The West has lost the will for peace

but yearns for endless wars

Western wars are not going well. Without tallying a score, American-led actions in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and Africa are in trouble. Even Joe Biden acknowledges war aims are not being achieved; and yet the endless wars sink further in the sand.

More broadly, French historian Emmanuel Todd in The Defeat of the West (La Défaite de l'Occident) argues the defeat of the West is coming; not just on the battlefields, but in the industry, culture and imperial systems of the American post-imperial system.

Too many of the elites of the West have become habituated to war to defend American primacy. Too many Western leaders, factions and media identities urge war on the world, and denounce anyone who seeks to understand the other as a traitor and a puppet. Yet these elites fail at war, will fall in defeat, and yet even now fear peace.

Fortunately, their failure and the signs of their defeat (whether military, moral or strategic) create an opportunity for initiatives for peace from the rest of the world. In years to come, the international news will be full of peace proposals from BRICS nations, but not peace conferences at Camp David.

Proposals for peace today are not coming from the West, or more concretely from its assumed leader, the USA. Rather America insists that other nations fight to their death, on America’s behalf, for as long as it takes. The US has become trapped in a victor’s game, where it fights off all those who challenge its primacy. Staying on top has become the goal, not what is created in the world by this domination. The Western leaders have lost the determination, the patience, the institutional commitments, the moral heart, and the fertile cultural soil to make the process of peace work effectively in the interests of all nations, not merely the American world system.

The West has lost the will to peace.

On February 6 Pearls and Irritations published my article, “The West has Lost the Will to Peace”.

A big thank you to the readers who shared it on social media, and to the subscribers who joined me here on Substack after reading the piece.

The submission editorial guidelines for Pearls and Irritations ask for articles to be around 1000 words, with some generous slack. My initial draft of the piece was quite a bit longer, and required cutting out some development of the ideas and some evidence for my claims.

So today I thought I would post a “Director’s Cut” of the article, together with a few additional insertions explaining some of the references and background.

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The West has lost the will for peace (Director’s cut)

Détente would be good. Dialogue and diplomacy would be better. An end to US-led covert actions and cold wars would liberate citizens around the world, and allow their cultures to flourish, without demonisation by US media. 

And what about a genuine, enduring and fair peace that balances interests of all concerned? Such a peace, surely, is the end to which the détente statement, led by former Foreign Ministers Carr and Evans and signed by 50 eminent, brave Australians, is one tentative step.

Author’s note: The détente statement was in part written by Adrian Pisarski and Kym Davey, who published an article, “Australia must not join the US in goading China to war”, explaining their thinking. They wrote:

We think Australia can help broker a new détente in a common sense approach to partnership with our ASEAN neighbours. It could be our contribution, as a middle power, to finding lasting peace in an era of uncertainty and danger.

Foreign Ministers Bob Carr and Gareth Evans also gave interviews, and of the two the interview with Evans is of most interest since he is a more substantial figure.

I had not seen this article or interviews when I wrote my piece. I did note that Evans, Carr, Davey and Pisarski all referred to the upcoming ASEAN-Australia Partner Dialogue meeting to be held in Melbourne in March 2024. Could the desire to project an image to ASEAN of Australia as a middle power motivated the statement, and led to a rushed assessment of the potential of détente to resolve the deeper conflicts in the world, beyond the “Group of Two”, USA and China?

The article continues.

Such a peace might allow the end of American occupation of Europe and the Western Pacific, only eight decades after the end of World War Two.

Such a peace might remove the shackles from the Charter international system founded in 1945. It might free the United Nations from the prison bars made by ideas and interests of American primacy.

But such a peace remains a diplomatic dream, even though it was the forgotten goal of détente. This dream was embedded in détente’s greatest achievements, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. The ideas of an enduring settlement, based in collective security and sovereign equality, lived on in Moscow’s proposals to Washington in 2021. But the US did not even give them the time of day. 

So this dream will not be realised, and, despite the best intentions, a call for détente will be a straw in the wind, because the West has lost the will for peace. 

