Though forgotten by the media in the face of more immediate Middle-Eastern tragedies, a UN mission is attempting to restore order. But such ambitions, reasonable in theory, fundamentally depend on the domestic political situation and whether the government in charge is competent or, as in Libya’s case, broken. Such analysis of Libya as a “failed state” is a longstanding characterisation in the West, and has similarly been revived in recent months as an explanation for the renewed flow of refugees to Europe.

But while blaming this on the breakdown of governance in Libya is a logical first step, we mustn’t stop there. That would be to ignore the roots of the dysfunction, which can be traced to the Nato-led intervention launched on 19 March, 2011. Libya’s state didn’t passively “fail”; the West triggered its failure through its programme of so-called humanitarian interventionism.

This isn’t to say that the description of state failure inside Libya is incorrect. It’s undeniable — indeed at present there isn’t a “state” to speak of. Not only does the country contain two rival governments (one in the capital, Tripoli, the other in Tobruk), but a Gaddafi-era general, Khalifa Haftar, acts autonomously and answers to neither administration, though he nominally backs the one in the east. Beyond him, a multitude of armed militias dominate fragments of the country and thrive by running illicit businesses. Terrorist groups and drug and human trafficking networks add to the mayhem. Outsiders — including Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Syria and the United Arab Emirates — have worsened the turmoil and violence by backing different Libyan clients.

These circumstances have made even the minimally competent governance needed to manage disasters such as Derna impossible. The nation’s infrastructure, especially Derna’s dams, had fallen into a state of disrepair, some of it damaged by the persistent violence. This was no secret: Libyan engineers had long been sounding the alarm. But institutions capable of taking responsibility for such critical tasks have become scarce since Libya’s state disintegrated in 2011.

For 42 years before that event, Muammar Gaddafi, a military officer who toppled the Western-supported monarchy of King Idris in 1969, ruled Libya in a brutal, authoritarian manner. But the country did at least have a central authority capable of policy-making and state action. Everything changed once the sudden shockwaves of the Arab Spring reached Libya and Gaddafi faced a popular uprising, which he promptly sought to crush. But as it gathered strength, clashes between protestors and security forces led to increasing bloodshed, and Western leaders, notably France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, demanded intervention to protect Libyan civilians.

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Within a month of the intervention, some 600,000 people had fled, seeking safety in adjacent countries, most of them migrants from sub-Saharan Africa originally lured to the country by the prospect of finding jobs. But economic desperation soon induced migrants from neighbouring countries — the bulk of them from Niger, Egypt, Sudan and Chad — to head to Libya again, some seeking work, others a passageway out of Africa. It did not take long for Europeans to feel the ripple effects. Though there were refugee flows from Libya to Europe even during Gaddafi’s rule, the country’s coast was more effectively policed because there was a functioning government. Gaddafi also cooperated directly with European leaders to reduce the exodus in exchange for cash: at one point he had demanded €5 billion annually, but in 2010 settled for €50 million over three years. But once the intervention put an end to Gaddafi’s regime and mayhem ensued, migrants from Libya and other African countries started crossing the Mediterranean to Europe in far larger numbers, many in makeshift boats.

Since then, this movement has ebbed and flowed, but never ceased. In March a legislator from Italian PM Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, citing intelligence reports, claimed that nearly 700,000 people are in Libya awaiting the opportunity to get to Europe. Though UN officials dismissed that figure, this much seems certain: whatever the precise number, Libya will remain a launch pad for destitute people eyeing Europe, no matter the EU’s payments to various African countries, and even Libyan militias, to stanch the flow. And the arrival of droves of refugees on Europe’s shores has aggravated the discord within the EU as member states bicker over how the burden ought to be shared. The first refugee crisis peaked in 2015, but it is once again remaking European politics as far-Right parties exploit xenophobic tropes and play upon public anxieties to increase their appeal. Libya’s “state failure” has washed across the Mediterranean and into the countries of the leaders who precipitated it back in 2011.

In seeking a prime mover for the disaster in Derna and the refugee crisis however, we must return to the Nato-led intervention and the mindset that drove it. As I show in my 2016 book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, the 2011 uprising in Libya was never as peaceful as was widely reported; nor, as was often alleged, did Gaddafi’s forces train heavy weapons on demonstrators with abandon. Gaddafi’s opponents also exaggerated the number of civilians that were killed by his security forces, as did Western advocates of armed intervention. The frightening estimates of those who were still in danger of being killed ultimately amounted to guesswork. (White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross’s warning that 100,000 people in Benghazi — which then had a population of about 674,000 —  would die was an egregious example.) Likewise, as US intelligence officials subsequently stated, the claim of Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the UN that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops so that they could commit mass rape lacked evidence.

Still, as the violence in Libya continued, demands for forceful action to stop it intensified, in part because the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P), which offered a plan to stop mass atrocities, was in its heyday. Its principles had even been included in the Outcome Document the UN adopted in 2005, its 50th anniversary. The essence of R2P — elaborated upon in a report from December 2001 — was that state sovereignty was not unconditional. When governments proved demonstrably incapable of fulfilling their basic responsibility to protect their people, or worse were subjecting them to atrocities, the international community was duty-bound to step in, using military force if other means had failed. This was the moral reasoning that led the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1973 on 17 March, 2011, as Gaddafi’s crackdown continued.

The resolution authorised a military operation — led by Nato but including states outside the alliance — whose remit was to protect Libyan civilians. But the campaign quickly morphed into one that, whether by design or default, overthrew Gaddafi, who was eventually murdered by rebel forces. The power vacuum was soon filled by the anarchy and violence that persists to this day. That denouement was preventable. R2P didn’t merely call for military intervention, as a last resort, to save civilians from harm; it also stressed the importance of establishing order and helping to promote economic recovery thereafter. But the countries that spearheaded the 2011 intervention were not nearly as enthusiastic about the former as they were about the latter. Ironically, one of R2P’s originators later described the intervention as a “textbook case of the R2P norm working exactly as it was supposed to”.

