The West is COLLAPSING But Still Tries To Capture Proxies | Lasha Kasradze

## The biggest myth being busted in world politics The idea that the post–Cold War world would be governed by a benign “liberal international order” has been revealed as an illusion. Where once there was talk of spreading democracy and building institutions, the last three decades have exposed a practice of geopolitics masked as moral mission. The conversation makes clear that the soft language of values has often been a veneer for hard calculation: alliances and promises were marketed as solidarity while serving strategic aims. That myth—of a West dedicated principally to democracy promotion and mutual security—is not simply tarnished; it has been deconstructed. This deconstruction matters because myths shape decisions. If policymakers and publics accept the story that Western power is essentially benevolent, they overlook patterns of manipulation and coercion that have become routine. The exchange in the discussion highlights how the rhetoric of “values” was appropriated by ideological currents—neoconservatism among them—to manufacture consent for interventions and to justify the instrumentalization of smaller states. In short, the idea of a rules-based, altruistic order has been eclipsed by a more cynical reality: great-power politics hidden under moralistic language. That realization is painful for countries that once relied on Western guarantees. It is also embarrassing for Western elites who, having won the Cold War, failed to convert victory into durable legitimacy. The interview suggests that instead of building lasting bridges through inclusion or neutral frameworks, Western policy often reverted to containment by other means—expanding influence at the margins and treating sovereign states as pawns in a continuing rivalry. ## How countries like Georgia navigate a West they can't trust For small states that sit in contested geopolitical spaces, the collapse of the myth carries immediate, practical consequences. Georgia provides a vivid case study of a country that learned, through war and pressure, that Western promises can be hollow when confronted with strategic risk. The 2008 invasion was a formative shock; it brought Georgia to the brink and revealed the limits of third-party protection. That trauma created an epiphany: aligning rhetorically with the West did not guarantee security, nor did it eliminate the reality of vulnerability next to a reviving Russia. The strategy that followed—of cautious balancing rather than full embrace of any patron—reflects a hard-earned political realism. Georgian political actors and publics have had to learn what alliance means in practice: diplomatic applause and access to institutions are not the same as the willingness to accept costly confrontation on behalf of a client. The conversation emphasizes that many in Georgia came to see the Western approach as instrumental—encouraging anti-Russian postures when convenient, withdrawing when costs rose. That produced a political culture that values autonomy and hedging, seeking economic and security ties multiple ways rather than relying exclusively on one great power. This is not unique to Georgia. Across the South Caucasus and beyond, smaller states are recalibrating: preserving relations with Western institutions for trade and prestige, while pursuing pragmatic accommodation with neighbors, including Russia, where survival requires it. The lesson is clear: trust is earned through consistent, risk-bearing support; where that is absent, alignment becomes transactional rather than existential. ## Was the Cold War inevitable? Missed opportunities with Russia One of the more provocative threads in the discussion is the argument that a bipolar clash between East and West was not historically inevitable. Diplomatic choices after World War II—long assumed to lock the world into an antagonistic bipolarity—were contingent. The presence of Soviet delegations at institutions such as Bretton Woods shows that inclusive visions existed; alternatives to partition and militarized blocs were plausible. The transcript points to several missed opportunities where bridge-building might have led to different outcomes. Proposals for a neutral Germany, or early Soviet overtures, could have been the basis for a different European security architecture. Instead, political choices—driven by fear, domestic politics, and ideological rigidity—pushed nations toward walls rather than bridges. The consequences were profound: a century of recurring crises, proxy wars, and the normalization of competition as a geopolitical default. This retrospective critique does not deny the real conflicts of interest that existed, nor the role of ideology. But it insists on contingency. The Cold War was not a mechanical result of abstract systems; it emerged from decisions made by leaders who could have prioritized integration or neutral arrangements in the early postwar years. The point is