Fighting for What Has Vanished?

Søren Kierkegaard, the 19^th century Danish philosopher, once characterized a certain personality type as continually “fighting for what has vanished.” Times change, but they stubbornly refuse to let go of the past, spending all their energy trying to recapture that which no longer exists.

In his landmark 1998 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington countered his former Harvard student Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 thesis that the collapse of the Soviet Union had signaled the “end of history.” Communism had lost, the West had won. The whole world would now align with Western values and live happily within a new world order orchestrated and administered by the United States and its Western European allies. Case closed.

Huntington contested this view, outlining a much more sophisticated and nuanced view of geopolitics. While it is true that WWII left much of the world in shambles, economically and culturally, and that America emerged as the ascendant, dominant force, the world since has changed.

After WWII, and perhaps especially in the aftermath of the Cold War, a new American “transnational imperialism” had replaced the older European “territorial empire.” All our ducks were in a row.

Yet despite this, and contra Fukuyama, Huntington showed that the West’s influence worldwide, in historic terms, was actually waning and American hegemony receding. The non-Western world was moving away from Western domination and consolidating around their own independence.

Over the years since WWII, in the areas of economic development, education, technical expertise, military might, population, and civilizational identity, the non-West has been ascendent. Rather than, say, a postwar bipolar world, Huntington identified no less than seven or eight separate “civilizations,” independent of national borders, moving in different directions. These civilizations include: Latin American, Orthodox, Muslim, Sinic, Buddhist, Hindu, Japanese, and Sub-Saharan.

Clustered around shared identities such as religion, history, culture, race, tribal allegiance, and other political and social markers, these civilizations have been defining themselves increasingly as separate entities with divergent interests. And, if anything, they purposefully reject Western values and norms.

Given this, Huntington argued that we would do well to respect these newly emerging civilizations, if for no other reason than that to do otherwise simply denies reality. Geopolitics has changed.

Since the world has been moving away from what Huntington called a 200-year “Western blip” (owing to its advancements during the industrial revolution), what’s required now is a fresh look and an intelligent retrenchment of sorts, since the world in which we live is now multipolar.

The trouble is, we don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Certainly our leaders haven’t. It’s hard to underestimate how prodigious has been their efforts in establishing and extending a unilateral American hegemony (with Western Europe as junior partners). It has been brazen, arrogant, and nothing if not ambitious.

The plan was to mop up what was left of the former U.S.S.R. (including its newly freed satellite nations in Eastern Europe) and lure Communist China into a global financial arrangement that eventually would democratize and westernize the erstwhile Middle Kingdom.

The strategy involved nothing less than complete cultural and economic control of the entire world, administered, naturally, by the West (but mostly by the U.S. given its unparalleled wealth, military power, and cultural influence). Jeffersonian democracy would bloom everywhere. Every single human being on the planet would be blessed with unceasing prosperity and peace.

Yet despite such glorious promises of freedom, democracy, universal human rights, and a never-ending supply of rainbows and unicorns, there’s a darker side to this tale. And some of it, I suspect, we’re now seeing being played out in the tragic conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, U.S. and European politicians and businessmen swooped into Russia and its satellite nations buying up their most valuable assets, purchased mostly from former high-ranking communist party officials who, having stolen these assets from the people, became instant multi-billionaires.

One need only consider the infamous “Russian oligarchs” who proceeded to buy up vast holdings throughout the West, with the rest of their ill-gotten gains safely deposited in Swiss bank accounts. As a result, most of these former Soviet states became kleptocracies funded by corrupt Western money.

On the political front, as it relates to Ukraine, President Bush promised the Russians that there would be no expansion of NATO into Ukraine. Then, presidents Clinton and Bush II decided NATO expansion was a good idea. Poking the bear, anyone?

Later, in 2014, when the U.S. foreign policy establishment decided regime change in Ukraine was desirable, they engineered a “color revolution,” effectively removing its democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, leading ultimately to the ascendancy of Volodymyr Zelensky, a more pro-Western political figure.

A color revolution, by the way, or “State Capture,” is a strategy developed during the Cold War by Professor Gene Sharp, who headed up a prominent group known as “the CIA at Harvard.”

The purpose of a color revolution is to replace, clandestinely, foreign regimes without the use of direct military intervention, by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass rallies (“peaceful protests”) and other acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage. All under the radar.