In the event, it proved to be a wrecking ball that shattered the Libyan state and saddled its people with the task of making their broken country whole again. Strikingly, while the major Western powers vigorously called attention to the dangers facing Libyan civilians in 2011, they do not display the same fervour today, never mind that the confirmed deaths in Derna alone far exceed the total for all of Libya in 2011. Nor have the high priests of humanitarian intervention outside officialdom demanded action in Derna or even publicised its plight with the passion they summoned back in 2011.

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Samantha Power, now the head of the US Agency for International Development, then a National Security Council staffer, visited Armenia and Azerbaijan recently to take stock of the refugee crisis that was created by the Azerbaijan’s army conquest of Nagorno Karabakh, the country’s Armenian-majority enclave that declared its independence in 1992. Derna, however, was not on her travel schedule, even though she was among the prominent voices that called for the 2011 humanitarian intervention that left Libya in the disarray that soon earned it the “failed state” moniker. As for the press, after an initial spate of reportage, the coverage of Derna’s suffering has trailed off, even though the miseries of its people are still very much in evidence.

The humanitarian intervention movement, and R2P, its programme, was motivated by a high-minded mission: eliminating or at least mitigating  the persistent, serious harm of mass atrocities committed mainly by governments. Yet the lesson offered by Libya — and Iraq and Afghanistan too — is that deploying military force in other countries in order to stop bloodshed and oppression can unwittingly promote prolonged disorder and violence, upending the lives of the intended beneficiaries. Perhaps Western leaders have learned this lesson. Then again, the hubris produced by overweening power dies hard. Some neoconservatives and liberal internationalists of a markedly millenarian mindset continue to believe that their earlier failures were rooted not in extravagant ambitions but in deficiencies of planning and implementation that can be fixed. As long as this delusion continues, more Libya-like interventions animated by visions of benevolent social engineering await.

Kosovo then was a province in the south of Yugoslavia, a landlocked area slightly smaller than the Falkland Islands. It was officially part of Serbia — the largest of the Yugoslav republics — but was heavily disputed: 90% of the population were Albanian by ethnicity, Muslim by faith. And Kosovo had, for differing reasons, a revered place in the histories of both Serbia and Albania, integral to each’s sense of national identity. As George Orwell noted in 1945: “Yugoslav politics are very complicated and I make no pretence of being an expert on them.”

The Kosovars were a small minority in Yugoslavia, who had long faced discrimination, and long sought independence. That had seemed an implausible hope, but by the time the province came to Blair’s attention, things were looking very different. In the first half of the Nineties, Yugoslavia had been ripped apart, with Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia splitting to become independent countries, the latter two after wars of a bloodiness not seen in Europe since 1945. The Kosovars were still a minority, but — with Yugoslavia reduced from six constituent republics to just two, Serbia and Montenegro — they now made up a fifth of the country’s population. Not so small anymore.

In 1995, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began armed actions; by 1998, the insurgency had escalated into serious conflict. The Yugoslav military was attempting to suppress the KLA by terrorising the population: hundreds were killed, thousands raped, and hundreds of thousands displaced. This was the point at which the situation forced itself into the international spotlight, provoking a sense of horrified déjà vu: the earlier Yugoslav Wars had cost the lives of up to 150,000, and made the term “ethnic cleansing” common currency. Many in the West were, retrospectively in some instances, feeling ashamed that such destruction had been allowed to run rampant in Europe. Then, the United Nations had tried to contain the killing with an arms embargo and the deployment of some ineffective peacekeepers; mostly they had looked on sorrowfully. And now it was happening again.

“I saw it as essentially a moral issue,” wrote Blair in his memoirs. There was a humanitarian disaster unfolding, and — as in Ukraine today — the blame lay at the feet of one man: in this case the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević. Action was needed. By June 1998, Britain was talking with its Nato partners about the possibility of an air and land operation; it was another nine months before, in March 1999, Nato began bombing Yugoslavia. “We have learned from bitter experience not to appease dictators,” explained Blair, who largely drove the initiative. “We tried it 60 years ago.”

There was — again, as today — political consensus, with backing for the government’s actions from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, then led by William Hague and Paddy Ashdown respectively. Even Blair’s own party was mostly in support. A few on the Left pointed out that the lack of UN authorisation made the bombing entirely illegal, but a motion condemning Nato’s actions was signed by just six of the usual suspects, including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Notably absent was Ken Livingstone, who joined Blair in comparing Milošević to Hitler. Robin Cook and Clare Short — who would both later resign from the cabinet over Iraq — were fully on board, the former as foreign secretary, the latter dutifully doing the media rounds to defend the government.

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Television news played its part in preparing the public for military action, with extensive coverage of the appalling suffering being endured by the Kosovars. In the press, the most notable cheerleaders were to be found at the Guardian. As early as April 1998, an editorial was calling for “intervention if only on humanitarian grounds” and for “the deployment of troops”. On the eve of the bombing, the leader column was headlined: “The sad need for force.” We have become familiar with that sense of sorrowful necessity in the last 12 months.

It was confidently predicted that 72 hours of bombing would be sufficient to force Milošević into retreat. That didn’t happen, and the days stretched out into weeks and months. Along the way, there was a series of Nato errors: the accidental strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; a cluster bomb aimed at an airfield that hit a market, killing more than 60 Serbian civilians; the deaths of 87 Kosovar refugees in a bomb attack on the village of Koriša. In the face of these blunders and the absence of a swift victory, Blair ramped up the moral rhetoric: “This is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity.” To prove the point, Milošević was indicted for crimes against humanity by a UN tribunal.

But the public was losing faith. Although an early opinion poll showed two-thirds supporting the use of ground troops, the Labour Party’s own focus groups reported far less enthusiasm. At a time when public spending was still under tight control, people wanted to know, why was money being spent on waging war? Philip Gould, Blair’s much-trusted pollster, urged him to ignore the findings and carry on, but press secretary Alastair Campbell was furious with the electorate’s lack of gratitude: “It made you wonder why we bothered sometimes.”

