A New Kidnapped West, or The Revenge of the Dystopians: A Philosophical Critique of a Self-fulfilling Tragedy in Modern International Relations

BY Théodore Bogaty

“Moon, valley, dew, death.”[1] László Krasznahorkai, Hungarian master of the apocalypse and recent Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, sees these four words as capturing the essence of the human epic. He gives this summation its historical form when he writes: “The wholly realm of history […] turns out, for their path leads but from war to war, and never from war to peace […], for there is no Way Out.”[2]

Modern international relations has long found reassurance in Clausewitz’s famous claim that war is the continuation of politics by other means.[3] The phrase suggests that war, however destructive, remained subordinate to political reason. If war could be understood as an instrument of policy, then it could also be mastered, given enough ingenuity and command of strategy.

This was the illusion: not simply that war could be prevented, but that it could be contained by the very political rationality that repeatedly made it possible. We believed we could reduce its danger to “residual” forms, exceptional moments that would be distant and manageable. I argue that this illusion is the very reason war has occurred again, including on the ‘Western soil’ despite the atrocities of the World Wars that should have been enough to deter any ordinarily constituted human being from ever repeating them. We missed the essential point: in the endless movement from peace to war and from war back to peace, there is no such thing as a genuine and lasting peace. Peacetime is never more than a pre-war or post-war condition.

In his 1983 essay A Kidnapped West,[4] Milan Kundera warned us of a civilizational failure in which the West was allowing itself to fall into a deadly trap. During the late Cold War, when Kundera was performing his critical analysis, this trap was the cultural and political submission of Central Europe to Soviet Russia.. Today, what remains of the West faces a new trap it has let itself fall into: the inescapability of war. By blurring the line between times of peace and times of war even further, we eroded one of the last secular substitutes for theodicy left to the political community and became the very harbingers of doom we had once accused visionary dystopias of being.

Perhaps this is also why we failed to learn the lesson of the Paris settlement after the First World War. Archibald Wavell, a British veteran of the Palestine campaign, said of it: “After ‘the war to end war,’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’”[5] After all, we did say ‘never again’ after the Second World War, just as we did after the First. Yet war persists in our societies more than ever, in diffuse forms—sometimes unseen, yet still experienced as such.

Caught in our own mirage, and under a constant flood of information about the misery and atrocities unfolding around the world, we are now incapable of distinguishing true peacetime from wartime. As early as 1932 the dystopian writer Aldous Huxley had already identified this pathology, long before the development of the modern communication channels we know today, calling it the ‘soma drug’ in Brave New World.[6] Through this drug that lulls consciences to sleep, silences inner revolts, and pacifies passions by replacing moral judgment with comfort, conformity, and the illusion of permanent stability, Huxley named the danger of a society that neutralizes both thought and feeling, not by suppressing violence, but by dissolving the capacity to recognize it as such.

Through repeated conditioning to violence, our moral vigilance, along with our capacity for shock and condemnation, becomes anesthetized. And our very perception of the boundary between good and evil—or at least the minimal, often intuitive and performative, idea we had of it—begins to erode. As a result, we cease to be what Paul Ricœur calls capable human beings, who recognize that “any other life, by reason of its capacities, is just as important as mine.”[7] By ceasing to exercise these basic human capabilities, we undermine our natural capacity to understand ourselves as responsible for our actions, to recognize others as both similar and irreducibly different, and to remain capable of acting through our will.

In a world where war feels constantly close—close enough to fear, yet distant enough to absolve us—this kidnapping of our primary ethical capabilities becomes a trap. In a last attempt to rationalize the purest forms of irrational behavior, we cling to the famous adage of our elders: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), and establish what we call a state of emergency. This apprehension of potential danger, we think, will heighten our vigilance and readiness for a war that appears to be drawing closer. In reality, it progressively anesthetizes our freedom, as well as our sensitivity to subtler signs of belligerence—the two very natural human capabilities upon which we were nevertheless able to construct a relative peace in the aftermath of the World Wars. We might have done better to listen more carefully to those so-called dramatic dystopians who had foreseen the space—left, at least in potentiality, within our ‘Western’ societies—for the development of this Orwellian perceptual, cognitive, and emotional erosion. Against this new self-fulfilling prophecy, I seek to re-actualize Kundera’s moral and political ontology of the West, as an attempt to lay the foundations for a modern sociopolitical praxis of resistance to war and affirmation of life.

Etiology – The Moral-Perceptual Erosion: A Dangerous Pathology of the So-Called ‘Free World’

Before addressing the deeper erosion of our moral, perceptual, and ideational capacities, our discussion first requires some clarification as to the so-called ‘Free World’ and the West, two qualifiers that today loosely overlap in what we call the ‘Global West.’[8]

This notion of the ‘Free World’ emerged in a specific historical context, shaped by World War II and the growing ideological and geopolitical confrontation that followed the onset of the Cold War. At this point in history, it referred to a constellation of societies that understood themselves as sharing a common political horizon—one grounded in liberty, self-government, and the moral rejection of totalitarian domination. It was a deliberate attachment to a collective moral and political community, just like Ernest Renan’s model of nationhood: a community united not by race, present religion, or language but primarily by a common history and driven by “a present consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.”[9] While inherently exclusionary and shaped by Western centrism, this ‘Free World’ designation nevertheless had the merit of placing freedom—at least rhetorically and within public debate—at the very center of social and political life.

