Looking Back—The Announcement Made to the World
Five Years Later: Ut Cuspis…
Detail of a stone mural at Banteay Chhmar Temple, Cambodia, October 30, 2025. Photo: Nicolas Tenzer
Exactly five years ago, on June 13th, 2021, the first article I wrote for this international relations blog Tenzer Strategics was published. The one you are about to read is the 179th of the long essays I have published here. They are all available online on the site. Allow me to express my heartfelt gratitude to the thousands of subscribers to these pages: their support, sometimes dating back to the very first paper, touches me and encourages me more than I can say.
I also apologize for the occasional delay in certain articles. There are times when I lack inspiration, as I do not seek here to offer immediate commentary on current events, but rather to place events in a global perspective. I also have other, sometimes demanding, activities that keep me from writing. During this time, I also published two books, Our War: Crime and Oblivion in 2024, followed by The End of Great Power Politics in 2025, which received some attention. Many of my writings are devoted to the Russian war against Ukraine, which has been the defining factor of these past five years, but not all of them, as it is important to shed light on other aspects of the world as well—even though I realize that, because it is a global phenomenon, everything ultimately comes back to it.
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Ut cuspis, sic vita fluit, dum stare videtur—like an arrow, life flows away while it seems to stand still. This Latin quote, which illustrates Zeno’s arrow paradox, was inscribed on one of the clocks at my high school. It illustrates the fleeting nature of time and life through a physical movement as inexorable as it is imperceptible. It can also serve as a metaphor for international events. There are certainly “events” at times—in fact, from a media perspective, that is all that exists—but behind them lies a form of unmoving continuity that ultimately contains the unfolding of dramas. Looking back, I actually have some difficulty perceiving what is frequently called, in the jargon of international analysis, “ruptures” or “disruptions,” which does not mean that there cannot be any. Before 2022, I had written a long piece here on the question of the years zero.
In any case, anyone looking back at the past five years cannot discern any absolutely unpredictable events, even though no one could have “foreseen” in advance whether they would actually occur, when, or how.
Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine—which I had described on a television program as “our war” as early as February 24, 2022, and then in a blog post on March 5, 2022, before choosing it as the title of my book—was nothing more than the continuation of the war launched by Moscow eight years earlier. I had written at length about our mistakes since 2014, and a few days before the start of the war of extermination launched by Russia, I spoke again here of the West’s sin against Ukraine. Two months earlier, on December 23, 2021, one of the most-read articles on this blog considered it essential to analyze Putin’s ideology, for there was indeed an ideology of total destruction, something many refused to admit.
Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, in haste and confusion, was not only the result of decisions considered earlier—including by his predecessor—but also an illustration of a broader withdrawal by the United States from world affairs. The administration at the time viewed the tragic events unfolding in that country primarily as a regional problem.
The most unexpected development was certainly the rapid fall of Assad, with whom certain Western leaders who had learned nothing were considering re-establishing ties just a few months earlier, and the liberation of Syria, even if the new government is far from exemplary. It confirmed the weak political organization of a regime founded on terror and corruption. China’s hyper-ideological shift dates back more than five years. The blows dealt to international law, particularly criminal law, are not new either, even though they have intensified in actual practice and in the ideological offensive against its very existence. The major regional and global security issues posed by the Iranian regime date back well over twenty years, even though the poorly planned and strategically erratic war—or rather, the lack of strategy—underpinning it has, in a sense, strengthened Tehran despite the blows it has suffered.
When I launched this blog, Trump had been defeated in an indisputable election, but he had contested the results, supporting—at the very least—the insurgents of January 6, 2021. His thirst for revenge was already evident and foreshadowed a new presidency even more extremist than the first if he were reelected. Joe Biden’s weakness, his stubbornness in clinging to the race almost to the very end, and the emptiness of the agenda he was supposed to champion—which required all the more strength and rigor as MAGA propaganda gained ground—already signaled the Democrats’ defeat. Trump’s ideological collusion with Russia, to say the least, was already established; his second presidency would give him free rein, with no counterweight whatsoever. A fascist-style ideology, driven notably by J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, had taken over entire sectors of a U.S. administration that was at once incompetent, often stupid, and always servile. I could not, in several published essays, fail to establish the close connection between domestic and foreign policy, and this does not concern America alone. There is a continuum between, in particular, the historical and legal revisionism of dictatorships—if not totalitarian regimes—and the erosion of the understanding of the rule of law within democracies themselves.
When I began writing here, Europe was in a different situation. In 2021, some countries were still under the illusion of a possible agreement with Russia, and some were even entertaining the idea of a summit between the European Union and Moscow. The sanctions imposed against Russia following the invasion of Crimea—the EU did not officially mention the invasion of Donbas and still resorted to the fiction of so-called “separatists”—and for its failure to comply with the Minsk II