War and Peace in the Crisis of Complexity

As Russia’s war against Ukraine looks increasingly likely to last, many in the West and beyond are growing wary of the risks of a protracted conflict and are calling on Kyiv to make concessions to end the hostilities. The idea that a negotiated settlement could swiftly end this war, however, is based on a misunderstanding of its geopolitical nature as well as its historical meaning.

A bit over a year after Russia launched a full-scale assault on Ukraine, experts and observers the world over are trying to predict the conflict’s upcoming developments or  to forecast its possible outcomes. Many foresee deadly offensives in the coming weeks and months. Some claim that one side will inevitably win or is already winning, or that the other is on the brink of military collapse and/or political disintegration. 

Yet all of this is informed speculation at best, pointless guessing and posturing in most cases. At this stage of the conflict, most information permeating from the battlefield, whichever side it comes from, goes through several layers of filtering, twisting and spinning to support a narrative or another, and whatever transpires in the public sphere and conversation is inherently partial, distorted and misleading. The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to predict with any meaningful degree of certainty or even probability how the conflict will evolve in the coming weeks, months or possibly years, let alone how it will end, which side will prevail and what will be the fate of the other.

More interesting and significant than this profusion of analyses and predictions is the growing unease in Western countries about the risk of the conflict dragging on and on, possibly for years, which is leading some to call for the West to stop arming Ukraine and instead push it to enter into negotiations with Russia or even to declare a unilateral ceasefire. These calls can be heard not just in Germany, where many still hope that business-as-usual with Russia can resume in the not-too-distant future; not just in France, where many still want to believe that Europe could live in peace with Moscow if only it would distance itself enough from Washington; not just in Madrid or Rome, where anti-americanism remains an easy and convenient rallying force on both right and left of the political spectrum; not just in Budapest, where Viktor Orbán would likely, if he only could, follow Vladimir Putin across the bridge that leads from illiberalism to autocracy; and not just among those, including in the Anglosphere, whose worldview starts and ends with American or Western culpability for anything and everything.

No, such calls for Ukraine to negotiate and accept compromises and concessions can now be heard within European chancelleries and even in the US foreign policy establishment. At the end of January, a report published by Rand Corporation, a think tank that forms an integral part of America’s military-industrial complex, explicitly stated that the United States should now give higher priority to “avoiding a long war” than to “facilitating significantly more Ukrainian territorial control”. The costs and risks of a protracted conflict in Ukraine, the report said, outweigh its possible benefits for the US, which should therefore take steps to make a negotiated end to the conflict more likely. This could be done, according to the report’s authors, through “clarifying plans for future support to Ukraine, making commitments to Ukraine’s security, issuing assurances regarding the country’s neutrality, and setting conditions for sanctions relief for Russia”. This would also entail accepting – and compelling Kyiv into accepting – that Ukraine regaining full control over all of its internationally recognized territory is “a highly unlikely outcome”, and hence accepting, even if not formally recognizing, that part of this territory remains de facto controlled by Moscow.

This kind of position is probably not dominant in Washington, and it is unlikely that it may change the course of US and Western policy in the short term, yet the fact that it can now be voiced from within the US foreign policy apparatus is significant and shows that part of this apparatus wishes to set limits to American support for Ukraine. President Biden does not seem to be considering setting such limits yet; on the contrary,  his recent visit to Kyiv was a major show of continued support and commitment to Ukraine’s effort to push back against the Russian assault. However, in his subsequent major speech in Warsaw, he formulated America’s main objective as being to ensure that Ukraine can never be considered a victory for Russia, rather than as being to help Ukraine win and kick the invaders out of all its territory. This suggests that, even at the highest levels of the US government, there might be a willingness to leave the door open to a variety of possible end-games rather than to commit to a goal that may not be achievable – or at least not at an acceptable cost or in a reasonable time frame.

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For the most part, calls for peace and negotiations in Ukraine are probably well-intentioned. The likelihood of the conflict dragging on for years is real, and many people are genuinely concerned that a protracted conflict might increase the risk and probability of an escalation to a Russia-NATO war, and hence almost inevitably to a nuclear exchange. Bringing the conflict to an early end would reduce that risk, at least temporarily. To this end, the West could in principle try to constrain Ukraine to offer negotiations to Russia by stopping or stemming the flow of military and financial support it provides it with. Most or all of Ukraine would probably have fallen already without Western support – more particularly without US support – and Kyiv would find itself unable to repel or contain the Russian assaults for much longer, let alone reconquer much of the territory occupied by the invaders, if that support would now be reduced instead of increased.

Yet these calls for immediate negotiations and peace, however well-intentioned they may be, and even if they keep growing louder and louder, are probably destined to remain unheeded as they rest on a flawed understanding of the dynamics and stakes of the conflict.

First, consider the dynamics. Peace negotiations between two parties at war with each other can only ever make sense if and when both parties consider talks to be their best possible option, or at least a preferable option to the continuation of hostilities. This is certainly not the case here, as neither Ukraine nor Russia considers that stopping the fight would serve their interests better, at this stage, than continuing it. Given the performance of its military during the first year of the war, and that of the Russian army, Ukraine has reasons to believe that it might have a real shot at regaining most or even all of its territory still occupied by Russia if it receives the Western weapons and equipments it needs to do so. But even if Ukraine could and would be compelled by its Western backers into ceasing fire and offering peace talks to Moscow, it appears quite unlikely that the Russian side would be interested in taking that offer. 

