who were also junior German partners whose delegated task was to relieve some of the burden upon Berlin for controlling parts of the continent. Back then, Rome’s German-approved “sphere of influence” was in Southeastern Europe, while Warsaw’s will remain in Central Europe. The difference, however, is that Poland’s new subordination to Germany might last a lot longer than Italy’s.

by Dmitry Trenin, RT, 3/23/24

By Dmitry Trenin, a research professor at the Higher School of Economics and a lead research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. He is also a member of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).

Strategic stability is usually understood as the absence of incentives for a nuclear-armed power to launch a massive first strike. Typically, it’s viewed primarily in military-technical terms. The reasons why an attack may be contemplated are usually not taken into account.

This idea emerged in the middle of the last century, when the USSR had achieved military-strategic parity with the US and the Cold War between them had entered a “mature” phase of limited confrontation and some predictability. The solution to the problem of strategic stability was then seen in the constant maintenance of contacts between the political leadership of the two superpowers. Which led to arms control and transparency in arranging their respective arsenals.

However, the first quarter of the 21st century is ending in conditions very different from the relative international political stability of the 1970s. The US-centric world order established after the end of the Cold War is being seriously challenged and its foundations are visibly shaken. The global hegemony of Washington and the position of the collective West as a whole is weakening, while the economic, military, scientific and technological might and political importance of non-Western countries –first and foremost China, but also India– are growing. This is leading to a deterioration in relations between the US and other power centers.

The two largest nuclear powers, Russia and the US, are in a state of semi-direct armed conflict. This confrontation is officially regarded in Russia as an existential threat. This situation has become possible as a result of the failure of strategic deterrence (in its geopolitical dimension) in an area where Russia’s vital interests are present. It should be noted that the main cause of the conflict is Washington’s conscious disregard –for three decades now– of Moscow’s clearly and explicitly expressed security interests.

Moreover, in the Ukrainian conflict, the US military and political leadership has not only articulated, but has publicly expressed, the mission of using its proxy to inflict a strategic military defeat on Russia, despite its nuclear status.

This is a complex undertaking in which the collective economic, political, military, military-technical, intelligence and informational capacity of the West is integrated with the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces in direct combat against the Russian army. In other words, the US is trying to defeat Russia not only without using nuclear weapons, but even without formally engaging in hostilities.

In this context, the declaration by the five nuclear powers on January 3, 2022, that “nuclear war should not be waged” and that “there can be no winners,” seems like a relic of the past. A proxy war between the nuclear powers is already underway; moreover, in the course of this conflict, more and more restrictions are being removed, both in terms of the weapon systems used and the participation of Western troops, as well as the geographical limits of the theater of war. It is possible to pretend that a certain ‘strategic stability’ is being maintained, but only if, like the US, a player sets the task of inflicting a strategic defeat on the enemy at the hands of its client state and expects that the enemy will not dare to use nuclear weapons.

Thus, the concept of strategic stability in its original form – the creation and maintenance of military-technical conditions to prevent a sudden massive nuclear strike – only partially retains its meaning under current conditions.

Strengthening nuclear deterrence could be the solution to the real problem of restoring strategic stability, which has been seriously disrupted by the ongoing and escalating conflict. To begin with, it is worth rethinking the concept of deterrence and, in the process, changing its name.

For example, instead of a passive, we should talk about an active form. The adversary should not remain in a state of comfort, believing that the war he is waging with the help of another country will not affect him in any way. In other words, it is necessary to put fear back into the minds and hearts of the enemy’s leaders. The beneficial sort of fear, it’s worth stressing.

It must also be recognized that the limits of purely verbal intervention have been exhausted at this stage of the Ukrainian conflict. Channels of communication all the way to the top must remain open around the clock, but the most important messages at this stage must be sent through concrete steps: doctrinal changes; military exercises to test them; underwater and aerial patrols along the coasts of the likely enemy; warnings about preparations for nuclear tests and the tests themselves; the imposition of no-fly zones over part of the Black Sea, and so on. The point of these actions is not only to demonstrate determination and readiness to use available capabilities to protect Russia’s vital interests, but –most importantly– to bring the enemy to a halt and encourage it to engage in serious dialogue.