Implicitly, this vision also rested on the survival of a shared belief that Immanuel Kant’s project of a lasting peace among republics could ultimately be realized. In this view, republics—later theorized as democracies[10]—grounded in reason and public deliberation, would have neither an interest in war nor any satisfaction in it. War, Kant argued, was a condition from which rational peoples would seek to escape, compelling one another to “leave this state of war and enter into a constitution that establishes lasting peace.” Trusting both in the conviction that war was, as Tolstoy put it, “the most horrible thing in life,”[11] and in our collective capacity to recognize this truth and act upon it, we came to believe that war itself could be rendered irrational—a tragic residue of history rather than a recurring instrument of politics. It is in this spirit that the twentieth century imagined a ‘last’ war—what Archibald Wavell famously called “the war to end war”—after which a ‘first’ true, lasting peace might finally emerge.

We further assumed that the development of global commerce would accomplish this task almost on its own, acting as a ‘gentle hand’ bringing societies closer together by eliminating ‘destructive prejudices’ and fostering mutual understanding and convergence.[12] This belief even led Norman Angell, the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to argue that “the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war, the consequences of which would be so disastrous.”[13]

What we are witnessing is not simply interdependence, but its intensification and weaponization.[14] Global economic life is now structured through highly asymmetric networks organized around a small number of central hubs and chokepoints, on which vast portions of financial, digital, and supply-chain flows depend. This new stage retains older forms of strategic interdependence inherited from earlier waves of globalization—such as the vulnerability created by maritime chokepoints, as illustrated by Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since the outbreak of war in late February 2026, on the model of the Suez Canal’s long closure following the Six-Day War of 1967. These older forms are further overlaid with more diffuse, hybrid, and often less visible forms of dependence, embedded in financial networks such as the U.S. dollar system, cloud infrastructures, undersea cables, and other critical digital intermediaries.

And yet, war persists in our societies, including on European soil, and despite the context of ‘hyper-interdependencies’ among many nations. After all, the First World War broke out at the height of the first age of globalization, a moment of unprecedented economic interdependence. These atrocities repeated themselves in Europe with the Second World War, at a time when Nazi Germany was deeply dependent on foreign resources including Romanian oil, Swedish iron ore, Soviet raw materials, and so on.

We were thus wrong to assume that economic interdependence alone could perform the task we assigned to it. We failed to carry through the normative, moral and political struggle required to ground it in the only foundation that can sustain it: our most fundamental human capabilities, actualized through freedom, rather than a reliance on the supposedly pacifying power of commerce. The only genuine and sustainable peace-like postwar construction is one that renders war and warlike behaviors irrational, and alien to the society that emerges after the conflict. In the face of this reality, the ‘Free World’ chose the easy path of denial, the very one we have undergone so many times throughout history. In the post-Cold War years, the prevailing Western liberal doxa proved to be very quick and effective in dismissing Huntington’s civilizational framework for its reductionism and systematism. Yet it did nothing to protect itself and our society from Fukuyama’s triumphalist proclamation that democracy had won the ideological contest once and for all, while the enemies of democracy had declared neither defeat nor victory and fully intended to continue the struggle. Once again, the hubris of the victors had struck.

The same very human arrogance and presumption led us to treat certain dystopians too lightly, and sometimes even disdainfully, as though they were merely fatalists or novelists of catastrophe rather than lucid witnesses to the disasters already latent within our world. War and Peace[15] serves as a powerful illustration of this. Tolstoy develops a vision of war and peace that, in certain respects, crosses paths with that of dystopian thinkers like Huxley: war begins long before the battlefield, in the quiet erosion of moral awareness and responsibility in everyday life. By entering a kind of moral hibernation—a dulling of consciousness, akin in many respects to the experience of sleep—human beings avoid confronting the deeper meaning of life and death, as their consciousness gradually withdraws from thought, feeling, and bodily presence. This “little death,” as Tolstoy calls it, is precisely where the seed of the acceptance of war is planted. Yet this is anything but a mere thought experiment or a novelistic abstraction. Through the character of Pierre Bezukhov, Tolstoy traces a continuity from our very real and ordinary social life—one we would easily qualify as peaceful—to tangible war. The absurdity that erupts on the battlefield already exists there in quieter, normalized forms of violence: lies, vanity, lust, cowardice, and self-deception, all of which Pierre repeatedly confronts.