Having failed to invade and subjugate its neighbor in a matter of days or weeks in 2022, as it probably expected, and even if the performance of its armed forces has so far been underwhelming, to say the least, Russia is now conducting a grinding war of attrition that it remains convinced it can win – due to its numerical and quantitative superiority, its ability to destroy or incapacitate Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and its greater capacity to take heavy losses for a longer period of time. In addition, Russia has so far managed to weather Western economic and financial sanctions better than expected – including by the Russians themselves – and is turning its economy into a war economy, focused on ramping up military production and reducing its dependency on Western  money, products and technologies. Hence, the Russian leadership remains convinced that it will end up winning, and has no real reason to engage in meaningful peace talks at this stage. It still bets on Ukrainian defences breaking down in the future, opening the door to Russian troops steamrolling beyond the current frontline – a process that would only be hastened by a reduction or withdrawal of Western support to Ukraine. How much of Ukraine’s territory would Russia then be willing to grab? Probably as much as it would be able to…

Consider the stakes, then. Even if Russia would, for some reason, accept a Ukrainian offer for peace negotiations, these talks would most probably be short-lived and quickly run into a brick wall, because the cost of any peace agreement conceivable would be far too unequally distributed. Any settlement in the short term would indeed imply and require a de facto recognition of Russia’s land grab and the acceptance by Ukraine of the loss of part of its territory. Not just any part of its territory, in fact, but some of its areas that are best endowed with mineral and energy resources, that were the most industrialized before the war, and that also host some of its most fertile lands. Those territories would be lost forever, and their loss would amputate and durably cripple the Ukrainian economy, hampering the country’s ability to rebuild itself or even to operate in any reasonably functional way. 

Furthermore, what would remain of Ukraine would likely have to accept a status of neutrality that would de facto, over time, bring it back under Russian influence. Any hope that it could ever become a truly independent and sovereign state would be crushed, as would be its EU and NATO membership aspirations. Ukrainian society would then probably descend into a spiral of misery, depression, recrimination and infighting, condemning the country to widespread dysfunction and further opening the door to Russian interference and manipulation. Even if a significant number of lives would potentially be spared in the short term , a deadly threat would then keep hovering over a country forever imprisoned by geography and voided of its lifeblood, indefinitely.

Hence, any potential settlement that could be conceived at this stage, even if it would lead to only limited territorial gains for Russia, would inevitably constitute a de facto victory for Vladimir Putin. Not only would he have effectively seized part of Ukraine by force, but over time he would inevitably be able to bring back the rest of it into the Russian sphere of influence and to push the Western powers away from it. In addition, himself, his kleptocratic clique and the Russian state would escape any real consequences for their aggression, such as risks of prosecution or demands for reparations – as of course he would not sign up to any settlement that would not fully extinguish those risks. Over time, he would be able to keep interfering not only in Ukraine’s affairs, but probably also in those of Russia’s other European neighbors, starting with the Baltic States and Poland, which he would seek to destabilize and ‘punish’ for their vocal support to Ukraine’s fight. He would be able to reconstitute his propaganda machine and to claim victory over not just Ukraine but the “collective West” (i.e. the US, NATO, the EU, etc.) that supported and armed it. NATO, in particular, would very quickly risk losing the sense of focus and unity that revived the organization over the last year, and getting back to being “brain-dead”, as French President Emmanuel Macron called it back in 2019. Sooner or later, it’s not just Ukraine that would end up being lost.

Right, but then what about the nuclear factor? Seeking immediate peace is still necessary, some argue, if only because avoiding the risk of a nuclear exchange trumps everything else. Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world – this actually constitutes its only tangible claim to great power status symbol on the world stage – and it has repeatedly made threats to use those weapons against Ukraine, or even against the West if need be. This nuclear threat is being used by the Kremlin and its propagandists to maintain the pretense that Russia “cannot be defeated” on the battlefield – because it would certainly nuke its enemies if the risk would actually materialise. It is also being used in the West by those who claim that the war must be stopped at all cost – Ukraine’s territorial integrity be damned. 

Yet the real risk of nuclear weapons being used probably remains, at this stage, limited. In fact, it would make little sense for Russia to nuke any target in Ukraine, as it would mean not just destroying and poisoning the territories it is trying to conquer, but also risking to contaminate part of its own lands for centuries – in particular its most fertile agricultural lands that are located not far from the Ukrainian border. In addition, pushing the nuclear button, even for limited ‘tactical’ strikes on Ukraine, would also trigger unpredictable consequences on the world stage and risk isolating Russia from the countries that explicitly or implicitly back it. China, in particular, has apparently made it clear to Russia that the nuclear option should remain off the table. Sending nukes towards Western Europe or the US, on the other hand, would mean triggering the quasi-certain and immediate annihilation of most of Russia. The modernisation of Russia’s nuclear capabilities in recent years, in particular its advances on hypersonic missiles, has reinstated rather than nullified mutual vulnerability, and despite all the questions that can legitimately be raised about the rationality of the Russian leadership, there is no indication at this stage that it may be tempted by or even capable of making a move that it perfectly knows would be suicidal.

Those, in Paris, Berlin or Washington, who now call for an immediate peace process out of a fear of a nuclear escalation would thus be well advised to balance the actually limited risk of such escalation with the very much inevitable long-term consequences that the resulting peace settlement would convey. If the West pushes Ukraine to make territorial concessions out of an exaggerated fear that Vladimir Putin might push the nuclear button, it also accepts that ‘the Bomb’ can in fact be used not just for deterring attacks by foreign powers, but for the purpose of conquering land and subjugating a neighboring nation. In other words, it accepts that the very meaning and function of the nuclear weapon irremediably changes – from an ultimate deterrence tool to an instrument of aggression and blackmail, which may be used for obtaining territorial and other strategic gains. 

What kind of lessons would Vladimir Putin draw from this? Probably that he can use the same method to obtain other Western retreats and concessions elsewhere. His strategic aims are not limited to Ukraine, as was made clear and explicit in the “ultimatums” he issued to the West in late 2021 and that also demanded a rollback of NATO’s expansion and retreat from Eastern Europe, and he would keep pursuing those other strategic aims should the fighting stop in Ukraine. What kind of lessons would other autocratic regimes across the world draw from this? Probably that they also can use nukes to extort what they want or grab what they claim to be theirs – or that  they really need to acquire them if they don’t have them yet. And what kind of lessons would countries being threatened by larger ones draw from this? Probably that the only real way for them to prevent aggression or invasion is to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. In other words, once the West has given in and let Putin grab part of Ukraine to avoid a nuclear exchange, it has made the world a more dangerous place, i.e., a place in which nuclear proliferation increases and the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used goes up rather than down.

