Moralism, utopianism, and denunciations of all things Russian are not the answer in the present fight.
Those of us who are attentive to the lessons of the past will remember that the architects of the second Gulf War, the two-part crusade to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s nefarious despotism and bring the blessings of democracy to the Arab Islamic Middle East, only belatedly discovered the fact that the divide between Sunnis and Shiites and the persistence of deep tribal cleavages were the fundamental realities we inherited in a newly “liberated” Iraq. Armchair theorists had spoken of an Iraqi middle class yearning for civic freedom, and of a reformed Islam waiting to find expression in “Islamic democracy,” something spiritually akin to the Christian Democratic parties that were so influential in Western Europe in the two-and-a-half decades after World War II. One read article after article of this type in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard. Even Stanley Kurtz, who was very cognizant of the tribal character of Iraqi society, did not think it would prove to be an insurmountable obstacle. But these visionary hopes, marked by ignorance of the facts on the ground and the democratic triumphalism—the “End of History”—that dominated Western thought after the collapse of Communism, proved to be catastrophic illusions.
Turning to the Russo-Ukrainian War that has raged since February 23, 2022, the same mix of historical ignorance and utopian expectations has clouded the Western response to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. But this time, there has yet to be an acknowledgement of the most relevant fact on the ground, namely the deep divide in Ukraine between the Galician Party, rooted in the west of the country and now dominant in Kiev, which is committed to expunging any Russian cultural and spiritual presence in Ukraine, and the Muscovite Party, which sees Russia and Ukraine not as enemies but as spiritual, if not exactly political, brothers.