Democracy or not, if this conflict goes on much longer, Ukraine runs the imminent risk of becoming irredeemably dysfunctional once it comes to an end. War is not like a Hollywood movie where the good guy always wins in the end. Civilization is coeval with conflict, not its Manichean opposite. In world politics, there is no apodictic solution to the problem of justice or the sempiternity of upheaval. Disorder cannot be transcended because human nature is not pliable like Play-Doh: we have deceived ourselves into confusing humanity’s indisputable technological progress with the illusion of our moral progression. Only in periods of history in which sophistry is mistaken for prudence and deliberation is permitted to atrophy into wishful thinking can there be a failure to understand that the teachings of thinkers like Thucydides and Machiavelli describe and explain the ways of the world better than any chiliastic alternative.
