Almost Seven Months On, a Look Back at Our War
At the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy honored the memory of the fallen defenders of Ukraine. Source: President of Ukraine
Almost seven months ago, on January 10, 2024, my latest book, Notre Guerre. Le crime et l’oubli (Our War. Crime and Oblivion), subtitled Pour une pensée stratégique (Re-Framing Strategics Thinking). I remember the discussions I had with my publisher at the beginning of 2023, when I presented her with the outline of the book. My own question was: would this book still be relevant when it appeared at the beginning of the following year? Or had the war somehow come to an end? Neither she nor I thought so. In any case, when I explained to her that the book was not so much about the conduct and stages of the war, but about the strategic flaws that had prevented the political leaders of the democracies first from averting it, and then from ending it with the only acceptable victory, that of Ukraine, she immediately grasped that we wouldn’t have come to the end of it by the beginning of the following year. Treating the government’s strategic illness would take a long time. I cannot express my gratitude enough for her immediate enthusiasm.
But seven months on, a review of the main theses of this thick book, which met with great success in France—I hope soon elsewhere too—also seems necessary to me for several reasons, even if the fact that, beyond certain details or references to be added, I wouldn’t change anything I had demonstrated there is also something rather despairing.
The first question is this: between the time I made the final adjustments to the proof, at the end of November 2023, and now, have the leaders of the democracies better understood the nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the world, or have they remained at the same point I described as in-between? This question cannot be addressed in a theoretical and intellectual way, because true understanding is measured by action.
The second question concerns medium- and long-term strategic vision. Here too, it had not generally been formulated, except sometimes in bits and pieces, and it cannot focus exclusively on Russia and Ukraine. Russia’s war against Ukraine requires us to reformulate this strategy globally, not just locally. It raises decisive questions not only about the need for greater justice in the international order, but also about the universality of these principles. Attacks on the legitimacy of what is presented as “the West” cannot be dismissed out of hand, even if they have been used to good effect by Russia and the People’s Republic of China.
A third focus of the book was how free and democratic countries must rethink their defense doctrines. This applies in particular to European defense and NATO, but also to other alliances whose nature and credibility must be constantly questioned. On a broader level, I was also concerned with the question of jus ad bellum and not just jus in bello, in other words, the rules of law that require us to engage in war and not just the law that governs it. Without going back over the many long-standing questions about the “just war”, the question of intervention and non-intervention remains the major issue, particularly dramatic in the case of Ukraine.
In fact, it is Ukraine itself that is at the heart of a fourth and broader reflection on the construction of free nations. However, it seems that many Western leaders, diplomats and analysts of international relations have failed to grasp what is at stake in Ukraine, both historically and intellectually. They still refuse to see Ukraine not just as a country with an exceptional people, but as the matrix of nations for a new century. While this model is certainly unique, they struggle to find analogies, even partial and contextualized, with the emergence of countries such as the United States, France and indeed some formerly colonized nations as free nations. They remain attached to a classic geopolitical vision in which Ukraine is the object of a reflection on the interplay of powers, not the subject in its own right of a new era in international relations.
Understanding and action
The question of understanding—or rather, of the sources of incomprehension—is at the heart of Our War, and occupies its entire first section. In particular, I show that the 22 years of inaction in the face of the Russian threat certainly had its origins in the compromise of some of the ruling elites, in their cowardice and their lack of moral concern in the sense of abandoning the values that were supposed to govern democratic states, but more surely in a lack of understanding of the principles that should govern strategic thinking. I included in this failure a truncated vision of realism, a refusal to include international law in the structural elements of this thinking and the data linked to ideology, but also an overly general vision of war, presented as an indistinct phenomenon, which consequently did not make it possible to understand the specificity of Russian war as total war. Seven months on, these flaws are still present.
We are all too familiar with their manifestations: the persistent refusal of certain Allies to authorize strikes by Ukraine on Russian territory with weapons supplied by them, the imagination that a peace agreement with Moscow is possible, the fear of a Russian defeat and the limited eagerness to demand justice for Russian leaders and their executors. The same lack of awareness can be found at home, with some governments failing to take large-scale measures to punish the Western relays of Russian propaganda.
