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

## Beim Ost-West-Forum in Istanbul The conversation recorded at the Ost-West-Forum in Istanbul exposes a fundamental rupture in contemporary geopolitics: the political West, shaped since 1945 by a transatlantic order, is both intellectually impoverished and institutionally brittle. What emerges in the exchange is less a debate about personalities and more an excavation of structures — the ideological habits, legal presumptions, and diplomatic failures that prevent the West from negotiating peace on terms that other major actors can accept. The speakers converge around a troubling diagnosis: triumphalism after the Cold War narrowed Western political imagination, hardened friend–foe thinking, and produced a diplomatic culture unable to engage seriously with an increasingly plural world. ## Der politische, imperiale und philosophische Westen The conversation distinguishes three overlapping conceptions of “the West” — the political West (the post‑1945 transatlantic order), the imperial or colonial West (five centuries of European expansion), and a broader philosophical West (the shared intellectual legacy of European, Near Eastern and South Asian exchanges). This tripartite framing is useful because it clarifies why critiques of the “West” are often talking past one another. The political West — the NATO‑EU‑U.S. complex — is a relatively recent institutional construction and, as discussed, arguably the weakest cog intellectually. It claims a universal model of modernity but rests upon a deeper imperial past and on philosophical traditions that were themselves cosmopolitan and syncretic. That contradiction matters: when the political West insists on universal prescription, it betrays the plural intellectual roots that might have counselled humility and dialogue. The imperial layer explains much of the structural confidence and coercive reflexes that sustain interventionist policy. The philosophical layer offers the resources for a different politics of pluralism, but it has been eclipsed by the political West’s institutions and by the securitized thinking of the post‑Cold War era. Recognizing these layered genealogies reframes the central problem: the West’s present incapacity to broker peace stems not merely from contingent errors, but from a political formation that privileges hegemony and homogenizing norms over plural diplomacy. ## Ein Westen und Europas verlorene Souveränität A striking claim in the discussion is that most European states have been effectively desovereignized within the transatlantic order. Except for the United States, few actors retain the full capacity to define independent national interests or to engage in strategic thinking free from alliance discipline. This is not only a legal or military observation; it is cultural and cognitive. Decision‑making centers are habituated to act as parts of an organism rather than as discrete political communities with competing aims. That pattern has two consequences. First, it compresses the space for genuine policy innovation in Europe: national debates are often framed by Washington’s priorities rather than by local strategic calculation. Second, it produces policy brittleness: when domestic electorates feel their strategic options are constrained, democratic legitimacy erodes and political polarisation feeds into foreign policy. The loss of European strategic autonomy thus becomes both a symptom and a driver of the West’s inability to craft sustainable settlements with other major powers. ## Sieg im Kalten Krieg und der verlorene Frieden The triumphalism that followed the Soviet collapse — celebrated as the “end of history” by some — carried a paradox. Rather than delivering a durable peace, the post‑Cold War decades witnessed a proliferation of military interventions, air campaigns, and proxy conflicts. The conversation points to a troubling statistic: the number of conflicts involving the United States since 1989 is comparable to, or exceeds, those of the earlier post‑1945 era. Far from being an aberration, this pattern looks systemic. Victory, in this sense, produced a lesson of impunity. If one believes in the rightness and universality of one’s system, the temptation to remake distant societies by force becomes difficult to resist. This dynamic also warped diplomatic practice. Diplomacy requires reciprocity and recognition of legitimate interests; triumphalism substitutes moral certitude for negotiation. The result is an order that routinely stages talks and “conferences” whose format excludes central parties or treats coercive measures as negotiation substitutes. The conversation’s examples underscore the tragedy: peace rhetoric persists even as policies institutionalize confrontation, undermining any credible pathway to settlement. ## Von der Nachkriegszeit zu einer Welt vor dem Krieg Using Fernand Braudel’s temporal schema, the speakers situate current events in a longer historical rhythm: the longue durée of capitalist modernity, the cycles of interstate struggle, and the punctuating role of events. According to this reading, the post‑1945 order itself is a cycle now winding down. The question then is whether the ending of this cycle will give way to stable reconfiguration or to escalation toward wider conflict. The interlocutors worry that rhetoric and preparations — rearmament, alliance consolidation, the hardening of blocs — are moving societies into a prewar posture. Unlike the early 20th century, however, nuclear weapons fundamentally alter the calculus: direct great‑power war is inadmissible but proxy, hybrid, and economic forms of contestation proliferate. That creates a dangerous in‑between: intensified rivalry without the stabilizing logic of deterrence that produced a hesitant peace in earlier Cold War years. This sense of drift from a postwar order back toward a prewar mind‑set is not inevitable, but it is enabled by the institutional and ideological pathologies identified earlier: the inability to conduct diplomacy, the friend–enemy political grammar, and the institutional imperatives of alliance politics. Without institutional reforms that make space for non‑hegemonic actors and plural security architectures, the risk is a longer period of managed conflict rather than negotiated settlement. ## Fukuyama und die ideologische Falle Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis is revisited not to defend it, but to explain how an intellectual error hardened into policy. The mistake was to assume ideological finality: that liberal democracy constituted the telos of political development and therefore required neither structural reform nor deep engagement with alternative modernities. Instead, the conversation suggests, liberal triumphalism turned into a doctrinal closure that shut down the kinds of philosophical self‑critique and institutional reinvention needed for a genuinely plural international order. Ironically, the liberal project’s claim to be non‑ideological became itself an ideology: policy choices framed as neutral or technical masked the political stakes of power. Once liberal norms were fused with geopolitical dominance, dissenting development paths — whether Chinese, Russian, or Global‑South approaches that prioritize different mixes of state, market, and social policy — were treated as aberrations rather than legitimate alternatives. The result is not simply competition among systems but a narrative war in which one side refuses to recognize the plural legitimacy of other modernities. ## China und eine Alternative zur Blockpolitik Can the emerging political configurations clustered around China, the BRICS, and regional institutions offer an anti‑hegemonic alternative? The exchange resists deterministic assumptions drawn from realist rivalry: rising powers will necessarily replicate the behavior of previous hegemons. Instead, it suggests that a political “East” could articulate different logics — pluralism, negotiated coexistence, and regional arrangem