August 7, 2026
Some years ago Paul Robinson, a Canadian scholar of Russian history, wrote about two different views of international political rules:
I pointed out that both Russia and the West claimed to be in favour of a 'rules-based order' and that each accused the other of breaking that order. The problem, I conjectured, derives from differing understanding of what the rules are and how they should be applied.
Russia believes in a traditional, Westphalian, order in which states are equal sovereign entities. The rules apply equally to all of them, regardless of who they are or what they do. States may only take action against other states with the permission of a superior court, in other words the United Nations Security Council. Of course, Russia doesn't 100% abide by the rules of its own model, but its preferred option remains one of legal symmetry - the same rules apply to all.
By contrast, human rights reasoning has pushed the West in an opposite direction, towards a preference for legal asymmetry. In this model, the just and the unjust, those who respect and those who don't respect human rights, are not legally or morally equal.
In a recent piece another Canadian Russia scholar, Patrick Armstrong, expands on this. Recent Russian policy has taken the Westphalian view of things because it has learned from its past where it had tried to make international policies based on moral reasoning and largely failed:
Moscow had spent seven decades pushing an exceptionalist/moralist view - the world's first socialist state, the bright future of mankind and all that stuff - and had found it to be a complete failure. It had learned the hard way that countries are as they are and have to be dealt with as they are. Moralistic posturing leads to failure.
The West has, in contrast, no yet learned that lesson. It insists on a (very subjective) 'moral' view of things:
The first problem with the moralistic worldview is that one soon becomes very restricted on whom one can talk with. After all, the Good cannot acknowledge the Bad. Especially after all the carefully constructed war words have been deployed: the "regime's" "claims" are "unverified", they're "disinformation" spread by "state media; they're "talking points" from the "playbook". The Good, The Just, by contrast, have democratic governments, speak the truth and have a free media. The more the Good stresses the evil of the other, the less it can know or understand. And certainly can never pollute its purity by meeting with The Bad.
Adhering to such moralistic views makes one incapable of dialog and sound judgment:
When moral superiority becomes entrenched, other superiorities soon take root. We're morally better and everything we do is better too. Evil fails across the board, in war and in peace. Our tools work better and we use them better. The morally inferior are worse at war too. And so we come, to quote a certain Austrian watercolourist, to the expectation that "one good kick at the door and the whole rotten edifice will collapse".
But the USSR did not collapse in 1941 and neither did Iran in 2026.
It is astonishing that nearly 25 years after George W. Bush declared some countries to be an 'axis of evil' the West is still holds to this Manichean or Zoroastrian view of 'good' versus 'evil'.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.