Therefore, the costs and risks of a protracted conflict in Ukraine might well be considerable for the US and the West, and might outweigh its possible benefits – and how would they not? Yet the long-term costs and risks of a short-term peace deal are higher still, even probably considerably higher. Forcing Ukraine to accept a Russian land grab, even a limited one, in order to avoid or reduce the long term risks and costs of war or of nuclear escalation might seem like a reasonable approach to some, yet it would in fact be a very shortsighted one.

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For Ukraine as well as for the West, the real alternative today is not between an increasingly costly and risky continuation of the war and a cost-saving, risk-reducing push for peace. It is between a costly and risky continuation of the war and the potentially ruinous geopolitical and geoeconomic dislocation that a peace settlement granting Russia some sort of victory would inevitably bring, sooner or later. Peace talks should certainly be considered at some point, but only if and when the situation on the ground has evolved in a way that makes it impossible for Vladimir Putin to claim with any kind of credibility that he has achieved some sort of victory.

To this, supporters of immediate peace talks, who often like to call themselves “realists”, typically object that a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield is all but impossible. Western leaders, they say, are delusional if they harbour the hope that Russian forces could ever be pushed back much further than the current frontline, and sending weaponry to Ukraine only serves to prolong and worsen the bloodshed. This may seem like a reasonable concern, yet it misses the fact that Ukraine’s capacity to push back the invaders and reclaim more of its territory is not a given state of affairs but a dynamic process that precisely depends on the extent and strength of the support it receives from the West. Unless this support increases, Ukraine will in fact probably be unable to make further advances or even to hold the current frontline – and in this case the Ukrainian fighters who lost their lives defending and pushing this frontline in the last year will have fallen in vain. If, on the contrary, this support does increase and provides Ukrainian forces with the equipment and technologies they need, they might then be able to break through the Russian lines and significantly alter the balance of power on the ground – a precondition for any meaningful negotiation to be considered.

Would there be a risk, then, that Russia might decide to directly retaliate against NATO countries rather than just against Ukraine? This risk is not null, obviously, yet it is also probably more limited than what some in the West claim. Its is very much known and understood in Moscow, just as well as in Western capitals, that triggering a direct military engagement between Russia and NATO means triggering a process that would be destined to become very rapidly uncontrollable, with knock-on effects the world over and a very low probability that the head-on confrontation could for very long remain under the nuclear threshold. The party that would start direct hostilities would therefore do so in full knowledge of the almost inevitable consequences of its move, and then again it is doubtful that Russia may be really willing or ready to make such move.

Hence, it is probably a reasonable course of action for the West to avoid at all cost initiating or getting dragged into a direct kinetic war with Russia, while ensuring that Ukraine gets everything it needs to push back the invaders – no more, but no less. This requires determination, patience and perseverance, making a long war almost inevitable. Yes, it is very risky, and it means a lot of pain for many people for possibly a very long time. But any alternative course of action would likely lead to far worse and riskier outcomes, either in the very short term or in the longer run.

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Disconnected as they are from the reality of the dynamics and stakes of the conflict, the mounting calls in the West for immediate peace negotiations in Ukraine constitute rhetorical and political statements rather than consequential positions or workable proposals. The chance that they may translate into any tangible development in the foreseeable future is negligible, regardless of how much they may be debated in the public conversation. The only event that could potentially change this situation and lead to a withdrawal of Western support for Ukraine, leaving Kyiv with no other choice than seeking a compromise with Moscow, would be the arrival in the White House of a Republican President – since the main Republican contenders increasingly align on these matters with the self-proclaimed “realist” camp. In principle, however, this cannot happen before January 2025, i.e. a world away from where we are.

Beyond the dynamics and stakes of the conflict, however, calls or hopes for a near-term peace negotiation and settlement are also and more importantly based on a misunderstanding of the geopolitical nature as well as the historical meaning of this war. This same misunderstanding also underpins the idea, often promoted by the same “realists”, that this war could easily have been avoided if only the Ukrainian government and its Western backers had been willing to accommodate Russia’s concerns and to find a compromise with Moscow in the years prior to 2022. Any such compromise, inevitably, would have entailed a loss of territory and/or sovereignty for Ukraine, represented a victory for Vladimir Putin, and significantly weakened the Western alliance. There was no more “realism” in accepting such compromise in the run-up to the war than there would be to do so today.

Contrarily to what the “realists” often claim and to what many in the West pretend or want to believe, the war in Ukraine is not a simple “territorial dispute” in a faraway land, in which the West should better not interfere. It is much more than that, and the West doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding the confrontation by simply looking elsewhere or backing off. In February 2022, Vladimir Putin did not just launch an assault on the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine – he had already been waging that particular war since 2014. What he initiated is Russia’s great war of revenge over the post–Cold War, West-dominated international order, for which his regime has been planning and preparing from many years. He did this in full knowledge that there could never be any way back to the situation that prevailed before the war, be it for himself, for his regime, for Ukraine, for Russia, or for the world, and he actually doesn’t want it. He decided to take a world-changing gamble, knowing perfectly well what this gamble meant and the risks it entailed. He took this gamble because he thought the risks were worth taking, the gamble could be won, and the time had come to take it.

In that sense, the self-proclaimed “realists” are right to point out that the war in Ukraine is a “proxy war” between the West and Russia, yet they fundamentally misunderstand or misrepresent its nature. Rather than a war waged against Russia by the nefarious and hypocritical West using Ukraine as a proxy, as they and Russian propagandists contend, it is Russia that has initiated a proxy war against the West-dominated world order – and more particularly against the US-guaranteed security architecture in Europe. This proxy war is being waged on Ukrainian territory, but the crux of the confrontation is not just – and not even mostly – about Ukraine. Putin himself, and his entourage, don’t say anything else when they declare that the war is “existential” for Russia and the Russian people and that the confrontation is “civilizational”. The “satanic” West, they say, is not just intent on defeating Russia in Ukraine, but on destroying the Russian Federation and Russian civilization – a civilization that constitutes “a world in itself”, a world that is unique, exceptional, historically virtuous and morally righteous. Framing the conflict in these terms excludes any other outcome than either victory or defeat, and precludes any compromise or possibility of peaceful coexistence with the enemies.

