Ukraine and the End of Dreams

How many more delusions are still to be burned away?

“I’m struck,” breathed the New York Times Frank Bruni, observing the invasion of Ukraine, “at this sense of disbelief that all of us seem to feel… This feels like a page from the 20th century. And here we are in the 21st century. And I’m struck by this sense I pick up in everyone around me that the world, we were somehow past this, that war in Europe was something that we wouldn’t see.”

“The Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries,” echoed Thomas Friedman. “Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower – but in a 21st-century globalized world.”

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country,” exclaimed John Kerry, eight whole years ago.

I’m struck, for my part, by the uniformity of the language we’ve seen used by much of the Western world’s blurry-eyed and slack-jawed commentariat to describe their feelings these last few days. By the nearly identical incredulity that something is now happening which is not meant to happen, that the world is not functioning as it’s supposed to function.

Watching as so many stumble around in a daze, as if having just been awakened momentarily from a deep slumber, I can’t help but recall the neoconservative Robert Kagan’s 2009 book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. I don’t think it was a great book, frankly, but I do love the title. Because for at least three decades now the Western world has been living in a dream.

In this dream, history left the past behind and humanity was reborn into a new world. In this world progress only marched, inexorably, in one direction: toward a great flattening of space and time and difference, in which all the peoples of the earth, once fallen and scattered, would be knit back together again by the golden threads of communication and commerce. First Europe and then in time the world would be united, whole and free. Someday they would, together, take to the stars and embrace their boundless destiny.

There were still challenges to be overcome, of course. Poverty and parasitic worms; rogue states and trans-national troublemakers. But such remaining unpleasantness was merely an expected holdover from the drama of mankind’s previous existence. In time all his tribal national loyalties, his fervors and irrationalities, his envies and hatreds, would be subsumed as his material privations and wants were met and his understanding grew. Eventually the better angels of his nature would triumph and War would fade from the earth – along with Famine, Pestilence, and, perhaps in time, even Death.

Kant’s Kingdom of Perpetual Peace would at last be established on earth.

This was the dream of global liberalism, made dream-able by the momentary advent of unipolar American hyperpower in the wake of the last Cold War. For years since that moment every bump and jolt that threatened to jostle the sleepwalking Western world out of this dream, from America’s disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the rise of China, seems to have provoked only a little tossing and turning between snores.

But now it seems Vladimir Putin may have succeeded at last. Startled awake by another major war in Europe, the liberal establishment may have, just maybe, now sat up and realized they’ve been under the spell of the “Great Delusion” – as the indefatigably realist scholar John Mearsheimer has memorably dubbed it – this whole time. And that in the 21st century the world is pretty much the same as it ever was in any other century.

Maybe now you think this is yet another essay on whether NATO expansion was historical folly, and whether war in Ukraine might have been avoided by a more realistic foreign policy. But I promise you it’s not (plus there’s a little twist at the end). I want to put those debates aside to try to make a broader point here. Because the delusions that have prevailed for so long now have run deeper than international relations theory.

When the Berlin Wall fell and American power seemed poised to transform everything in its image, it created an illusion of the total malleability and perfectibility of the world. No longer was there anything fixed and unchangeable forever.

Lost was Thucydides’ ancient wisdom that history is valuable not as entertainment but as “a possession for all time” precisely because “knowledge of the past [serves] as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human events must resemble if it does not reflect it.” There were no longer any hard, timeless truths to learn from history, because we had transcended history.

And so were lost old truths like the fact that nations inevitably fight when they feel compelled to do so by “fear, honor, and interest,” or that the atrocities of war are always “such as happen and will always happen as long as human nature is the same.”

For indeed we could no longer speak of any fixed human nature at all. How could there be such a thing, if a new, last man was to emerge and usher us into a better world?

But once human nature was rejected, the human element of life soon became impossible to truly understand. How could a motivating factor as immaterial as “honor” be grasped at all? Or faith? Let alone something like Asabiyyah?

