Tag: history

The End of the Long Cold Peace

Posted in Politics, warLeave a comment

On Moral Law, the Golden Rule, and a World Crossing a Threshold

The immediate trigger for this reflection is the rapidly unfolding news of U.S. military action in Venezuela, accompanied by extraordinary claims regarding the removal or capture of that country’s leadership. As of this writing, facts remain incomplete and contested, and prudence demands restraint. Yet even allowing for later clarification, legal reframing, or partial walk-backs, something significant has already occurred at the level of signal.

In international politics, signals often matter as much as facts.

For those who read world affairs through the lens of Sun Tzu, this episode provokes a deeper unease than any single crisis headline. Not because it heralds an imminent world war — it does not — but because it suggests that a moral threshold has been crossed.

Sun Tzu begins The Art of War not with weapons or tactics, but with what he calls the Moral Law: the principle that binds ruler and people, allies and partners, through shared restraint. It is not moralism. It is cohesion.

Across cultures and centuries, this intuition has been captured by what later traditions called the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not wish done to yourself.

Applied to individuals, it governs ethical behavior.
Applied to groups, it underpins trust.
Applied to nations, it becomes the foundation of sovereignty and international law: Do not do to other countries what you would not accept being done to your own.

Since 1945, the international system has lived — imperfectly, inconsistently, often hypocritically — under a version of this principle. Sovereignty was never absolute; international law was never fully enforceable. But there was a broadly shared understanding that force required justification, and that exceptions should not be normalized.

UN mandates, alliance consultations, coalition-building, legal argumentation — these were not guarantees of justice, but rituals of self-binding. Even when violated, they signaled an intent not to universalize the violation. The message was: this is an exception, not a model.

That understanding underpinned what might be called the Long Cold Peace: a period without direct great-power war, sustained less by goodwill than by restraint, legal framing, and moral asymmetry. The strongest actors claimed — and were often granted — a special responsibility to uphold the rules they themselves had helped shape.

What feels different now is not simply the use of force, but the open abandonment of self-binding restraint. When a major power acts unilaterally, publicly, and without multilateral authorization against another sovereign state, it does more than resolve a tactical problem. It sends a systemic signal: We reserve the right to do this — and we accept the logic if others do the same.

This is where the Golden Rule fractures. Because when a system’s primary enforcer no longer acts as if it would object to others doing the same to it, the Golden Rule is replaced by its inverse. Not another moral law, but what might be called a Dark Rule: Do unto others before they do unto you.

This rule does not appeal to reciprocity, but to pre-emption.
Not to restraint, but to demonstration.
Not to law, but to capability.

That is not a moral judgment. It is a strategic diagnosis.

Once this inversion takes hold, moral asymmetry collapses. Arguments that once distinguished enforcement from aggression, or order from destabilization, lose their force. What remains is equivalence. And in international politics, equivalence is corrosive.

From that point onward, it becomes easier — not morally right, but rhetorically easier — for others to justify their own unilateral actions. Russia’s claims to spheres of influence, China’s extraterritorial assertions, Iran’s proxy logic: all gain oxygen once the leading power demonstrates that power itself defines legitimacy.

The question shifts from Is this lawful? to Can this be done?

This does not mean the world is on the brink of World War III. History is rarely that punctual. But it does suggest the end of a phase: the slow erosion of a post-1945 order in which even the powerful felt compelled to narrate their actions in the language of law, reciprocity, and collective authority.

When Moral Law collapses, it does not disappear.
It inverts.

Annex: Three Phases of the Post-1945 Order

Seen through a diplomatic lens, the post-1945 period can probably be read in three overlapping phases — with different dates depending on whether one looks at power, law, or legitimacy.

1. The Cold War Balance (1945–1989)
A bipolar world: dangerous, but paradoxically stable. Moral Law operated through deterrence, alliance discipline, and fear of escalation. Sovereignty was violated, but usually indirectly, through proxies and narrative restraint. The rules mattered because breaking them openly risked systemic collapse.

2. The Unipolar Illusion and the Missed “Warm Peace” (1989–2003)
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the true turning point. The Cold War was won — but no genuine Warm Peace followed. Instead of embedding victory in a strengthened, universally respected legal order, power increasingly substituted itself for consent.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003, without a clear UN mandate, was the moment many diplomats experienced as a moral rupture: the Golden Rule bent sharply, even if the language of law was still invoked.

3. The Age of Open Instrumentalism (2003/2014– )
From Iraq onward, restraint thinned. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 made explicit what had been implicit: law had become a tool, not a boundary. Extraterritoriality — legal, economic, and strategic — normalized. Moral asymmetry faded. Power no longer consistently bound itself.

If we are now fully in this third phase, then the Long Cold Peace is not ending in catastrophe, but in something more subtle and more dangerous: the abandonment of the Golden Rule at the level of states.

