Kharkiv, where Putin pursues his regional goals

In central Kharkiv, amid the frequent Russian missile attacks, lives a young British woman with a sharp mind and a clear geopolitical understanding.  Her name is Jade McGlynn.  She has a PhD from Oxford in Russian, and today she is a researcher and lecturer producing academic work, books and journalism on the Russo-Ukrainian war since 2014, particularly through the filters of identity and memory.  She has a substack which holds her already copious body of work.  At the beginning of April she published there a long and detailed piece titled Blueprints, from which I will quote.  It begins:

In 2021, the Russian Federation released its National Security Strategy, followed in 2023 by its Foreign Policy Concept. At the time—especially in 2021—one might have dismissed these documents as paranoid, backward-looking, or self-aggrandising. But they were not relics. They were roadmaps—not only for how Russia intended to act, but for the kind of world it imagined was coming: a world where might makes right, where transactionalism reigns, and where the last of the three big ideologies—liberalism—finally falls.

This world is no longer speculative. It is reality. The Trump administration is gleefully dismantling the last scaffolding of U.S. global leadership. Europe is fragmented, fatigued, and fearful. Many pretend that American leadership is merely going through a rough patch. It isn’t. A new world order is upon us. And we can either fight for the right to live as we choose—or prepare to live under the terms of a new, illiberal order. Since Western Europe appears unwilling to do the former, what follows may prove useful: a guide to the world we now inhabit, through the lens of the Russian doctrine that foresaw it.

So this is a writer after my own heart.  She knows that not just the western rules-based order but the liberalism which underpins it is falling.  This is not something the European political class, or Kiev, have yet grasped.  They know that the world is changing in dangerous ways.  But Dr Glynn has gone beyond that, and is only too aware that the philosophical ground on which the west stands, and on which America is wholly constructed, has been cut away.

Her essay then addresses the delusion much fostered by Vladimir Putin and the Russian intellectual, media, and security cadres – and let it be said, shamefully and uncritically internalised by dissenters in the west.  That delusion is that traditional living and the general good is returning in the wake of Russia’s painful advance on the ground in Ukraine:

These [ie, Russian] values are closely tied to patriotism, religion, family, and historical identity. Liberal ideals—such as gender equality, LGBTQ rights, secularism, and multiculturalism—are not just viewed as policy disagreements, but as threats to civilisational integrity. Yet the reality behind this rhetoric is deeply contradictory. Just as Donald Trump—so often cast as a defender of Christian America—is far removed from the Christian values he claims to uphold, Russia’s invocation of traditionalism is hollow. Divorce and abortion rates remain among the highest in the world. The Russian Orthodox Church, far from being a moral guide, glorifies war and incites murder. Minority faiths, particularly Protestants, are harassed and repressed.

Russia’s so-called values are not principles—they are instruments. They serve as political weapons, used to stir up illiberal sentiment among those fearful of modernity and globalism. This moral framing is not about shaping Russia’s domestic future; it is about presenting an alternative global pole to liberalism, designed to appeal to like-minded governments and disillusioned publics. It is not moral renewal, but ideological realignment, grounded in authoritarian control.

All of this leads naturally to the rejection of universal rights in favour of power-based legitimacy. Russia explicitly opposes the liberal conception of human rights as defined by the UN and Western democracies. Instead, it calls for a return to the Westphalian model: a world in which states set their own rules, and legitimacy is derived not from moral claims, but from strength.

Thus Dr McGlynn finds for the position I have argued for the last three years, long before we knew that Donald Trump would be re-elected, let alone that he would support Putin so actively.  True, there are too many ways in which the post-1945 rules-based order has been manipulated against the interests of Europeans.  But that is a separate issue from the order as such, which – as Dr McGlynn makes clear – is the alternative to Great Power predation:

… I would rather live in a world of hypocrites than nihilists. If norms and law are stripped of moral weight, then force becomes the final arbiter. At its core, Russia’s doctrine is unapologetically militarised. It sees power—not treaties—as the guarantor of sovereignty, identity, and survival.

I, too, would rather fight within a system I know, against weak, predictable men bound by its moral and historical conventions … a system, moreover, that cannot for long accommodate within itself the arbitrary power it came into being to banish.  For liberalism is the mortal enemy of all entrenched or concentrated power.  Obviously, there is the unwelcome complication that as a secularised form of Christianity it stands in the Judaic line.  It apprehends the “sovereignty, identity, and survival” of Europe’s peoples as just such a concentration.

I would not, of course, expect Dr McGlynn to share that understanding.  She abides within the historical and intellectual constraints of the western academy, not in our domain of profound separation, and the freedom of mind which that bestows.  She does not think as a nationalist thinks.  She very likely subscribes to the view that the dead politics of National Socialism and Italian fascism … forms of expansionist nationalism …  speak reliably for nationalists today.  She then assumes, or appears to assume, that socialism/communism is separate from liberalism.  This is a chiefly American view which I do not accept because, as practised in the 20th century, socialism was a massification within the liberal system.  It pursued the same unfettered will and, ultimately genuflected before the same Judaic G-d.

I would very much prefer that decent, thinking people like Dr McGlynn understand how and why we Europeans are still waiting for a nationalism of our life and rights and interests, and that one small part of making the space for it is to order history accordingly.