Not peace, not diplomacy and not even détente will be realised because American supremacists still rule in Washington, Westminster and Brussels, and their servants submit in Canberra. So despite the admirable letter, do not expect détente or diplomacy or honest dialogue on peace any time soon.

The détente statement, signed by John Menadue and two Foreign Ministers, is to be applauded. It surely beats calls for conscription, and media-intelligence confections about the Red Threat of China.

But it saddens me that détente - a limited success from a murky period of compromised diplomacy 60 years ago - is the best that the few remaining virtuous political minds in this country can offer those who govern us. 

It dismays me that the judgement of the best of us is that our leaders could not even listen to something bolder. If they had asked for more, the 50 signatories would be slurred as puppets, propagandists and agents of foreign governments. But alas, even so, the insults came.

It is a sign of how far we have fallen in our ambition for peace, and our loss of respect for all nations and all cultures to find their own path to fulfilment.

Author’s note: I am referring here to my theme of the “symphony of civilizations”, which may be expressed as the free and harmonious development along autonomous paths of multiple cultures or civilizations in the modern world. The idea has been taken up in various forms by at least leaders of India, China and Russia (three of the five great power of the world). It is a contrasting vision to the primacy of Western civilization or visions of Europe as a garden and the rest of the world as a jungle or American as an exceptional nation or a progressive universalist image of one global culture. I wrote an extended piece here on Substack, “The Price of Great Historical Transformations”, on the idea last year.

The difficult admission Australia may need to make is that to expect détente, dialogue or diplomacy from the USA is a comforting delusion. 

The USA does not want détente, and the world does not need the US to offer a false détente like a dying king choosing his successor. The world needs the limited disarmament of the USA. It needs the USA to quit its 800 military bases, forswear primacy, and look after its own people. But limited disarmament will only be achieved when the USA admits that defeats have diminished its status in the world to just one of five great powers.

In the last three years, the US has experienced defeats in Kabul, Ukraine, Africa, and West Asia. But it remains in denial. Its ranting supremacists want to forestall defeat in Taiwan, and ignore how the BRICS+ economies are larger than the G7. The US grows more isolated diplomatically, while the Global Majority asserts its voice. The US’s liberal internationalism and humanitarian interventionism have been defeated by US hypocrisy, crimes and disgraces from Serbia to Libya, from Syria to Gaza, and from Africa to Donestsk.

The greatest ever army has been undone by its own vanity. The empire of democracy was defeated by drinking its own Kool-Aid, and by inventing too many of its own realities. Even its grand alliance, NATO, is tasting defeat in Europe. Does anyone in Australia remember the late 1980s dream to dissolve NATO, just like the Warsaw Pact. Does anyone remember that détente began when European leaders imagined how they could guarantee European security with their neighbours, not against Russia, and not with American weapons. How many deaths has NATO caused since America turned its back on détente?

Détente was a brief episode of the cold war that a rare US President acceded to in a moment of imperial self-doubt. It was initiated by de Gaulle, who said Europe’s future was not in a bipolar world, but in “détente, entente and cooperation.” He withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966. Willy Brandt took up Ostpolitik, and found support, to the surprise of Moscow, in Eastern European states. Europe’s initiative worked in parallel with Indian diplomacy to find a way beyond the Cold War. Its greatest achievement was the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which for a few years kindled hopes of European peace without US missiles.

Yet it lasted less than a decade. By the time of Gerald Ford’s presidency he banned the term from his campaign. Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State maintained support and clung to hopes to deliver on the SALT treaties. But the hawks and emigre Ahabs of the American state, principally Zbigniew Brzenzinski, turned an evangelical President into a crusader to overthrow the Soviet Union and reassert American supremacy. By Reagan’s election, American Supremacists ruled the roost again. As Odd Arne Westad wrote (The Cold War: A World History)

“Ultimately, though, détente was defeated by politics in the United States. Nixon and Kisinger had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept…. Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in the 1970s or ever. And they elected Ronald Reagan president to make sure that such a devaluation of the American purpose would not happen again.” (p. 500)

I wonder how Xi Jingping would respond to the modest Australian proposal for détente? He might ask China’s closest strategic partner, Russia: should we trust the USA or Australia with this initiative?

