In 1842 as angry hordes were preparing to savage the British occupiers of Kabul, Afghan tribal leader, Abdullah Khan Achakzai, declared, ‘We must stop these occupiers right here right now, otherwise they will continue to ride the donkey of their desires into the field of stupidity.’ The seeds of that disaster began during the last Great Game fuelled by Russia phobia and the fear the strange-looking Cossacks were planning to use Afghanistan as a bridge to take India, the British colonial jewel.

Now the weakest bunch of Western leaders in modern history continue holding tight to the shaggy manes of their modern-day desires as the proxy war of attrition with Russia muddles along in confusion and denial. As Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson explains, it is not dangerous and disciplined men who we should concern ourselves with, but rather, it is weak men who are society’s greatest risk. One of Putin’s greatest fears is the threat of his own weaknesses being exposed.

It’s not that the West shouldn’t defend freedom and democracy and seek to liberate the oppressed. But if Ukraine is our new red line, whose interpretation of freedom and democracy are we defending? As the late US diplomat George Kennan warned in the final paragraph of the ‘Long Telegram’, we are at risk of becoming the monster we sought to protect ourselves against.

Let’s hope what we are defending is not the emerging state-backed, institutional censorship, the erosion of women’s rights in the name of trans ideology, and support for mass immigration of people who hate the West, along with a weird obsession with climate-infused Marxism. The fact is the West is approaching an inflection point. Just like when Athens and Sparta defeated the Persians, the fall of Rome, the second world war and the first Cold War. Right now, anyone exemplifying the Western spirit of Enlightenment, who like ancient Greek general Thucydides, insists on empiricism, and asks critical questions, is labelled an enemy of democracy, possibly even a Putin stooge. Right now, anyone proud of their country, who believes in strong borders and does not want to hear Allahu Akbar called out in our streets, is labelled a right-wing extremist.  Try raising critical questions at our universities and see how long you last in academia.

And so here we find ourselves fighting a war to save democracy in the Ukraine, while facing a war against democracy in the West by authoritarian governments and bureacracies.

When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was asked who Putin relied on for advice before deciding to invade Ukraine, Lavrov’s response was Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. That might appal you. Yet it is not about feelings, but cold hard reality. Spend five minutes studying Russian history and how these leaders brutally gained and maintained power, and you get a glimpse into not just Putin the man, but a deeply complex nation, state and empire Russia has been, seemingly never at ease and always slow, cumbersome, and bogged down at first when fighting on home soil. Yet our Western leaders just couldn’t help themselves. They knew best. They were gonna teach history a lesson.

Remember how we were told the war to defend Ukraine was existential to the West. A war for our very survival. Ukraine President Zelensky was basically Churchill as he toured the world demanding we hand over our billions otherwise Russian President Putin would come for us next. And just like Covid and climate, asking questions meant you were an enemy of the people. Somehow our governments, and many on all sides of politics, will have you believe that to save democracy we need suspend its principles.

In May last year, the worst military commander in modern US history, General ‘Brassbottom’ Mark Milley, declared, ‘Russia had lost strategically, operationally and tactically.’ He was the kind of general wars should not be left to. What is even crazier than allowing Milley near any buttons in a war room, is the total failure of the Western oligarchs to destroy the Russian military at the beginning of this war. We just let them regroup, learn from their errors, and allow Russia to revert to a war of attrition. In the UFC, no fighter allows their opponent to recover. All look to exploit an opponent’s mistakes with speed, aggression, and a total commitment to destroy.

Remember in the early days of the war the bulk of Russia’s mechanised division that had entered Ukraine was stuck along a 64-kilometre corridor. Yet the best Western leaders could do was stare at the problem, like bees trapped in a bottle, fascinated by their own brilliance, and discuss the effects on Russian troop morale.

Then before the deployment of new pieces of Western kit such as tanks, F-16s, Patriot systems and missiles to strike Russian-based targets, Western politicians pre-announced their arrival with months of fearful hand-wringing, allowing the Russians time to prepare. If after 20 years and $2 trillion the US-Nato-led war machine could not beat the Taleban with their rusty AK-47s, IEDs and sandals, are they really going to beat the Russians with this kind of leadership?

We were also told how Russia would be stopped in its tracks with sanctions. If only enough mega-yachts were seized the oligarchs would revolt. Putin was mad. He had cancer. He blew-up his own pipeline. Not content with advice from Nato and Milley, ‘military experts’, such as Hollywood actor Sean Penn, were deployed to Ukraine. He knew how to win the war.

Now the French have arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of the social media platform Telegram. Apparently, Pavel’s social media application allowing freedom of speech is another threat to democracy. This follows the recent riots in the United Kingdom, where the British government, under new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, effectively declared Elon Musk and British commentator Douglas Murray enemies of the state for expressing their own opinions.  UK Commissioner of Police Sir Mark Rowley threatened to extradite and jail US citizens over online posts. ‘We’ll come after you,’ he proclaimed. Where does it stop? In the 1670s, King Charles II attempted to shut down coffeehouses because, he believed, sedition, treason, atheism, heresy, and blasphemy were running riot within them.

Modern-day Athenian academic Theodore Tsakiris explains that history changes according to each era and to the idiosyncratic political, technological, military, and economic characteristics that define it. Yet, like every other contest for power, at its core the war to save Ukraine is driven by fear, interest, and honour, or ‘that human thing’. These greatest of human motives are being used to weaken and divide us. Now exposure to information from all sides, freedom of speech and a contest of ideas have become enemies of democracy.

So not only did the Western oligarchs fail to apply lessons from Russian history and appreciate what that means for the mindset of those in charge, they failed to execute without prejudice a course of military action to end the war on their terms. At the same time Western citizens are being slowly co-opted as members of the censorship mob – who, just like during Covid, are becoming participants in destroying the principles of their own democracy.