How Security Guarantees Are Like Safe Spaces

Removing Zelensky's halo, security guarantees and moral hazard, evolutionary psychology of leadership and followership, and how there's such a thing as "too much security". And much more!

“The people who start the wars don’t fight them, the people who spend the taxes don’t pay them, and the people who forgive the criminals don’t live next to them.

Of course, we’re going to have too many wars, too much spending, and too much crime.”

— Naval

“Whoever contends that History has ended might as well be certain that History awaits him around the next corner.”

—Panagiotis Kondylis

“Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.”

—Eric Hoffer

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The recent spat at the Oval Office left many people wondering about the future of the war in Ukraine. I watched the whole episode, and needless to say, the mainstream media’s descriptions are largely biased and untrustworthy. Richard Hanania has an account of the event I agree with:

There was 40 minutes of discussion up to the argument. Most people saw at most the last ten minutes. The whole video gives the proper context.

When I first watched the argument without the proper context, I thought it was possible that Trump and Vance ambushed Zelensky or were even trying to humiliate him. That's not what happened.

You had 40 minutes of calm conversation. Vance made a point that didn't attack Zelensky and wasn't even addressed to him, and Zelensky clearly started the argument.

In the first 40 minutes, Zelensky kept trying to go beyond what was negotiated in the deal. When Trump was asked a question, it was always "we'll see." Zelensky made blanket assertions that there would be no negotiating with Putin, and that Russia would pay for the war. When Trump said that it was a tragedy that people on both sides were dying, Zelensky interjected that the Russians were the invaders.

For his part, Trump made clear that the US would continue delivering military aid. All Zelensky had to do was remain calm for a few more minutes and they would've signed a deal.

The argument started when Trump pointed out that it would be hard to make a deal if you talk about Putin the way Zelensky does. Vance interjects to make the reasonable point that Biden called Putin names and that didn't get us anywhere.

The Zelensky/Trump dynamic was calm and stable. It was when Vance spoke that Zelensky started to interrogate him. Throughout the press conference to that point, everyone was making their arguments directly to the audience. Zelensky decided to challenge Vance and ask him hostile questions. (No one ever starts interrogating another participant. It’s a norm, and Zelensky broke it, even if his question was reasonable. No way could that not be taken as an aggressive move.)

He went back to his point that Putin never sticks to ceasefires, once again implying that negotiations are pointless. Why on earth would you do this? Then came the fight we all saw.

Zelensky was minutes away from being home free, and he would have had the deal and new commitments from the Trump administration. The point Vance made was directed against Biden and the media, taking them to task for speaking in moralistic terms. This offended Zelensky, and that began the argument.

I've been a fan of Zelensky up to this point, but this showed so much incompetence, if not emotional instability, that I don't see how he recovers from this. The relationship with the administration is broken. Ukraine should probably go with new leadership at this point.

Inside the Mind of Volodymyr Zelensky

A lot has been written about Putin's state of mind but not nearly enough about Zelensky's. In a Time magazine from October 2023, we had the opportunity to get a glimpse into it:

…his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

While many might consider this “messianic” impulse noble, it comes at a great human cost. Indeed, Zelensky could be locked in a kind of sunk cost fallacy: The more people die, the greater the need to prove that they didn't die for nothing. Therefore, more people die.

Another aspect is that Russian victory would amplify voices accusing him of killing thousands of his own people for nothing and losing much of the territory. Terrible situation! So much so that he would rather risk starting a World War III?

His demeanour at the White House points to a certain sense of entitlement, which is perhaps attributable to his—that is, the Ukrainian’s—victimhood status in international affairs. However, it is far from clear that Ukrainian leadership has led a wise politics over the years and that, therefore, this status is deserved. Do Ukrainians share some responsibility for what happened, or are they completely innocent victims of “unprovoked aggression”? If you believe the mainline Western narrative, it’s the latter, but real life is typically more complex than simplistic narratives designed to “manufacture consent”.¹

The truth of the matter is that Ukrainians felt they could disregard the concerns of a much more powerful neighbour, emboldened by the illusion of third-party assistance. Similar to Georgians before them.

Is it fair that the Ukrainians had a much more powerful neighbor, making it impossible for them to ignore its concerns about Ukraine's NATO membership? I’m not sure how to answer that. If the question is, "Wouldn't it be nice if Ukraine could act as it wished?" the answer might be yes. However, we live in a world where people's desires and interests often clash, necessitating mutual accommodation and compromises.