It’s as if solutions could be found halfway, and that they could be sustainable. Measure after good measure is being taken, but none is likely to radically change the situation. Since the publication of Our War, there has certainly been more, whether in terms of the delivery of weapons, some of them more powerful, and ammunition, or in terms of sanctions, the implementation of which has been perfected. But they are not yet working at full capacity, whether in terms of combating circumvention or seizing all the frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank, for the time being essentially limited to the interests of these assets. The very fact that one measure follows another demonstrates the Allies’ lack of resolve and plan from the outset. After all, the measures decided today—a year, two years, two and a half years after February 24, 2022—could all have been decided earlier.
Despite everything, I have the feeling that certain Western leaders, in the United States and even in some Western European countries, now have a clearer idea that Putin will continue his war whatever the cost, that he will never give up his project to annihilate the Ukrainian people, and that his war—for the moment of a different kind—against Europe is unlikely to come to an end as long as he or his clique are in power. They also know that any form of truce or peace agreement would be short-lived, and at best a Russian stunt by the Kremlin to buy time and strengthen a weakened army. They know better—and this was obvious to many analysts, including myself, long before 2022—but this does not mean that this understanding is being translated into action.
In Our War, I introduced the concept of cognitive dissonance to illustrate the internal contradictions between several propositions held simultaneously by some of these leaders and analysts. This contradiction is even more pronounced when it comes to action. This is undoubtedly what so upsets Ukrainians, for whom—and they have no choice—there is a straight line between analysis and action. They don’t understand because, in reality, the attitude of most Westerners, unable to enter fully into the war they see, is literally incomprehensible. I continue—particularly during my two trips this year—to be struck by the fact that many Ukrainians, over and above the customary thanks that are sometimes a little heavy-handed—when it is we in the West who should be thanking them—know perfectly well that they cannot count on the full support of most of the countries in the Alliance. They know they can only count on themselves in the end. In fact, they have made further great strides in this direction since my book was published, and are capable of aiming ever further and ever harder. In every respect, they’re right.
For a complete strategy
Our War is not just a plea for action in favor of Ukraine’s total victory. To a large extent, support for Kyiv is not primarily a moral imperative—and I have no objection to a moral reading of our international strategy, since it is based on values, as Aron, whom I often comment on in my book, once said—but is the logical and analytical result of consistent strategic thinking.
Fundamentally, Our War is a work of strategy. It sifts through all the presuppositions that have led to the major failure of Western conduct towards Russia—and which could well be repeated with the People’s Republic of China—and whose consequences amount to hundreds of thousands of victims and a loss in terms of security. It aims to show that there was in fact a non-strategy. This continued long after February 24, 2022. One of the questions I’m trying to examine now is whether, since January 2024, when Our War was published, there has been progress and a more accurate and correct apprehension of the constituent elements of a strategy as I proposed them in my book.
Over the past seven months, I’ve noticed even more strongly a kind of willingness not even to engage in what might be called a strategic exercise, with differentiated scenarios, within the administrations of several states. They are seized with dread at the very idea of putting all possible options clearly and calmly on the table. Even in internal reflections, there seem to be many taboos that no one could break, even in the case of a strategic game—precisely because the right options would then appear to be those considered the riskiest. I’ve also noticed that even some think-tanks, which we wouldn’t suspect of being sympathetic to Russia, are self-restricting in their positions and proposals in the name of “realism”, as if it were no longer possible to loosen certain intellectual locks. And of course, in the wake of the US Congress’s blockade—which was fortunately lifted—and the Russian army’s limited advances, as well as the monstrous damage done to the Ukrainian population by Russians emboldened by the inadequacy of Western anti-missile systems, some of the regime’s unofficial intermediaries took up the same defeatist rhetoric of yesteryear and called for peace negotiations. This rhetoric continues to contaminate certain Western chancelleries, and is an even more powerful brake on strategic analysis.