The truth is that it has been very clear since the beginning of the war, and even before, that the fight for Ukraine’s future is inherently “existential” for all the parties to the conflict – Putin’s Russia, Ukraine, and the West. 

It is existential for Vladimir Putin and his regime, because they would quickly and almost inevitably fall if they would fail to subjugate Ukraine and bring it back firmly into the bleak swamps of Russkiy Mir, the “Russian World” ideology that underpins contemporary Russia’s self-perception and its claim to domination over the post-Soviet space. It is also “existential” for the Russian Federation itself, as a defeat in Ukraine would void the Russkiy Mir worldview of its substance and crush the perception that Russia has built of itself and around which it has rebuilt itself and its claim to great power status after the Soviet collapse. It would also likely lead to the rise of strong centrifugal forces across the Federation, which could lead to the fracturing or even crumbling of what remains, fundamentally, an imperialist construction.

The conflict is of course no less “existential” for Ukraine, as the country would immediately cease to exist as a sovereign and independent nation, and probably forever, if it would back down and accept Russia’s conditions for stopping its invasion, even the minimal ones. Ukrainian history is tragic and has been so for a long time, yet Ukrainians know that they now finally have a chance to free themselves from their secular oppressor and to affirm the pro-Western choice they have been yearning for since the 19th century. This war is their war of liberation, their own “great patriotic war”. Waging it is how a fragile and uncertain nation is becoming a strong and proud one; winning it is how a dysfunctional state can have a chance of becoming a successful one. The immense majority of Ukrainians has understood that, for them, freedom from Russian oppression is now or never, and that losing this war means getting sucked back into the black hole of Russkiy Mir, probably for ever. Hence, and as long as they are not let down by the West, the Ukrainians won’t back down. They will fight, regardless of what Western “realists” may think and say.

Last but not least, the fight in Ukraine is also “existential” for the West, and most particularly for the United States. If the Western alliance would accept a partition of Ukraine and hence grant a de facto victory to Putin, the whole European security order would be at risk of crumbling. In particular, the commitment of the US to defending that order, and the security guarantees it provides to European nations through the Atlantic alliance would be severely weakened. A perilous face-off and arms race with an emboldened Russia would ensue on the Alliance’s Eastern flank, which could lead to a possible break-up of the European Union between appeasers in the West and those in the East who know what Russian domination means and don’t want to have any of it ever again. In addition, the very moral and political foundations upon which the West-dominated international order is built would be shaken to the core, and the whole edifice on which the West’s power and prosperity rests would be at risk of coming crashing down. The Western alliance would  probably end up breaking up, and the benefits of global domination would stop accruing to the Western populations, particularly the US population, leading to economic and social disintegration, civil strife, and political instability or even violence.

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That Russia’s assault on Ukraine is in fact its proxy war of revenge against the West-dominated international order also gives it a wider geopolitical dimension and explains why it has received at least tacit support from all those countries around the world that, for one reason or another, also feel that they have a revenge to take over the West. Accumulated resentment against the West is widespread, long-standing, in many cases justified, or at least largely justifiable, and deep-rooted. Vladimir Putin’s world-changing gamble now crystallises global resentment and revanchism against Western dominance, and means that Russia is not and probably cannot be isolated on the world stage. 

Chinese support for Russia, in particular, constitutes an essential feature of the conflict, and is probably poised to deepen and widen in the near- to medium-term. In fact, China is not just the main supporter of Russia on the world stage, it is the indispensable enabler of its assault on the West-dominated international order. Without the presence at its Eastern flank of an economic behemoth, capable of substituting the West, at least partly and progressively, both as a client (for its energy and mineral resources and its agricultural products) and as a supplier (of technologies and manufactured products, including possibly of military equipment), Russia would probably not have been able to even consider launching a full-scale assault on Ukraine. 

China, just like Russia, considers it has a revenge to take over the West. Resentment for the ‘Century of Humiliation’ still underpins its historical perceptions, its worldview and its strategic ambitions. Its openly and long-stated goal is to reclaim the world’s top economic spot that it occupied before the Industrial Revolution and the ‘Great Divergence’, and that it believes has been ‘usurped’ by Western powers since then. This requires displacing the United States as the world’s most powerful country, an objective that in itself probably puts the two countries on an inescapable collision course. 

China has understood that in order to achieve its goal it needs to “decouple” from the West, when its economic rise over the last decades has mostly been built on its capacity  to produce massive volumes of low- and mid-range manufactured products for exporting them to Europe and North America. Despite all its efforts to transition towards an internal consumption-led, technology-focused growth model, China fundamentally remains a manufacturing economy dependent on continued access to the US and EU as export markets. Its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI), launched by Xi Jinping after his accession to power in 2012, is precisely aimed at developing alternative outlets and markets for China’s industries. The BRI initiative, however, does not seem to be progressing as fast as expected, and even appears to be losing momentum. 

Yet China does not have much time left to reach its strategic goal, as its demographic prospects are raising doubts about its future ability to assert its power on the world stage. Its population already started to shrink, earlier than expected, and it is now being overtaken by India as the world’s most populous nation. Its demographic decline is  already slowing down its economic growth and is poised to accelerate over the coming years and decades, as its population is aging faster than almost all other countries across the world. Historically, a nation only rises to dominance when its population is young and expands, not when it is rapidly aging and shrinking. Hence, time is not on China’s side, and its needs to move fast if it wants to still have a chance of attaining its strategic ambitions before the full effects of its demographic crunch make it all but impossible.

China also has understood that, despite its size and extraordinary economic rise over the last decades, it cannot achieve those strategic ambitions on its own as it does not possess all the assets, strengths and levers of power required to do so. In particular, it is far from being resource-rich enough to become self-sufficient in energy and in food production, as well as globally dominant in strategic technologies. It thus needs to secure access to the resources it doesn’t have, and this has precisely been the focus of its foreign policy over the last couple of decades, from the purchase of vast quantities of farmland across the globe to the development of the BRI economic corridors and the rapid buildup of its military, in particular its naval force. 