In his phrase “Moon, valley, dew, death,” Krasznahorkai radicalizes this moral intuition into an almost inescapable historical continuum. If war is already latent within peace wherever human beings abdicate their ethical and political agency, then only a peace grounded in freedom can endure. Despite the very reason for the existence of such a normative pole as the ‘Free World,’ we failed to understand that only a peace that consistently chooses freedom over everything else could approach something like perpetuity. What we especially failed to understand was that this ‘everything’ encompassed the sacrosanct core of modern international relations: stability. We shall never stabilize the purest forms of irrationality, inhumanity, and alienation. A meaningful peace, one that allows human beings to fully realize their humanity, leaves no room for time-buying or status quo arrangements. You can’t check, balance, or contain the most unpredictable and inhuman forms of violence and domination.

This is not merely a theoretical point. A so-called peace that stabilizes domination, censorship, and political dispossession is not peace in any meaningful human sense, whether in the world or within the self. It is precisely for this reason that people subjected to such orders do not simply ask for stability; they ask for freedom. The Iranian case offers a stark contemporary illustration of this. Since the protests that followed the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the demand for freedom has appeared not merely as a political slogan, but as a rejection of a whole form of life organized around coercion, surveillance, and the denial of bodily and civic autonomy. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” is powerful precisely because it refuses the false choice between order and emancipation: life itself is presented as inseparable from freedom. What is rejected there is not merely a regime, but the fiction that stability without freedom could count as peace. What many Iranians seek is a society that offers them more than a slow death under censorship: bloodthirsty at worst, and at best quiet, culpable, self-serving arrangements with domination. They want to be free to realize their own philosophy, their own praxis, and their own conception of the good life.

Symptomatology – Vulnerability, Over-Reliance, and Weaponized Interdependence: The Hidden Path from Peace to Conflict

What, then, are the philosophical outcomes of the path we did undertake—interdependence as a means of pacifying world society? With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the West was plunged into a period of reckless euphoria and liberal enchantment, notably leading to the WTO and other international institutions opening up to China in the hope of liberalizing global trade entirely. In this respect, it was largely a period of blindness: to the rising dependency of the United States on China; to Europe’s growing reliance on both; and to the renewed dependence of post-Soviet states on their former imperial center, Russia. In 1993, European integration culminated in the creation of the EU with the Treaty of Maastricht. The implicit business model that emerged was one of internal interdependencies and external reliance on Russia for cheap energy, on the United States for cheap security, and on the Chinese market as a dream destination for European high-value manufactured products.

These dependencies were conscious and deliberate in the sense that they were promoted by Western policymakers and international economic institutions as part of a project aimed at the global liberalization of markets, on the assumption that the political liberalization and democratization would naturally follow—economic praxis first, political essence second. The paradigm also rested on a deeply presumed fungibility of goodwill: the belief that trust, integration, and cooperation could circulate across domains and produce political effects (rather like many ancient religious texts that came with both a moral codex and something resembling a codification of commerce). It was believed to offer a credible alternative to Schelling’s realist notion of the fungibility of force, whereby force can be converted into political leverage,[16] giving rise to a more liberal, inclusive, and cooperative international order.

Unfortunately, we failed to understand what this interdependence model could do to international relations and to our long-term pursuit of a lasting global peace. These dependencies have now shifted from ‘sensitivity interdependencies’ to what Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane call ‘vulnerability interdependencies.’[17] The latter are structural, chronic dependencies that are endured on the long run for a nation and that can’t be resolved by a simple shift in policymaking, weakening its sovereignty and the way it is perceived by its population. Europe is no exception to this, as even its core dependency—one relying on one of its greatest historical allies, the United States—became increasingly weaponized against its countries’ interests and sovereignty. These ‘vulnerability interdependencies’ are the very current example of soft coercion—belligerent, warlike behaviors occurring in social life during ‘peacetimes,’ which Tolstoy had warned us about—that fosters the emergence of war while weakening societies in their capacity to identify and resist it.

In this increasingly transactional international environment, some former allies and ‘nation-friends’—including some historical leading nations of the ‘Global West’—have become, at best, business-like partners, or, at worst, rivals. You care for friends, you cherish your relationship with them, you owe them honesty, attention, and concern when a problem arises—you act morally, emotionally, and intellectually for their sake. You do not, and cannot, behave this way with mere partners or transactional allies. The growing erosion of mutual trust in relationships such as the transatlantic one offers a striking illustration of this shift in interdependence, all the more so when one recalls that, in the same century, more than 1,000 of the United States’ international partners were killed while supporting U.S. military operations during the post-9/11 war on terror.[18]

This reaffirmed atmosphere of uncertainty and ambiguity thus pushes former U.S. allies to reconsider their alliances and dependencies on the international scene. This is notably the case for many European countries building up their defenses—measures that, paradoxically, can be perceived as offensive on the other side of the globe (once again, si vis pacem, para bellum)—following a certain retrenchment of the United States from the European theater. This process can have a dual effect. While Russia might restrain itself from pursuing further imperialistic conquests—especially with its expected blitzkrieg turning into an industrial-scale, technologically augmented war of attrition in Ukraine—China might interpret the disintegration of historical power poles as a sign of weakness or U.S. laissez-faire towards what it considers the former sphere of liberal influence.