In the event, it took 78 days before Milošević agreed an unconditional withdrawal of Serbian troops, and even then, it was Russian diplomacy and the threat of a Nato land invasion that proved decisive. There was a limit to what bombing alone could do (as Martin McGuinness of the IRA helpfully pointed out). Nonetheless, the operation had achieved its objective. Indeed, it went further. So damaged was Milošević’s standing among Serbs that the following year he lost the presidential election and was dragged from office. (He was subsequently extradited to The Hague to face charges of war crimes, dying before the trial could conclude.) Regime change had not been the war’s aim, but it was achieved.

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Insofar as Kosovo is remembered, it’s seen as, to use Blair’s description, “a just war”. The comparisons between Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany were historically illiterate — and tone-deaf, given the history of the country in the Forties — but there was a clear aggressor, who everyone agreed had to be defeated. It was also, from a British perspective, a clean war. There were around 13,500 dead, most of them civilians, but Nato had no combat fatalities at all. And it was welcomed by those in whose name it was being fought. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, but it was notable that they blamed Milošević, not Nato. The Kosovars were overwhelmingly in favour of the military intervention, and Blair in particular was seen as a hero. When he visited the capital, Pristina, a few weeks after the cessation of hostilities, he was greeted by huge crowds, chanting his name, waving Union Jacks and presenting him with flowers. “Tonibler” and “Bler” became popular names for male children born in Kosovo that year (as with the Kosovan footballer Bler Thaçi).

“War is never civilised,” said Blair in his moment of triumph. “But war can be necessary to uphold civilisation.” It was the kind of paradox that appealed to him and was so integral to his oratory: the civilising war, the imposition of democracy. The victory, he believed, confirmed his “doctrine of international community” — which he outlined during the conflict: those with military power, he argued, had the right, indeed the duty, to intervene where possible against “a despotic, dictatorial regime”, even if there was no “immediate threat to our interests”.

It was the philosophy that later fed his fervour for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and of Iraq in 2003. There was the same talk of good and evil, of how we should never appease dictators; the same predictions of swift success. And in the case of Iraq, there was a similar failure — much more controversially this time — to get UN backing. But by now, Blair was, said Labour’s ex-deputy leader Roy Hattersley, in a “messianic mood”.

Neither of those ventures, of course, ended well. There was no repeat of the welcome in Pristina, and the unforeseen consequences were catastrophic. The destabilising of Iraq led to the emergence of Islamic State; Afghanistan reverted to Taliban control as soon as western troops departed. Nor was Nato’s later bombing of Libya in 2011 any more positive: Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, but then another, longer and more costly, civil war broke out. All are, by any normal measure, failed states. The Foreign Office currently advises British citizens not to travel to Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.

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It also advises against all but essential travel to northern Kosovo, and there’s a warning for the whole country: “Terrorists are likely to try to carry out attacks.” Media attention has long since moved on, but even with the continuing presence of KFOR — the Nato-led peacekeeping force, now much reduced in numbers — Kosovo is still not stable. Maybe that was inevitable. In public, this was “a battle between good and evil”. In private, Blair acknowledged that “the KLA were not much better than the Serbs”. The Nato victory was followed by Kosovan retaliation. There was an exodus of Serbs and Roma in a further wave of ethnic cleansing; churches were attacked, just as mosques had once been; and there have been frequent outbreaks of violence over the years: more than 200 KFOR personnel have lost their lives.

There have also been knock-on effects internationally. In 2004, Amnesty International published a report revealing how women were being trafficked into the province from Albania to work as prostitutes, meeting the demands of the 50,000 peacekeeping troops stationed there. And it wasn’t just adult women. “I was forced by the boss to serve international soldiers and police officers,” a 12-year-old Albanian girl told the researchers. Amnesty concluded that the UN and Nato forces were “not only failing to protect the human rights of the women and girls, but are in many cases themselves using them for sexual gratification and are even allegedly involved in trafficking itself”.

By the time the report was released, the sex industry created for KFOR had grown, becoming the centre of a network that sold woman and girls into prostitution in western Europe — 1,400 were being smuggled into Britain every year, it was estimated. When in 2005 ex-cabinet minister Harriet Harman analysed the successful prosecutions for people trafficking, she concluded that, “in nearly every case the culprit was Albanian or Kosovan, some of whom had been allowed in as refugees”.

The legacy of Kosovo was also seen in the transformation of Nato, now an organisation prepared to initiate war beyond the UN: a fact that ensures Kosovo still has traction in Russian propaganda. Answering western criticism of the invasion of Ukraine last year, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was quick to talk of Nato’s “illegal use of force” in 1999. And, in the context of Ukraine, it’s hard not to see Blair in Pristina as the model for Boris Johnson, or indeed Keir Starmer, in Kyiv. (How envious they must be to see all those Toniblers.) Adoring crowds and moral certainty are a seductive combination, particularly for a politician feeling a lack of honour in his own land.

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Ukraine, of course, is not Kosovo. In one sense, the argument today is even more clear-cut: Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, whereas Kosovo had no such status. (Indeed, it is still not recognised by all member states of Nato.) The Yugoslav claim that its forces were suppressing an internal terrorist threat carried some weight; the same is evidently not true of the invasion of Ukraine. The real difference, though, is the nature of the opponent. Blair’s interventionism depended, he said, on answering the question: “Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?” Nobody seriously thinks that Nato taking on Russia directly is either sensible or prudent.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric remains, despite all that has happened since Kosovo. The Ukraine War is seen in the moral terms advocated by Blair. Emotion is the order of the day, realpolitik is out of favour, and the political and media consensus is that this is again a fight between good and evil. The danger is of over-simplification. It is not hard to identify an evil, but good is a much less clearcut phenomenon. “War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress,” conceded Blair. More than that, it brings unintended consequences, which can amount to evils.

If Blair’s military adventuring had ended with Kosovo, foreign policy would be seen as a minor part of his legacy, rather than the dominant note that it now is. And the Kosovo War would be regarded as a qualified success, the negatives — including the lack of an exit strategy — outweighed by the positives. Few doubted that the cause was just, and most agreed that the violence and the death toll would have been worse had Nato not got involved. It might even be remembered for making the case for Blair’s doctrine of liberal intervention. There was an emergency, a clearly defined solution, and a task that was accomplished. There was also, however, the hazardous, illusory hope that the solution could be replicated in very different circumstances.