However,  the presence at its borders of the most resource-rich state on the planet gives China its best chance of securing long-term access to the resources it needs to achieve its global ambitions, especially as this resource-rich country increasingly needs its economic, technological and geopolitical support. Russia has consistently failed to move beyond extractivism and to develop higher value-added economic activities, and thus it still does little more than dig up stuff and sell it for export. Having lost its access to Western markets, it is in dire need of new clients and has plenty of commodities and raw materials it needs to sell, even on the cheap. Its assault on the West-dominated international order thus provides China with a unique opportunity to secure massive supplies of energy and materials, as well as of agricultural commodities, at very advantageous financial conditions. This is fundamentally the reason why China’s support for Russia is likely to keep increasing. 

Far from being interested in brokering a peace deal in Ukraine, as it seems to pretend, China knows that the continuation of Russia’s aggression is fundamentally in its interest, provided it doesn’t escalate too far. Not only does it allow China to increase its grip over Russia’s resource wealth, but it also contributes to keeping the West’s attention, at least partly, away from its pursuit of its own strategic objectives. The longer this war goes on, the more attention and resources the West will have to invest in preventing a Russian victory, attention and resources that will not be devoted to countering China’s manoeuvres in other areas or domains, e.g., accelerating its military buildup, threatening to invade Taiwan, pushing the US out of the South China Sea and sidelining it in the Middle East, expanding its debt diplomacy across the world, increasing its influence in Africa and in Latin America, promoting the internationalization of its currency, while also dumbing down Western youth, spying on the United States and the EU, harassing its citizens abroad, fueling America’s drug epidemic, and  concealing the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that killed close to 7 million globally, affected the lives of billions and profoundly disrupted and distorted the world economy. As the West is forced to  look elsewhere, China will continue to do all this, and much more, while providing Russia with just enough support to avoid an outright defeat in Ukraine.

The Chinese factor, hence, is another reason why the conflict in Ukraine is unlikely to find a peaceful resolution in the short term. If Beijing wanted it to end, it would probably be able to find the arguments needed to push Vladimir Putin to pull back, or at least to revise down his objectives and tone down his rhetoric. But it doesn’t want it to end, not yet at least, because Russia taking the lead in fighting and undermining the West-dominated world order serves Beijing’s strategic interests. Which is why China is stepping up its public displays of “friendship” with Russia, as during Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow. This is raising fears in the West that the two countries might finally be constituting the “antihegemonic” coalition that former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned about back in the 1990s, and which he called “the most dangerous scenario” for the US (The Grand Chessboard, 1997). 

Yet the deepening of this coalition does not mean that China is now going to support Russia unconditionally and indefinitely. Brzezinski had understood the strategic threat for the US of such coalition materialising, yet he had also understood that it would not be united by ideology or cultural and civilizational proximity, as the Western alliance can be, but only by complementary grievances, meaning that it could only ever be based on “negative” drivers (i.e., resentment, opposition and confrontation) rather than on “positive” ones (i.e., ambition, open cooperation and shared leadership). He had understood, in other words, that such “coalition of the aggrieved” has inherent limits, both in terms of how far they can go and how long they can last. And in fact there is little love lost between China and Russia, and certainly no meaningful “friendship”. Both countries know that great powers have no friends, only interests, and that their increasing alignment on the world stage is, fundamentally, a circumstantial conjunction of interests. It is neither a  real partnership nor a formal alliance, rather a temporary rapprochement and a clearly unequal relationship that could still cool down or even turn sour in the future. China has not forgotten that Russia took advantage of its ‘Century of Humiliation’ to grab vast portions of its territory, and it could well reaffirm its territorial claims over “Outer Manchuria” should things turn badly for Moscow. China, in fact, is more likely than any other country to be tempted to snatch some of Russia’s lands and resources if the occasion arises.

For now, however, China’s support is fundamentally what will enable Russia’s war on Ukraine to drag on.

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Beyond all these geopolitical considerations, there is also another, even more fundamental reason why “realist” calls for immediate peace negotiations in Ukraine are actually devoid of any realism.  These calls, in fact, are ignorant of the historical meaning and significance of this conflict.

The war in Ukraine does not just result from the inevitable friction arising from great power politics, at a time when a once-dominant superpower finds itself increasingly challenged by an emerging one and its “allies”.  It is not just the logical pursuit  of a long-standing conflict between two peoples who have a very different perception and understanding of the nature of their relationship, past, present and future. It is not just the tentative revival of the imperialist drive of a fledging civilizational entity that sees itself as something it never really was. It is not just the confrontation between two political systems, democracy and autocracy, that are increasingly diverging in their evolutions and opposed in their aspirations.

The war in Ukraine is all of this, of course, yet its historical meaning goes beyond it all. It is indeed a pivotal conflict of global significance taking place at a very particular moment in human history, of which it constitutes both a consequence and an amplifier. The key characteristics of this historical moment that we are living through can be summarised as such: human societies the world over are confronted with a growing number and range of difficult and compounding problems and crises, which they are increasingly struggling to address and failing to solve, and which are slowly but surely eroding their ability to function effectively and undermining their capacity to coexist peacefully.

A term sometimes used to describe this situation is that of ‘polycrisis’, which has been debated in fringe academic and intellectual circles for some time but is now permeating into the mainstream, even if in a somewhat restrictive sense. This term captures the essence of an accumulation of crises that keep coming our way, which often seem to be unrelated at first yet pile onto each other and feed each other, to the point of overwhelming our capacity to cope and respond. However, the concept of polycrisis somehow misses the fact that there might be an inherent historical logic to the accumulation and conjunction of these crises and problems at this particular moment in time, as well as to the fact that whatever we are doing to address them is not working. These crises and problems are not just piling up on each other by coincidence, out of bad luck or because of the sheer incompetence of the ruling elites, and a better characterisation of our situation is thus probably needed.