In international relations, while information is a source of strength, uncertainty generates fear, vulnerability, and, in turn, potentially impulsive defensive reactions. This may lead some nations to seek the recovery of the part of their sovereignty they delegated to great powers through such vulnerability-based dependencies. Because those have become chronic, coercion may be their last resort—it starts with sanctions, embargoes, weaponized interdependence, and then it can lead to the very recourse to force a country to free itself from this vulnerability deemed critical. On this point, Keohane and Nye cite the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a historical example, noting that it was largely prompted by yet another round of economic pressure on oil, following embargoes imposed by the United States that curtailed Japan’s access to vital resources.[19]

Even the United States of America falls into this paradigm. Beyond its long-standing trade deficit vis-à-vis China, another highly critical asymmetry emerges: control over central nodes and chokepoints within global economic networks, where interdependence becomes potentially weaponizable.[20] This sheds important light on the ‘soft coercive’ dimension of the economic, financial, and technological U.S.-China relationship. It is those key hubs and chokepoints—financial, technological, and supply-chain ones—that, if over-weaponized, could lead to escalating tensions and potentially light the fuse.

For the moment, a certain balance and symmetry has prevented a direct conflict from breaking out. The United States’ reliance on China for rare-earth supply chains, especially for processing and refining, is still partly offset by China’s dependence on advanced semiconductors and dual-use technologies embedded in a U.S.-dominated tech ecosystem. Yet the window in which China could plausibly expect limited U.S. intervention to defend Taiwan is gradually closing. U.S. President Donald J. Trump has publicly claimed that U.S. dependence on China for rare earths could be eliminated within 18-24 months, through a combination of new international agreements—the Pax Silica Declaration with Singapore, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Israel[21] being an example—and expanded domestic processing initiatives. For Beijing, this suggests that time may be becoming a constraining factor rather than a strategic asset, undermining Beijing’s traditional “hide and bide” strategy.

Diagnosis – The Erosion of Normative Meaning and Collective Moral Agency

Despite allegations that we have plunged into a Cold War 2.0, the current geopolitical context cannot—and should not—be equated with the confrontation that opposed the Soviet Union to the West during the Cold War. We are instead witnessing a clear and continuing disintegration of longstanding geopolitical poles. As traditional centers of gravity dissolve, revisionist powers—whether declining, rising, or acting in concert—may increasingly come to see war as a legitimate means to resolve existential and civilizational contradictions, as illustrated by Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s posture toward Taiwan. I argue that in this context, the greatest risk of great power war today may not lie in multipolarity itself, but rather in the erosion of any pole at all.

By ‘pole,’ I mean—following Renan’s conception of nationhood—a space of power and agency, peacefully and fraternally shared by nations that retain full sovereignty while possessing a consciousness of their shared heritage from past relationships, a consent to form this collective in the present, and the desire to continue living together in fraternity and for the sake of freedom. That was the very essence of the so-called Free World, after all. Without such an identifiable space of fraternity for nations, one that is recognizable as normative and intentional, the prospect of genuine, sustainable peace ceases to be conceivable. It is precisely at this moment that war becomes conceivable once again and, in doing so, reemerges as a normal instrument of statecraft.

This must begin at the national level. To think of the world, to think of the Other, one must first possess a consciousness of oneself in the world. The French revolutionaries of May 1968 understood this very well when they would ask anyone taking the floor: “D’où parles-tu camarade?” (Where do you speak from, comrade?).[22] Thought must always proceed from somewhere, through a critical engagement with—and, where necessary, beyond—certain shared bearings. In a world where such reference points are gradually disintegrating, we often find ourselves disinhibited in ways that undermine our very Ricœurian human capabilities.

In what was originally a simple essay published in French in the journal Le Débat in late 1983, the Czech author Milan Kundera proclaimed: “Central Europe is not a state: it is a culture or a fate. Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation.”[23] Kundera insists that a nation is an idea, a unique one which can only be articulated, expressed, and defended, even at the risk of life, by the very nation itself. Situated at the heart of Europe, Central European nations faced a unique existential dilemma at the time Kundera spoke of. While politically situated in the East, they were naturally drawn to the West because of their cultural and intellectual symbiosis—the very defining feature in which, according to Kundera, lay a people’s national ‘substance,’ sense of belonging, and distinctiveness.

We should never forget that one’s nation, like the federation, civilization, or pole to which one belongs—or with which one chooses to affiliate—is part of the concentric circles that constitute one’s home. This home is the most basic existential experience of one’s “natural world.”[24] Every circle, and every aspect of it, however close or distant from the center (the very “I”), carries political significance, though in different forms and degrees of salience. It should therefore be recognized as such by any free and just political community. For a Czech national like Kundera or Václav Havel[25]: “My home is therefore my Czechness, my nationality,” just as much as it is my family, friends, profession, workplace, or “my Czechoslovakness, […] my Europeanness, […] this world and its present civilization and for that matter the universe”[26]: each with different meanings, but with equal political validity within society. This implies a fundamental and inalienable civil and human right to one’s home, and to the forms of freedom and identity that such a home makes possible.