Like many post-Soviet states, upon becoming independent in 1991, Ukraine faced a serious challenge of nation-building. Ukraine is a multinational, multireligious and multilingual country with little historical experience of independent statehood. Its major ethno-linguistic groups include Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east. Many speak both languages and their histories and cultural practices are deeply intertwined.

An atavistic nationalism that bases political authority on supposed ancient traditions of ethnic-Ukrainians alone is neither consistent with reality, nor capable of uniting the whole Ukrainian people. The challenge of post-Soviet nation-building was, therefore, to craft a civic nationalism, based around a shared commitment to democratic self-government.

Sadly, Ukrainian elites failed in this task. Indeed, as Yuliya Yurchenko documents in her compelling but depressing book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, they were too busy plundering the remnants of the Soviet economy, with officials and their criminal-business networks transforming themselves into powerful, predatory oligarchs while the rest of their society fell into penury.

From 1990 to 2000, Ukraine’s GDP fell from $81.4bn to just $31.2bn. Hyperinflation, peaking at 10,155% in 1993, destroyed people’s living standards, creating long-term unemployment, especially among the young. The oligarchs had little to offer citizens, relying increasingly on fraud, corruption and intimidation to stay in power.

In this context, reformers — who took power after the 2004 “orange revolution” — looked to EU and Nato membership as a way to transform their society. This attempt to move “from Brezhnev to Brussels” occurred widely in post-communist Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, reformers hoped that EU rules would discipline or destroy the oligarchs and root out corruption by imposing free-market reforms.

But this was a very dangerous strategy. As Yurchenko observes, the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) signed in 2008 would, if fully implemented, devastate small businesses and workers by exposing them to continental competition. Meanwhile, many oligarchs have found ways to exploit the opening of markets and limit measures that would damage their interests.

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Other oligarchs resisted liberalisation by rallying the people of eastern Ukraine into thinking that pro-Western elites were not heeding their interests. Donetsk, where many oligarchic businesses are based, has deeper economic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia, and people there have often complained of being neglected and sneered at by the West, despite constituting a substantial share of Ukraine’s GDP and population.

The oligarchs began harnessing this resentment, fostering a growing east/west split in Ukrainian politics. The “East” — led by Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions — retook national power following the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych’s subsequent persecution of his opponents drew the ire of Washington and Brussels, but this only reinforced his preference for stronger ties with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), reflecting the economic needs of his eastern base.

This growing internationalisation of Ukraine’s domestic struggles was perilous, given the geopolitical context. Russia had stridently opposed Nato’s eastward expansion since the Nineties. Gorbachev had asked Washington to disband Nato in exchange for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, while Yeltsin had asked for a new, inclusive security architecture that incorporated Russia into Europe, only to be rebuffed. The latter later warned the West that a Cold War was giving way to a cold peace, with Nato expansion entailing “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.

When the West proceeded anyway, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, made it clear that Moscow saw Nato expansion as directed at Russia. In April 2008, a Nato summit welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance. Putin invaded Georgia a few months later, rather than see it join this anti-Russian bloc. Many analysts, from the Cold Warrior George Kennan to the realist professor John Mearsheimer, predicted disaster if Nato continued to expand towards Russia’s borders.

The same, to a lesser extent, applied to EU expansion. Putin described the DCFTA as a “big threat” to Russia, as it would allow EU exports to enter tariff-free, via Ukraine, and “choke” the Russian economy. EU officials insisted their cooperation with Ukraine was merely technical, refusing to recognise the geopolitical implications.

The 2014 “Euromaidan” crisis saw the culmination of this toxic fracturing of the Ukrainian nation. In 2013, President Yanukovych rejected the DCFTA, opting for closer ties with the EEU. This prompted widespread protests, which were egged on by senior EU and American politicians, despite the growing involvement of far-Right nationalists. Eventually, amid escalating unrest and violence, Yanukovych fled to Russia. But while his opponents in western Ukraine celebrated, his eastern supporters perceived a “fascist” coup against their democratically-elected president. The Ukrainian state’s authority collapsed in the east, allowing opportunistic pro-Russian separatists to seize power in many areas, while Russia reacted by invading Crimea.

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Instead of moving to reassure their fellow citizens and build an inclusive national project, Ukraine’s pro-Western faction instead doubled down. Under the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, the Government purged eastern politicians and officials from the state, sending many fleeing into exile, and banned Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, intensifying the crisis of representation in the east. It also launched military offensives against the separatists, triggering further Russian intervention, producing heavy casualties and a grinding stalemate.

Neither Poroshenko, nor his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have implemented the Minsk accords agreed with Russia in 2014-15, which proposed to settle the conflict by granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. Instead, the new government loudly sought full membership of Nato and the EU — measures that could only undermine Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Yet the EU has not — and will not — actually admit Ukraine, as it is still reeling from the divisions induced by the last round of enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and does not want to take responsibility for a war-torn country. But it was happy to pretend otherwise, flattering Ukrainian elites while pushing neoliberal reforms on them.

The Poroshenko government enacted the EU DCFTA, rapidly introducing structural reforms to comply with EU rules. Facing rising debt amid economic decline, the Ukrainian state became economically dependent on the EU and IMF. Foreigners were brought in to run three ministries and IMF advisors were embedded with the central bank, entailing further losses of sovereignty. Austerity, neoliberalism and further privatisation benefited well-positioned oligarchs but did nothing to alleviate mounting poverty.

Far from reaching out to Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Kyiv has actively promoted a narrowly Ukrainian, anti-Russian form of nationalism, reflected in language policy, “de-communisation”, and the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox church from its Russian “mother” church. As Yurchenko observes, instead of reconsolidating Ukraine, these measures only “further divided the broken nation”.

This failure of Ukrainian politicians to represent the whole nation has led both sides to turn to foreigners to bolster their domestic position. The pro-Russian faction appears backwards and corrupt, offering little to inspire and unite the country, and ultimately relies on Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine slipping from its grasp. But nor can the pro-Western faction command the consent of the whole nation. It was prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected president to get its own way, and has persistently sought to lock in its preferences against internal opposition by sacrificing Ukrainian national sovereignty to supranational organisations.