A few years ago, I suggested a possible concept and framework to characterise and understand the historical moment we are living through, which I called a “Crisis of Complexity”, and which I think provides a useful way to look at the likely causes, dynamics and consequences of our compounding and increasingly intractable problems. This concept is based on the work of American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter, and more particularly his seminal book on “The Collapse of Complex Societies” (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Investigating how and why complex societies or civilizations have been rising and falling in human history, Joseph Tainter uncovered a pattern that is very much relevant to our present situation, yet remains largely ignored or misunderstood. Human societies, he showed, can historically be conceived as problem-solving organisations. They inevitably face a never-ending stream of social, economic and political problems, that they solve by developing new activities, new technologies, new institutions, new social roles, new forms of entertainment and recreation, by adding more specialists or bureaucratic levels to existing institutions, by adding organisational layers or increasing regulation, or by gathering and processing more or new types of information. These solutions, in turn, tend to create ever-greater socio-political, organisational and technical complexity. In general this growing complexity is not intentional, yet it is the inevitable result of societies’ successful attempts at solving the problems they are confronted with – and hence it constitutes a measure of their capacity to “progress”. In fact, the solutions that societies find to their problems and that they implement, as well as the actions and behaviors these solutions entail or generate, inexorably result in unintended and largely unpredictable consequences and end up increasing overall socio-political complexity, while also creating new and more complex problems. As societies’ complexity rises, the problems they have to deal with become more difficult to solve, requiring growing investment in problem-solving and hence in further socio-political complexity.

At some point, however, investment in socio-political complexity typically reaches a point of diminishing returns, meaning that the marginal beneficial returns (i.e. problems solved) of additional complexity start to decline, leading to a reduction of the capacity to solve the new problems that arise from this additional complexity and to deal with its consequences. These returns may even turn negative, at which point societies are not anymore capable of upholding the level of socio-political complexity they have reached. Typically, they then tend to experience a sudden and rapid loss of complexity, otherwise called “collapse”. According to Tainter, this dialectical movement of complexification and  then simplification underpins human societies’ rise and collapse, and therefore constitutes the defining dynamic of human history. 

If Tainter is correct, and he provides numerous examples of how this has played out throughout history, then it is likely that the industrial societies we are currently living in might also be entangled in this “Tainterian dynamic”. Ever since their emergence, modern industrial societies have continuously grown more complex, to the point of becoming, by far, the most complex human societies that ever existed. They keep getting more complex, year after year, in many different ways, yet they are poised to run at some point, like the societies that preceded them, into the diminishing returns of complexity.

The main reason why industrial societies have been able to grow and complexify so much, according to Tainter, has been their capacity to access ever-growing supplies of affordable energy. The availability of abundant, inexpensive, high quality energy in the form of fossil fuels has indeed been instrumental in the development of industrial societies’ capacity to build increasing complexity into their economic, technical, political and social systems. Fossil fuels have provided human societies with unprecedented amounts of “surplus energy” (i.e., usable energy in excess of the energy consumed in the  energy extraction/transformation/transport and delivery process), which have made it possible to increase socio-political complexity, which in turn has made it possible to solve certain societal problems, which in turn has then produced additional complexity, which in turn has required that the production of energy and other resources be further increased to meet demand and address the new problems that societies needed or wished to solve. This is what Tainter calls the “energy-complexity spiral” (Tainter and Patzek, 2011), by which socio-political complexity and energy availability feed each other and grow together, in a system of positive feedback.

Humanity has been living in this energy-complexity spiral for over two centuries, and it has served it rather well during most of that time, powering an unprecedented growth of populations and of material living standards in many parts of the world. Yet the energy sources that have underpinned this growth, as well as the other natural resources they have made possible to use, are subject to depletion, which over time inevitably puts rising pressure and constraints on the quantity and quality of energy and resources that can be made available to societies and raises the cost and difficulty of doing so. In addition, the large-scale use of fossil energy also causes, directly and indirectly, massive environmental damage, including but not limited to climate change, which compounds over time and makes this use increasingly costly and risky.  As a result, the ‘energy-complexity spiral’ based on fossil fuels, which underpins the very existence of industrial societies, is inevitably poised to stop propping us up the way it has been doing for the last 200+ years. It could even, potentially, turn from being an upward spiral into a downward one, bringing us down as the availability of surplus fossil energy shrinks.

Technical innovation that increases the productivity of energy and resource extraction and use may slow down this evolution, yet Tainter’s research shows that innovation in industrialised countries is also subject to diminishing returns and tends to become more expensive and less productive over time, meaning that it can only counter the effects of depletion for so long, and only partially.

For modern societies to continue benefiting from the rising surplus energy they need to solve their problems, a transition from fossil fuels to alternative, more qualitative and productive energy sources would be required. This is precisely what we are pinning our hopes on today, as we make plans for transitioning industrial societies, in just a few decades, to renewable energy sources (solar and wind power mainly) that will enable us to mitigate climate change while continuing to grow and to solve our other societal problems (i.e., complexify) as we have been doing for two centuries. We are making these plans because we have gotten so much used to living with plentiful and inexpensive energy that we now perceive access to surplus energy as a “normal” situation, almost a given, and believe that we have the capacity to decide where we get that surplus energy from.

The reality, however, is that our transition away from fossil energy is not happening – not yet at least. Fossil fuels still represent about 80% of the world’s final energy consumption, a share that has barely changed in the last decades. Modern renewables (solar and wind) have been growing fast for several years, yet so far they only exist as an extension of – or an add-on to – the fossil energy foundations of techno-industrial civilization. The reason why we are not transitioning away from fossil fuels is less related to a lack of political will or to the nefarious effects of vested interests, as we often hear, than to the insufficient energetic quality and productivity of renewables. On all the aspects that determine or influence energetic quality and productivity (energy density, power density, fungibility, storability, transportability, ready availability, convenience and versatility of use, convertibility, etc.), solar and wind energy are in fact significantly “inferior” to fossil fuels. Biophysical examination as well as empirical evidence so far shows that the capture of diffuse and intermittent energy flows and their conversion to electricity through man-made devices is, inherently, an imperfect substitute for the extraction and burning of concentrated energy locked up in coal, oil and gas, and hence that it might not be able to provide the same services and value to society or not on the same scale. Unfortunately, no amount of “innovation” seems to be likely to fundamentally change that.

