Paralysis of will: What happened to the West? asks Yury Fedorov

The much vaunted offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces ended in failure, not least because the United States and Ukraine’s European allies in the west failed to supply weapons on time.

The United States has indecently delayed making decisions on the supply of Abrams tanks, ATACMS missiles, and combat aircraft to Ukraine, and the number of these weapons transferred or planned to be transferred to Ukraine is minimal.

There are persistent rumors that the leaders of a number of Western countries are instilling in Kyiv the idea of the need for a compromise with Moscow, an exchange of territories for peace, although there is no reason to believe that Russia will agree to any compromise solution to the conflict.

The possible victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election could result in both a cessation of American aid to Ukraine and a weakening of NATO.

EU member state Hungary is blocking the allocation of vital funds to Ukraine, and the European giants cannot or do not wish to put Budapest in its place.

The matter is not limited to Ukraine. The Global South, which is sometimes referred to as the “world majority” or “non-Western civilisations,” is demanding that Israel cease fire in Gaza, which will lead to the rescue of Hamas terrorists.

Western ruling circles are persistently making it clear to Israel that these demands should be heeded.

Demonstrations in support of Palestinian terrorists are taking place in European capitals, attracting hundreds of thousands of people.

Some leading Western media generally avoid calling terrorists “terrorists”, inventing various euphemisms.

It appears that the West is not prepared to use the vast economic, technological and military resources it has to defend its values. It is suffering from paralysis of will.

Clash of civilisations or the end of history?

The origins of this paralysis of will go back to the early 1990s. Immediately after the collapse of Soviet communism and the Soviet empire, the Western intellectual and political community was faced with the question: what would the new world system be like? There were essentially two answers.

One was given by the prominent American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who wrote several works under the same title, “The Clash of Civilsations.”

The post-Cold War world, Huntington argued, would be a field of confrontation among civilisations—trans-state communities united by a common history, culture, traditions, and religion.

Huntington called radical Islam the main threat to the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West. Without going into the details of this theory, and it is important to emphasise here Huntington’s main conclusion: the coming era will be a period of acute conflicts and wars. Not ideological, as was the case during the Cold War, but civilisational wars, and the West must be ready for this both politically and military terms.

Paralysis of will

However, in the early 1990s, a different system of views, which was originally formulated by Huntington’s student, Francis Fukuyama, under the name “end of history”, came to dominate Western political discourse and strategic thinking.

After the victory of the West in the Cold War and the discrediting of communism as an ideology and political system, supporters of this concept argued that liberal democracy and the market economy had finally won. The West no longer had existential enemies, and therefore it was possible and necessary to focus on the global spread and establishment of the Western model.

From this flowed a strategic doctrine, which assumed, among other things, that Russia was entering the community of developed democratic states, and the main threat not only to the West, but also to the globalising international community were the rudiments of the outgoing system.

Russia needed to be involved in common efforts with the West, involved in the fight against terrorism, accelerating its inclusion in the Judeo-Christian civilisation.

The assumption, even a purely hypothetical one, about the possibility of a major war in Europe was considered at best a relic of the Cold War.

Accordingly, European states minimised their armed forces and defence spending, and the military development of the United States was focused on local, mainly anti-terrorist wars in the global South and on confrontation with China.

The latter, which was quickly turning into an economic giant with obvious expansionist aspirations, did not fit into the idea of the triumph of Western civilisation. However, de-ideologisation and a market economy, supporters of the “end of history” believed, would inevitably lead to the democratisation of China’s political regime and its inclusion in a single world economic and political system.

Until this happens, it is necessary to have a military capability capable of containing Chinese geopolitical ambitions.

In the 1990s, it seemed that the “end of history” was indeed approaching.

However, already in the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that this was not happening.

The shocking failure of a strategy based on this concept was the failed attempt to force democratic order in Iraq and Afghanistan. China has challenged the collective West, increasingly assertively strengthening its position in the global South.

The semi-market, semi-state economy does not lead to democratisation of the Chinese political regime, and impressive economic growth increases foreign policy ambitions, fraught with a military clash with the United States over Taiwan.

The inconsistency of the idea of the “end of history”, and the steadily approaching triumph of liberal democracy, is obvious, but the West does not yet have another strategic concept.

There is no obvious appeal to the logic of a “clash of civilizations.”

This is hampered, firstly, by the inertia of thinking, the inability of the majority of the Western intellectual community to admit the bankruptcy of their views, and secondly, by the unpreparedness of the ruling elites for profound changes in economic and military policy, for the mobilisation of forces and the means necessary to protect civilisation. This, in fact, is the essence of paralysis of the will.

What to do with Russia?

The most dangerous manifestation of paralysis of will is the lack of an effective strategy for countering Russian military-political expansion by the United States and a group of leading European states.

