In some important ways that Western information warriors love to miss, Russia and the West are quite similar. Like the West, Russia has a typically modern state, even if today it functions much better than its Western counterparts.

Russia’s economy is capitalist like almost everywhere else on the planet now, even if the Russian state – because it functions better – has reasserted control over the rich, while the West, sick with neoliberalism, lets them dominate and damage national interests. This is one reason, incidentally, why Russia has withstood unprecedentedly savage Western economic warfare and has a far more effective military-industrial complex than the West.

Finally, while Russia spans Europe and Asia, it is also a major force within that specific cultural tradition whose origins we associate with Europe, or more broadly, the West, from novels to classical conservatories.

Yet, in other respects, there are principal differences between Russia and the West. Please forget, for a moment, about the usual suspects (Russian Orthodoxy versus the rest, for instance, or the usual speculations about space, climate, and mentality). Instead, let’s be concrete and very contemporary: Let’s ask what differences matter most to the issue of finding (or not) a valid peace for the Ukraine conflict. Then two things emerge, one obvious and the other a little less so.

What is easy to spot is that Russia is united and the West is not. In part, this is simply due to the fact that Moscow rules over one country, while Washington, the de facto capital of the West as a geopolitical entity, rules – and exploits ever more crudely – a complicated outer empire of formally independent nation-states that are de facto its clients, satellites, and vassals.

While the US exerts a great deal of brute power over its domain, in reality, the latter is as potentially fissiparous as every empire before. If you think that the mere assertion of unity and control is the same as reality, ask the Soviets about their luck with that idea. Except you can’t, because one day they were there and the next – as if by foul magic – they were not.

What is harder to notice – but never to be unseen once you do – is that the political establishments of........

© RT.com