Russia’s role in this disaster is obvious. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian nationalism has taken a sharply anti-Russian turn given the annexation of Crimea, Russian support for separatist fighters, and Putin’s open contempt for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty — let alone the recent invasion.

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But the West has also been reckless and irresponsible. Russia has made perfectly clear that it will not tolerate the expansion of the Western sphere of influence up to its borders. It wants at least a neutral buffer zone between itself and Nato, and ideally a friendly sphere of influence among its post-Soviet neighbours. We might wish this were not so, but it is a geopolitical fact. Russia’s willingness to use force to achieve its goals — at great reputational and economic cost — has been beyond doubt since 2008. To put this into perspective, we can imagine how the US might react if Canada sought to join a Russian-led military alliance — or merely recall Washington’s reaction when Cuba did so.

The West had two strategic options. Either it could acknowledge and accommodate Russian interests, or it could defy them, ushering Ukraine into Nato and deploying overwhelming military power to deter Russia from using force. Instead, it did neither. It allowed its Ukrainian allies falsely to believe that they could rely on the EU and Nato, yet did not nearly enough to deter Putin militarily. This has encouraged the Ukrainian government to prioritise integration with Russia’s enemies over rapprochement with its own citizens, while fanning Russian anxieties. Had Nato been clearer, Ukrainian elites might have come to their senses and pursued a less reckless course of action.

The only solution to this crisis, aside from war and devastation, is for Ukraine to become a neutral state, as Finland was during the Cold War. The sovereignty of the Ukrainian people — their capacity to work out their differences and collectively determine their life together in a peaceful and democratic manner — can only be enhanced if all sides renounce their external ties, and foreign powers cease meddling in Ukrainian politics.

To be truly sovereign, the Ukrainian state must be seen to represent the whole national population. The push towards Nato and EU membership — only intensified by Russia’s aggressive reaction — has fragmented the Ukrainian nation. It is hard to see how it can be reunited if this continues; bloody partition seems more likely.

Sovereignty does not imply total control over the state’s internal or external environment; it only entails self-rule, and this requires political realism. This was a source of some confusion in the Brexit debate. Many Thatcherite Eurosceptics foolishly believed that the UK could restore its sovereignty — its capacity to make laws and adopt policies inconsistent with EU rules — while retaining full access to the EU’s single market. The EU had no interest in agreeing such attractive terms; on the contrary, its interest lay in making Brexit as painful as possible.

Today, the Ukrainians clearly have no more “sovereign right” to join the EU or Nato than Brexit Britain had a “sovereign right” to full access to EU markets. Reflecting their own interests, these organisations will not admit Ukraine. This is the geopolitical reality that any truly sovereign Ukrainian government must reckon with.

Of course, Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. But the only way for the Ukrainian people to achieve national sovereignty is for all sides within Ukraine to cease internationalising their political conflict, and for foreign powers to cease their meddling. Neutrality offers the only context in which Ukraine can restore its territorial integrity and secure peace. It also provides the only context in which pro-Western forces will be forced to reckon with their pro-Russian counterparts, and find a more consensual way to exist.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

But with the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan — and signs of resistance dwindling — is he still convinced the West was right to invade?

He joined Freddie Sayers in our London studio to discuss his new book, The Will to See. An edited transcript is below.

The worldview you espouse and are famous for, what we might call liberal interventionism, seems more out of fashion than at any point in the past 30 years. Do you feel you now write in a spirit of defiance?
I never was concerned with being out of fashion or not out of fashion. I have my line, my conviction. It never moved since the beginning of my career. And I’m still the same. I believe that democracy deserves to be shared. I believe that there is no place in the world that is unfit for democracy. I believe in human rights. I believe in universality of values. And it is not because of the illiberal trend, or because of Mr Putin and Mr Erdogan being on the move, that I’m going to change my opinion.

But after all the disasters of the past 20 or 30 years, do you really think we should still be trying to export democracy around the world?
I never said that democracy has to be exported. What I say is that, where you have some democrats, if you have some democrats in a place or in another, we have the moral duty and sometimes the political duty to help, to encourage, to embrace, to reinforce, not to export. You have to have first the existence of a strong political force.

So in Afghanistan, for example?
There is a growing movement of women in particular, wishing equality, wishing to unveil their face, refusing the law of Taliban… The number grows from year to year. We had the moral duty of supporting them and when we denied it we betrayed this moral duty, and that it is a huge moral fault and political mistake.

So should we still be there?
In Afghanistan a few weeks ago, how many soldiers there were — two or three thousand? No more. They were not in war operations. They were in their barracks at the end of the day, but their symbolic presence, the fact that they were there, was like a shelter permitting the women to unveil, permitting the little girls to go to school, permitting your colleagues, journalists in Afghanistan, to do their job. My prescription was that America, and the UK and France have troops all over the world — in Korea, in Germany, in Europe. So what was the cost of leaving 2,500 or 3,000 troops on the non combat-mission? To leave them there just to show that we care, that we have a policy, that we are not withdrawing behind the walls of our fortress, that we don’t give space and abandon the field to Turks, Russians and Chinese.

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You write about the massacre of Christians of Nigeria. Do you think it’s reasonable for Christians in Western countries to care more about because of a solidarity of faith?
They should care about massacres in general. They should care about people embracing their values, our values. Why do the Christians in the West support so much the Christians of the Middle East, and of Mosul. I pleaded for that a lot! But nothing for the Christians of Nigeria. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because there is a blackout in the press. Maybe because Africa is considered as being remote.

Many people who, like you, are proud defenders of Western liberalism, feel that we would be better defended by moving on from the universalist delusions of the past decades — i.e. that every country will eventually look like our countries, and that we have no business being in faraway lands. What do you say to those people?
It’s a mistake. I believe it from the bottom of my heart. I know this way of thinking; it’s a big mistake. It’s a big mistake because the game is worldwide. And the people whom I confront in Mogadishu, in Nigeria, the Muslim Brotherhood, extremist Islamists — they have their equivalents in London and in Paris. What happens when their equivalents in Paris see that we let them act? That we leave them free to act in Nigeria or Mogadishu? They are emboldened, they are happy. They feel encouraged and every victory which they make in Nigeria or in Syria is an encouragement to fight more in London or in Paris. We cannot strengthen our model of liberal society at home, if we give the feeling that we quit the field and abandon the field in the rest of the world.

