As we approach Christmas, with its connotations of peace and goodwill to all people, and the New Year, when one traditionally comes up with ‘resolutions’ for the year ahead, with the intention of compensating for mistakes made during the past year, and of initiating creative projects for the future, one has to ask: is all of this just Heideggerian ‘idle talk,’ or is peace a realistic possibility?
This seems to be an easy question to answer. Despite President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated assurance that he would bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, it is by no means certain that he would be able to do that, not only because his enemies, both in the US and abroad, are heavily invested in keeping the war going at all costs, but also in light of the improbability that President Vladimir Putin of Russia would be a pushover when it comes to conditions for a peace agreement.
Such an arrangement would suit Ukraine and NATO very well, insofar as it would provide them with the opportunity to rearm and recruit more soldiers for the likely recommencement of hostilities in the future – something that was done before (after the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements), as Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande have admitted. Besides, that this is not a novel tactic, and a disingenuous one to boot, should be evident, as Immanuel Kant knew in the 18th century already, when he wrote his famous essay on the conditions for ‘perpetual peace,’ on which I have elaborated before. I am thinking of a specific condition stated in this essay, in the very first of the ‘preliminary articles,’ which reads: ‘No treaty of peace shall be regarded as valid, if made with the secret reservation of material for a future war.’
Kant’s elaboration on this article shows that he was not sufficiently shortsighted to confuse peace with ‘a mere truce, a mere suspension of hostilities’ – possibly to gain valuable time for strengthening one’s military to recover after relinquishing some of their capabilities in battle. The article is therefore clearly aimed at preventing any ‘mental reservation’ of demands to be used as casus belli to be revitalised on a more auspicious occasion in the future. This is essentially what was done before, as acknowledged by Merkel and Hollande in the RT article linked above, which reported that ‘…former German chancellor Angela Merkel [who] described the Minsk accords in December [2014/2015] as ‘an attempt to give Ukraine time’ to build up its armed forces.’
Hellbound and Down 