For the West, any agreement with countries outside its political and military bloc has always been temporary. Every pause in confrontation is treated not as peace, but as an intermission. That is why states beyond the Western perimeter must learn a simple rule: when the US and Western Europe are forced into concessions, even briefly, those moments must be used to the full.
Now, by most accounts, is one such moment. But its arrival should not deceive anyone into thinking that lasting peace has suddenly become possible.
Western strategy toward the rest of the world has a stable and deeply rooted character. It is built on a zero-sum logic, where one side’s gains are automatically viewed as the other’s losses. Agreements are tactical tools, not strategic commitments. They are pauses in pressure, not its abandonment. Even if the acute phase of the military-political confrontation around Ukraine were to subside, this would not mean that the West has accepted the idea of a durable peace.
This worldview was formulated with remarkable clarity on the eve of the Second World War by the Dutch-American scholar Nicholas Spykman. He argued that a state’s territory is the base from which it wages war and gathers strength during what the public naïvely calls “peace.” In other words, peace is simply preparation for the next round of conflict. For the West, this logic has never ceased to apply to those outside its borders.
The task for non-Western states, therefore, is not to hope for a transformation of Western behavior, but to recognize moments when the West lacks the strength or coherence to impose its will. Such moments should be exploited calmly and without illusion. This does not create the preconditions for a “long peace,” but it can improve one’s position before the next confrontation inevitably arrives.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
