The West has tended in the last 35 years or so (since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc) to focus on the immediate moment of a politico-military event or geopolitical crisis and see how it might play out, usually seeking an immediate response to situations that we see developing today. The idea that “understanding how the crisis arose points the way to its solution” is completely foreign to the West. Typically we can mention the “duck test”: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to judge a situation is an image that corresponds to its preconceptions. But the reality is much more subtle than the duck model…
This is why the Russians are better in Ukraine than the West, because they see the conflict as an organic process, while the West sees it as a series of separate, isolated actions. Russians see events like a movie. The West sees them as photographs. Russia sees the forest, the West focuses on the trees. This is why the West sets the start of the conflict in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. The West ignores contexts that bother it and conflicts it does not understand. That’s why she loses her wars. Its enemies understand it better than the West understands itself.
The main reason for the “blinkers” of the West is the result of an approach that we have already seen in the waves of terrorist attacks of the last several years, the opponent is demonized in such a stupid way that his way of thinking is not understood. Thus, the West is unable to develop strategies, articulate its forces, or even equip them for the realities of the wars it is waging or those it is waging through its proxies.
With this way of thinking, the West succumbs to nihilism and a dogmatism that lends itself to a kind of ideological solipsism, with the consequence that it does not see the world as it really is. To put it more simply: The West insists that geopolitics is about the “underlying nature of man.” Facts and history don’t matter. What counts is an image that fits the preconceived notions. The consequence is not only not seeing the world as it really is, but with an ideological teleology that refuses to see the world as it is.
This is why the West is systematically surprised by Russia in Ukraine, this entrenched bias has given Russia a surprise advantage, to the point that the Western narrative has led Ukraine to completely underestimate Russian capabilities, which has been a major factor in her defeat. At the same time, this Western thinking model leads it to geopolitical misinterpretations and defeats.
Just as the West did not understand Russia and allowed itself to be taken by surprise, so it ignores the biblical dimension of the end times of Israeli “war thinking” and prefers to cling to the “liberal-secular” image of Israel. Likewise, the West refuses to understand the Palestinian resistance to Zionism, with the adversary being demonized so stupidly that it either fails to understand or hides its way of thinking.
Thus, the West returns to the old established colonial responses to what it observes (e.g. in Gaza or Yemen), seeing them simply as “revolutionary” or “rebellious” unconnected eruptions that must be crushed by an act of war, i.e. the sees as discontinuous, regular events. The reasons for these irritating anti-colonial outbursts to her are not really explored, nor is there any interest in knowing if they have a history.
One result of this approach is that the geopolitical frustrations of the West are transformed by unscrupulous media into narratives that fuel hatred and heighten feelings of Russophobia, Cynophobia or Iranophobia, with a dogmatism that hides from the average citizen the true dimensions of international developments.
The West therefore does not understand itself, but its opponents have studied it very well. The results of this study and understanding will likely be seen very soon in the seismic geopolitical developments to come.