Realistically, though, there simply isn’t the political will in Western countries for these kind of ongoing foreign campaigns. If you’re a true democrat, surely what the majority of the citizens of those countries want is the point?
The majority is not the point. Majority is the point for a prime minister, for a president. But for a whistleblower, for an intellectual, the question is to say what one feels to be the truth. And if you are alone, to say it even louder. And you have to go against the majority. If the majority does not want to hear, you have to try your best to help them to see.

So your solution to populism, after all that has happened in the past few years, is still to try to “educate” the people out of their mistakes? It doesn’t seem to work very well.
It depends. In the fifties in France, for example, we had a populist movement. It was very strong, but they were defeated by the return to power of General de Gaulle. Then it was a high way for a long time. Now it’s a low, and the populists did gain some ground. This is the old story. It goes back and forth. We are in a moment where these sort of ideas which I defend are on low tide. I’m not discouraged by that. I don’t believe that it means that I’m wrong. I continue and I do hope that I will see a reversal of the tide.

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But surely there must be lessons to learn from the past 30 years. Look at China — part of the reason China was brought in to the global market was the idea that they would liberalise and become more democratic. But it didn’t work.
On China, what I said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, was that we had a duty to protect and defend the dissidents. For example, I was expelled from China in 1998, or 99, because I went there for in a movie festival and I dared to defend and to speak in favour of dissidents. And I think that we did not do that enough. So: defend the dissidents, not accept like stupid morons or beggars the Belt and Road which they are building now. Not accept their compact with Turkey and Russia in Africa to expel the West from this part of the world. I don’t believe that we have to exclude China, I believe that we have to intelligently confront them, not leave the ground; to have a real, proper diplomacy, not to be like, again, stupid morons swallowing all the propaganda of the Chinese when they say that they are creating prosperity and so on. We democrats should not be on the defence.

So you must be very unhappy with the isolationism of President Biden — seems it wasn’t only President Trump then?
I never said that it was only Donald Trump. I wrote a book before this one a few years ago, saying that the isolationism as a trend in America started with Barack Obama, and started on 29 August 2013, when Barack Obama decided not to respect his own red line in Syria… I even said that it was older than that, even years before. And Biden today embodies that… I am disappointed by the way in which he validated the choice of Trump. Trump dreamt the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden did it. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a joint operation — conceived by Trump; executed by Biden.

But again – the reason that leaders of both Republicans and Democrats have pulled out of Afghanistan is that majorities of voters in both of their parties wanted it. So in a way, isn’t the withdrawal by President Biden from Afghanistan a success story for liberal democracy?
No, because liberal democracy is not only the rule of numbers; liberal democracy is also the rule of law. And even if the numbers disagree with the law, both are still valid — liberal democracy is a mix, an an encounter between number, law, institutions, a sort of civilisation and of practices… It is also a big trend in public opinion, which is an egoist trend, which is a trend, leading an increasing number of people to believe that their interest is a selfish interest reduced to the little home of their narcissism. And this is not a liberal democracy. This is something else, a new pattern of society, which you have, by the way, in some countries of Europe, like Hungary, for example. And which has not to be blessed. An intellectual is not here just to bless all that is happening in what is happening. Things have to be blessed, and things that have to be confronted. Liberal democracy is not amor fati — love of destiny — no!

Are you worried about that we are importing some illiberal trends within our Western Democracies?
Yes we are, we are, of course. The woke culture, the cancel culture, attacks on freedom of speech. I know it comes from the Left, but it does not deserve, in my eyes, more indulgence because it comes from the Left than if it came from the Right. For me, the new political dividing line crosses the Left and the Right. We have to adapt our mind, our behaviour, our way of acting, to these new dividing lines, and cancel culture, attacks to freedom of speech is really a huge problem on which we have to be very careful.

How does the pandemic feature in this? Lockdowns were a policy that came out of China and spread very rapidly around the Western world. Were you troubled by the curtailment of liberty and due process?
Of course, it reduced some liberties and it accelerated a process which was already going on, which consists in tracing all of us, collecting data on us and so on and so on. So I may understand that it was necessary for a while, but number one, it has to be just a while. Number two, citizens should be asking for guarantees that when it is over, these liberty measures will be destroyed. Number three, as for myself, I believe this isa terrible time. This is why I escaped to Syria, Iraq, Mogadishu and the Ukraine  during this time because for me, it was, I am impossible to lock down — I cannot be locked. And number four, this has not been a good period for the care of the others, has not been a good period for brotherhood, has not been a good period for internet journalism.

It’s thrown up its own miniature revolution, hasn’t it? We now see on the streets of Berlin, London and Paris regular protests against vaccine passports and steps towards mandatory vaccines. Do you think it’s important not to demonise those people?
I don’t like to demonise anyone. I am a man of words. I try to convince, I try to plead. Ideas are a battle, like an arm wrestling… These anti-vax people they are conspiracy theorists.

Some…
A lot of them. They have a stupid conception of health… So they have to be confronted.

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They might feel like they’re your people. They are missing and trying to defend the liberal world order that you’re talking about. They want their freedoms. They want due process. They want to make their own decisions.
No, no, no. Because I listen to them. I listen — I am ready of course to hear, I try to hear everything. They are not — they pretend to be in favour of liberal freedom. But when you ask them what they want, a majority of them or big lot of them what they want, what is the ideal regime for them? It is not a liberal one.

In France, Éric Zemmour is doing very well. How worried are you and how do you propose that people of your political persuasion confront his popularity?
You have to try to show that Zemmour is not a new way of being far-Right — he is pumping the votes of Marine le Pen and incorporating them to him, but it’s the same. I would like to say that he is falsely sophisticated and fond of history, I don’t think he is so much. It seems to me useful to say that his conception of France is a tiny, retracted conception of France — little France. Like in UK when you had the debate about Brexit, they wanted the UK great again, the result is that they made England more and more little.