relevant today: contemporary choices about NATO expansion, neutrality, and the bounds of influence are similarly contingent and thus subject to revision if political will and imagination allow. ## Why cynical foreign policy always wins over cooperation The conversation offers a sobering diagnosis about what tends to succeed in international politics: cynicism and hard-edged power often outcompete cooperative projects. When elites view international relations primarily through the zero-sum lens of advantage and vulnerability, policies that exploit asymmetries and cultivate proxies prove effective in achieving short-term objectives. Where normative arguments lack enforcement, they are easily subordinated to strategic imperatives. Cynical foreign policy wins for structural and psychological reasons. Structurally, power asymmetries allow great powers to use economic, military, and institutional levers to shape smaller states’ behavior. Psychologically, narratives of existential threat mobilize domestic support for aggressive policies and delegitimize alternatives. The discussion points to how this pattern becomes self-reproducing: success through coercion validates the method, and the language of values becomes a tool to mask power politics rather than a constraint on it. That does not mean cooperation is impossible, but it does suggest that cooperative frameworks must be engineered with enforcement, reciprocity, and credible benefit-sharing. Without demonstrable reciprocal gains and credible security assurances, cooperation struggles to compete with the immediacy of coercive tactics and the spectacle of decisive action—even when the latter are ultimately destabilizing. ## Using small nations: The West's geopolitical strategy A striking analytical thread is the depiction of how larger powers use smaller nations instrumentally. The West’s post–Cold War approach to the periphery often involved courting fragile states not primarily to strengthen them, but to weaken larger rivals by proxy. Support for certain governments, encouragement of contested alignments, and the nurturing of oppositions have been part of a strategy aimed at creating strategic depth and pressure points against rivals rather than building resilient regional orders. This instrumentalization has political and moral costs. For client states, being prized primarily for their utility breeds volatility and undermines internal legitimacy. It also invites retaliatory measures from neighbors who feel threatened by external meddling, turning buffer zones into battlefields. The conversation makes clear that such strategies are neither new nor confined to one side; the Great Game of earlier centuries is echoed in contemporary practices. The real difference today is the veneer of global norms that makes the instrumental logic harder to contest domestically within donor states. This strategic pattern helps explain why rhetoric about democracy promotion often sits beside policies that produce instability: when short-term geostrategic leverage is the

The West is COLLAPSING But Still Tries To Capture Proxies The Post-Cold War myth of the "Liberal International Order" is dead. And it's dead for good. But there are others that are still persisting and they are dangerous. One of the most hurtful myths is of course that the West only wants to "spread democracy" and "protect" peoples at home and abroad. Nother could be further from the truth. The USA and NATO are ruthlessly exploiting their members and proxies for naked, blatant, and highly illegal power projection. Today I’m talking again to Lasha Kasradze, Liaison Officer at Sokhumi State University. We explore the cynical geopolitics of the post- Cold War era, from the West's broken promises to Russia to the strategic use of smaller nations like Georgia and Armenia, questioning whether true cooperation was ever on the table or if conflict was always the intended outcome. Links: The Realist Review Substack: https://therealistreview.substack. com/ ACURA: https://usrussiaaccord.org/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack. com Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:39 The biggest myth being busted in world politics 00:05:48 How countries like Georgia navigate a West they can't trust 00:15:49 Was the Cold War inevitable? Missed opportunities with Russia 00:30:21 Why cynical foreign policy always wins over cooperation 00:39:12 Using small nations: The West's geopolitical strategy 00:45:12 Is Russia losing influence in the South Caucasus? 