In fact, the availability of surplus energy on the scale that we have been enjoying during the last couple of centuries and that we have come to consider as a given is anything but. It constitutes a unique occurrence in human history, and the conditions that we have been experiencing as a result of it are highly unusual, a historical anomaly, almost an aberration. There are growing signs that this aberration might be in the process of coming to a close, due to the inescapable and mounting impacts and consequences of fossil fuel depletion, and to the unavailability of alternatives that could really substitute them and keep our energy-complexity spiral running.

We might therefore have reached the point, identified by Joseph Tainter, where our  societies’ standard way of solving the problems they face – i.e., investing in socio-political, organisational and technical complexity – is being undermined and rendered ineffective by the gradual breakdown of the energy-complexity spiral that has propped us for 200 years, and is thus yielding diminishing marginal returns. This would explain why we now seem to be getting more and more engulfed in a “polycrisis”, i.e., an accumulation of compounding problems and crises that we are consistently failing to address and solve, and even in many cases to just fully comprehend. As we are largely blind to the energetic underpinning of our industrial civilization and ignorant of the energy-complexity spiral, our reaction in the face of these problems that assail us is still to try to solve them by adding layer after layer of organisational and technical complexity, yet the cost of doing so keeps growing while the returns obtained (i.e., number of problems solved, or extent to which the problems are solved) irremediably goes down. And we remain largely clueless about why what we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working anymore and why major societal stressors keep accumulating and compounding across the board. We are, in other words, in a ‘Crisis of Complexity’.

We might even be approaching the moment where the marginal returns on our investments in complexity turn negative, i.e., create more and bigger problems than what they solve. When that happens, our societies will become unable to uphold the level of complexity that they have reached, and we will get projected into yet another historical moment as we exit the ‘Crisis of Complexity’ and enter what American systems thinker Nate Hagens calls the “Great Simplification’. In principle, this shift should happen when the energy-complexity spiral identified by Joseph Tainter turns from an upward into a downward spiral, or at least that’s what it would signal. There is no way to precisely know when that occurs, though, and we will therefore only be able to become aware of this shift retrospectively and through a series of symptoms. 

However, there are signs that we are now making, in a number of areas, problem-solving decisions (i.e., investments in complexity) that are likely to create more and bigger problems than what they are going to solve. This is the case, for instance, in the energy domain, as our growing investments in ‘clean’ energy technologies are increasing the overall cost and complexity of our energy systems without, so far, altering the trajectory of our greenhouse gases emissions and environmental degradation. This is also the case in the financial domain, as the exercise in perpetual bankruptcy concealment in which the world’s largest central banks have been engaged since the Great Financial Crisis is now quickly reaching its limits and increasingly failing to contain mounting financial stress. This is even more the case in the technological domain, where we are engaged in a wild rush forward towards the development of artificial general intelligence, which seems both unstoppable and uncontrollable. How far the rise of AI will go and what its consequences will be is unpredictable, but what we can be pretty sure of is that it will most probably generate more, bigger and more complex problems than whatever it will solve.

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How does this relate to the war in Ukraine, you might ask? Well, one of the key consequences of our ‘Crisis of Complexity’ is that by eroding the capacity of industrial societies to solve the problems they face it inevitably leads to a rise of conflictuality, both within those societies and between them. 

Within societies, the growing inability of established political systems to solve the most important and pressing societal problems is resulting in a process of ‘sophisticated state failure’ and leading in some cases to a rise of civil unrest and political violence. This evolution is particularly noticeable in liberal democracies, as the stability and durability of democratic regimes precisely rests on their supposed ability to peacefully mediate and arbitrate between conflicting or opposing interests or values.  As the ‘Crisis of Complexity’ advances and engulfs them, democracies are progressively losing this ability and falling into extreme polarization. In some cases, they then tend to degenerate into some form of oligarchy or drifting towards illiberalism, or even towards ‘soft authoritarianism’. 

In Western democracies, rising polarization and conflictuality tend to build up around issues such as political governance (i.e., centralization vs. decentralization in decision-making),  economic balance  of power (i.e., localism vs. globalism in production and wealth distribution), and socio-cultural evolution (i.e., diversity and mandated inclusiveness vs. homogeneity and ontological cohesion). On these various aspects, democratic societies are increasingly struggling to uphold the  level of complexity they have developed and are subject to strong forces that are pulling them down towards a lower complexity level (i.e. more localised economies, more nationalistic governance, more homogeneous societies, etc.). 

Autocratic regimes, on the other hand, have no pretense to mediate and arbitrate between conflicting or opposing interests or values peacefully and through popular consent – they do so authoritatively and through coercion. Their growing inability to solve societal problems is therefore less visible than that of liberal democracies, yet it is no less consequential. What it translates into, typically, is a further hardening of authoritarianism, aimed at suppressing not just the public expression of dissent but its very emergence. Both Russia and China are examples of how this is playing out.

The ‘Crisis of Complexity’ is also causing conflictuality to rise between societies, as the progressive breakdown of the energy-complexity spiral undermines the capacity of nations across the world to find peaceful ways of mediating and arbitrating between their conflicting or opposing interests. Since the end of World War II, the world, and particularly the Western world, has enjoyed a period of rising stability and decreasing conflictuality, which started during the Cold War and persisted afterwards, with a marked decline in interstate and intrastate wars. This “Long Peace”, as it is sometimes called, is typically thought to have resulted from economic progress, attributed to globalization and international trade, as well as from the spread of  democracy and the deterrence effect of nuclear weapons. Yet it has probably resulted, more fundamentally, from the world’s ‘Great Acceleration’ along the energy-complexity spiral in the years that followed World War II. This acceleration was made possible by entering fully in the age of oil. The most powerful and versatile of fossil fuels, oil overtook coal as the world’s dominant energy source shortly after WWII, and provided  humanity with a much bigger energy surplus than it had ever enjoyed before. By doing so it turbocharged population and economic growth and delivered unprecedented material prosperity and social stability to many parts of the world, while also making it easier for nations to settle their differences and coexist more or less peacefully despite their opposing views, values and interests. In other words, oil laid the foundation for a long and historically exceptional period of increasing stability and decreasing conflictuality, which seems paradoxical for a resource that is commonly perceived as the cause of most modern wars.

