Summit in Madrid: NATO of the left, NATO of the right | Opinion

Peace and security are values ​​that we all share; landing them in reality is another story. We see it these days to the left and right with the reactions provoked by the supposed resurgence of NATO, on which Macron had decreed his brain death. He was somewhat right: the Atlantic Alliance did not know how to measure the relationship of forces between Russia and Ukraine when Putin started the war, and it did not fulfill the objective for which it had been created, to contain the Russian expansionist drive. Putin has changed everything, and that forces us to adapt our gaze to the new reality. However, the left observes NATO from the immobility of the abstract ideal of the dove of peace and, before the summit, only repeats the old and decontextualized cliché of No to NATO. His position on the war in Ukraine is one more example of the disorientation in which he lives. Without wanting to enter the new geopolitical conversation, the self-styled “authentic left” feels more comfortable anchored in old ideological schemes. And from there we listened to it, yes, maintaining thoughtful historical debates on the supposed causes that pushed Putin to the offensive that sound more like justification, as long as we do not face uncomfortable questions about what price we are willing to pay for the freedom of Ukraine or What does it mean for feminism to hoist the flag of peace in a contest where rape is a weapon of war? It is curious that the left is in favor of the self-determination of peoples while criticizing the fact that great democracies such as Sweden and Finland decide of their own free will to join NATO for fear of this crazy aggression. On the other hand, the position of the assumptions hawks It is not, first, much less immoral. The Madrid summit should strengthen ties between the world’s democracies to face a new bloc of autocracies led by Russia and China, increasingly emboldened. In his argument, faced with the current situation, there would be no choice but to send weapons to Ukraine and defeat Russia, in a victory that must be total.

I confess that I am not sure what it means for that left to talk about peace, if what it suggests is allowing Putin to dominate, cut off or destroy Ukraine. But I don’t understand the hawks who want to place the West on the right side of history, that of justice, and to do so they intend to wipe Russia off the map. If there is something that this war has shown, it is that we cannot frame the world in a Manichaean battle between democracies and autocracies: that logic makes incomprehensible the moral shortcuts that we use for convenience with Venezuela or the rich Saudis in search of oil. The left pretends not to understand that there are just wars, and Ukraine’s response has been out of necessity, out of self-defense. The obligation of the Atlantic Alliance was to support a country unfairly attacked and help it defend itself. But just because war is just does not mean that peace will be just, and this is what the hawks. The war in Ukraine is not an existential battle between democracies and autocracies: we will not achieve a lasting peace with a clear defeat of Russia, history is full of similar examples. Europe will have to find a form of stability after the conflict, and it is not under the umbrella of a NATO led by the United States that we will have to look for the answer. The United States does not share a neighborhood with Russia, nor does it have any kind of energy dependence on Russia, and its vision of any viable security order in Europe cannot be the same as ours, nor are the costs of maintaining the conflict similar. Peace and justice make up a political tension that is impossible to close: the war has achieved things that we consider just, but history teaches us that no definitive solution will bring, whether we like it or not, a truly just peace.