The escalation ladder does not end here. Military-technical steps can be followed by real acts, warnings of which have already been given: for example, attacks on air bases and supply centers on the territory of NATO countries, and so on. There is no need to go further. We simply need to understand, and help the enemy to understand, that strategic stability in the real, not narrow, technical sense of the word is not compatible with armed conflict between nuclear powers, even if (for the time being) it is being waged indirectly.

It is unlikely that the enemy will accept this state of affairs easily and immediately. At the very least, they will need to realize that this is our position and draw the appropriate conclusions.

It is time for us to start revising the conceptual apparatus we use in matters of security strategy. We talk about international security, strategic stability, deterrence, arms control, nuclear non-proliferation and so on. These concepts emerged in the course of the development of Western – mainly American – political thought and found immediate practical application in US foreign policy. They are based on existing realities but adapted to American foreign policy objectives. We have tried to adapt them to our needs, but with mixed success.

It is time to move on and develop our own concepts that reflect Russia’s position in the world as well as its needs.

This article was first published by Russia in Global Affairs, translated and edited by the RT team:

Переосмысление стратегической стабильности

By Henry Hopwood-Phillips, Asia Times, 3/15/24

Henry Hopwood-Phillips is founder of Daotong Strategy (DS), a Singapore-based political consultancy. He has contributed to several magazines including American Affairs, Spectator and The Critic in the past.

“[There is] the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia.” – Samuel Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations” (1996).

The opening drama of the Ukraine war, involving sweeping drone shots, ant-like convoys and plans so secret that most Russian commanders received orders just 24 hours before the invasion, tended to derail meaningful analysis.

Rather than focus efforts on unpacking Moscow’s motivations and a series of nested conflicts, commentators preferred the more glamorous task of forecasting outcomes and timescales.

In President Vladimir Putin, the West found a scapegoat that united left and right with the latter throwing off the shackles of pacifism and relativism, and the former reveling in the reactionary identity of the opponent. To label Russian security concerns as anything other than sophistry risked being tarred as not only part of a fifth column but a dupe.

In those heady days, there was a tangible catharsis to swerving questions surrounding the casus belli and concentrating on trialing military hardware and tactics. In short, celebrating the destruction – an option not available against less politically acceptable opponents.

Over two years on, less glib narratives might have come to the fore yet Russia’s demonization persists – despite being rooted in precisely the solipsism that channeled fractious interests into a clash of arms in the first place; a conflict that has enabled Moscow to annex four regions, approximately a fifth of Ukraine.

It also leans on several historical accounts that have lost traction with reality. Fantasies include the notion that the Cold War was resolved by Moscow’s total submission rather than a staggered implosion in which only ideologically hostile elements proved capable of disciplining kleptocrats.

And the idea that peace, trade and globalization were the gifts of a liberal cornucopia that would turn viral, an assertion hard to square with the rise of illiberal powers such as China, Russia, Iran and India.

Such complacent narratives also leave the West woefully unprepared for changes in tack from non-liberal leaders. In March 2024, for example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban revealed presidential candidate Donald Trump’s position on the conflict, saying that “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war, which is why the war will end.”

In such an environment it is clear that the West knows what it supports: Ukraine is a free country and Western institutions have a right to amass any countries that wish to subscribe. Few in the West, however, are sure as to what the opposition stands for other than a garden variety of Death Star imperialism.

It is rare, for example, to find many who concern themselves with the fact that neutrality was written into Ukraine’s 1990 declaration of sovereignty and 1996 constitution, both repudiated in Kiev’s 2019 volte-face. A handful care to recall that bloc-based thinking has been foundational to Europe’s collective security for most of its history.

Formalized in the postwar period as the “indivisibility” principle, which advised that the “security of one nation” is considered “inseparable from other countries in its region,” it was enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act, the Paris Charter and innumerable other texts, and lately promoted by China as part of its Global Security Initiative (GSI).