Kundera understood that a loss of these essential bearings—ones that are not ethnic, but cultural, philosophical, ideational, memorial, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual—could be deadly. It could lead, in particular, to Leo Tolstoy’s greatest fear: the blurring of any collective distinction between what is good and bad, right and wrong, and, by extension, between what is warlike and what is peaceful—one that also ends up undermining a community’s capacity to respond when war does occur.

In an increasingly post-positivist modern world, some nations even came to believe they could survive the deconstruction of these very moral and ideational bearings that had once justified their existence and persistence. Yet these bearings were precisely what allowed people from different horizons to unite around a minimal, shared understanding of the good life, and of what the world is—and ought to be. It is this very intangible and elusive ‘substance’ that Milan Kundera argues anchors a people’s uniqueness, its reason for existing, and its capacity to live together in peace: a shared arbitration between fundamental distinctions such as good and evil, freedom and domination, legitimate force and criminal violence.

It was these very unique arbitrations, once shared by the Czech nation, that a handful of Czech intellectuals like Kundera sought to defend in the nineteenth century, when they revived the Czech language in the face of its Germanization. Even though linguistic assimilation might have “simplified life for the Czechs, offering their children wider opportunities,”[27] Kundera argues, they believed that something more essential was at stake. This ‘something’ was the intuitive yet inexpressible perception of a common ‘substance’—one that could only continue to exist through the language by which these distinctions, judgments, and moral intuitions were articulated as their own.

Prescription – Ethical Re-armament and the Re-sacralization of Human Life for an Affirmative and Human-Realizing Peace

Against this backdrop, policies from nations still identifying with what remains of the ‘Free World’—if they believe such a thing can exist, did, and still does—should aim not at further dissolving poles, but at restoring a coherent one: a pole that is appealing and inclusive to all nations sharing a common desire to place freedom above all else, and understanding it as a political and moral project that can be collectively embraced. This will also allow them to shift the moral burden onto regimes that reject it, forcing them to assume ownership of their choice openly and transparently. The prospect of a future, sustainable peace does not require full consensus at this stage, but at minimum a recognizable center of gravity capable of restoring the boundaries between peace and war. Clear red lines are not an obstacle to peace; they are a precondition for preventing catastrophic miscalculations and moral and social collapse, leaving only a Hobbesian struggle for survival in a global system that fosters it.

We ought to rearm ourselves intellectually and morally to achieve true, lasting peace—one that draws inspiration from Kant’s and Doyle’s understanding, yet is performative in the sense of being deliberate, actively creating freedom, rather than passive. But such a rearmament must also be perceptual and effective. If one of the defining pathologies of our time lies in a growing desensitization to violence, and in an ever higher tolerance for illiberty in the name of order, stability, or necessity, then peace can only be rebuilt through a corresponding re-sensitization: the recovery of our capacity to perceive belligerence, domination, and dehumanization before they harden into normality.

One of the historical strengths of the so-called Free World was its consciousness of sharing these values and ideas. By contrast, many of its adversaries, Russia in particular, do not unite with partners such as Iran, China or North Korea (what we commonly call the “Axis of Upheaval”) on the basis of a genuinely shared moral, ethical, and ideational project—one that is civilizational insofar as it is defined by a common horizon of order and purpose—but rather through a negative convergence of interests, strategic convenience, and common resentment toward the West, especially the United States. While these regimes have converged in the short term—most notably in support of Russia’s war in Ukraine through arms transfers, industrial backfilling, and technological cooperation[28]—their cooperation rests less on shared identity than on strategic convenience. Historically, these actors have frequently been rivals, and at times outright adversaries, divided by ideology, regional ambitions, and mutual mistrust.

What binds them today is not a positive common vision of order, but a negative coalition driven by resentment, regime survival, and resistance to the liberal international order. It is on this very ground that these regimes seek—and often succeed—to gain influence in parts of Africa, notably in the Sahel, by mobilizing lingering resentment toward former colonial powers—where the Russian Wagner mercenaries, and later the Africa Corps, have actively fueled anti-French sentiment. But this absence of a shared moral horizon limits the depth and durability of their alignment, while also underscoring the strategic advantage the ‘Free World’ once possessed, and risks losing, if it abandons its own normative coherence. If it ceases to perceive itself—and to be perceived—as a credible space of freedom, moral clarity, and political purpose, deterrence will fail, and a Third World War risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Policymakers from the ‘Global West’ must therefore abandon once and for all the illusion that economic interdependence is inherently pacifying. Dependencies are not neutral market outcomes but strategic facts that can be deliberately weaponized. Agency is undermined when critical infrastructures, technologies, and supply chains fall under foreign control, particularly when the controlling actor explicitly threatens to weaponize them. To strengthen alliances, acceptable and politically intended forms of interdependence should be pursued, while chronic vulnerabilities that deeply affect a country’s stability, sovereignty, and mutual trust should be collectively addressed before war does occur. Policymakers should identify, monitor, and actively manage those strategic vulnerabilities, bearing in mind that agency, in our interdependent world, does not primarily derive from aggregate trade imbalances, but from control over central hubs and chokepoints within global economic networks.