Sun Tzu would have understood this moment. Moral Law, once lost, is not easily restored. And when it fades, wars do not begin immediately — but they become easier to justify.

That is the danger of thresholds.
You only realize you crossed one when the ground behind you no longer holds.

Post Scriptum: A Preliminary Note on the European Union’s Reaction

As events continue to unfold, it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the European Union’s official position regarding recent U.S. actions in Venezuela. Formal statements from the Council, consolidated EU positions, or explicit UN-related démarches may yet emerge. Prudence requires waiting for those.

Still, even at this early stage, the initial signals coming from Brussels — including reported comments attributed to the EU’s High Representative (reported by Reuters and picked up by sites such as Modern Diplomacy) — already raise a number of structural questions worth noting.

First, there is the striking impression that the European Union was caught unprepared. If U.S. military action of this magnitude took place without prior political coordination with European partners, this suggests that the transatlantic relationship functions less as a partnership in strategic decision-making than as a system of post hoc notification. That asymmetry is not new, but moments like this make it visible — and uncomfortable.

Second, the EU’s early language appears to reflect a familiar difficulty: commenting on rapidly evolving ground reality. European diplomacy excels at carefully calibrated, legally precise statements, but it is institutionally ill-suited to situations where faits accomplis unfold faster than consensus can be built. The result is often a default to general principles — restraint, international law, the UN Charter — without clear positioning on the action that triggered the crisis itself.

Third, and more fundamentally, these early reactions expose the EU’s lack of an autonomous ideological or strategic stance when judging U.S. military action. The Union defines itself as a normative power, committed to international law and multilateralism. Yet when its principal security partner acts unilaterally, Europe seems torn between upholding those norms and preserving political alignment. The outcome is language that is normatively correct, but strategically weightless.

This tension is not unprecedented. The 2003 invasion of Iraq already revealed a similar fracture: moral concern without collective leverage, legal unease without institutional resolve. Two decades later, the underlying dilemma appears unresolved.

None of this implies that the EU should reflexively oppose U.S. action, nor that it should ignore internal legitimacy issues within Venezuela itself. Rather, the question is whether Europe is prepared to do more than react normatively to precedents that shape the international order — especially when those precedents touch the very principles the EU claims to defend.

This annex does not offer conclusions. It merely notes a pattern that may become clearer with time: a widening gap between fact-setting power and norm-commenting authority. Whether the European Union is content to inhabit the latter role — or intends to close that gap — remains an open question.

Note: This annex was written in the awareness that early impressions can be corrected by later facts. But precedents are often set before interpretations catch up — which is precisely why they merit attention, even in provisional form.

Afghanistan After the Fall: Power, Fragmentation, and the Limits of Centralisation

Posted in Politics, Development, PersonalLeave a comment

Why the Taliban victory did not end Afghanistan’s political problem — it merely inverted it.

A personal preface

Recently, I received New Year’s wishes from an Afghan colleague I had worked with many years ago, back when Afghanistan was still the object of large-scale international programmes, donor coordination meetings, and endless PowerPoint decks about “capacity building.” He now lives in the UK. The message was warm, ordinary — and quietly disarming.

It reminded me how long it has been since I last tried to understand what is actually going on in Afghanistan today. Like many others who have served there for a long time in one role or another, I instinctively stopped following the country after the collapse of the internationally supported government in 2021. Not out of indifference, but because it was painful to watch so much money, effort, and human energy apparently evaporate.

This post is an attempt to look again — calmly, structurally, and without nostalgia.

The Taliban were never a monolith

The media still speak of “the Taliban” as if it were a single, unified actor. It never was.

Historically, the Taliban functioned as a loose coalition of regional, tribal, clerical, and militant networks. What bound these networks together was not a shared blueprint for governance, but a narrower set of common denominators:

  • a fundamentalist religious worldview,
  • rejection of foreign domination and foreign ideas,
  • reliance on local legitimacy rather than abstract institutions,
  • and, ultimately, victory.

That victory in 2021 did not resolve internal differences. It simply suspended them.

Insurgent movements tend to fracture after they win, not while they fight. Afghanistan is no exception.

Three fault lines inside Taliban rule

1. Clerical absolutism vs. operational realism

At the core of today’s Emirate lies a clerical leadership that sees the Taliban’s success as a divine mandate. For this group, governance is primarily a moral and religious project. Compromise, pragmatism, or external conditionality are viewed not as tools, but as corruption.

Opposing this outlook — quietly, often indirectly — are Taliban figures responsible for security, administration, borders, and economic survival. They face the everyday reality that a country cannot function on ideology alone. Their concern is not liberal reform, but basic governability.

This tension explains much of the regime’s paralysis: cohesion is prioritized over competence.

2. Security networks vs. traditional authority

A second fault line runs between the old clerical core and powerful security-oriented networks that control intelligence, policing, and internal coercion. These actors are more accustomed to regional bargaining, informal diplomacy, and transactional relationships.