00:49:58 Conclusion #Pascal Hello, everybody. This is Pascal Lottaz from Neutrality Studies, and today we're doing an update with Lasha Kasradze, a liaison officer at Sukhumi State University, residing in the United States. Lasha, welcome back. #Lasha Kasradze Thank you, Pascal. It's great to be back. #Pascal Lasha, we're seeing right now a couple of things in world politics that I’d like to discuss with you. We said, let’s frame it as what we could call the end of the myth—or the myths—that are being dispelled right now in front of our eyes. When it comes to IR and how the world works, what do you think? To you, what’s the biggest myth that’s being busted right now, the one that’s going to be impossible to put back together again? #Lasha Kasradze -- 1 of 14 -- Thanks for that, Pascal. Yes. Well, first, let's just say that the myth has been deconstructed, so to speak. The post–Cold War myth within the non-Western world—the Global South, BRICS—I think it’s fair to say has been challenged and deconstructed. #Pascal So you mean the myth of the post–Cold War era, or the myth of the liberal international order? #Lasha Kasradze Right. So that's correct. The post–Cold War liberal institutionalism, liberal hegemony, democracy promotion—with its sort of apex during the Bush administration—all that, I think, has been rediscovered as basically nothing but hot air, fluff, to a large extent. There are some good elements in it; perhaps the intention was good. But I think it’s been revealed that ideologues, ideology, neoconservatism, and practitioners of that worldview have hijacked those good ideas and turned them into a grotesque, ideologically driven foreign policy that has reached the present day of absurdity we’re witnessing—being translated, say, in Brussels, for example, not to mention Washington, of course, which I’d call its originator. But we’re seeing these almost comical events taking place, where they’re basically collapsing under their own weight—driven by ideology, a complete loss of common sense and rationality. It’s a very sad situation to witness. And what makes it even sadder is that, you know, look, the world has witnessed ideologically driven massacres. The European continent has gone through two world wars. But not in peacetime—not when all of that was supposed to be over. That’s the problem. That’s the tragedy of this whole thing. #Pascal And you're calling it comical, but it's comical without being funny, right? It's just a charade—one that’ s there, to some extent, to entertain us and keep the masses quiet, but also to uphold an image that, thirty years ago, might still have been believable, and today it’s not. I was just reading that the BBC is under big pressure right now because a lie has been debunked. And I read through that and thought, oh, wow, are they talking about the lie about Gaza, the lies about Ukraine? No, no. Apparently, it’s the lie that they edited together a video about Donald Trump, making it look like he said things on January 6th that he never actually said. And I’m like, okay, so those are the lies being called out—the lies about other liars within the same system. It blows my mind what kind of things now pass as “deconstructing the narrative.” And I wonder whether we’re not, again, caught in a narrative bubble in the West—just shifting from one bubble to the next, from the liberal international order to the Trump bubble—while the West is still trapped in its own little mindset. What do you make of that? -- 2 of 14 -- #Lasha Kasradze I think, by the way, I fleetingly heard about that story. I think some of the top brass at the BBC resigned. #Pascal Two executives were apparently let go—over reporting on Trump. Not on Gaza, not on Ukraine, not on Venezuela—nothing else, just Mr. Trump. #Lasha Kasradze We just cannot fathom the idea that there’s somebody in Washington who actually challenges the system. They just can’t accept it unless it fits their uniform way of looking at the world—waving their fingers at everybody else, telling them how to be democratic or better people, better societies. They’ re just not going to tolerate anything other than that. So, your last point—your last question. #Pascal My last point is, are we witnessing, you know, a new set of myths—a new way for the West to keep itself busy with itself, ignoring the real shifts that are happening? I mean, look at Georgia, where you’ re from. Georgia has gone through a very intense learning period in terms of what the West is about, right? Starting off basically as a kind of small Ukraine, having a proxy war with Russia, and then learning how to say no without actually saying, “We’re going to join the Russians.” It’s like Georgia had to go through a moment of very intense learning—not soul-searching, but approach- searching—figuring out how to deal with the fact that you can’t trust the West, while obviously not wanting to throw yourself into anyone else’s camp. How do you think these countries are trying to navigate that right now, or at least those that have faced these kinds of challenges? #Lasha Kasradze Yeah, it’s a great epiphany, if you will—a big realization that happened within Georgia. Just very briefly, to your original point: will the West ever realize what’s happening, what it’s done? Or will it collapse under its own mythology, creating and lying to itself first and foremost? I think if they continue like this, they’re facing a huge embarrassment. You know, Donald