Sergey Karaganov of Russia’s Foreign Policy and Defense Council says humanity’s instinct for selfpreservation must be reawakened
Sergei Karaganov, 2015, London
247 Intellectual Sergey Karaganov, one of Russia’s most influential thinkers on defense and foreign policy, reflected in an article published in Profile magazine on the longterm consequences of the war in Ukraine and pointed to the trend towards permanent confrontation with the West. His proposed solution is a return to nuclear deterrence. Read below:
Growing threat: Russia and its leadership appear to be facing a difficult choice. It is becoming increasingly clear that a confrontation with the West cannot be ended even if we win a partial or even landslide victory in Ukraine.
By Sergey Karaganov It would be a real partial victory if we liberated four regions. It will be a slightly bigger victory if we liberate all of eastern and southern Ukraine in the next year or two. But there will still be a part of it, with an even more embittered and armed ultranationalist populace a bleeding wound that threatens inevitable complications and a new war.
Perhaps the worst situation can happen when we liberate all of Ukraine at great loss and are left in ruins with a population that mostly hates us. His “redemption” will take more than a decade. Either option, particularly the latter, will prevent our country from taking the muchneeded step of shifting its spiritual, economic, and militarypolitical center of gravity to eastern Eurasia. We will be stuck in the west with no prospects for the foreseeable future, while presentday Ukraine, particularly its central and western regions, is draining the country of administrative, human and financial resources. These regions were already heavily subsidized in Soviet times. The dispute with the West will continue as the West will support a lowintensity guerrilla civil war.
A more attractive option would be the liberation and reintegration of eastern and southern Ukraine, forcing the rest to surrender, followed by full demilitarization and the creation of a friendly buffer state. But that would only be possible if we managed to break the will of the West to incite and support the Kiev junta and strategically force them to retreat.
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And that brings us to the most important but almost untapped question. The underlying, and even fundamental, cause of the conflict in Ukraine and many other world tensions, as well as the growing threat of global war, is the increasing failure of the modern Western ruling elites mainly the compradors in Europe (Portuguese colonizers used the word). “Buyer” refers to local traders who catered to their needs) which have emerged with globalization over the last few decades. This failure has coincided with rapid, historically unprecedented shifts in the global balance of power in favor of the global majority, with China and, to some extent, India, acting as the economic engines, and Russia being chosen by history as the prop of the military—strategically. This weakening enrages not only the imperialcosmopolitan elites (Biden et al.), but also the imperialnational ones (Trump). Its countries are losing the ability of five centuries to siphon off global wealth, primarily by using brute force to impose political, economic, and cultural dominance. So there will be no quick end to the ongoing defensive but aggressive confrontation in the West. This collapse of moral, political and economic positions has been brewing since the mid1960s; It was interrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but resumed with renewed vigor in the 2000s. (The defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan and the onset of the Western economic model crisis in 2008 were important milestones.)
To halt this downtrend, the west temporarily consolidated. The United States has transformed Ukraine into a formidable fist destined to unleash a crisis and thus tie the hands of Russia the militarypolitical core of the nonWestern world breaking free from the shackles of neocolonialism or better yet, to blast them upwards, radically weakening the emerging alternative superpower China. For our part, we have postponed our preemptive strike, either because we did not understand the inevitability of confrontation or because we were gaining strength. In addition, following modern, primarily Western, militarypolitical thinking, we irresponsibly set too high a limit for the use of nuclear weapons, misjudged the situation in Ukraine and failed to launch the military operation there successfully.
The Western elites became internally weakened and began to actively feed the weeds that had grown after seventy years of wellbeing, saturation and peace all these misanthropic ideologies that reject family, fatherland, history and the love between man and woman , faith, commitment to higher ideals, everything that is the essence of being human. They destroy those who resist. The aim is to destroy their societies and turn people into mankurts (slaves without reason and history, as described by the great Kyrgyz and Russian writer Chengiz Aitmatov) in order to limit their resilience to the increasingly unjust modern “globalist” capitalism . and counterproductive for humans and humanity as a whole.