It doesn’t so far feel like Brexit has turned out quite as badly as you feared though, does it? In 2016, you came to London and delivered a play imploring people not to vote for Brexit. We’ve just done a deal with Australia and the US which, although it upset Mr Macron, does not exactly imply a “little England” mentality. Were your fears about Brexit overblown?
I don’t feel that way, but I hope that they are unfounded. I love this country. As I often say, I would not be born without the sacrifice of British young boys on D-Day so I hope I was wrong. But alas, let’s wait to see what happens in in Ulster, in Northern Ireland. Let’s wait. Let’s wait to see what happens in Scotland. I arrived in London on a day when the newspapers were full of the shortage of fuel for the cars, of the shortage of people to work.

What about Boris Johnson. Do you view him as a liberal who just does some things you don’t like, or some kind of dangerous populist?
I think that nobody knows who is Boris Johnson, including himself. He doesn’t know himself if he’s still a liberal, or a really dangerous populist. From outside, it seems to me that it depends on the day. It depends on the hour. It depends on the mood. He’s a strange guy. I’m sure that if I had met him 20 years ago when he was journalist in Brussels, he would have seemed like a jolly and a sympathetic guy. Today, he seems more like Viktor Orbán. A populist — not authoritarian, but more of a populist than his buddy Macron, for example.

BHL, thank you.

In the event, enormous quantities of money, weaponry and human lives were expended over the ensuing 17 years in something more like a vast missionary enterprise than a military one, with the aim of converting the country’s inhabitants to modern beliefs and values. Not only were the Afghans taught how to run elections. In an effort to shake them out of pre-modern modes of thinking, they were also instructed in the emancipating power of conceptual art.

In Bitter Lake, a documentary by the filmmaker Adam Curtis, a short clip illustrates how this this cultural mission was conducted. The footage shows Afghan men and women in a darkened seminar room, sitting in the dim light given off by a projected image of Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated urinal, listening to a lecture given by a young English woman with a faint Roedean-like accent on the work’s significance.

When the lecturer says she does not expect the females in the audience to recognise the object in question, the camera pans away from her to show their reaction. Glancing nervously at one another, the women seem baffled; one shakes her head incredulously. Most of those present seem perplexed not so much as to the function of the object as by the purpose of the lecture. Unfazed, the lecturer assures the audience that the work was a revolutionary act. In later footage, she goes on to assert that Duchamp’s aim was to “fight against the system”.

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The notion that Afghanistan needed to embrace Duchamp’s art may seem comically absurd. Yet it has a hidden logic.  The Franco-American painter and creator of “readymades” – everyday objects that have been slightly tweaked and designated as works of art – followed early 20th-century Dadaism in aiming to deconstruct art itself. Signed and dated “R. Mutt, 1917”, the urinal signified that art would not in future be shaped by any practice or tradition. No longer a distinct sphere of human activity with its own ruling norms, it would be whatever anyone wanted it to be. Duchamp inaugurated an assertion of unfettered human autonomy that has come to pervade ethics and politics. If the liberal west stands for anything any more, this is it.

A similar ideology was intimated in the Romantic Movement, which viewed human life as an exercise in self-creation. But the Romantic Movement was a rebellion against Greco-Roman rationalism and Jewish and Christian monotheism, which in their different ways posited external constraints on human autonomy. Humans were surrounded by a realm of values – embodied in a transcendental deity or a natural order – that limited how they could fashion their lives. However much they tried to escape it, the Romantics could not help continuing this constraining inheritance. Even when they glamorised evil, they invoked a domain beyond the human world that determined what evil consisted in.

In contrast, Duchamp’s anti-art was a secular version of antinomianism – the mediaeval heresy in which any kind of law was rejected as an impediment to the spiritual freedom of those who claimed a direct relationship with God. In this modern antinomianism, however, human will was asserted in a void.

It was a project that quickly found political expression. Some in the Italian Futurist movement embraced Fascism as an embodiment of values of creative destruction, novelty and speed. Museums were to be burnt down, ancient civilisations flattened and replaced by modernist constructions. The author of the Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, exulted in the savage Italian assault on Abyssinia, which he celebrated as an opportunity to obliterate the past and build a new society from nothing.

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In the 20th century, the political expressions of this project were principally in totalitarian regimes. If Mussolini’s Fascists aimed to raze Abyssinia, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Mao’s cultural revolutionaries bulldozed the past, along with tens of millions of human lives in Russia, China and Tibet. As well as killing nearly two million people, around a quarter of Cambodia’s population, Pol Pot laid waste to much of the country’s cultural inheritance. In Europe, the Nazis projected, and partly achieved, a uniquely hideous desolation. All of these regimes were driven by the belief that a new world could be created by unbridled human will.

This cult of the will did not end with classical totalitarianism. An ideal of self-creation has returned in 21st-century liberalism. Part of the craze for identity politics is the insistence that each of us can be whoever and whatever we decide to be. Not fate or accident but untrammelled choice must shape our identities. It is an illusory vision, since identity in practice is never unilateral. Everyone’s identity depends on recognition by others – a relationship that must be negotiated, one way or another. Yet pursuing a fantasy of autonomous self-creation has come to be seen as the fundamental human freedom. The fact that the demand for recognition of one’s chosen identity leads to the fragmentation of society into warring groups has not diminished the appeal of this vision.

The problem is that identity is being asserted in a cultural vacuum. According to the ruling philosophy of deconstruction, freedom is not exercised within a matrix of practices and institutions. It is found in anomie – the normless condition of insatiable self-assertion that the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “the malady of the infinite”. Individual autonomy is fully realised only once the structures that helped form identities in the past have been demolished. True freedom means creating oneself, a god-like power which requires that the norms that defined western civilisation be left behind.

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Exponents of deconstruction will dispute this description. When they dismantle ideas of family, nationality and religion they believe they are exercising the power of critical reason – the faculty, they seem to think, that distinguishes them from the rest of humankind. This attitude shapes their attitude to benighted people who have yet to receive the antinomian revelation.