Trump—he tries, but he’s surrounded by the traditional sort of demagoguery in Washington. One could argue that he has to push back more strongly, but that’s a different discussion altogether. Still, he has tried—whether it’s Israel-Palestine or Russia-Ukraine—but now you see how he’s been dragged all over, even in the Western Hemisphere, in the U.S. neighborhood, vis-à-vis Venezuela. So, yeah, you know, again, to answer your question, I think the West is going to keep tripping over its own madness, if you will, until it realizes there’s no other way but to face reality. What happens -- 3 of 14 -- now concerning Georgia—as far as Georgia is concerned—ironically, I know John Mearsheimer points to 2017 as the beginning of the end, or the end of the unipolar moment, the unipolar world. And not that I’m correcting Professor Mearsheimer, but I’d argue that Georgia actually realized this back in 2008, after Russia invaded Georgia and almost ended the country’s nationhood and statehood. If Putin had taken that policy further—I keep saying this—Georgia, as we know it today, would not exist. So, shortly—well, it was 2008, and by 2012, it took about three to five years, but then, slowly, slowly, they started to come out of this fantasy world. With the Georgian Dream coming to power, they began to realize that something was fundamentally wrong and just not sustainable any longer. Business as usual meant listening to the, you know, Victoria Nulands of the world, the John McCains of the world—being egged on against Russia in this very cynical, very condescending way: “You go fight, we’re here with you.” You know, the whole phrase “freedom is not free” has been used countless times in Georgia to show them that, hey, look, people die for freedom. You know, so, going back to the original point—our opening statements—yeah, it was a myth. It was the creation, the manufacturing of myths and narratives that, you know, the brave Washington establishment stands with Georgia, this small country against evil Russia, and this extreme sort of normative, you know, “values-based”—quote-unquote “values-based”—approach. Because the people preaching values and democracy couldn’t care less if those values had actually been consolidated in Georgia. And now we know the only motivating factor behind all that was to see if they could weaken Russia by egging Georgia on against Moscow. Obviously, right from the get-go, that was a foolish strategy. It never would have worked. It’s been tried for centuries. It was tried, you know, a few years leading up to the Russian Revolution, during the Revolution, and after it. You know, from Great Britain—this traditional fear of Russia taking over Great Britain’s most prized possession, India. That whole brouhaha with Afghanistan, the so‑called Great Game, where Great Britain tried to prop up the then‑declining Ottoman Empire, eventually leading to the Crimean War. You know, all of this—perhaps not exactly uniform—but overall, the strategic calculus of the West was always to create some sort of vulnerability around the periphery of Imperial Russia, later Soviet Russia. And it didn’t work. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s grand vision was to destroy Russia—or perhaps “destroy” is too simplistic a term. Let’s say to weaken Russia. That turned out to be a failure as well. His propping up of Afghanistan, for example—he understood correctly that Eurasia was the place to be if the collective West, and particularly the United States, wanted to maintain its primacy. But it just didn’t work. Russia didn’t disappear. It remains a major nuclear power—the only country on the planet that could devastate the continental United States if it came to a nuclear exchange. And the rest—look, the rest is just noise. The rest is what we said at the beginning of this recording: that myth creation, they had to justify Russia. Undoubtedly, the collective West defeated the Soviet Union, and it did so because, let’s be honest, there were some better ideas, okay? Not that -- 4 of 14 -- capitalism or communism—however they looked on paper—were perfect. The fact of the matter is, materially and in practice, the West won. Their ideas sort of triumphed. But then things went downhill. America, in my view, just blew it in terms of maintaining that enormous legitimacy after the collapse, after the victory in the Cold War. Now, we can go back to World War II and talk about—sort of go back to Stalin, if you will, go back to Lavrentiy Beria, if you will—how they were extremely strategic with Roosevelt, who was, in my view, a genius of a president, one of the greatest presidents the United States has ever had. These two were keen on maintaining, and they understood that the Soviet Union could not have maintained its parity with the United States and the collective West. Because at the end of the day— even, you know, I’m not advocating for Stalin here or defending him—but what I’m saying is, the man had a strategic vision, and he’s con