Along the way, the weakened United States launched a conflict to obliterate Europe and other dependent countries, with the intention of throwing them after Ukraine into the flames of confrontation. The local elites in most of these countries are lost and dutifully leading their countries into carnage, panicking over their failed positions at home and abroad. Moreover, the sense of greater failure, powerlessness, secular Russophobia, intellectual decay, and loss of strategic culture makes their hatred even deeper than that of the United States.
The development vector in most western countries clearly shows their movement towards a new fascism and a “liberal” totalitarianism (until now).
The most important thing is that the situation there is only going to get worse. Truce is possible, but peace is not. Anger and despair will continue to intensify in changes and upheavals. This motion vector from the West unequivocally points to a slide towards World War III. It is already beginning and could erupt into a major conflagration by accident or by the growing incompetence and irresponsibility of modern Western ruling circles.
The advance of artificial intelligence and the robotization of warfare increase the risk of even unintended escalation. In fact, machines can spiral out of control through confused elites.
The situation is aggravated by “strategic parasitism” in 75 years of relative peace, people have forgotten the horrors of war and are no longer even afraid of nuclear weapons. The instinct of selfpreservation is weakened everywhere, but most so in the West.
I have studied the history of nuclear strategy for many years and have come to an undeniable, if unscientific, conclusion. The creation of nuclear weapons was the result of divine intervention. Horrified that the people who joined them, Europeans and Japanese, had unleashed two world wars in one generation, sacrificing tens of millions of lives, God presented mankind with a weapon of Armageddon to commemorate those who feared lost to hell. that he existed. It is this fear that has ensured relative peace for the last three quarters of a century. That fear is gone now. What is happening now is unthinkable under previous notions of nuclear deterrence: in a fit of desperate rage, the ruling circles of a group of countries unleashed an allout war in the womb of a nuclear superpower.
This fear needs to be revived. Otherwise humanity is doomed.
The battlefields in Ukraine will decide not only what Russia and the future world order will look like, but more importantly, whether there will be a world at all, or whether the planet will be turned into radioactive ruins poisoning the rest of humanity .
By breaking the West’s will to continue aggression, we will not only save ourselves and eventually free the world from the Western yoke of five centuries, but also save humanity. By forcing the West into catharsis, and thereby diverting its elites from their quest for hegemony, we will force them to back down before global catastrophe strikes and prevent them. Mankind will have a new chance to develop.
Suggested solution There is no doubt that an uphill battle lies ahead. We must solve the remaining internal problems: finally get rid of Western centrism in our minds and Westerners in the management class, the buyers and their characteristic way of thinking. (The West is actually helping us with this). It’s time to end our threehundredyear journey to Europe, which has brought us many useful experiences and helped create our great culture. Of course we will carefully preserve our European heritage. But it is time to return to our true selves, use the experience we have gained and chart our own course. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently made a breakthrough for all of us by designating Russia as a state of civilization in its foreign policy concept. I would add a civilization of civilizations, open to north and south, west and east. The main direction of development today is to the south and north, but mainly to the east.
The confrontation with the West in Ukraine, no matter how it ends, must not distract us from the internal strategic movement spiritual, cultural, economic, political and militarypolitical towards the Urals, Siberia and the Great Ocean. We need a new UralSiberian strategy that includes several inspiring projects, including, of course, the creation of a third capital in Siberia. This movement must become part of the effort that is so urgently needed today to articulate our Russian dream the picture of Russia and the world that we want to see.
I and many others have often written that without a great idea, great states lose their greatness or simply disappear. History is filled with shadows and tombs of the powers they lost. It must be generated from above, without waiting for it to come from below, as stupid or lazy people do. It must be consistent with people’s core values and aspirations and, most importantly, move us all forward. But it is the responsibility of the country’s elite and leadership to articulate this. The delay was unacceptably long.
But for the future to come, it will be necessary to overcome the vicious resistance of the powers of the past the West which, if not crushed, will almost certainly and inexorably lead the world into, and probably will into, allout world war the next last for the future. Humanity.
