Why the West Can’t Make Peace | Prof. Richard Sakwa

## The political, imperial, and philosophical West The conversation in Istanbul cut to the heart of a persistent problem: the West is not a single, coherent entity but a layered and often contradictory set of historical projects, each carrying different assumptions about power, universality, and legitimacy. This matters because the form the West takes determines how it interacts with the rest of the world. The exchange sketched three overlapping Wests — the philosophical, the imperial, and the political — and identified how the currently dominant form is both intellectually impoverished and geopolitically aggressive. The philosophical West, as discussed, traces its roots to a long history of ideas: Greco-Roman thought, Judeo-Christian moral traditions, and critical inflections from the Enlightenment and Renaissance, but also intellectual flows from West Asia and South Asia. This is the strata that legitimizes debate, pluralism, and reasoned self-critique. By contrast, the imperial West is the five-century project of expansion, colonization, and the imposition of a model of modernity as universal. That project produced technologies, institutions, and deep inequalities that still shape global arrangements. The political West, emerging most clearly after 1945, is a narrower construct: a network centered on the United States, NATO, the EU and their like-minded partners. It is a geopolitical formation with a specific administrative and security architecture. The key analytic move the conversation makes is to single out the political West as the current actor in world affairs — not because it is the only West, but because it is the one making policy and projecting force. This political West is intellectually thin: it often claims the mantle of universalism without the philosophical self-reflection of the older West, and it carries the practical machinery of the imperial West without its overt declarations of empire. That combination, argued during the exchange, helps explain why diplomacy has atrophied and why a triumphalist mindset can translate into perpetual confrontation rather than into the exercise of restrained, imaginative statecraft. ## One West and Europe’s lost sovereignty A striking theme in the Istanbul discussion was the homogenizing effect of the political West on Europe's nation-states. The image advanced — of a “One West” in which national priorities are subsumed into an integrated strategic project — captures the sense that sovereignty has been hollowed out. States that once conceived strategic questions independently now frequently align their policies with a transatlantic consensus; in some cases, regional institutions reinforce this alignment and narrowing of options. This homogenization is not merely administrative. It shapes political imagination. The conversation noted an erosion of strategic thinking among many European states: the mechanisms for assessing national interest, weighing independent options, and engaging in experimental diplomacy have atrophied. Where sovereign judgment once enabled hedging, mediation, and creative balancing, the prevailing pattern is to adopt the priorities of the core power or of alliance decision-making, sometimes without robust internal debate. Yet homogenization has contradictions. The political West’s unity is simultaneously deep and brittle: it depends on shared narratives of liberal supremacy and common threat perceptions, but it also produces internal resentments and strategic misperceptions. The inability of many European states to define an autonomous security doctrine makes them dependent on a system that privileges offence and containment, narrowing the space for alternative conflict-management approaches. That structural dependence, in the view expressed across the exchange, increasingly looks less like a sustainable order and more like a brittle coalition built around a single lead power’s preferences. ## Cold War victory and the lost peace The post-1989 narrative of a “victory” for liberal democracy has been one of the most consequential intellectual misfires of the late twentieth century, and the conversation in Istanbul pressed that point sharply. Rather than ushering in a stable, extended peace, the period after the Cold War has been marked by a proliferation of interventions, proxy conflicts, and a reassertion of military readiness. The paradox is stark: the rhetoric of liberal universalism was accompanied by a foreign policy pattern that multiplied violence. Several linked dynamics explain this dissonance. First, the sense of having “won” created a political psychology of impunity. When a state system believes its model is self-evidently superior, it tends to delegitimize adversaries and overreach in pursuit of coercive outcomes. Second, institutional continuities mattered: NATO, other security architectures, and policy communities built during the Cold War did not dissolve with the Soviet collapse; they adapted in ways that kept the friend-enemy distinction alive. Third, intellectual habits hardened into a doctrine that privileged regime change, sanctions, and militarized diplomacy over patient, interest-based negotiation. The human costs of that pattern were no small matter. The discussion at the forum cited research documenting the scale of lives lost or disrupted by post-Cold War conflicts and by policies that prioritized strategic advantage over humanitarian consequence. Those figures stand as a rebuke to any narrative that treats victory as an end rather than as a responsibility requiring new forms of restraint and restitution. ## From the postwar era to a prewar world Historical time matters in another register: the conversation employed Braudel’s tripartite sense of time — longue durée, cycles, and events — to argue that the current moment feels like the end of a postwar cycle. The 1945 order was itself a response to a particular European century of cataclysm. Its institutions and norms were designed for a very specific context, and their persistence beyond that context has been both stabilizing and distorting. What we are witnessing, according to the analysis advanced in the discussion, is not merely a new set of events but the unraveling of a postwar political cycle and a reversion toward prewar dynamics: heightened militarization, great-power competition, and an ideological reheating of international relations. Unlike the euphoria that attends the outbreak of some wars in earlier eras, the current moment is marked by anxiety rather than celebration — a population aware of the costs of