At the same time, the rest of the world had to enthusiastically accept the risk of possible nuclear escalation and/or being drawn into a World War III, with dissents being squashed as spreading “Russian propaganda”.

John J. Mearsheimer

pointed out that Zelensky's motivation for asking for the long-range missiles was to get the Russians to overreact in order to drag the Americans into the conflict:

Let's talk about the whole business of using American missiles to strike deep into Mother Russia. I mean, what's going on here in my opinion, is that Zelensky is desperate. He has really no cards to play except to try to drag the Americans into the war and get the Americans fighting the Russians, in which case he'll be in reasonably good shape. The Russians versus the Ukrainians, it's quite clear the Russians are going to win but if it's the Russians versus the Ukrainians plus NATO on the battlefield, it may be the case that the Russians lose, so he is trying to drag the Americans in here. I don't believe that Zelensky thinks that those missiles are going to affect events on the battlefield in the sense that they're going to destroy Russian targets and weaken the Russian military position along the front lines. that's not going to happen. We don't have enough missiles to give them, they won't do that much damage. What he wants to do is cross a Russian Red Line and get the Russians to overreact, and then that will drag the Americans in, and he believes that that will pull his chestnuts out of the fire.

Putin is often quoted saying, “Why would we want a world without Russia?” but it seems Zelensky thinks similarly, just replacing “Russia” with “Ukraine”.

Indeed, Zelensky invested a lot of effort in trying to convince—without any credible evidence—various European countries that they would be the next victim of Putin’s aggression. He used the same rhetoric at the Oval Office when he said that “you have nice ocean and don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future,” to which Trump angrily replied:

You don’t know that. You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.

While it is understandable that Zelensky is doing everything possible to support his own country, people from other nations are under no obligation to admire his disregard for global consequences. Since fear has a self-fulfilling logic in international affairs, spreading it among countries is hard to see as noble. Whether Russia is a threat to its European neighbors is not independent from actions of those very neighbors, actions that might be perceived as threatening by Russia. It's a mutually reinforcing dynamic.

As for the European political elites, they seem to have embraced Zelensky’s fearmongering not so much because they agreed with him their countries would be the next victims of Putin's aggression but rather because Russophobia has become a tool for achieving European cohesion as well as enabling incumbents to fight off populist tendencies within their own countries by labeling them as “Russian assets” while criticisms disqualified as “Russian disinformation,” Romania, perhaps, being the clearest example.

This is why J.D. Vance, in his speech at the Munich Security Conference, said:

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within—the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values shared with the United States of America. …

It looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like 'misinformation' and 'disinformation,' who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or God forbid vote a different way, or even worse win an election.

In other words, the external threat or “Russia” was largely a means of maintaining power and regulating internal “threats” by the political elites who are increasingly unable to cope with the loss of trust from their own population. If this modus operandi reminds you of Russiagate—an attempt by the Democrats to attribute their election loss to Russian interference—you wouldn't be wrong.

As

Nemets

pointed out, there were 1,449 persecutions and 98 convictions for internet speech in Russia 2008 to 2017. By contrast, there were 1,696 persecutions and 1,399 convictions for internet speech in the UK in 2016 alone—despite having a population half that of Russia.

This is why I once joked that Hollywood should remake the Balkan Spy with someone like a retired John Bolton spying on his new Russian neighbor, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, and reporting his social media posts to the authorities. From Wikipedia:

Kovačević's work talks about the relationship between the individual and the government, individual and totalitarian consciousness, and the consequences of a system that demands absolute obedience, which are primarily manifested in the loss of reason and the disintegration of the family. Because of such contradictions, such a system is an idea that destroys itself, and sees its survival in the search for "invisible enemies".

Understanding all of these dynamics and the interplay between various actors and their incentives requires knowledge that most people do not possess—it is easier to offer them a simplistic morality play of victim and aggressor, good and evil.

Too Much Security

Now, as a cure to end this bloody mess, Zelensky demands “more of the same”: more of the illusion of third-party assistance—"security guarantees"— the very thing that, arguably, got them in trouble in the first place.

