I was asked yesterday what Ukraine has been doing wrong in its foreign policy. The question wasn’t asked in good faith but I still want to write about it because there’s a lesson here that is useful to all of us in our lives. People hate long posts, so I’ll publish this in parts.
We often engage with people as if they only exist during our interactions with them. We perceive everything they do or say as being about us when there might be a million unrelated things happening to them. It’s a good idea to remind ourselves that if somebody is being irritable, disengaged or rude, it’s probably not about us at all. That person has a million things going on that have nothing to do with us.
Ukrainians on all levels have found it hard to see their Western allies as countries with the exact same complexity, history, internal concerns and burning-hot arguments as themselves. The West, for them, is this perfect place where everything is perfect and everybody marinates in this perfection briefly coming out of this perfect stupor to condemn Russia and support Ukraine. Yes, it’s the bloody Barbieland.
This attitude is, of course, part of the Soviet legacy. We lived behind the Iron Curtain and, for lack of any actual knowledge, imagined utter bliss on the other side. When the Iron Curtain fell, one could finally see reality. The West is great but it’s complicated and contradictory, it has problems, people argue, sometimes they suffer, sometimes things are unfair. I’m in love precisely with this complexity that produces enormously better results than monolithic authoritarianisms.
The reaction to this realization was disparate in different parts of the former USSR. This disparate reaction is a lot more responsible for the current war against Ukraine than any fairy tales about “the NATO expansion”. I’ll explain how in the next post.
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