Yet another fundamental work of individual self-reflection—one that has been just as persistently neglected—must be undertaken if we are to avoid repeating the very mistake we made with the Montesquieuian promise: a true and collective moral, philosophical and ideational awakening can only begin with the re-sacralization of the sanctity of human life in our understanding of modern international relations. When innocent people are being killed—especially those who are themselves striving to reclaim self-determined agency, understood as both individual free will in social life and collective political self-determination, namely what the very ‘Free World’ once claimed to represent and defend—there is no rational justification for oscillation. An objective good still subsists within our moral consciousness, as an intuitive resistance to the pathology of relativism, and it demands action over equivocation. It is also constantly unsettled by what might be called an Arendtian temptation: an oscillation bordering on guilty prevarication, enacted not by monsters, but by capable humans—agents endowed with the very same faculties of judgment, responsibility, and freedom as ourselves. This irreducible and persistent tension marks the very site where moral clarity collides with political evasion.

Amid these conditions, I side with Hannah Arendt in arguing that the refusal to choose the good already constitutes a grave form of complicity with evil. There is no time for what Václav Havel called, in The Power of the Powerless[29], the posture of the powerless: the quiet compliance of the greengrocer who displays a slogan he does not believe in, simply to avoid trouble. As Hannah Arendt famously observed, “the sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either good or evil.”[30] It is in that sense that evil is made banal in our societies. This posture amounts to a clear renunciation of one’s humanity. In All That Is Human, Sofia Andrukhovych—a Ukrainian writer bearing witness to every remaining sign of life and dignity within a society shattered by war—traces the gestures of those who, even in the face of the worst atrocities, have refused this temptation of apathetic evil. What remains, she suggests, is a single irreducible human capacity: “the ability to live others’ experiences with them, the audacity to take on another’s pain, and the willingness to share one’s own”—a capacity stronger than any physical limitation.[31]

Across Ukraine, this capacity finds expression in countless improvised burials, funerals, and acts of remembrance, unfolding both at the front and far from it—quiet rituals through which the dead are refused oblivion, and the living refuse moral collapse. These may take the form of a shared silence, a song sung in the corners of an abandoned railway station, or a real burial marked by the placing of a flower on a body while crossing a field. Of crucial significance is that these acts bear witness to the humanity of the deceased: one cannot be left without mourning—a form of social death—for that would amount to being left without life. By doing so, these everyday heroes ensure the continuity of the sanctity of human life—its sacrality, as some might say—under all circumstances. Life must always be affirmed, cherished, and preferred—both in others and within ourselves. Because the Other grants me an immaterial, social gift of life by giving me the opportunity to be confronted and interact with one’s face, and thereby to emerge as an equal, capable human being within social life, I owe them a social counter-gift of mourning and memory when death comes. It is therefore no longer a matter of “getting over” grief, but of bearing it. Mourning is not meant to be overcome or sealed off; it is carried, shared despite its irreducible intimacy, because lives are never singular but always intertwined with others, living and dead, near and distant, whose presence endures in memory. Mourning, then, is not only an intimate ethical act; it is also a normative one. The scope of what a society is able to grieve—near or distant, familiar or foreign—reveals the true horizon of its moral community.

I therefore argue that this very elementary human capability will be fundamental in rearming ourselves morally and ethically. Lending one’s voice to any unmourned death—whether on the battlefield, in an Antigonean defiance of a prohibition, or in the desolate anonymity of an abandoned hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic—is a profoundly political act, because a life left unmourned is not quite a life. It doesn’t socially exist, and therefore loses some of its political and ethical power. I argue that this essential human capability is the only capacity capable of truly loosening death’s grip over us and our lives, and of preventing the very forces that can drive good people to kill.[32] I advocate for such a disinterested, purely ethical and human approach, which alone can restore the full sanctity of human life that it deserves, and thus finally counteract the collective intellectual, perceptual, moral, and emotional erosion from which we—not only the ‘Global West,’ but also any individual striving for freedom and human dignity—are suffering so profoundly.

Only such an approach can allow us to re-emerge as fully effective, capable human beings, able to free ourselves from the grip of inhumanity—whether it comes from the loss of self-agency or the condition of total autarky, both of which can pave the way to the warlike. Precisely because it restores moral judgment, agency, and responsiveness to the suffering of others, it also deprives the status quo of what sustains it most deeply: resignation, desensitization, and the quiet acceptance of ever further encroachments upon freedom.

