Realism dictates that Rus-sia is a third-rate regional power-a nuisance to her neighbourhood and insecure due to a historically inflated threat perception of a hostile alliance architecture in its neighbourhood. If at all, realism as a foreign policy theory has been proven correctly repeatedly, ever since the invasion started. Nor is it a strategic need, given that Russia isn’t the USSR, with its sorry performance in Ukraine. What explains this development? Surely not a sudden bout of moral clarity. The Swedish decision is even more interesting, considering that Sweden chose this particular moment to reject neutrality, a stance they continued even during the Second World War, and Cold War, where they were critical of Western capitalism, just as much as they opposed the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union. The same goes for Sweden, which enjoys the advantage of having the Baltic states and Finland as territorial buffers. It is a decision made out of visible Russian weakness, regardless of the rhetorical justification. Finland’s neutrality was due to political expedience, an imposed peace which they are planning to ditch at an opportune moment. Consider that Finland and Sweden are now determined to shed their neutrality, which they prudentially avoided for decades in the case of Finland and centuries for Sweden. Let us categorically analyse the two important political developments that resulted from this war: the further expansion of NATO and the proxy war to bleed Russia. Whether they are advisable and prudent for American grand strategy is a different question. Anglos, and to some extent the Americans want to see Russia permanently crippled, bleeding from her self-inflicted wounds.Īll of those instincts are logical to a degree. Both arch-conservative Poland and the hyper-liberal Baltic states are determined about humiliating Russia, although with the guns firmly placed on Anglo-American shoulders.
France favours a strategic status-quo too, but is also interested in enhancing European autonomy, under-preferably unsaid-a French military preponderance with diminished European dependence on the Anglo-Americans. Germany, Austria, and Hungary, the core of central Europe, favour a mercantilist status-quo.
Russia is bogged down in a quagmire of her own making, reliving her historically revanchist pattern of misadventure abroad due to a toxic combination of a sense of betrayal, victimhood, and autocratic rule at home. The direction of European history changed (or returned to a cyclical norm, depending on which philosophical framework one subscribes to) in the last five months. A handful of great powers in a balance against one another is far more favourable a world to navigate than expanding and mutating alliances, which increase the risk of war. Then as now, only a handful had the det-ached foresight to understand that an imposed peace on a great power wounded by her own folly resulting in global anarchy is categorically worse and unethical than either a settled equilibrium or localised tyranny. Then, as now, anyone arguing for a negotiated settlement and great power equilibrium was called a pacifist, isolationist, and appeaser by ideologues and by the media. As great power conquest and territorial war returned to Europe this spring, Lansdowne is increasingly relevant. One of the last hereditary aristocrats in high office, he worked for both liberal and conservative governments and was one of the last Tory realist grandees from that now lost and underappreciated scho-ol of Canning, Salisbury, and Curzon.
He favoured equilibrium and a concert between great powers and supported a hierarchical social order over revolutionary homogenisation, egalitarianism, and anarchy. Lansdowne was a conservative shaped in the mould of Metternich and Castlereagh. Is it prudent to take advantage and humiliate an insecure great power wounded by her own folly? Wisdom from a century ago suggests otherwise.Ī week from the publication of his remarkable letter calling for realism, restraint, and a negotiated settlement between European great powers in the third year of the Great War, Colonel Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson’s chief adviser on European Politics, found Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, in a “pacific state of mind” lamenting the “folly and madness” of British leaders.
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