In his speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022, Zelensky suggested that Ukraine might reconsider its non-nuclear status. This fact is seldom mentioned by the biased media. Zelensky argued at Munich, just five days before the Russian invasion, that if security guarantees were not upheld, Ukraine had the right to reconsider its commitments from the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. This pissed off the Russians and probably contributed to the invasion on 24 February 2022.

The thing to understand here is that there is such a thing as “too much security,” a point where security-seeking actions no longer enhance a country's security—they diminish it. This is what a security dilemma is all about. Indeed, it is probably the case that Ukraine's false sense of security, enabled by the promises of third-party assistance, encouraged reckless behavior toward a much more powerful neighbor.

Demand for “security guarantees” sounds awfully like the demand for “safe spaces”. Security guarantees, like safe spaces, prevent countries and people from modifying and adjusting their behavior in more realistic and adaptive ways—which means taking into account real-world consequences and the existing balance of power. Indeed, it could be argued that they are part of the same desire to be free of consequences, to do what one pleases while not being held accountable, a perverse and misguided notion of freedom, individualism, and human rights.

The Neighbor

When you encounter someone you perceive as a threat, you usually have the option to move on, ignoring the threat. Such a threat is not fixed. What is specific with a neighbor is that you are pretty much stuck with them, whether we are talking about your next-door neighbor (less stuck) or the country next to yours (more stuck).

When people or countries are stuck with each other, they have the incentive to accommodate each other, to compromise and so on. Conflicts often occur because one of the neighbors thinks that they do not have to maintain good neighborly relations because someone will come to their aid in case of trouble or protect them in some way from bad consequences. Being empowered with a sense of security leads to more risky behavior, a situation known as moral hazard.

What is true for relations between countries is also true for relations between people within the same country; after all, these are all people.

For example, how much of the problems with immigrant populations, especially from the Third World, stems from the fact that various groups within the countries they enter create incentives preventing immigrants from adapting their behavior to the population they enter? As Thomas Sowell remarked:

In some countries today, any claim that intergroup differences in outcomes are results of intergroup differences in skills, behavior or performance are dismissed by the intelligentsia as false “perceptions,” “prejudices,” or “stereotypes,” or else are condemned as “blaming the victim.”

Providing people with alibis and excuses for their counterproductive or faulty behaviors prevents them from making necessary adjustments to reality, and although it may sound noble to "secure” people from blame, judgments, appraisals, or even law and order, such protection ultimately does them more harm than good. Again, from Sowell:

Intellectuals give people who have the handicap of poverty the further handicap of a sense of victimhood. They have encouraged the poor to believe that their poverty is caused by the rich—a message which may be a passing annoyance to the rich but a lasting handicap to the poor, who may see less need to make fundamental changes in their own lives that could lift themselves up, instead of focusing their efforts on dragging others down.

Intellectuals have—on issues ranging across the spectrum from housing policies to laws governing organ transplants—sought to have decision-making discretion taken from those directly involved, who have personal knowledge and a personal stake, and transferred to third parties who have neither, and who pay no price for being wrong.

The Unipolar Moment and Institutonal Entropy

Receiving and accepting the illusion of third-party assistance was one part of the equation. Another one was providing it. How did that come about?

During the “unipolar moment,” the Western foreign policy establishment got populated with idealistic and incompetent wordcels who believed that history has ended. There is a saying that “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” The unipolar moment—the era after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the U.S. faced no near-term rival—was one of those “good times”. The absence of discipline imposed by the pressure of competition increased the institutional entropy in Western countries by accumulating incompetent and corrupt individuals.

Whether it’s politicians, senior fellows in think tanks, scholars in International Relations, or the journalists incapable (or unwilling) of following their track record and holding them accountable, they are all part of what Marc Andreessen called the “systemic collapse of competence,” exacerbated by the unmeritocratic hiring practices like DEI.

These people were the illusion providers, patting Zelensky on the back and spouting phrases like "We stand with Ukraine.” After all, in a world where history has ended, countries are free to do what they please because they have “rights,” free from consequences and unconstrained by any real power relations.

Evolutionary Psychology of Leadership-Followership

Another related issue that this war highlighted is how modern organizational structures are mismatched with aspects of our evolved leadership/followership psychology. 