This solution is certainly individual in its starting point, but infinitely intersubjective, ethical, and collective in its realization. We will achieve our full potential only through what the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas calls the encounter with another human face that “orders and ordains” us, giving us an ethical call for responsibility in the presence of a naked foreign body at our mercy. This face-to-face encounter constitutes the origin of ethics as it demands from us the most fundamental restraint: “Thou shalt not kill.”[33] These natural human capabilities are, in fact, fundamental principles—those that globalization was supposed to foster through the spread of human rights—which, in practice, are rather used as rhetoric, not to guide specific action, but to provide a collective moral vocabulary, corpus, as well as a community of belief within which one can ground one’s ethical judgment and moral action.

Thus, Tolstoy’s vision of a better world should not be mistaken for a fatalistic vision of history without escape. It is, rather, a path shaped by hope and faith—one in which no rules were required for human beings to act morally, respect and love nature, and live simply yet fraternally: a Christian anarchy inspired by the ascetic way of life of the mujik farmers, understood not as a political program, but as a moral intuition, allowing us to withdraw from the vicious continuum of violence that leads us endlessly to war.

A rather unexpected contemporary figure provides a modern, non-theological illustration of this approach: Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer who replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection in Drachten with a simple traffic circle and expanded space for cyclists and pedestrians. This philosophy of ‘shared space,’ sometimes described as a form of ‘anarchist calisthenics,’ relies on the assumption that civic responsibility, fraternity, and moral awareness can emerge without constant external enforcement, awakening a sense of civic and fraternal consciousness within political communities—particularly those of an outward-looking ‘Global West.’

Today therefore, political agents and statesmen should aim above all to “improve the general cultural level of everyday life” and raise “the general level of civility.”[34] This is precisely the “higher responsibility” incumbent upon them: to conduct politics as a practice of morality—what Havel calls “anti-political politics.”[35] They should work toward what they consider good, while seeking everywhere and at all times to provide the conditions in which people may pursue their own good, by enhancing “the quality of people’s relationships to nature, to animals, to the atmosphere, to the landscape, to towns, to gardens, to their home.”[36] By concerning itself with “the culture of everything,” politics does not create this ‘shared space’ ex nihilo. It actualizes its latent potency by cultivating people’s humanity and civility. After all, they know better than anyone what this consists of, and that they share it one with another.

Only once such a fraternal space is actualized, together with the ethics that sustain it, can the absurdity and evil of war wake us from the ‘soma’ that Huxley once depicted in his dystopia. Europe is in particularly vital need for such a reawakening of the sacredness and sanctity of freedom, human dignity, and the conditions for human flourishing—the only pillars around which fraternity can be built. This not as nostalgia, but as a condition for deterrence and strategic credibility in a fragmenting world. Unlike the United States which has historically sustained a strong civic religion, Europe’s political culture has been shaped by a long-standing tension between spiritual and temporal authority, which has made the articulation of a shared civic faith in those very principles—though contemporary events, such as those in Iran, nonetheless reveal their fragile and tragic tangibility—impossible, in spite of the fact that they justified its very existence. Enlightenment has shown us the road to such a purely and inherently secular faith that fundamentally allows, rather than constrains.

Thomas Paine once declared: “in the early ages of the world, […] there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars.”[37] Let us keep this in mind at a moment when history offers the West a very last chance to break free from the self-fulfilling tragedy in which it has allowed itself to be kidnapped, once again.

References

Andrukhovych, Sofia. Tout ce qui est humain [All That Is Human]. Bayard, 2023.

Angell, Norman. The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage. Vernon Press, 2013.

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

CRINK’s Support for Russia’s War on Ukraine. Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), n.d. https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2025-08/250801_CRINK_Map.pdf?VersionId=0jmvhSD09sdedkgo5cd8KvWr2lS_RDI6.

Doyle, Michael W. “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 205-235.

Farrell, Henry, and Abraham L. Newman. “Weaponized Interdependence, How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.” International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 42-79.

Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. 1. Owl Books edition. Owl Book. Holt, 2001.Havel, Václav. Summer Meditations. Translated by Paul Wilson. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1993.

Havel, Václav. The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe. Taylor and Francis, 2016.

Hutzler, Alexandra, and Justin Fishel. “Trump Questions If NATO Would Defend US, but 1,000 Allies Were Killed in the War on Terror.” ABC News, March 6, 2025.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2004.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Dr. A 1. Diesterwegs Neusprachliche Bibliothek. Diesterweg, 2009.

Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. 1. Edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Keohane, Robert O., and Joseph S. Nye. Power and Interdependence. 4. Longman Classics in Political Science. Pearson, 2011.

Kine, Phelim. “Trump Enlists 5 Allies to Counter China on Rare Earths and Tech.” Politico, December 12, 2025.

Krasznahorkai, László. War & War. Translated by George Szirtes. Tuskar Rock Press, 2016.

Kundera, Milan. A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe. Translated by Linda Asher and Edmund White. Faber & Faber Limited, 2023.Lentz, Thierry. “D’où parles-tu, camarade?” in Pour Napoléon, 53-59. Perrin, 2023.