Significantly, color revolutions are designed to undermine disfavored foreign governments by non-attribution, using third-party NGOs in coordination with the State Department, Department of Defense, and the CIA. This reflects, by the way, an increasingly disturbing trend where state policy objectives are outsourced to private entities, again, under the radar.

All this has been cheered on silently (or not so silently) by our globalist elites, the Davos crowd, who see these revolutions as further movement toward one-world governance run by the West, i.e., themselves. On the not so silent front, George Soros’ “Open Society Foundation” proudly touts its successful involvement in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution.

The U.S. government, as the leader of this globalist coalition, has been involved in every color revolution since 2000, including the 2005 Orange Revolution as well as the above-mentioned 2013-4 Euromaiden Revolution, both in Ukraine.

The Euromaiden Revolution occurred in the immediate aftermath of Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an EU trade agreement, choosing Russia’s trade bloc instead. The West was not happy, despite repeated assurances that neither NATO nor the EU would interfere in the domestic policies of what was supposedly an independent state.

Since the Euromaiden Revolution, Ukraine has been embroiled in an eight-year civil war pitting mostly Russian-speaking and culturally Russian Eastern Ukraine (with Russia’s heavy hand, of course) against the West-leaning Western Ukraine (with the West’s heavy hand, of course). There’s been violence on both sides.

During this time, despite claims of its non-aligned neutrality, the U.S. has poured roughly $2.7 billion in military “aid” into the country.

As an aside, a cynic might reasonably wonder how Eisenhower’s aptly named “military-industrial complex” has benefited in all this. Needless to say, defense contractors have made out like bandits over the last 70 years.

But there’s another problem as well. And it’s cultural. Huntington made the argument that the greatest influence within any given civilization is…religion. So how do Russian and Eastern European religious affectations coincide with the neoliberal assertions of the West’s new world order?

The NWO promotes a form of materialist progressivism which involves not only economic and social modernization but secular humanism, science, rationalism, and pragmatism, contemporary Western values all.

It also champions the idea of “universality” or “objectivity,” neither of which these cultures (or their religion) naturally support. Similarly, they are repulsed by the West’s decadent influence of relativism, egoism, wokism, as well as the crass consumerism globalists assume is universally appealing.

So what’s my point? Simply this: while I recognize that the former KGB officer, Vladmir Putin, is corrupt, vicious, and has malign designs on the region, I am highly disturbed by the unthinking jingoism and emotionally-driven bloodlust here in the West that seems to define the conflict in simplistic, black and white terms. Ukraine good, Russia bad. We’re angels, they’re the devil incarnate. As they say, the first casualty of war is the truth.

That said, I am hardly unaware of the possibility that Putin’s actions reflect a perverse Tsarist dream. His heroes are, purportedly, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, harkening back to a time of Russian military, cultural, and religious dominance. It was they who, in combination, first consolidated fro Russia the area we now know as Ukraine.

Regardless, Putin has been strategic in marshaling his ambitions by building up his military and creating economic conditions that further his cause (think the exportation of oil and gas). While the West dithers, Putin schemes.

I recently saw the head of the German military react to the events in Ukraine by saying that he never thought he’d ever be involved in another war. The head of their military! Putin senses our weakness.

Meanwhile, not bound by the niceties of Western pacifistic dilettantism, Putin has consolidated his power and is running the country with an iron fist. His goals, despite what we hear in the media, may appear crazy to us, but not to him. He is cold, calculating, and indeed very rational, even if diabolical.

My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine – and the people of Russia – neither of whom want or desire this war. It appears to me as yet another example of dynastic powers fighting it out at the expense of the people, the West through circuitous and stealth measures (not least economic) and Russia by employing more traditional kinetic warfare.

On a certain level, I almost wish both sides could lose. For while I’m appalled at Putin’s barbarism, I’m not sure I have any great desire to make Ukraine safe for George Soros either.

Of course, in an imperfect world one must choose. And in that sense, it’s an easy choice.

After all, for centuries, the Ukrainian people have been made innocent pawns to the vainglorious ambitions of powerful outside forces. Their suffering has been incalculable, and any decent person should wish for their suffering to stop.

As such, I pray the war ends quickly and that Ukraine emerges victorious.