José Javier Esparza
February 26th
Trump has changed the narrative on the war in Ukraine. The winner of the German elections has said it, our Minister of Defence has said it and other prominent spokesmen of the global order have said it. And it is striking that they have said it in these precise terms: the narrative. Because, in effect, the political relevance of the war in Ukraine, outside the contending countries, lies above all in its strength as a narrative: an evil aggressor power abuses its power and treacherously invades the territory of a free and sovereign nation. How can we not come to the defence of the country that was attacked? This has been the official narrative since February 2022 and from the beginning they wanted it to be the only possible narrative. So much so that one of the first decisions of the European countries was to ban any Russian media on our soil and, immediately afterwards, to publish in all our countries, at the expense of no one knows who, laudatory biographies of Zelensky, both in book and audiovisual format. All to make the narrative clear.
From that moment until today, the only tone of information in our major media has been war propaganda: everything was told from Zelensky's perspective. We were on the verge of winning the war every day. The cruelties and atrocities of the Russians were highlighted while the virtues of the Ukrainians were extolled, for whom more and more weapons were incessantly demanded, since victory was only a matter of time. A strongly emotional atmosphere has grown around this narrative and it made any dissent impossible. Any attempt to see things from another point of view was - and still is - immediately recast as treason, fifth columnism or venality ("who's paying this guy?"), in a kind of reductio ad Putinum that justified any insult, because, of course, who else but a scoundrel or a sell-out could choose Evil instead of Good? And from that point of view, it was true.
The problem was – and always has been – this very issue: the point of view. To use a very popular image, it is like that Indian tale in which a group of blind men try to describe an elephant by palpating the part of the animal they can touch. Each one describes a different animal depending on whether they feel the trunk, the ear, a leg, etc. Each of them is right, but none of them is describing the whole reality. It is the same here in this war (as in all others). If one focuses on February 22, it is clear that Russia started the war with a treacherous and clearly illegal invasion of Ukrainian sovereign territory. Now, if one broadens the focus and places it not in 2022, but in 2013-14, which is when the conflict becomes irreversible, then the perspective changes. Do we remember this? Elections won by Yanukovich, a coup d'état disguised as a popular revolution, the transparent declaration by Victoria Nuland, at the time U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Eurasian Affairs with her "Fuck the EU." And the failed Minsk agreements, and the Russian occupation of Crimea… If we focus on those, the Americans started the conflict. But if we widen the focus and go back to the birth of the Ukrainian state in 1991, then the perspective changes again: we have a largely artificial state, with two clearly differentiated communities (the Ukrainian and the Russian), both governed by two symmetrically corrupt oligarchies, incapable of building an efficient state. If we focus on those, the blame for the conflict undoubtedly lies with the successive Ukrainian governments, predators of a nation that they have condemned to permanent corruption and the emigration of millions of people long before the war began. But there is more: if we focus again and go to the spring of 2022, to the peace talks in Istanbul, the perspective changes again. Zelensky had then obtained a much more advantageous peace than the one he will be able to achieve now, but the English arrived and pushed Ukraine to prolong the war, we still do not know under what promises. If we focus on that, then the fault lies with the Europeans; the same Europeans who confessed (Merkel, Hollande) that the Minsk agreements were only a trap to gain time and allow the Ukrainians to rearm. And Europe, since then, has not stopped prolonging... the story.
Trump has violently changed the script. He has done so not out of love for the truth, but out of pure political pragmatism (which is his duty, mind you). Quite simply, this war is not his war, but that of the Democratic establishment. He is not in the least interested in pressuring the Russians, because, in his vision of the world order, his rival on the chessboard is not Russia, but China (and if he succeeds in separating Russia from China, all the better). The war in Ukraine is only a money-sink whose fate, on the other hand, is shrouded in shadows. As for the war itself, of course NATO could bring Russia to its knees, but only at the cost of an escalation whose consequences would surely be catastrophic. Under these conditions, what is the point of prolonging the war? A war that you are not going to win is better terminated. And that's all there is to it. So what about the Ukrainians, who have been pushed into an impossible conflict? Well, the White House must be thinking now that they would have been better not trusting the US or its European acolytes, who are as guilty of this as Washington is. But to do so, it is essential, first of all, to break the narrative that for three years has made the war in Ukraine the axis of world politics, the quintessence of the struggle for freedoms and "Western values" against Asian-Russian-Soviet despotism. The narrative must be broken.
The helplessness of those who, throughout all this time, had finally found a discourse capable of explaining History, a new Cold War that explained how the world worked, is perfectly understandable. Now the narrative is falling apart and the blind man has to accept that he was only touching one part of the elephant. But how can one accept such a thing when one cannot see the whole? That is why there are those who, unable to react, opt for tears, like Christoph Heusgen, or else for the delirium of conspiracy: Trump is a puppet of the Russians, its the Sudetenland, Trump is a traitor to the cause, it's Chamberlain and Churchill, evil Trump abandons the Ukrainians to their fate… or to the embrace of the European Union, which may be an even worse fate. But no, there is none of that. There is only power. As always. As when the conflict began. And now again, as always, we will see a new story manufactured whilst the weapons fall silent and peace prevails… until the next war comes around.
And what about us Europeans? Perhaps we should start writing another story. Our own story. But with different scribes, please, because the ones in Brussels are no longer even fit to write a comic strip.
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Fourth World comments:
The above article was written several days before Trump's public humiliation of Zelensky at the Oval Office. But it bolsters what was said in our previous post, that Washington has stopped resisting the shift to a new global order and is now instead trying to lead it.
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