What about some peace through hope?

Since the Second World War our hopes for peace have been predicated on deterrence working. But it isn’t working, and if we offer only stick and no carrot, the future will be violent.

Everything is now precision air power. No, hold on, it's all about tank battles. Wait a minute, where are the tanks? This is trench warfare. Oh no, drones can get over trenches – this is now drone warfare. We need a missile defence shield. Except that doesn't work against drones. We'll need to invent space lasers.

And that, dear reader, is precisely four years of western military debate. From the start of the Ukraine war until now, the military has basically had no idea what was going on, much in the same way it didn't understand what was happening with militia-based gurrilla warfare in the Middle East during the war on terror.

It is time we stopped pretending otherwise; no-one wins an arms race. If one great power finds a new technology, the next will copy it. If one administration uses overwhelming violence, another group of insurgents will find a way round it.

We need a new theory of peace. We always see peace through the lens of the military and the bomb makers. Our collective model of peace isn't really rules-based at all, it is deterrent-based. We still frame our future as a 'balance of terror' on the belief that if everyone is permanently held over a precipice of destruction, we'll all behave sensibly.

If ever there was a theory that has failed, surely it is deterrence. It has stoped superpowers from facing off directly with each other, but it has done next to nothing to slow down the flood of global military violence. We can't keep going like this if we need to survive. We need a new model of peace.

This is one aspect of what I've been writing about all year. We are locked into a series of narrow ideological assumptions about how things work and how you can use the tools that are there. This is mainly a western thing, and the West is in freefall.

Our economic model clearly doesn't work now. Our welfare model is in jeopardy. Our democratic model seems under attack everywhere – it is easy to see this as 'just Trump and Putin', but we now seldom go a week without the Scottish Government or a public agency being pulled up for breaking transparency laws. Our trade model is a mess. And our model of peace and coexistence is now lying under rubble. None of this is working.

So on peace, if we can't win through an arms race, how do we win? I mean all of us. The anwer has to begin with the times we achieved this before. It was all about negotiating between hostile partners. It worked. Both the fall of the oppressive Soviet Union and the period of comparative peace that resulted were the outcome of direct negotiations, not military build-up.

The problem is that things have got so bad the great powers can't even talk to each other properly and those on each side are not really trying to achieve peace through talks but rather domination. Certainly Trump, Netenyahu and Putin have a vision which you wouldn't call peace.

And ironically it is the authoritarian Chinese who are least in favour of an unstable militarised world but are being shut out by Europe and the US, sending them towards Russia. None of this really makes any sense until you remember who is leading the western world now.

So what on earth can we even negotiating over? It isn't enough simply to seek to excise things we don't like through negotiation, great as some weapons restraint from international diplomacy would be. Just like the backlash against net zero, if an agenda is only restrictive without any give-back, you can't ask people to feel good about it.

Or, to put it another way, if all you use is a stick and if you offer no carrot, people just get bruised and angry. We need an awful lot more carrot in our international engagement now. The problem is that the mismatch between what we all think a carrot actually is at this point. The thing Europe wants and the thing Putin wants are currently in different dimensions.

Which is why I want to bring in one of my least favouite phrase concepts – prefiguration. Prefiguration is important. It simply means talking about the version of the future you actually want to see as a means of establishing its possibility in people's minds.

Personally I hate the word. It is yet another centre-left pointy-headed jargon term it feels embarrasing to say out loud outside pointy-headed centre-left circles. But moreover, the centre left has constantly substituted action for loose vision. It prefigures a (slightly) better future in part because that reduces the pressure to actually do anything.

And yet that is what I have been writing about a lot recently. When I say 'we need more utopian thinking' or 'we need to stop assuming the current way of doing things makes sense', what I have really been saying is that we're so lost up a blind alley that we need to imagine there is a different alley altogether before we have any chance of getting there.

As I have been pointing out, it is hard to do this because one of the precepts of contemporary politics is that utopia is for fools and that talking about it is embarrassing. This is part of the trap in which we find ourselves.

“If your only tool is hate, every solution is violence”

When it comes to global affairs though, our stupidity is multiplied. The liberal establishment find utopia silly but see dystopia in every foe. To imagine a foe as not a foe on any terms other than their surrender is anathema to a liberal tradition which has come to benefit from an external enemy every bit as much as domestic nationalism has.

This makes it feel strange to say, but the only meaningful future for Europe is an alliance with Russia. There is no version of our future which is pleasant for as long as half of our continent is pointing guns at the other half. This ought to be clear enough. We need an accord.

And yet the path from here to there is almost impossible to see. I doubt there is any negotiation with Putin which would make sense for either side right now. Putin is where he wants to be and the EU (with Britain) can't commit to anything because we are still desperately trying to pacify an out-of-control United States.

So let's take a step back for a second. Might we at least start to imagine a future without a specific timescale, a future without anyone's surrender (those never work because the humiliated refuse to stay humiliated so it all kicks off again), a future we might actually want to live with? Let me take a shot.

We need to be on the same page on security on one continent. The only way we can do that is throuh a proper continent-wide coalition. It needs to include Russia. It may also need to include Turkey. It would take over European security assurance and eventually replace Nato as the means of collective defence for Europe.

But it can't just be a guns and bombs treaty. We need to find a space where our nations can converge on some kind of agreed terms of behaviour and attitudes. We need to have some form of protected democracy. It doesn't need to come at the expense of any nation, but it must mean something.

It needs to offer everyone some kind of economic gain, but it cannot be predatory. We cannot be eyeing each other trying to work out how to screw each other over. It has to be give and take. It needs to be an inspiring model.

We cannot have a continent that is wholly reliant on another. We need different social architecture for our different society. We need a European tech platform. Ideally it would be interoperable with other people's tech platforms and we don't end up in a post-Babel tech world. But it is mad for a continent like Europe not to be self-reliant on the fundamentals of our way of life.

This has great opportunities for all. We need to create a new kind of economy that works for everyone without climate change, but we need to get there without anyone being punished. It is possible. We want to trade as self-sufficiently across this continent as we can. We want to take a real, continent-wide approach to migration.

As people flee parts of the world which the climate is making uninhabitable, at the same time Siberia and the far north will become constantly more habitable. There are threats for all in this but also enormous opportunities. Resettling new territory – if we do it properly, together – could be by far our best hope to manage the accelerating flow of people.

And then we can embed this all in a global system that doesn't need to pit one against the other. If we use resources better it doesn't need to be a zero-sum game.

No, none of this is realistic just now. But we are perfectly capable of making it possible. The first step is to offer a vision and a pathway for reformers in Russia which offers the people of Russia a vision and a hope that can work. It is no justification of Putin to accept that we have continually taken a hostile stance towards the people of Russia.

So progress would be contingent on there being very real reform. But Putin isn't going to be there forever and it would be really stupid to wait until he goes before thinking about this or to expect that the outcome will be Russia's surrender to the EU.

To this very day all the liberal commentator class can do is out-compete each other in their reverse virtue-signalling over how much they hate Putin. But if your only tool is hate, every solution is violence. That is why all anyone is talking about is cutting welfare spending to buy more bombs.

Someone has to be wiser than this. There is a genuinely peaceful future there for the taking on this continent. We're not close to it, but we must not assume we're many decades away. If there is one thing that we know right now it's that change can come disorientatingly quickly.

Peace through deterrance has failed abysmally. In that context, peace through hope and good will is nothing like as crazy as it sounds in 2025.