Consider the following: the need for collective action raises the question of how individuals within groups decide what to do and how and when to do it. These challenges can be solved through a decision-making process where one individual takes the lead, offering guidance, while others comply and follow that direction. Hence, in species that often face coordination problems, adaptations for both leadership and followership are likely to develop.

These adaptations would come in the form of cognitive mechanisms designed by natural selection to attend to and evaluate cues for leadership potential—competence, intelligence, trustworthiness, fairness, boldness, persistence, generosity, decisiveness, physical strength and height, charisma—and motivational mechanisms that induce deference and subordination when such cues are met.

How do modern leaders measure up when taking into account our evolved leadership psychology? During his presidency, Biden famously showed signs of cognitive and physical decline, and his decision to pardon his son Hunter—despite previously pledging to uphold the court's ruling—ultimately shattered his trustworthiness.

EU leaders, on the other hand, are frequently criticized as mere figureheads, unremarkable bureaucrats, poseurs, or NPCs. (After the Zelensky-Trump incident in the Oval Office, a whole series of EU officials sent an identical message of support to Zelensky). This suggests a lack in charisma or character essential for a leader to effectively mobilize their voters.

“Would you fight for your country?” survey

Especially in times of conflict, leaders must inspire a certain level of fear among their followers. But how can someone with a grandmotherly demeanor, like Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, achieve that?

(A slight digression: how much of the frictions in modern romantic relationships is because modern men’s frail/impaired masculinity does not evoke a natural submissive behavior from women?)

Or Kaja Kallas for that matter, the hawkish High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy? This is interesting since, as research and experience show, intergroup threats automatically activate a preference for male leadership, and according to her and many others, Europe is faced with a serious threat from Russia.

I was watching Kaja Kallas the other day and thought to myself, how can this physically frail woman, wearing revealing and suggestive attire, be effective at mobilizing people for a fight? Rather than having any mobilization potential for a potential conflict, her appearance conveys what could be interpreted as mating signals. Mating signals do not evoke subordination or deference; instead, they elicit a response that is more aligned with courtship (from men) than the discipline and cohesion needed in times of conflict.

Kaja Kallas warning about Russians ante portas

To compensate for her leadership deficiencies, she is trying to act tough. But she confuses the way women maintain control and power over men—via their bodies and sexuality—with the way a leader evokes respect and subordination from followers.

Many of these individuals are unelected officials, elevated to power through an artificial selection process, which creates the mismatch between their appearance/personality and people's evolved leadership psychology. This, in turn, weakens their popularity and erodes public trust.

It’s easy to dismiss these considerations as “ad hominems” or leftovers from our ancestral past but the feasibility of policies should be judged on the basis of facts, not on the basis of normative theories about how facts should be.

Demand for Eternal Peace

So who shares larger responsibility: those accepting promises that turn out to be empty or those who provide them? I don’t have an answer to that question, but it obviously takes two to tango.

In a 2023 Time magazine article, it is stated that “Zelensky feels betrayed by his Western allies. They have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it.” Fair enough, but did his administration conduct the necessary due diligence in evaluating the risk of such a “betrayal,” or was it based on hope that things would turn out alright? Moreover, to what extent do those who accept a promise share responsibility when the consequences of that promise being broken come to bear?

(This reminds me that back in July 2022, I wrote that “The question ‘Who was fooling whom?’ seems like one of many questions that will be asked more and more in the future”. Sounds about right.)

As I have already said somewhere, the tragic 'catch-22' of war is that warfare is the most credible method for uncovering information relevant to deciding whether to go to war. One of those relevant pieces of information was how much skin in the game, and therefore commitment, each party has.

Zelensky says he wants security guarantees “that ensure this war never returns”.

Peace? Yes, but only if it is eternal!

Peace? Yes, but only if it is just or fair!

If your house is on fire, do you start putting out the fire only if you know there will be no future ones? And only if the extinguishing method is “fair”?

As Eric Hoffer once said, basic human problems can have no final solutions. Our freedom, justice, etc., are far from absolute, and the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

Perhaps returning to common-sense morality might be in order: respect your neighbor, especially if he is much stronger than you, try to accommodate their demands, make compromises, and work out some modus vivendi. There is no deus ex machina to save you when push comes to shove, so plan accordingly.

Is this fair? I don’t know, but the alternative looks worse.

1. See

Scott Horton

’s book Provoked for a different account