If such a strategy is indispensable, it is also because we are gradually coming to what might look like the end of a cycle in the post-World War II historical period, or more precisely of several cycles that partly overlap. There are indeed cycles in terms of international security within Europe, Asia, the US and other continents, just as there are on other continents. Some cycles are also global, and can affect the global configuration of the world to a greater or lesser extent. Our hypothesis is that the latest cycle is to a large extent marked by a convergence of the various regional cycles.
The first cycle was, broadly speaking, that of the Cold War, marked by a latent conflict between the USSR and the countries of the Alliance. Meanwhile, China was gradually asserting itself as a power with an autonomous strategy, but with limited impact. A second cycle opened with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but quickly began to close again with the war in ex-Yugoslavia, followed by the war in Chechnya. This eleven-year cycle is a broken cycle, but not a complete one. We could perhaps add another cycle beginning with September 11, but without going into it again here, it is far from certain that international terrorism has a structuring effect on the international scene and a profound geo-strategic situation. The Middle East disorder itself appears to be a long, non-linear cycle, with no clear beginning or end. The last cycle began in 1999-2000 with Putin’s accession to power, and another may well have begun with Xi Jinping’s presidency (2012), while an American cycle began to emerge in 2008, with an increasingly marked withdrawal from global conflicts (Bush, Georgia, 2008; Obama, Syria, 2013 and 2015, and Ukraine, 2014; Trump: Russia, North Korea; Biden, Afghanistan 2021). This cycle also has ramifications in increasingly destabilized Africa, in parts of Latin America and in Asia. What is most striking about this latest period is the convergence of movements in different parts of the world.
This certainly doesn’t mean that all dictatorships have formed a formal alliance, but there is certainly a convergence of interests and often mutual support. We all know NATO’s motto: “Stronger together”. It could also be that of dictatorships or uncomfortable regimes, dwarfed on the international stage because they lack a clear body of ideas—Brazil, South Africa and, to a large extent, India obey this pattern—and have never chosen a rigorous path. In reality, the formation of the BRICS does not make states other than China and Russia stronger, just more dependent. Even the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, not to mention African states that have come under the effective dependence of Moscow or Beijing, are not stronger because they challenge the West, but they have the illusion of benefiting from the fact that they no longer appear to be controllable. In any case, this latest round of convergences shows that there can be no strategy, piecemeal or purely geographical, that does not take into account the joint action of our enemies. It is undoubtedly desirable for this to become possible once again.
It is in this spirit that Our War defines not only a strategy for defeating Russia, but also a global, legal, economic, intellectual and social strategy for restoring a legitimate structure to the world order. This means not only repelling Russia’s and China’s murderous assaults and implementing a system for enforcing the rules of international law, but also either offering countries tempted to look to Moscow and Beijing another way—if they have done so out of a sense of abandonment and resentment—or stepping up the pressure against them—when they have chosen these protectors out of corruption or in exchange for protection from the clan in power.
Here too, there were snatches of words. Emmanuel Macron in particular understood the importance for democracies of regaining legitimacy in the countries of the South, but his words carried little weight due to an often soothing view of China, India or certain Gulf states. In a way, he did not “de-globalize” the South. The NATO summit in Washington also, for the first time, adopted the right tone, devoid of any complacency, towards Beijing. President Zelenskyy’s so-called peace summit—a misleading terminology I’ll come back to in another essay—was also an opportunity to send a strategic message to the countries of the South. The democracies failed to do so. The only one to finally define such a strategy was the Ukrainian president himself, in his speech on June 28, 2023.
Defense, alliances and deterrence
It was also one of the aims of Our War to demonstrate that the leaders of the Alliance and the European Union must change their software to make deterrence effective. Deterrence could no longer be based, on the one hand, on the simple distinction between NATO and non-NATO, and, on the other, on the only apparent comfort provided by nuclear deterrence. They also had to revise the traditional jurisprudence according to which a country responding to a war of aggression could not be admitted to the Atlantic Alliance, particularly when this war also constituted a threat to member countries. This also applies to the EU, whose treaty also contains an article 42-7 on solidarity in the event of attack, which itself refers to collective defense within NATO.
