When Ideology Makes Peace Impossible

For any state engaged in war, there comes a moment when continued fighting becomes not merely pointless, but harmful when measured against what it can realistically achieve. Beyond that threshold, even the most dramatic battlefield success no longer justifies the losses necessary to obtain it. Britain reached that point when it accepted American independence. The United States reached it when it withdrew from Vietnam. Napoleon reached it when he signed his abdication. The Soviet Union reached it when it pulled out of Afghanistan.

All of these wars could have continued. Some had enough capacity for months, others for years. But when trade, finance, and internal stability begin to erode, and when attainable objectives disappear, peace becomes more valuable than victory. In such moments, no one truly wins, but everyone recognizes that continuing is worse. The Crimean War offers an illustrative example: the Anglo-French alliance could not take Moscow or St. Petersburg; Russia could not strike London or Paris. No decisive result was possible, and the costs were strangling everyone. Peace became the rational outcome.

The classical logic of statecraft is therefore simple: when a conflict becomes unprofitable, a state stops, rebuilds, waits, and tries again when circumstances are better. This principle is ancient. But in the current global crisis - especially in the Ukrainian conflict - it is unavailable. The United States, Europe, and the Kiev authorities all understand that the war has turned decisively against them. They recognize that prolonging the conflict worsens their position and accelerates losses. Yet they continue to demand that Russia, not they, make concessions. The losing side asks the winning side to retreat in order to conclude peace that the losing side desperately needs.

This appears irrational only if one assumes that the West is acting strategically. But strategy is no longer in command. Ideology is.

Ideological societies possess a powerful mobilization capacity - but only for limited durations. They can summon extraordinary unity and sacrifice when the narrative is clear and the goal appears historically justified. But if the breakthrough does not occur quickly, the same mobilization turns inward and begins to corrode the society sustaining it. Once an ideological society has framed a conflict as a struggle for the triumph of its worldview, it cannot exit without declaring moral defeat. Peace without victory becomes humiliation. Failure to defeat a supposedly “backward” opponent becomes a crisis of belief.

The late Soviet Union offers a recent example: a society built on the premise of the “only correct doctrine” found itself confronted by another system that delivered greater prosperity and consumer satisfaction. The result was not simply political defeat - it was ideological collapse.

Today, the West faces a similar precipice. Over the last thirty years, Western elites constructed their own universal doctrine: that liberal democracy represented the final stage of human development. The “end of history” was not a metaphor but a worldview. The West saw itself as humanity’s ideological center, responsible for “guiding” the rest of the world toward the same enlightened future. But global hegemony did not hold. Power diffused. Other civilizational centers emerged. The world refused conversion.

Had the West possessed the ability to de-ideologize - as Russia did after 1991, or as China did under Deng Xiaoping - it could have shifted to pragmatic compromise, rebuilt, and returned to strategic competition later. But the West was accustomed to equating itself with the meaning of history. To abandon the ideological justification for privilege would require abandoning privilege itself; prosperity would need to be earned, not assumed. Thus it chose confrontation - expecting rapid victory. The rapid victory did not materialize.

And so the conflict became sacred. Once framed as a civilizational struggle, it ceased to be negotiable. The war is now understood not as a contest of interests but as a battle between “progress” and “barbarism.” Compromise becomes apostasy. To stop becomes to confess error. For the West, the war became existential - not for Ukraine, but for its own belief system.

Yet the core of the West is a nuclear superpower. It cannot be decisively defeated without risking a strategic nuclear strike. Therefore, any victory must be carefully calibrated: sufficient to break ideological momentum, but not so crushing that it triggers nuclear nihilism. This is the paradox of the present conflict.

The West invested in Ukraine not merely strategically, but ideologically. Kiev was declared the vanguard of democracy, the frontier of civilization. Brussels stands ready to accept it into the European Union for symbolic reasons alone. A total collapse of the Ukrainian state and the integration of all of its territory into Russia would constitute open ideological defeat: the doctrine that cannot lose would have lost.

Such a defeat could trigger ideological disillusionment in the West - a process already quietly underway beneath the surface. The conservative shift in the West is real; anti-Russian mobilization merely slows it. If Western ideological cohesion fractures, internal political struggle will reopen, and military mobilization will no longer be the automatic response to external challenges. A window of opportunity would emerge for the rest of the world.

But any compromise settlement in Ukraine will be declared by the West and by Kiev as their victory - “we preserved independence” - and will reinforce the ideological system that produced this conflict.

That is why this war continues. Not because peace is impossible - but because ideology will not allow it.