Letter From the Editors

This week’s news and commentary lay a lot of blame for the world’s problems on the West: the US, France and the EU in general. The CIS summit hosted by Russia offered ample opportunities for such finger-pointing. With regard to the ongoing conflict settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, for example, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said that the West is making a bid to “butt into the negotiation process.” FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov went even further: “The Americans and Europeans clearly have no interest in establishing stability in the Caucasus. By persuading Yerevan to draw out talks with Baku, the West is trying to . . . get its own ‘peacekeeping’ contingent deployed in the region – de jure under the aegis of the UN, but de facto under the aegis of NATO.”

Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev decried the US and France as hypocritical for supporting Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence even as they advocate Ukraine’s territorial integrity and supply it with weapons.

Perhaps the most fundamental criticism of the West uttered at the CIS summit – albeit indirectly – came from Belarussian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko. Lamenting that monuments to Soviet soldiers in a number of European countries are now being vandalized by “neo-Nazis,” he concluded: “Young people participating in this infernal show, indoctrinated in the spirit of national superiority and revanchism, have no clue about the course of history. They do not know that their predecessors – Balts, Poles, Belgians and even Germans – fought alongside the Soviet people.”

So, the West is not only taking over the world, but making over the history of the world. Does its power have no limits?

Yes, but they are self-imposed, if you believe Bernard Guetta. He writes that the West is pulling punches in the Ukraine war: “The Americans and Europeans unanimously believe that Putin cannot be allowed to win. . . . Therefore, Western countries are supplying Ukraine with enough weapons to resist aggression” – but because they fear that Russia’s defeat will bring nuclear chaos, they refuse to let these weapons be used against military targets on Russian territory.

Guetta similarly assesses the West’s policy toward Israel and Palestine. “For three decades, the US and European Union have jointly advocated for a two-state solution in the Middle East but have never been willing to force both sides to accept it. . . . [O]ut of fear of Sunni Islamists and Iran strengthening in the region, they have never threatened to withhold economic and military aid to Israel if it obstructs the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Europeans and Americans have thus doomed themselves to helplessness.”

Boris Kagarlitsky diagnoses the problem differently: He argues that protracted wars like those in Ukraine and the Middle East serve the interests of those in power (particularly Putin and Netanyahu), because they reinforce the idea that these leaders are the great hope of saving their respective countries from destruction by the enemy. However, this sense of perpetual war breeds a sense of helplessness among those not in power. “We are all so used to being helpless victims or embittered critics that we find any other role inorganic and incomprehensible.”

And yet change is inevitable. At some point the current leaders will leave power, and new ones will have to take over. Kagarlitsky’s advice to Russians in particular is “to end the culture of pessimism that has dominated for many years among those who see themselves as guardians of advanced democratic values, both in the left-leaning and the liberal sense. Pessimism and fatalistic humility are incompatible with accountability and a readiness to be more than spectators, to be participants in and agents of social change.”

These words could just as well apply to the West. With elections coming up, voters need to choose responsible leaders – otherwise, they will have only themselves to blame.