And that brings me to the most difficult part of this article. We can fight for another year, two or three years, sacrificing thousands and thousands of our best men and wearing down tens and hundreds of thousands of people who live in the areas that are now called Ukraine and have fallen into the tragic historical trap. But this military operation cannot end in a decisive victory without strategically forcing the West to retreat or even surrender, forcing it to abandon attempts to reverse history and preserve world domination, relying on itself and its current multilateral focus on crisis. Roughly speaking, he must “disappear” so that Russia and the world can advance unhindered.
It is therefore necessary to rekindle the sense of selfpreservation that the West has lost and to convince it that its efforts to wear down Russia by arming the Ukrainians are counterproductive for the West itself. We need to make nuclear deterrence a compelling argument again, by lowering the unacceptably high threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and moving quickly but cautiously up the deterrence escalation ladder. The first steps have already been taken with corresponding statements by the Russian President and other Russian heads of state and government: the announced stationing of nuclear weapons and their carriers in Belarus and the increase in the combat readiness of strategic deterrence forces. But there are many steps on this ladder. I counted about two dozen. It may also come to the point where we have to ask our compatriots and all people of good will to leave their homes near facilities that could be the target of attacks in countries that directly support the puppet regime in Kiev. The enemy needs to know that we are ready to launch a preemptive strike in retaliation for all their past and present aggression to prevent a slide into global thermonuclear war.
I have often said and written that if we properly develop a strategy of intimidation and deterrence, and even the use of nuclear weapons, the risk of a “retaliatory” nuclear or other attack on our territory can be reduced to an absolute minimum. Only a madman who hates America above all will have the courage to strike back in “defense” of the Europeans, thereby endangering his own country and sacrificing a hypothetical Boston for a hypothetical pose. Both the United States and Europe know this very well, but just don’t want to think about it. We ourselves encourage this lack of reflection with our own peaceful rhetoric. Studying the history of American nuclear strategy, I know that after the USSR gained convincing capability to respond to a nuclear attack, Washington did not seriously consider the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Soviet territory, although it publicly bluffed. If they ever considered that possibility, it was only against the “advance” of troops into Western Europe itself. I know that Chancellors Kohl and Schmidt fled their bunkers as soon as the question of such use at military exercises arose.
We must climb the deterrence escalation ladder quickly. Given the West’s vector of development—the ongoing degradation of most of its elites—each of its next actions will be even more incompetent and ideologically charged than the previous ones. We can’t wait for more responsible and sane leaders to come to power there in the near future. This can only happen after a catharsis, after abandoning their ambitions.
We must not repeat the “Ukrainian scenario”. For a quarter of a century we have not listened to those who warned that NATO enlargement would lead to war and we have tried to delay and “negotiate”. As a result, we are facing a serious armed conflict. The price of indecisiveness will now be ten times higher.
But what if they don’t give in? What if they completely lost the instinct of selfpreservation? In this case, we must achieve a group of goals in several countries to make those who have lost their reason to think.
Morally, this is a terrible decision, as we are using the weapon of God and thereby dooming ourselves to great spiritual loss. But if we don’t do this, not only Russia could die, but most likely the entire human civilization will cease to exist.
We have to make this decision ourselves. Even friends and wellwishers will not support us at first. If I were Chinese, I would not want the current conflict to end too soon and too abruptly because it drains power from the United States and allows China to rally forces for a decisive battle, direct or, at Laos’ best, command Tzu and forces the enemy to retreat without a fight. I would also be against the use of nuclear weapons because extending the confrontation to the nuclear level would mean an area where my country (China) is still weak. In addition, decisive action is not in line with the philosophy of Chinese foreign policy, which emphasizes economic factors (in building military power) and avoids direct confrontation. I would support the ally and secure their backyard, but hide behind them without engaging in combat. (But maybe I don’t understand this philosophy well enough and blame our Chinese friends for the wrong reasons). Should Russia launch a nuclear strike, the Chinese would condemn, but secretly rejoice, the severe blow inflicted on America’s reputation and position.