In the past, an idea of western civilisation was promoted in foreign lands by an imperial caste of soldiers and administrators, some of whom went so far as to learn the languages and customs of the peoples they ruled. Today, a lumpen-intelligentsia aims to erase the central traditions of the West while knowing little or nothing of their fellow citizens who still live by them. Instead of injecting western traditions into other cultures, these bourgeois antinomians look forward to a time when their own anomie has become universal.

For all the idle chatter about the evils of colonialism, the claim to represent a superior form of life has not been renounced. Deconstructionism is peculiarly and ineffably a progressive western ideology, and among those who promote it, the ceaseless assault on the West’s past only serves to demonstrate their own advanced level of development. This time, however, what they aim to bring to other cultures is a formless freedom cut loose from any tradition – in other words, a type of nihilism.

A long history lies behind this contemporary western project. Its ultimate origins may well be in Gnostic currents within western religion, which aim to liberate the human spirit from any material constraint. More recently, the project of self-creation continues a Romantic faith – the idea that we should fashion our lives as original works of art – which entered liberalism from German thought when Mill invoked the idea in his paean to individuality, On Liberty.

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At the same time, the project of autonomous self-creation marks a crisis in the Enlightenment. In After Virtue (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment pursuit of human autonomy ended in Nietzsche’s glorification of will-to-power. Enlightenment humanists believed reason could establish norms of conduct to replace those of religion; but the end-result of their inquiries was subjectivism, the extinction of any idea of truth in ethics and Nietzsche’s assertion that value is created by acts of will.

In identifying the culmination of the Enlightenment project with Nietzsche’s prophetic frenzy, however, MacIntyre missed the mark. Duchamp’s unruffled nihilism is a more likely end-point for the Enlightenment. Humankind cannot bear very much autonomy. Hence the dangerous allure of would-be dictators, which is gripping hollowed-out liberal societies throughout the world.

The Afghan people were casualties of an absurdist mission. Already proficient in the destruction of Afghan traditions, the Taliban were unlikely recruits to an ideology of deconstruction. But the beneficiary of the western project in Afghanistan was never going to be the Afghan people. It was the western need to leave a mark on the world, even as the West is visibly fading, which drove on the Afghan mission.

Geopolitical factors have perpetuated the western presence in the country. There would be strategic risks in any sudden withdrawal. An admission of defeat akin to that of the Soviets when they began their exit in May 1988, it would leave a black hole that would be filled by China. This may be the rationale for continuing the occupation indefinitely, as apparently envisaged in Donald Trump’s proposal that the occupying forces should in future be private contractors. The war has left the allies with an insoluble geopolitical dilemma.

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But the futile Afghan mission and the ruinous western interventions in Iraq and Libya that followed were not consequences of mistaken geopolitical calculation, however inept. They expressed the collective malady of western societies, which has brought them to a point at which their defining project is dismantling themselves. With the liberal West gripped by this passion, what could be more logical than exporting Duchamp’s vision to countries the West is bent on remaking in its own image?

To be sure, the western project in Afghanistan failed. The Taliban is as strong as it has ever been, if not stronger. Duchamp, on the other hand, has succeeded. In the West, antinomianism has become an ideology that is marketed throughout the media. The “communism” of Teen Vogue is only the latest example of the commoditisation of nihilism.

Embodying the spirit of the age long before the age had come fully into being, Duchamp’s urinal has proved to be a true icon of the present time. If the self-composed anti-artist could have known how his work would come to be used he would surely have responded with a playful smile.

As Michael Dempsey writes in a piece for Bloomberg, the Russian President is garnering plaudits at home and grudging respect elsewhere:

“Many Western analysts and policy makers believe that Putin has played a weak hand skillfully, evolved from a tactician into a first-rate strategist, and won a series of major victories for Russian diplomacy…

“This attitude is deeply held inside Russia as well, where recent polling shows that nearly 90 percent of the public has confidence in Putin’s handling of world affairs.”

But, Dempsey argues, this narrative is misleading:

“In my opinion, it pays too little attention to the long-term costs of Putin’s foreign engagements…”

These engagements have embroiled Russia in ongoing sets of commitments – many of them military and most of them financial. Consider Syria:

“…while Assad currently enjoys the upper hand on the battlefield, there are still tens of thousands of embittered and heavily armed opposition fighters who will never accept his leadership. There are also thousands of Islamic State and al Qaeda-affiliated extremists who, despite battlefield setbacks, are likely to continue operating in Syria, meaning that Russian forces will have to remain engaged in combat there for the foreseeable future – at considerable cost and with more casualties…

“…as long as Assad remains in power, the international community is unlikely to provide significant reconstruction assistance to Syria, guaranteeing that Russia will be forced to foot at least part of the reconstruction cost…”

As for the Russian near abroad (i.e. the ex-Soviet bloc), Putin’s support for breakaway statelets like Transnistria and South Ossetia – largely unrecognised by the rest of the world – isn’t cost-free. Putin’s intervention in Ukraine was intended to shift the whole country back into the Russian sphere of influence, but has instead created two additional financially-dependent client states in Crimea and eastern Ukraine (with an on-off military conflict in the latter).

There are other costs:

“Putin has turned a generation of Ukrainians against Russia – recent polling shows that while nearly 95 percent of Ukrainians viewed Russia positively as recently as 2010, that number now hovers in the low 40s, and is undoubtedly much lower than that in western Ukraine. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine also triggered a series of punishing economic sanctions from the U.S. and Europe…”

Note that these sanctions persist, despite Russia’s supposedly growing influence over Western politics. It is true that Putin has some fans in Europe and America, especially on the populist right. But on the other hand he has alienated liberal opinion – which used to be the biggest brake on the hawkish tendencies of the conventional right.

The irony is that in pushing back against the West, Putin has repeated many of the same mistakes made by America and her allies during the Bush-Blair era of ‘liberal interventionism’. Imposing oneself where one isn’t universally welcome is a high-risk strategy. Quick interventions become permanent commitments paid for in blood, treasure and international goodwill.

There are other, more effective ways of spreading one’s influence. For instance, by offering help, but waiting for an invitation before actually giving it. That way there is no diplomatic backlash, nor any long-term military or financial obligation.

In this respect the country with the smartest strategy is neither Russia nor America, but the People’s Republic of China.