Russia’s demonization undermines Western universalism

“[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.

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.