The West must turn the narrative on war and peace

A rushed deal with Putin will only invite more conflict later

For defenders of the West, and the euro-atlantic community in particular, one of the great vulnerabilities is the accusation that we are ‘pro-war’.

Most readers of this blog would naturally recoil at that idea and instinctively push back at the absurdity. However, it would be a mistake to completely discount the force of this accusation merely because we already know it to be false. Whether it is Donald Trump in Germany, Viktor Orban in Hungary or Alice Weidel in Germany, many of the rising and influential far-right authoritarians of today present themselves as candidates for peace. While we should not shy away from labelling them as fascists, that ostensible opposition to war is one of the big differences between the far-right today and their forebears of the 1930s.

The average voter meanwhile is certainly apprehensive about war and about their country’s involvement in one. Failed interventions in the Middle East and North Africa by Western states have made much of the public doubtful about the real value of military opposition to hostile powers, so long as they do not pose a direct threat to their own country. Faced with insecurity and instability in the world, many look to the comfort of the inward turn, battening down the hatches and waiting for the storm to pass.

So we should not be surprised that large numbers of voters in countries across the West are endorsing appeasers and friends of autocratic regimes in the name of ‘peace’. This is a real problem that must be taken seriously. We know from past experience that appeasement does not work, that the aggressor will always seek to take advantage of weakness and will only be deterred by strength. Yet ‘war’ is not popular and understandably so. In advocating for fierce resistance against the likes of Vladimir Putin, we must not allow ourselves to be stereotyped as warmongers, lest those who would truly sell out the West manage to gain the upper hand.

There is a tendency to look past the issue of peace, taken almost as a given, to focus on what we feel is actually at stake: freedom, independence, democracy. The language and the arguments of those who favour resistance to capitulation tends to be wrapped up in these notions. Intrinsically, there is nothing wrong with this. These are indeed immensely valuable ideals that we have willingly protected with force of arms in the past. To make the case for such a defence again, when these ideals are so visibly under threat, is only good and natural.

But the argument should not stop there. It is important to move onto the territory of the appeasers and take them on at their own game by establishing a new narrative for peace.

What would this narrative look like? The ‘peace’ proposed by appeasers like Trump and Orban should be exposed as no real peace at all. There is the obvious moral dimension to this, namely that the kind of peace that involves the aggressor taking and holding large swathes of the victim’s territory means placing large numbers of people under indefinite occupation, with the constant and real threat of violence. This is the idea of a just peace contrasted with an unjust peace, that the price of peace paid by the victim is simply too great to countenance. To a certain extent, this is already an argument that is made.

Unfortunately, much as we may wish that concern for your fellow man was enough, it probably isn’t. So we must go further. One way to do this is to drive home to voters the reality that any peace signed on the aggressor’s terms is unlikely to hold for long. In the case of Ukraine, for example, why would Putin want Ukraine demilitarised and outside of NATO after having succeeded in taking so much of Ukraine’s territory? It is not because he has any serious fears about NATO launching an attack on Russia via Ukraine. It is so that Russia would have a free hand in launching another war again in the future, invading Ukraine any time that is useful or convenient to do so. It is the model of control that Russia already established in Georgia and Moldova. Every time the West failed to stop Putin and instead chose to find compromises, in the name of ‘peace’. And every time it has led to more war. Here we have the concept of an unsustainable peace as opposed to a sustainable one.

And this is the weakness of Putin’s lackeys in the West, of Orban, Trump or Elon Musk, where there apparent desire for peace falls apart. They have no answer to what would stop Putin from simply coming back for more later. They have no argument to explain why giving Putin everything he wants in Ukraine would discourage Xi Jinping, or any other potential enemy of freedom and democracy, from launching their own wars of expansion. The choice of the unsustainable peace is a fundamentally selfish one, opting for comfort for yourself in exchange for disaster for your children.

The appeasers would have us believe that we must choose between victory and peace. Zelensky himself had to wrestle with the dominance of this narrative when he designed his Victory Plan, originally named a Peace Plan to appeal to Western audiences but renamed to ensure approval from Ukrainians themselves. Appeasers argue that to have peace we must give up on victory. Yet that will only get us an unjust and unsustainable peace. To have a sustainable peace, one that not only pushes back the aggressor today but also deters them in the future, one that has enough time to take root and allow a real recovery, one that revitalises and animates the idea of democracy in the world, then victory must come first. This is the case that must be made with urgency and with determination to Western publics, that effort and resources invested in Putin’s defeat is the route to peace, while a quick and dirty deal is merely disaster delayed.