There is a chance of Ukraine splitting in half, which historical factors would indicate that a split might be far less terrible than the one in Yugoslavia but more harsh than that of Czechoslovakia. – Samuel Huntington,” Clash of Civilizations” ( 1996 ).
The opening episode of the Ukraine conflict, which featured extensive drone strikes, ant-like convoys, and plans but secret that most Russian leaders received orders only 24 hours before the conquest, frequently caused significant analysis to go unnoticed.
Rather than focus efforts on , unpacking Moscow’s desires and a series of nested problems, critics preferred the more beautiful work of forecasting results and durations.
The West found a victim in President Vladimir Putin, one that unified the left and right, with the latter removing the restrictions of pacifism and relativity and the latter delighting in the opposition’s conservative identity. To label Soviet security issues as anything other than hyperbole risked being tarred as not only element of a second paragraph but a dupe.
In those dark years, there was a real emotion to swerving questions about the casus belli and focusing on evaluating military tactics and equipment. In brief, celebrating the destruction – an option no applicable against less socially acceptable opponents.
Over the course of two years, less slick stories may have emerged, but Russia’s demonization persists despite being rooted in exactly the solipsism that led to a conflict that allowed Moscow to seize four regions, roughly a fifth of Ukraine, in the first place.
It even leans on various historical balances that have lost momentum with reality. The Cold War was ultimately ended by Moscow’s complete submission, according to fantasies, as opposed to a symbiotic implosion where only philosophically antagonistic elements emerged as the only ones who could discipline kleptocrats.
And the idea that harmony, industry and globalization were the gifts of a democratic cornucopia that may change popular, an assertion hard to circle with the rise of authoritarian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and India.
For comfortable narratives even make the West woefully unprepared for tack changes from non-liberal leaders. In March 2024, for instance, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban revealed political candidate Donald Trump’s placement on the conflict, saying that” He will never supply a penny in the Ukraine- Russia war, which is why the war will stop”.
In a situation like this, it is obvious that the West is aware of its support: Ukraine is a free nation, and Western institutions have the right to assemble any nations 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.
For instance, it is uncommon to find many people who are upset about the fact that the Ukraine’s 1990 declaration of sovereignty and the 1996 constitution, both of which were rejected in Kiev’s 2019 volte-face, are written in neutral. A handful care to recall that bloc- based thinking has been foundational to Europe’s collective security for most of its history.
The “indivisibility” principle, which established that the” security of one nation” is “inseparable from other countries in its region,” was first introduced in the postwar era as the “indivisibility” principle and was later endorsed by China as part of its Global Security Initiative ( GSI), which advised that the” security of one nation” is “inseparable from other countries in its region.” It is enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act, the Paris Charter, and countless other
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. Russia’s attempts to join the West on its own terms were frequently rejected, most notably between 2000 and 2001, when Putin suggested that Russia join 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. This suggests to Putin that security orders are still hegemonic even though we are not yet in a new enlightened era.
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’s activism in Serbia, which culminated with the Romanian Summit’s ( 2008 ) declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would join, demonstrated that NATO was trying to encircle 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 specifically, there was a possibility that US proxies might own large assets, including the Sevastopol naval base, which houses the Black Sea Fleet.
Moreover, it is not clear that a broad consensus underpins Kiev’s hostile stance towards Russia. A sizable constituency preferred closer ties to Moscow as recently as 2014, and even its most ardent supporters are now exhausted from the war.
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 last straw was the idea that Ukraine might reject its non-nuclear status, which President Volodymyr Zelensky raised at the Munich Security Conference in 2022.
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 Dark Ages was the last time Ireland was able to launch massive offensives against Britain, and why America was able to detach Texas from Mexico without fear of reprisals.
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.
The West can afford to view outdated mechanisms like” spheres of influence” and objectives like “balancing powers” as relics, the kind of thinking that only produced global wars while maintaining its geopolitical position.
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.
In such circumstances, the truancy of a framework capable of resolving lower-order logics or ideologies is palpable, not just intellectually, which is ironic given Western academia’s obsession with respecting and understanding the other, but also systemically, in the sense that the UN Security Council, the only truly coercive component of the international apparatus, is subject to paralyzing vetoes.
Misrepresentations of Russia might boost short- term poll numbers but they rarely help resolve wars. The most widely refuted imperialism is hardly a compelling explanation of Russian behavior.
There is no evidence of plans to invade Moldova, Poland or the Baltic republics. Russia is already the largest nation in the world, and the country has no idea how to govern its current territory. This is made worse by the agonizing experience of trying to steer an Eastern European bloc that is not well-tempered.
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 countries have homelands that do n’t particularly resemble contemporary capitals, and many are polycentric. 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 has actually stopped short of fighting 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.
In essence, the East adheres to the UN’s declaration of sovereign internationalism right after World War II. 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.
Although these ideals appear appealing in the abstract, the West is frequently accused of appropriating them in order to pursue broader geopolitical goals, resulting in 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.
Although Russia’s threat perceptions may have been exaggerated, diplomacy is about seeing the world as a protagonist sees it rather than the West’s. 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 argument that democracy is deserving of supporting with arms no matter how error-prone its decisions are, but such morality arguments fall flat when they raise the possibility of 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 viewed as anodyne, but today, in the heyday of liberalism’s ideological monopoly, they are deemed to be 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 end result has been a naivety best summed up by the hope that war can be stopped or that the three ancient civilizations of Eurasia, China, Russia, and Iran, are bound to vanish in a boundless liberal order, which has resulted in a monoculture at home and hubris abroad. 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 world shares a Western trajectory, that Westerners are equally disposed to use rationality, and that it is a guiding 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 squabbles between two stools, failing to either begin the creation of a world state with the political compromises that would accompany it, or to transition 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.
A conflict over the conception of politics is at the heart of the Ukrainian conflict. 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 donating or bringing lives to terms with a community is known as the” chicken and egg of sovereignty,” which is expressed in most early-stage states.
At root, it openly relies on violence as a coercive tool. In the postwar period, the West bizarrely argued that traditional conceptions of power were no longer relevant after the devastation of two world wars and the division of the country in the following conflict. It then shifted from this order to a more peaceful one, which relies on far less violent forms of coercion.
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.
The West loses the moral high ground if it proves more willing to risk nuclear war than to develop a framework that acknowledges the validity of concerns brought on by various political systems, rather than to be judgmental about which framework is more true or morally commendable.
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.
Daotong Strategy ( DS ), a political consultancy based in Singapore, was founded by Henry Hopwood-Phillips. He has contributed to several magazines including , American Affairs,  , Spectator , and , The Critic , in the past.