For a long time, from the early 1990s until February 24th, 2022, their policy was based on the belief that after the collapse of communism, Russia had ceased to be an enemy of the West and was gradually moving closer to it; that it is possible and necessary to negotiate with Moscow; that the bursts of aggression that erupted from time to time, such as the attack on Georgia and the annexation of Crimea, were nothing more than unprincipled deviations from the main trend of Russian political evolution, which, moreover, can, at least partially, be explained by the mistakes of the West, which did not take into account Russia’s security interests , as well as the overload of Russian political thinking with stereotypes inherited from the past.

The unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and the ultimatum put forward on the eve of it for the United States and NATO to withdraw not only from the former USSR, but also from Central and Eastern Europe forced Western elites to more realistically assess both Russia and their own policies towards it.

The formula about Russia as the main threat to European and international security appeared in NATO policy documents and in statements by leading Western leaders.

the West

There is now a growing understanding in political and military circles in the United States and many European countries that if Ukraine is defeated, NATO will have to fight Russia.

However, while saying A, the West is not saying B—at least not yet.

It seems that in many capitals of the states of the collective West the dominant idea is that neither Ukraine nor Russia can be allowed to fail.

In other words, Russia needs to be preserved as a full-fledged subject of the world and especially the European system in the hope that over time, most likely after Putin’s departure, circles and individuals capable of moderating the aggressiveness of foreign policy will come to power. As a result, the political will of the West in this direction is, if not paralyzed, then significantly weakened.

The lack of political will and determination among the leading Western states to use all their resources to defeat Russia, among other things, is explained by a lack of understanding of the underlying motives of Russian policy.

Of course, we cannot exclude the possibility that Putin’s heirs will pursue a more cautious policy on the world stage for some time. However, history shows that each time after the thaw Moscow fell into a state of aggression.

For centuries, the alpha and omega of the foreign policy of the Moscow Principality and the Moscow Kingdom, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union was expansion, and the means of its implementation was military force. Historical experience was fixed in the consciousness of the Russian nation: the annexation of new lands and the expansion of the empire became its goal and raison d’être.

From the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China,

From the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube…

This is the Russian kingdom… And it will never pass away,

Somehow the Spirit foresaw and Daniel predicted.

This is how Fyodor Tyutchev, an extraordinary poet but a somewhat mediocre diplomat, formulated the foreign policy ambitions of the Russian state and society. The dream of borders along the Elbe, Danube, Euphrates and Ganges still haunts the minds of the Russian ruling class. By invading Ukraine and blackmailing the West with nuclear war, Putin only once again tried to realise the “previsions of the Spirit.”

Therefore, if Russia is not defeated, a repetition of aggression is inevitable.

The Collective West and the Global South

The Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent events once again demonstrated that attempts to find some kind of agreement with radical terrorist forces, to involve them in mutually beneficial relations, and with the help of concessions to push them to renounce aggression, are untenable.

European Jews

At the same time, the Hamas invasion and the atrocities it committed against the Israeli population made the destruction of this and other terrorist organisations in the Middle East, and the radical weakening of their main sponsor and inspirer, Iran, justified not only politically, but also legally and morally.

However, the leading countries of the collective West have once again taken a half-hearted position: supporting Israel and recognising its right to defence, they are simultaneously persuading it to reduce the intensity of hostilities, succumbing to pressure from the global South and anti-Israeli factions, and in fact, the ever present anti-Semitic radical left forces in the Western world.

Leaving aside the question of where the line between terrorists and peaceful Palestinian Arabs lies, let us dwell on the logic of the Western position.

It is simple: by preventing Israel from completely defeating Hamas, a significant part of the ruling circles of the West is trying to avoid complications with the global South.

This state of affairs is truly discouraging: the collective West is giving in to a loose conglomerate of countries that, with the exception of China, are dependent upon it, and are unable to compete with it either in terms of the level and quality of life, or in technological and military potential.

Is everything hopeless?

In the twentieth century, the West several times faced challenges that could question its existence, but each time it was able to mobilise forces and neutralise them.

In the late 1930s, Britain and France resisted the temptation to accept Nazi expansion, abandoned the Munich policy, and entered the war with Hitler’s Germany.

In December 1941, overcoming mass isolationist sentiments, the United States entered the war.

In the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s, the West built a system of defence against Soviet expansion and prevented the threat from communist parties that undermined its position from within. The list goes on.

Another thing is important: each time we had to overcome paralysis of will.

There are signs that this paralysis will be overcome today; the ruling elites of the Western world are beginning to at least understand the scale of the Russian threat.

Influential American and European media and think tanks are publishing very alarming materials about the dangerous consequences of Ukraine’s defeat for Europe.

Practical discussions have begun on ways to confiscate Russian assets – about $300 billion – to transfer them to Ukraine, which could compensate for the withdrawal of Western aid as a result of domestic political squabbles in the United States and Europe.

And perhaps most encouraging of all is that Israel is not yielding to pressure, is not stopping the destruction of Hamas and, possibly, is preparing to eliminate Hezbollah.

To quote from Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s play The Tragedie of Gorbuduc (1562) “you should hope for the best, but you should prepare for the worst.”