Their influence is practical rather than theological. That makes them indispensable — and suspect.

3. Centre vs. periphery: the Afghan constant

Afghanistan has never functioned as a strongly centralized state in the modern sense. Authority has always been negotiated locally.

The internationally backed governments after 2001 tried to impose centralization: ministries, national systems, uniform laws, donor-driven coherence. With hindsight, the failure was predictable.

Ironically, the Taliban succeeded partly because they did not try to out-centralize the state. They tolerated local variation, informal authority, and pragmatic arrangements.

Now, as rulers, they face the same paradox as every Afghan government before them: governing requires central authority — but enforcing it risks fragmentation.

Women’s rights as a proxy battlefield

The harsh restrictions on women and girls are often described as simple ideology. Internally, they serve a second function: they are a mechanism of power.

By enforcing uncompromising social rules, the clerical core asserts dominance over pragmatists and technocrats. Opposition becomes heresy rather than policy disagreement.

The result is a state that signals purity at the cost of functionality — and deepens its own isolation.

The Najibullah comparison: useful, but limited

Some analysts compare today’s Taliban rule with the late Najibullah period of the 1980s: a regime surviving through local deals, external support, and careful balancing.

The comparison is instructive — but inverted.

Najibullah presided over a centralized state trying to buy local compliance. The Taliban preside over a decentralized movement trying to become a state.

The warning from history is not collapse, but dependency: Afghan regimes become fragile when they cannot arbitrate between local power centers or sustain the flows (financial, political, symbolic) that keep those centers aligned.

What slow fragmentation actually looks like

If fragmentation comes, it is unlikely to resemble a dramatic civil war — at least not initially.

More likely scenarios include:

  • An Emirate on paper, provinces in practice: national decrees exist, but enforcement varies widely.
  • Competing centres of gravity: clerical authority and security-administrative power drift apart without a formal split.
  • Warlordisation under a single flag: local strongmen retain Taliban branding while operating autonomously.

This kind of fragmentation is quiet, deniable, and often stable — until it suddenly isn’t.

Why Afghanistan faded from Western attention

Afghanistan did not disappear because it became peaceful, nor because its problems were solved. It faded because it stopped fitting the Western geopolitical narrative.

For two decades, Afghanistan was framed as a test case: of liberal state‑building, of counter‑terrorism doctrine, of the belief that institutions, elections, and aid could rewire political legitimacy. Once that test was lost, attention moved on. There was no rival great power visibly “winning” Afghanistan in 2021 — no Cold War mirror image, no adversary to contain, no geopolitical drama that required sustained explanation.

Unlike Ukraine, the Middle East, or the US–China relationship, Afghanistan no longer offered a stage for strategic signalling. What remained was something Western politics is deeply uncomfortable with: a failure that could not be blamed on an external enemy.

In that sense, Afghanistan became politically inconvenient rather than strategically urgent.

State‑building as geopolitics — and its quiet collapse

The post‑2001 state‑building project in Afghanistan was never ideologically neutral. It was embedded in a broader geopolitical ambition: to demonstrate that Western‑backed governance could succeed where earlier imperial or Soviet efforts had failed.

There is a crucial and uncomfortable difference, however, between the Soviet experience and the later US‑led one.

The Soviet intervention unfolded within a clear geopolitical contest. The Afghan resistance was heavily funded, armed, and sustained through regional and international channels. The collapse of Soviet control can be read — at least in part — as the outcome of external opposition.

The Western project faced no comparable external spoiler.

There was no superpower arming a rival Afghan state, no sustained counter‑intervention designed to bleed NATO forces into withdrawal. What undermined the project was not foreign competition, but internal contradiction: the attempt to impose a centralized, technocratic state on a society whose political logic had never been centralized to begin with.

The Afghan Republic did not fall because it was outgunned by an external enemy. It collapsed because the institutions built in its name were not organically rooted in Afghan legitimacy structures. When external support was reduced, the system did not resist — it evaporated.

That makes the failure bleaker than earlier interventions. It failed under its own assumptions.

A closing thought

The Taliban understood Afghanistan’s political grammar better than their predecessors, which is why they prevailed militarily. But military victory does not resolve the deeper Afghan paradox: authority must be local to be legitimate, yet centralized enough to govern.

Every attempt to rule Afghanistan has eventually collided with that contradiction.

The Taliban have not escaped it. They have merely inherited it.

This post was generated by ChatGPT, based on me playing the devil’s advocate with it, verified news sources, and game‑theoretical analysis patterns. It was moderated and approved by a human editor (me) for clarity, neutrality, ethical framing, and attribution. Responsibility for the views expressed remains entirely my own.

Tags: #Afghanistan #Geopolitics #State-building #Governance #Institutional failure