However, this strategic review has not taken place. The NATO summit in Washington on July 9-11, 2024, while affirming the principle of Ukraine’s membership, did not set a firm date. It automatically refused to examine the possibility of even a limited intervention to put an end to Russia's war against Ukraine. The Allies continue, despite more realistic voices who consider that the time has come to go all the way, to limit their commitment while stepping up military assistance to Ukraine. Alliance leaders are well aware that their weakness in this area casts doubt on the ability of certain member countries to defend themselves if attacked. If, tomorrow, Estonia or Finland were attacked by Russia, the nuclear guarantee alone would be of little use. Of course, in the immediate future, many claim that Moscow would not have the means to carry out such an attack. But what about in three or five years' time? Would all the countries in the Alliance be ready, intellectually and militarily, to respond conventionally, when they haven’t considered it for Ukraine? The question certainly arises for the US if Trump were elected, but not only.
In Our War, as in numerous articles and TV interviews since the start of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine, I argued in favor of direct intervention on our part, however limited. Since February 26, 2024, Emmanuel Macron had refused to rule it out a priori. A limited number of countries followed suit. However, moving in this direction presupposes first of all recognition that Ukraine alone will probably not be able to push Russia back outside Ukraine’s borders, then rejection of any prospect of negotiation with Moscow, and finally mobilization of public opinion to make this primary reality understood. But this is precisely what most Western governments refuse to do. Here too, the lack of understanding remains, preventing the formulation of a strategy.
Ukraine, the matrix of free nations
Another element of understanding that I tried to present in Our War lay in what might be called the Ukrainian model of free nation-building. Of course, we can all find fault with Ukraine, which is not, in its entirety, a perfect country. Like any other, it has its collaborators, its traitors and its corrupt. But the uprising of a people, first in Maidan, then with weapons in hand since February 24, 2022, and the way it has reworked its history, says a great deal not only about the uniqueness of its people, but also about what a nation represents in the 21st century when it once again forges its specific character with the colors of freedom.
Ukraine not only rejects any reference to an “ethnic nation”, precisely because it was forged under the auspices of diversity, but also because freedom is incompatible with such a notion forged by the Russian regime and nationalisms of all kinds. On the contrary, it defines itself as a “political nation”, i.e. a nation that is great for its struggle, its ideals and its wider membership of a set of principles embodied in Europe. It has become the European nation par excellence.
No one will dispute the sincerity of the admiration most democratic leaders have for the Ukrainians and the struggle embodied by President Zelenskyy. But this insurrection for freedom also seems to disturb them. Firstly, because in a way it reminds them of their own fragility in defending democracy and the values of law and justice. Secondly, because they had done everything in their power to ensure that this historical reality, which also concerns other peoples (Syria, Belarus, Hong Kong, etc.), was somehow buried under the indistinct magma of geopolitics. They remain somewhat embarrassed by these troublemakers, who remind them of their unfulfilled commitments to free peoples. Finally, because these same Western leaders continue to read the world through geographical groupings dominated by states—often authoritarian, even dictatorial—and not through a plurality of peoples shaking off the trappings of empire. Driven by the illusory cult of stability, which I set out to dismantle in Our War, they continue to pay suicidal reverence to the strongest. Perhaps it should be added that they are uncomfortable with the emergence of a nation, which they equate with nationalism, without realizing that it has nothing to do with nationalism, because it is driven by a nation and not by a ruling clique that uses nationalism to consolidate its power. It’s all the more paradoxical that they continue to be unwilling to confront real nationalisms, those that invoke the ethnic nation to enslave their own people and others.
Our War is all about the necessary conceptual revision that needs to be undertaken. Almost seven months after the publication of this book, the process is still in its infancy.