At the heart of the conflict lies an essential fact: Russia was excluded from an expanding political West, which was unwilling to compromise its hegemonic ambitions while remaining vulnerable to the gradual erosion of its appendages. Moscow’s attempts to join the West on its own terms were consistently rebuffed, most notably in 2000–01 when Putin floated the idea of Russia joining NATO.

In brief, Moscow confronts a defense pact it is excluded from, while a framework of collective security which includes it is absent, causing a groundswell of fears rooted in NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign of Serbia in 1999 and its involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. To Putin, this suggests that far from entering a new enlightened age, security orders remain hegemonic.

His forebear, president Yeltsin, had warned in 1994 that NATO enlargement would bring about the prospect of a “Cold Peace” characterized by mistrust and fear. NATO activism in Serbia culminating in the Bucharest Summit (2008) declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would become members indicated that NATO aimed at enveloping Moscow.

If Russia’s Blizhnee Zarubezhe (Near Abroad) were to vanish in a mass of Western satellite states it would not take long for the Kremlin to be drowned by a tide of value shifts discrediting its rule. More concretely, there was also the risk that major assets such as the Sevastopol naval base, home to the Black Sea Fleet, might fall into the hands of US proxies.

Moreover, it is not clear that a broad consensus underpins Kiev’s hostile stance towards Russia. As late as 2014, a strong constituency preferred closer links with Moscow and today the total war has fatigued even its strongest supporters.

Yet Ukrainian elites deepened derussianization, suppressing the Russian language in civic life for example, and encouraged the US and UK to transform the Ukrainian armed forces, causing Putin to complain in 2022 that the country had been converted into a hostile “bridgehead.” The prospect of Ukraine repudiating its non-nuclear status, broached by President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference 2022, represented the final straw.

An unfashionable truth is that small nations on the doormat of hegemons are rarely permitted to challenge the latter’s agendas. There is a reason why the last time Ireland was able to stage large-scale offensives against Britain was the Dark Ages; why Cambodia and Laos are essentially client states; why America was able to detach Texas from Mexico with impunity.

In South America, Washington’s Monroe Doctrine simply made explicit what great powers typically kept implicit, and still Cuba attempted to defy it only to be confronted by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust.

Holding the geopolitical high ground, the West can afford to dismiss older mechanisms such as “spheres of influence” and goals like “balancing powers” as relics, the sort of thinking that harvested only global wars.

Russia, however, sees the abandonment of these concepts as attempts to convert victory into ideological imperialism, an escalation not unlike the Ottoman devshirme in which an enemy was not merely defeated but forced to resemble the former opponent.

The truancy of a framework capable of resolving lower-order logics or ideologies is palpable in such circumstances, not just intellectually – which is ironic given Western academia’s obsession with respecting and understanding the other – but also systematically in the sense that the only truly coercive part of the international apparatus, the UN Security Council, is subject to paralyzing vetoes.

Misrepresentations of Russia might boost short-term poll numbers but they rarely help resolve wars. The most popular accusation of imperialism is hardly an engaging explanatory model for Russian actions.

There is no evidence of plans to invade Moldova, Poland or the Baltic republics. Russia is already the world’s largest country and can barely govern its existing territory – facts compounded by distressing memories of trying to steer an ill-tempered Eastern European bloc.

Far more likely is that Ukraine’s wish to rid itself of neocolonial influence entails systemic “derussianization”, which Moscow finds geopolitically unsettling and emotionally insulting, not least due to Kiev’s formative role in Russian history which, according to Putin, renders it “inalienable.”

Many nations are polycentric with homelands that are not particularly close to contemporary capitals. To empathize, imagine the psychological impact of Wessex being pulled into a foreign power’s orbit, a Frankish homeland around Reims deviating from an alignment with the Paris Basin or Weimar Triangle, or Washington’s response to a UK attempt to ally with Russia. Madrid, in fact, has stopped only short of war to keep Barcelona and its hinterland bound to a union.

In hindsight, the West’s triumphalism unmoored Russia from the pretense of being a Western power – an alignment with roots in Peter the Great’s reign – encouraging it to identify with a resurgent East which rejects bloc politics and insists on the sovereign equality of its members.