great-power conflict but trapped in a strategic environment that pushes states toward posturing and rearms. That shift from postwar to prewar sensibility is dangerous because the instruments of prevention — diplomacy, mediation, multilateral problem-solving — have been weakened. The capacity to negotiate across civilizational or strategic divides, to craft compromise solutions that respect differing conceptions of legitimacy, has atrophied. As a result, episodes that could once have been managed through bargaining and confidence-building risk escalating into a deeper rupture. ## Fukuyama and the ideological trap The intellectual fallout of 1989 lingered in unexpected ways. The conversation returned repeatedly to Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis not to defend it but to locate a structural misreading: the mistake was not merely philosophical optimism but a deeper blindness to cycles and to alternative modernities. Declaring the ideological struggle over stripped the liberal project of the self-critical capacity needed to engage with rivals on terms that are not exclusively metaphysical. The troubling consequence has been that liberalism itself hardened into an orthodoxy indistinguishable from the ideological adversary it once critiqued. Instead of opening up to plural modernities, the dominant narrative treated liberal arrangements as the final form of political life, th

Why the West Can’t Make Peace | Prof. Richard Sakwa The warmongering is not a bug. It's a feature of the system the Political West has build to dominate the world. How can we change that? At the East-West Forum in Istanbul, Professor Richard Sakwa joins Pascal to examine the political West, European sovereignty, and the persistence of Cold War thinking. Sakwa argues that Western triumphalism has weakened diplomacy and narrowed political imagination. They discuss competing visions of modernity, the risks of confrontation, and whether China offers an alternative to bloc politics. The conversation concludes with Sakwa’s proposal for a Charter Order grounded in international law, pluralism, and the unfulfilled promise of the United Nations. Richard's Links: University of Kent profile: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics-international- relations/people/2273/sakwa-richard East-West Forum: https://east-west-forum.com/ Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com /shop Time Stamps 00:00 At the East-West Forum in Istanbul 00:39 The political, imperial, and philosophical West 03:22 One West and Europe’s lost sovereignty 07:10 Cold War victory and the lost peace 08:46 From the postwar era to a prewar world 12:28 Fukuyama and the ideological trap 15:38 China and an alternative to bloc politics 18:57 A Charter Order: the promise of 1945 #Pascal Welcome back, everybody, to Neutral Studies. Today, outside a conference in Istanbul, where we just discussed the East-West Forum and what is happening now in terms of the new multipolarity arising. And with me is one of the speakers at the forum, my friend and colleague, Richard Sakwa. Richard, welcome. #Richard Sakwa Lovely to be with you again. #Pascal Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Richard, we just discussed multipolarity basically for an entire day. What are you making of the discussions that you've heard and of this hopeful connection between East and West, being also in Istanbul? #Richard Sakwa -- 1 of 9 -- I think this is the inaugural conference of what I hope will become a series. And it really was a sort of meeting of East and West, both politically, in the sense that we're meeting in Istanbul, which is the junction, if you like, of Europe and Asia. At the same time, we talked more specifically about what is the West. My argument, as some people may know, I've been arguing that since 1945, what was often called the Transatlantic Alliance, Euro-Atlanticism, that we need to give it a very specific political content. Hence, I call it the political West. And this political West is only the latest form of the West, and not the best, because I would argue that there's other forms. The one which has dominated for 500 years has been the imperial West, the colonial West, or you could maybe put it, as one of our speakers argued most, I think, fruitfully, the idea of it as the development of a type of modernity, European modernity, which now claims to be the universal model of how people should live. This universalism, a universal modernity, whereas, of course, many other civilizations, cultures—some of our speakers, in particular from China, would very specifically argue that China is a civilizational state, and therefore it has a different vision of modernity. The third West I've taken to calling the philosophical West. And why is that? Because it's not just simply the Greco-Roman, the Judeo-Christian tradition, but those ideas came and developed in interaction with the whole what we now call West Asia, Persia, later on Babylon, all the rest. In fact, the idea of philosophy itself, of thinking about society, came from Persia, from ancient Persia. And in fact, there was plenty of evidence of the influence of Indic cultures and so on. So, in other words, this philosophical West—and they're not in succession—that today we have these three layers: this philosophical West, which includes the Enlightenment, which includes the Renaissance, and many other moments. We have this colonial imperial West, and we have this political West, which is a US-dominated one, NATO, European Union, and it's the most impoverished one in intellectual terms. And just finally, what we were discussing today, and it was very heartening, is that we were discussing perhaps the fourth instantiation of the West, and that is a better West. #Pascal I wonder how we build toward that. May I just run one of my ideas—not ideas, observations—by you? Because I have one more West that I kind of try to conceptualize, and I call that the One West. And what I mean by that is this phenomenon that it seems, at the moment, that the Europeans have completely given up these national priorities, and they subsumed them under the American priorities, and the Americans seem to subsume their priorities under the Israelis. And the Israelis seem to constantly—you know, there's this constant question, like, "Oh, how do the Israelis do what they do?" and so on. But at the same time, they also get all of the support from the Europeans. And with the One West, I just try to conceptualize this idea that it's maybe a mistake to think of them as separate countries. The way that it makes little sense to think of a