The advancing and inescapable depletion of the world’s oil reserves has already been changing this picture for some time, though. This depletion is the key factor undermining the energy-complexity spiral and is, fundamentally, what lies behind the endless accumulation of problems that our societies are increasingly unable to solve. A dwindling capacity to solve problems also means a  dwindling capacity to find ways of coexisting peacefully, among the various groups that constitute modern societies, as well as among societies or nations themselves. As the energy-complexity spiral continues to break down, the conditions for peaceful coexistence between nations with opposing interests are vanishing, and international conflictuality inevitably rises, leading to war in some cases. War, it should be remembered, is “the continuation of politics by other means”, in the words Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), which means that it is a “problem-solving mechanism” that typically gets used when other problem-solving mechanisms fail or become unavailable. As the ‘Crisis of Complexity’ reduces the availability and effectiveness of other problem-solving-mechanisms, the likelihood of war being waged to solve lingering problems increases.

This rising international conflictuality inevitably focuses first and foremost on the main points of geopolitical friction, where the vital interests of key geopolitical players collide, and which constitute ‘gordian knots’ of the geopolitical chessboard, i.e. intractable problems that are or have become insoluble without the recourse to violence. Ukraine is and has long been such a geopolitical gordian knot, one of the world’s main ones actually, and one where armed conflict was already ongoing prior to Russia’s invasion in 2022. As the ‘Crisis of Complexity‘ eroded both the capacity of the opposing parties to live with this intractable problem and the availability and effectiveness of non-violent problem-solving mechanisms, the eruption of full-scale war in Ukraine was a logical development and was to be expected – one way or another, this gordian knot that cannot be untied has to be cut.

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War in Ukraine is therefore an unsurprising consequence of the ‘Crisis of Complexity’, and to some extent it was even a predictable one. It is also, however, an amplifier of this crisis, as it is deepening it and accelerating its march towards the stage where it triggers the onset of the next historical phase that awaits us, the “Great Simplification”. And this actually provides us with some clues about the possible development of the conflict, if not about its outcomes.

Ever since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, it has been clear that the the fight in Ukraine was “existential” for all the parties to the conflict. There is far too much at stake for any of them to retreat and accept defeat or even compromise – at least as long as other options seem to exist. The first year of war has shown that outright victory on the battlefield is unlikely to be achieved by either side in the short term without having to pay a prohibitive price. It has also shown that there is still considerable scope for escalation of the military confrontation, while also suggesting that limits to this escalation might exist – the risk of nuclear escalation, in particular, is probably lower that what some self-proclaimed “realists” in the West contend. A prolonged war, without any clear path to battlefield victory appearing for either side for a very long time, is a growing probability.

There might still be, however, lying beyond the battlefield, a shorter path to victory for the belligerents, a path that they are actually already pursuing. In fact the proxy war waged by the revanchist Russo-Chinese axis against the West-dominated world order is not limited to the military operations in Ukraine. It is also waged on other fronts and through other means, which commonality is their end goal, i.e., pushing the enemies over the edge of collapse by targeting their strategic, social, economic and political weaknesses.

Russia, hence, is trying to induce the collapse of Ukraine through the systematic destruction of its critical infrastructure. So far Ukraine has managed to keep the lights on through the winter, yet Russian attacks on its electricity, heating, communications and water infrastructure are likely to continue. But Russia is also trying to induce the collapse of the EU through a forced energy descent leading to industrial devastation, social dislocation, financial meltdown and political implosion. There again, Europe seems to have gone through the winter rather better than what many feared or expected, yet the loss of access to Russian energy supplies is definitive, or at least long-lasting, and will have compounding detrimental effects for Europe over many years. Russia is also intent on inducing the collapse of the transatlantic alliance through encouraging and promoting division between Europe and America, as well as between Europeans themselves, through various means. 

Most of all, Russia is intent on collapsing its nemesis the United States by triggering the meltdown of its over-extended financial system and the crash of its over-financialized economy. Playing the energy card to trigger a chain reaction that might blow up the West’s financial house of cards is one way of doing this. Another, and more crucial one, is the push for de-dollarization of international trade, with the active support of China, which aims to deprive the US dollar from its status as the world’s primary reserve currency and means of transaction, and America from the “exorbitant privilege” this status represents. This prospect is raising increasing concerns in Washington, as the loss or even just erosion of the US dollar’s global supremacy would have massive detrimental consequences for the US and for the American people.

The West, on the other hand, is also trying to defeat Russia by inducing its internal collapse through imposing harsher and harsher sanctions, trying to isolate it from the global financial and trade systems, and depriving it from key technologies. Russia has become since the beginning of 2022 the most sanctioned country in the world. So far, it has weathered these sanctions better than expected, but there are signs that they are having an increasingly significant impact on Moscow’s oil revenues and that they are  steadily raising the cost of waging the war.

It is impossible at this stage to know or predict how these mutual efforts at “collapsing” the other side will play out, and which side will prevail. Yet it seems plausible that, more than the military operations in Ukraine, this is what could ultimately decide the outcome of the conflict and maybe shorten its duration. The side that will “win” this conflict could well be the one that “collapses” the other first. “Mutually Induced Collapse®” (MIC) is also a possible outcome, and even an increasingly likely one as the conflict drags on.

However the military operations may evolve in Ukraine over the coming weeks and months, it is likely that Vladimir Putin has understood that his only real path to victory is through triggering the social, economic and political collapse of the West. It is therefore to be expected that both Russia and China will step up their respective and joint efforts to that end in the coming months. Should they manage to push the US and Europe over the edge one way or another, they would precipitate the arrival of the ‘Great Simplification’. Sooner or later, this process would end up engulfing them as well, yet in the meantime they could have an opportunity to extend their domination, at least for a while, to vast portions of the world. Maybe this is their plan, and maybe it has been their plan all along.

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If you have made it to the end of this long essay, thank you and congratulations! Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts about all these matters in the comments section below, even and especially if they differ from mine.  

Yours, Paul A.