We know the likely response. Laughter, and a careful setting out of the record of twenty-five years of American betrayal, interference, deception and dishonesty, starting with that promise not to move NATO one inch eastward.

Xi might consult his own memory. Did I not offer to Obama to demilitarise the South China Sea, and he said, no?

Author’s note: This refers to the statement of Kishore Mahbubahnni of the report by the former US Ambassador to China who attended the conversation between Xi and Obama. The US political leadership claimed publicly that the opposite happened.

Did I not tell Joe Biden, in diplomatic words, that I cannot rely on his word as US President, since he does not meet his commitments? Then he called me a dictator, a few hours after our awkward meeting?

Xi might consult China’s history. When a bedazzled Henry Kissinger met Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1971, Zhou told him the US

“must recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China and not make any exceptions. Just as we recognize the United States as the sole legitimate government without considering Hawaii, the last state an exception to your sovereignty, or still less Long Island.”

(Westad, The Cold War, p. 409)

Kissinger never delivered in full. US diplomacy frankly never does.

Author’s note: Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History is worth reading to dispel some of the myths Henry Kissinger created about his own diplomatic genius. Westad wrote that Nixon had doubts about Kissinger’s ability to negotiate, and Mao considered Henry a fool. I discussed the feet of clay of the Grand Diplomat in my podcast following his death.

Xi might consult their trading partner and middle power, Australia. But why consult them when the USA announces that vassal’s actions in Yemen.

Australia’s wish to conduct middle-power diplomacy, as proposed in the détente statement, is a reasonable aspiration; but an unrealistic assessment.

Of course, we had our opportunities. In 2022 we could have chosen India’s path, stood on our own ground, and committed to dialogue and diplomacy. But instead our leaders chose, without public discussion, to barrack for NATO in the war in Ukraine. Instead, we were shrill, supine and useless. Now our consciences are stained with the blood of half a million Ukrainians and thousands of children in Gaza. Yet India stands tall as a new diplomatic super-power. We should have followed the Indian way, set out by Dr S. Jaishankar in his book.

The open letter rightly refers to diplomatic achievements of 1990’s. But these are now three decades past, and has not our great ally unilaterally undone any minor progress on nuclear disarmament that was then achieved?

Australia has burned its credibility as a middle power. It is a sunken diplomatic shipwreck far off the continental shelf of the new multipolar world. Australia has burned its soft power, especially since 2021. Shameful actions and words on Gaza, the UNRWA and genocide. Obscene votes at the UN standing like Custer with an isolated USA. The gormless, shameless complicity in America’s ruin of Ukraine. Impulsive, bipartisan idiocy on AUKUS. Reckless engagement in more Anglo-American slaughter in the former British colony of Yemen.

I wish there was something I could do. I wish there was a more compelling and courageous letter that I could sign; but my name is worth nothing, and I see no Western leaders with the courage and the skill to find the true path to peace.

I fear I have a long wait through a dark winter as America recklessly takes the world to more devastating wars that it still believes will leave America on top. 

I regret my citizenship of this broken commonwealth, Australia. It will endure a long sleep until this country’s elites reverse the abasement of their minds by American imperialism and the vapid theatre of modern politics.

But I will wait, and endure; because I know that the tides of history have turned on the vengeful American empire. I will not stir from my beach to save its drowning leaders. May they go down with the USS Exceptionalism, the latest incarnation of Melville’s Pequod. I will stay ashore and tend my garden, and wait for the new waves of the better world to come.

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I notice that Joseph Camilleri has written an excellent article sceptical of the détente statement. I recommend reading it, and let us hope the public debate slowly recommits to a genuine process for peace.

I hope you enjoyed this piece. Please share on Substack and other networks.

Until next week, take care and remember that what thou lovest well will not be reft from thee. (Ezra Pound, Cantos)