body as separate organs, right? They all interact. And asking, is Israel guiding the United States, or the U.S. Israel, is asking, is the brain controlling the -- 2 of 9 -- heart or the heart the brain? It's like they're part and parcel of the same organism. And because they conceive of themselves as one unit, as, you know, defending civilization, defending being democratic—democracy, the only democracy in the Middle East—and everybody stands up and claps, also in the EU Parliament and in the Senate and so on. What do you think about that? This idea that it is one system, and the idea that it's nation-states is actually just, like, kind of a camouflage on top of what is actually happening. And that's Western civilization pushing against all the others, as it has done for the last five, six hundred years. #Richard Sakwa Yeah, I like the idea. But I think I'm arguing a similar thing, just by calling it something else. But it is, first of all, this political West is homogenizing. As you say, it's one of the key features of the political West since 1945 has been the de-sovereignization of the Western European states. The only state which has kept its sovereignty relatively has been the United States, which was the leader in shaping this West. It also has, of course, the wider West, covering West Asia, Israel you mentioned earlier. And, of course, the political West would include South Korea, Japan, and the Anglosphere. But your point is an absolutely correct one, that it's homogenizing, de-sovereignizing, and that these states, apart from the United States, cannot understand and define their own national interest. Israel can, in the way it does, in its very strange sort of perverse manner. But the rest of the states—we're talking about the legacy European states, Germany, France, United Kingdom, the E3 as they're called now—the inability to define, you know, what is the, first of all, the general national interest of the community itself and of the individuals making it up. And they've lost this ability of having strategic thinking. But I don't... It is homogenizing, but at the same time, there's always been the tensions between... What's paradoxical is that it became more homogeneous when it, at least at the end of the Cold War, actually became more radicalized by a whole set of philosophical, political, geopolitical challenges. Because, as one of the speakers said, there is nothing worse than victory for destroying a state—the sense of impunity that always permitted this shamelessness of actions—which has reached an absolute peak at the present time. #Pascal That's what is so weird about it, right? I mean, the people who believe that they won the Cold War even—and a lot of people will argue against that, including, of course, Jack Matlock and many others—it's like there was no winning of the Cold War. It was wound down, and then you had a proper moment in the 1990s, which I still remember, that was, like, super optimistic about the future, right? Everything will be better, everything will be good, and now peace will spread, right? Peace will break out. And then it didn't. And then the warmongering continued. And we now have data and research on all of the wars and all of the violent interventions that were done by the United States after '89 that are even more than between '45 and '89. And so, is this the outcome of constantly winning? If you win, then you get addicted to your own stuff. -- 3 of 9 -- #Richard Sakwa Your self-importance and impunity, and you're standing above the law and so on. Yeah, Brown University in Massachusetts has estimated that, at the minimum, direct deaths from the victory, if you like, since the end of the Cold War, is nearly a million. It's 800,000. Of course, in recent months, it's gone up massively as well. One way of looking at it: direct consequences of the various conflicts and wars which have started and been fought since the end of the Cold War. And that excludes the ones dying from sanctions and lack of medicine and so on. #Pascal Because that's half a million a year. Yes. #Richard Sakwa So the tally is quite a big one. #Pascal Yes, a huge one. #Richard Sakwa Can I say the way that I'm now beginning to try to conceptualize why, after the end of the first Cold War, we continued and perpetuated the logic of the Cold War, including the institutions of the Cold War, NATO above all, but even, in its own way, the European Union, and the thinking of cold warfare and enemy distinction—that we're the only universal model of civilization, of modernity, and so on—that false universalism. Again, one of the speakers talked about that. The way I see it is that I go back now to Fernand Braudel, and he divided visions and understanding of historical time in three different ways. The first one is the longue durée, and the longue durée, of course, for us, would be, if you like, democratic or industrial capitalism. Right. That's the historical epoch in which we live: capitalism, where the market and various types of capitalism—we've had social democratic inflection, we've had neoliberalism for the last 40 years, we had a different type of corporate capitalism in the late 19th century and in the 20th century, and so on. But that's the longue durée. Then he would say, we have cycles, the next thing within that. And I'm now seeing that we had a cycle—many cycles—but the latest one, 1914 to 1945, the cycle of European civil wars, which sucked in colonial troops from many outsiders, and the United States, of course. But that cycle then came to an end. We're now living in the tail end of the next cycle, which is the 1945 post-war cycle of Cold War, of the dominance of the political West, of Euro-Atlanticism, transatlanticism, a vision of European unity -- 4 of 9 -- which is disintegrating in front of our eyes. So this is the cycle we're living in. We're living at the end of that cycle. The last one ended in a massive world war. This one, we're living in these post-war years, we're now—it's gradually turning, if you like, into a pre-war situation where everybody's preparing for war, warning of war, talking about arming for war, preparing populations for war, who don't seem to be enthusiastic for it, by the way. #Pascal They shall just never, ever call it again sleepwalking. I don't think it was sleepwalking in the First World War. They were doing it consciously. Sleepwalking now. #Richard Sakwa Yes. Hermann Broch did a marvellous novel called The Sleepwalkers, and it's got the three stages. Christopher Clark used that title for a marvellous book. It shows the spirit of the time, that militarism, that sort of i