Moati, Raoul. Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity. Translated by Damiel Wyche. Fordham University Press, 2017.Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws. Edited and translated by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Orwell, George. 1984. 75th anniversary edition. Fourth Berkley trade paperback edition. With Dolen Perkens-Valdez, Thomas Pynchon, Sandra Newman, and Erich Fromm. Berkley, 2023.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Reprint. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books, 1986.

Patočka, Jean. The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem. Edited by Ivan Chvatík and Lubica Učník. Translated by Erika Abrams. Northwestern University Press, 2016.

Renan, Ernest. What Is a Nation? And Other Political Writings. Translated by M. F. N. Giglioli. Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Ricœur, Paul. Philosophy, Ethics, & Politics. Edited by Catherine Goldenstein. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Polity, 2020.

Schelling, Thomas C. Arms and Influence. Veritas paperback edition. Veritas Paperbacks. Yale University Press, 2020.

Scott, Michael. “Landmark Deal Gives North America Its First Heavy Rare Earth Refinery.” Yahoo Finance, December 9, 2025.

Stubb, Alexander. “The West’s Last Chance.” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2026, vol. 105, no. 1 (2025): 104-16.

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Trump, Donald J. 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. The White House, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119289142.

U.S. Census Bureau. “Top Trading Partners - September 2025.” n.d. https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/topyr.html.

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In text citations

[1] László Krasznahorkai, War & War, trans. George Szirtes (Tuskar Rock Press, 2016), 279.

[2] László Krasznahorkai, War & War, trans. George Szirtes (Tuskar Rock Press, 2016), 203.

[3] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J. J. Graham, new and rev. ed. with introduction and notes by Col. F. N. Maude, vol. 1 (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1918), chap. 1, “What Is War?”.

[4] Milan Kundera, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, trans. Linda Asher and Edmund White (Faber & Faber Limited, 2023).

[5] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, 1. Owl Books ed, Owl Book (Holt, 2001), 5.

[6] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Dr. A 1, Diesterwegs Neusprachliche Bibliothek (Diesterweg, 2009).

[7] Paul Ricœur, “Sketch of a Plea for the Capable Human Being,” in Philosophy, Ethics, & Politics, ed. Catherine Goldenstein, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Polity, 2020), 18–19.

[8] Alexander Stubb, “The West’s Last Chance,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2026, vol. 105, no. 1 (2025): 105.

[9] Ernest Renan, What Is a Nation? And Other Political Writings, trans. M. F. N. Giglioli, Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History (Columbia University Press, 2018), 261.

[10] Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 205-235.

[11] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Rev. ed., trans. Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2010), 1168.

[12] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 20, chap. 1.

[13] Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (Vernon Press, 2013).

[14] For the literature on “weaponized interdependence,” see Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 42-79.

[15] Tolstoy, War and Peace.

[16] Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, Veritas paperback edition, Veritas Paperbacks (Yale University Press, 2020).

[17] Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence, 4. ed, Longman Classics in Political Science (Pearson, 2011).

[18] Alexandra Hutzler and Justin Fishel, “Trump Questions If NATO Would Defend US, but 1,000 Allies Were Killed in the War on Terror,” ABC News, March 6, 2025.

[19] Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence.

[20] Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman, “Weaponized Interdependence, How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion,” International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 42-79.

[21] Phelim Kine, “Trump Enlists 5 Allies to Counter China on Rare Earths and Tech,” Politico, December 12, 2025.

[22] Thierry Lentz, “D’où parles-tu, camarade ?,” in Pour Napoléon (Perrin, 2023), 53-59, 53 (my translation).

[23] Milan Kundera, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe, trans. Linda Asher and Edmund White (Faber & Faber Limited, 2023), Section 2.

[24] Jan Patočka, The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, ed. Ivan Chvatík and Lubica Učník, trans. Erika Abrams (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

[25] Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, dissident, and statesman. He served as the last President of Czechoslovakia and as the first President of the Czech Republic.

[26] Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, trans. Paul Wilson (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1993), 31.

[27] Milan Kundera, “Address to the Czech Writers’ Congress: The Literature of Small Nations,” 1967.

[28] CRINK’s Support for Russia’s War on Ukraine (Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2025-08/250801_CRINK_Map.pdf?VersionId=0jmvhSD09sdedkgo5cd8KvWr2lS_RDI6.

[29] Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe (Taylor and Francis, 2016).

[30] Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).

[31] Sofia Andrukhovych, Tout ce qui est humain [All That Is Human] (Bayard, 2023), 176 (my translation).

[32] This is also precisely the capability Sofia Andrukhovych presents as one of the last forms of human resistance to violence and dehumanization in the face of war.

[33] Raoul Moati, Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity, trans. Damiel Wyche (Fordham University Press, 2017), 124.

[34] Havel, Summer Meditations, 15.

[35] Havel, Summer Meditations, 10.

[36] Havel, Summer Meditations, 14.

[37] Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Reprint, Penguin Classics (Penguin Books, 1986), 72.