The progressive Left, and its media and podcasts, keep invoking the likelihood of “nuclear escalation” in Eurasia, because they can’t emotionally accept a simple and practical solution: surrender by Iran and Ukraine. To them, both countries are symbols of defiance, and champions against the object of their contempt: the West and empire.
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Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance.” They won’t accept the reality of an Iran and Ukraine defeat, so instead, they latch onto an illusion of more war because this lets them avoid hard facts that make their dissonance worse: Iran cannot win, and Ukraine is finished.
Surrender and settlement solve the escalation problem cold.
So why can’t the progressive global left, and its Iranian and Ukraine sympathizers, intellectually process this reality?
One reason is political partisanship, because surrender by Iran means that President Trump is successful. It is cognitive dissonance by the political left: they want peace, but will accept war if they believe it can lead to domestic political retribution. As the left has already shown in the U.S., civil violence, legal terror and property destruction is their political cause.
In Ukraine’s case, it is helpful to ask why it was even selected for proxy purposes in the first place. Why Ukraine?
There’s a simple reason: its corruption and disorganization lend itself to manipulation. No such proxy actions, including regime change, could have been accomplished with other Russian border states such as Belarus, or even the Baltic states. Mongolia or Kazakhstan wouldn’t work either, and the EU and U.K. don’t understand the larger East anyway; it is too alien and removed from their understanding and experience. Even Poland is difficult to fully destabilize and appropriate, despite its strong aversion to all things Russian.
When I was a young businessman working in Eastern Europe and Russia in the telecommunications and aerospace industries, our larger U.S. corporate management put a firm “No” (and “Nyet”) on any investments or joint ventures in Ukraine. That was the 1990s.
Things have only gotten worse since then, so it seems prudent in retrospect. This corporate risk decision wasn’t due to a weak appetite for commercial risk and opportunity: After spending several months in Kiev, it became clear that Ukraine was unusually corrupt, and simply did not possess or have control of working government institutions, and a legal, banking, and regulatory infrastructure that could act as a reliable counter-party in business projects. Nor did it appear to have any interest in establishing them.
Iran doesn’t really either, and we weren’t even welcomed there. Both were undeveloped and hostile.
So that brings up why multiple media sources, including alternative podcasts which saturate modern news opinion, can’t get their arms around two simple realities of current global conflict: both Ukraine and Iran need to surrender because neither possesses the resources and institutions to prevail, or even consolidate any imaginary victory. Moreover, they are each unwilling and incapable of acting as regional leaders, so they are, therefore, not sources of regional stability. They are guarantors of regional instability.
Too much media dialogue is being drawn into a naive and limited framework where ideology, emotion and moralizing are replacing Realpolitik. Their language centers around three constantly repeated terms: “escalation ladder,” “U.S. defeat” and “the nuclear option.”
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Rarely if ever is the term “total surrender” ever invoked.
Why? The second reason is because the Iran war, and the Ukraine war, are both seen by the progressive left as moral symbols that serve to confirm their own biases against the U.S., Israel and the larger West. This includes seeing Russia and China as rising powers who are just biding their time until they challenge the liberal left’s foes.
“Escalation” doctrine, in reality, appeals to their feelings about retribution against Western supremacy, even though they will admit that such escalation could lead to nuclear detonation, and once that happens, a series of automatic responses are “pre-programmed.”
No one wins a mutual nuclear exchange and there is no coherent first strike doctrine.
But no matter: the Left can’t process that reality either — nor that unconditional surrender by Iran and Ukraine makes this all moot.
There is no way that Iran will ever prevail against the combined powers, and determination, of joint U.S.-Israel operations. Indeed, with a rational and competent government in Iran, and in the Ukraine territory (I say “territory” because Russia cannot be deterred from ultimately controlling it), an eventual Middle East federalism makes sense, while Ukraine needs Russia if only for a competent government.
The three major superpowers are capable of leading that kind of eventual accord because their underlying economic model of capitalism, a model adapted even in China, and in Russia, puts trade and development ultimately ahead of war.
When progressives ruminate about escalation, and when they fantasize about an Iranian or Ukraine victory, they are in reality indulging a larger “underdog” fantasy of an ideological “Bolshevik” utopia by revolutionary uprising and socialism. As the Soviet Union and China can attest, that only comes about through violence, and ends in dictatorship.
Ironically, the 1979 Iranian revolution proves the same thing, while Ukraine shows what happens when a corrupt independent state is for sale.
Matthew G. Andersson is a former aerospace CEO and has worked in the Former Soviet Union. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the National Academies of Science, and is a graduate of the University of Chicago.
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