In the end the rejection of human nature and the need to understand it detached politics from the realities of life, and death, and therefore all risk. It was now about perfecting systems, tweaking marginal tax rates, and raising PISA scores with the right nudge. Politics was now a simulation game, to be played by technocrats and livestreamed for kicks by elected careerists.

Then Putin showed up willing to pay the Iron Price for what he desired, and suddenly everything looks different. Whether the “liberal international order” and the age of globalization will survive this moment remains to be seen, but this century isn’t going to go as was planned. The realization has already dawned: politics is not a game; politics is about power, and power is based on violence. Politics is actually a matter of life and death.

There is only one problem for Putin: all his own clever plans seem to also be crumbling to dust between his fingers.

Because if Putin’s goal was to prevent the emergence of a sovereign and independent-minded Ukraine, to improve his security vis-à-vis NATO, or to drive a wedge into Europe and destroy the Western order, he has failed spectacularly. Instead, thanks to fear and honor, his invasion has managed to unite the whole of Europe in a way that a few weeks ago was unimaginable. Even the Germans are remilitarizing.

And if Putin or his generals thought that Ukraine’s people would welcome his forces as liberators, its cities would surrender, and its leader flee, this was a self-induced delusion. Absolutely enraged Ukrainians have instead put up ferocious resistance, flocking to defend their homes and their nation. Ukraine’s army says it has raised some 100,000 new troops in just the last 24 hours, mostly ordinary citizens who have signed up to fight street-by-street in grinding urban warfare.

If Russian military leaders were counting on pulling off an easy blitzkrieg campaign that would succeed in only a few days, as they appear to have been, this plan evaporated on first contact with the enemy. Russian special forces sent to quickly seize crucial airfields near Kyiv were apparently annihilated. Russia’s air force has somehow still failed to secure air superiority. Column after Column after Russian military column has been totally wrecked.

Seemingly unprepared for an extended operation, Russian logistics appear to be a shambles. Its aircraft don’t seem to have enough munitions to provide proper air support. Mechanized units are ending up lost, out of fuel, and ridiculed all over the internet. As of Monday morning the front remained some 30 km north of the capital – the same place it was Saturday. Estimates of Russian causalities after four days of fighting range from hundreds to thousands – compared, just for context, to 15,000 Soviet soldiers lost in Afghanistan over 10 years.

All this could be more easily dismissed as just predictable Ukrainian and Western propaganda if it wasn’t becoming more and more obvious by the day that Russia is floundering in achieving any of its major military objectives. Russia’s forces may still recover and muddle through to victory in the end, at immense cost to themselves and Ukraine. But the paper tiger of unstoppable Russian military might – the core narrative of Putin’s political legitimacy – has been torn apart. Already two of Russia’s richest oligarchs, Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska, have released statements openly opposing the war.

Did Putin really understand nothing of the heroism of the human spirit when defending home and loved ones against even the greatest odds? Did he ever read anything about the Blitz, about how bombardment only increased the British people’s resolve? For that matter did he learn anything from the history of fierce Slavic fierce resolve in the face of foreign invasion? Did he know nothing of Warsaw? Or Stalingrad? No, apparently he didn’t really understand any of these lessons from humanity’s past. Perhaps because his world had shrank to no longer be much of a human world at all.

So as his dreams of being the next Peter the Great die in Ukraine, and the chance of polonium finding its way into his borscht grows exponentially, Putin may also soon learn the truth that politics – and war, that extension of politics by other means – is indeed not a game, but “a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.”

Putin set out to, in his words, strike a blow at an “empire of lies” by attacking Ukraine, and in a way he has succeeded. He probably just didn’t expect this to include his own as well.

In the end the “international order” may have been saved for now after all, rescued from fantasies of perpetual peace and harmony before an even larger conflict came to bear, not by liberal technocracy but by Russia’s hubristic delusion about the reality of its own power, and by the nationalistic bravery of Ukrainians.

But as the fighting continues, and the rest of us try to rub the sleep from our eyes, it may be best if we all take a moment to consider: what other dreams might we still be stubbornly clinging to? How many more delusions are left to be burned away in our current age of fire and revelation?