The East, in essence, adheres to the sovereign internationalism the UN celebrated immediately after WWII. Its support for this flattened mode of relations is a reaction to an uptick in the West’s political will to enforce universal values – mounting interventions if necessary – under the rubric of human rights.

While these ideals appear palatable in the abstract, the West is often charged with appropriating ideals to pursue broader geopolitical ambitions, generating double standards in partial and selective application.

According to this view, the West has delegitimized – or at least created a hierarchy of – other value systems to such an extent that rising powers may wish to risk war rather than subject themselves to the moral hectoring and condemnation that accompanies a failure to adhere to western scripts, meaning the current system risks escalating rather than impeding global conflict.

Russia’s threat perceptions may have been exaggerated yet what matters in diplomacy is how a protagonist sees the world and not how the West would like them to see it. Key Western players knew that Ukrainian entry into NATO – articulated as a goal in the 2019 constitutional amendment – would be the thickest of red lines for Moscow, a direct challenge to its interests, yet it has remained willing to flex down to the very last Ukrainian.

There is a strong case that democracy is worth defending with arms no matter how flawed its decisions but such arguments from morality fall flat when they risk inducing world wars or nuclear threats. While international norms have undoubtedly been compromised, they have arguably been transgressed no more or less than US decisions to invade Vietnam or Iraq.

In the past, such statements would have been considered anodyne yet today – in the heyday of liberalism’s ideological monopoly – they are flagged as haw-hawism. In hindsight, the Cold War drummed an epistemic humility into the West that has long since evaporated.

Political premises become legal norms, which are eventually treated as natural law, forcing nations that have failed to develop in the same manner to infer their subordinate status.

The result has been not just a monoculture at home and hubris abroad, but also a naivety best encapsulated by the hope that war can be banned, or that the three ancient civilizations of Eurasia – China, Russia and Iran – are bound to vanish in a boundless liberal order. Such is the zealotry that when events deviate from theories the former are denigrated rather than the latter revised.

Behind mawkish ideals lurks the vanity that the globe shares a Western trajectory; that rationality as conceived by Westerners is identically conceived and deployed by others; that it is a unifying principle. Yet rationality underpins several political systems – authoritarian, Communist, hybrid and so on – all of which are capable of exerting or enforcing severely different versions of reality.

The West currently falls between two stools, failing to either commence construction of a world state – with the political compromises such a project would entail – or retire into a parochial liberalism that acknowledges its ideals as historically and geographically contingent.

Instead, it stands in a no-man’s-land in which global institutions, insofar as they exist, disclaim Western hegemony even while utilizing it, making the use of military firepower highly attractive to rising powers who do not have the same soft power resources to exploit.

At the heart of the Ukrainian conflict is a tension over how politics is conceived. The Russians subscribe to an ancient order in which the res publica is born through a people’s readiness to kill or die on its behalf. The act of taking lives or giving them – hence the importance of sacrifice in most early-stage states – identifies a community: the people and its myths are to an extent the chicken and egg of sovereignty.

At root, it openly relies on violence as a coercive tool. The West switched from this order towards a more peaceful one – which depends on far less violent forms of coercion – in the postwar period, eccentrically arguing that conventional conceptions of power were obsolete after devastation in two world wars and being partitioned in the subsequent conflict.

It did so by exchanging the explicit strictures of the Christian faith for its soft patterning in the likes of Kant’s “Weltburgerbund” and Habermas’ call for a cosmopolitan order which established a regime of “global governance without a world government” – switches in register that made Western norms easier to export without inviting charges of imperialism.

Rather than indulge in judgment on which framework is more true or morally laudable, it is worth highlighting that the West loses the moral high ground if it proves more willing to risk nuclear war than establish a framework that acknowledges the validity of concerns that stem from different political systems.

While it remains open to dispute whether the post-Christian cultures of Western democracies are suitable as paradigms for the rest of the world, a realistic picture of conflict resolution must conceive of a diversity of socio-political orders in terms of a meta-ethical or meta-political plurality if resolutions are to be rediscovered at the point of a pen rather than the barrel a gun.

YouTube link here.