Four years into Russia’s war of aggression, Europe still hasn’t understood the nature of this war, nor has it defined the objective of its support for Ukraine. Pierre Raiman cites the work of French philosopher Raymond Aron (1905-1983) on war and draws an important lesson. To effectively help Ukraine, Europe first needs to understand that, for the Russian regime, this is a war of civilizational annihilation. As long as the West is content with formulas that sidestep this dimension, it will only manage hesitations, for lack of a strategy.
Paris, December 1971. Raymond Aron opens his course at the Collège de France. Before him lies the enigma of Clausewitz, the Prussian general who sought less to teach victory than to understand the essence of war. “What attracted me at first,” Aron wrote, “was the philosophical problem, the effort to grasp the nature of war, to develop a theory that was not confused with a doctrine, that taught the strategist to understand his task without harboring the derisory pretension of communicating the secret of victory1.”
We are in the midst of the Cold War. Yet Aron chooses to meditate on the 23 years (1792-1815) that set Europe ablaze—first the revolutionary war, then the Napoleonic epic, when the coalition forces suffered defeat after defeat because they failed to understand the revolutionary nature of their enemy.
From this reflection, Aron draws a rigorous law: “Politics can only adequately determine the end if it accurately assesses the nature of the war in terms of the circumstances that condition it”. Before setting goals, we need to understand what we are facing. We must grasp the logic of our adversary and identify the nature of the conflict, or else condemn ourselves to strategic drift.
February 2022. Ukraine is invaded once again. Four years later, the toll is devastating. Hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded. Twenty percent of Ukrainian territory is under occupation. And a succession of empty phrases are presented as war aims: “As long as it takes,” “Don’t humiliate Russia,” “Don’t let Ukraine lose,” “Put Ukraine in a position of strength to negotiate,” “Bring Putin to the negotiating table.”
Davos, January 2026. Volodymyr Zelensky invokes the film Groundhog Day2. The comedy in which Phil (Bill Murray) relives the same day over and over again. “That’s exactly how we live right now. “Europe loves to discuss the future, but avoids taking action now.”Endless and, above all, pointless discussions. What do we really want to achieve? What kind of peace are we seeking? Have we even understood the nature of this war and the aggressor regime?
The lesson of 1792
“The head of state must not make the mistake of misunderstanding the nature of war and the enemy, as did the coalition forces of Koblenz and the Brunswick Manifesto3 in 17924“. The European monarchies, strong in their professional armies, treated the war against the French Revolution as a passing rebellion.
They did not understand that they were facing a radically new phenomenon: a revolutionary regime mobilizing the entire population, rejecting all limits, aiming not at negotiation but at the transformation of the European political order. This misunderstanding was not primarily military. It was political and intellectual. The coalition powers projected their own categories—balance, compromise, restoration—onto the Revolution, even though it was defined by rupture, universality, and total mobilization.
Valmy, in September 1792, crystallized this error. The Prussian army counted on the collapse of revolutionary troops that were assumed to be fragile. The collapse did not happen. Faced with men who were not fighting for a prince but for a collective entity, Brunswick’s army hesitated, then withdrew. On that day, only a poet grasped what the military leaders failed to see. Goethe, who was present in the Prussian camp, exclaimed that evening at the bivouac: “From this place and this day begins a new era in the history of the world.”
The harsh lesson remains intact. War imposes its form on those who refuse to recognize its nature.
Twofold blindness
However, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not the one the West believes it is confronting. Patiently, well before 2022, the regime changed . The FSB, heir to the KGB, now forms its backbone; the ideology of the “Russian World” provides its justification—all Russian-speaking territories belong to Moscow, and Ukraine does not exist as a legitimate nation. And this nature conditions a war of civilizational annihilation—a total war in which the destruction of the adversary becomes an end in itself.
Aron understood this in the last century. In 1976, the same year that Penser la guerre, Clausewitz was published, he wrote the preface to his friend Alain Besançon’s Court traité de soviétologie. This was no coincidence. Thinking about war and diagnosing the opposing regime were part of the same intellectual process – because Clausewitz’s first lesson is that politics determines the nature of war, and that we must therefore understand politics for what it is, not for what we would like it to be.
Alain Besançon demonstrates that for the Kremlin, détente and the Cold War were not two states but “two tactics in an offensive strategy, and the most conquering one is not the one we think it is.” Leninist politics “is a global, dramatic confrontation, where one must prevail completely and the other must disappear.” In his preface, Aron offers a mirror image diagnosis: “Most Westerners have convinced themselves that the Soviet Union is a country ‘like any other.’”
Replace “Soviet Union” with “Russian Federation,” “détente” with “reset” or “strategic dialogue,” “exporting the revolution” with “defending the Russian world”: the structure remains intact, as does Western blindness—because the objectives pursued in Europe have not changed5.
The error is symmetrical to that of 1792, and almost as complete. We continue to describe Russia as a mere “authoritarian regime” and to frame the invasion as a “territorial conflict” in which Putin is seeking limited gains. These are reassuring categories imposed on a reality that rejects them, just as the coalition forces imposed their dynastic grids on the Revolution. February 2022 is a replay of September 1792.
But the pattern is reversed. Putin is making the symmetrical mistake. He, who is waging a totalitarian war, has failed to understand that he is facing a patriotic and revolutionary mobilization. He thought he was conquering a corrupt state, dividing a fragmented society. He is discovering that the Ukrainian people are rising up like France in 1792, transforming a war of aggression into a patriotic war in three days. Clausewitz’s trinity—people, army, government—which had been disjointed in Russia, aligned itself before his eyes in Ukraine with magnificent force.
This war has a nature that Europe stubbornly refuses to recognize. It is terrorist in nature: striking civilians to rule through fear, turning every winter into a weapon. It is civilizational: denying Ukraine’s existence, erasing its language, deporting its children, looting its museums—these are its war aims. It is cognitive: subverting, poisoning, demoralizing, infiltrating minds before territories. It is subversive: capturing elites, corrupting institutions, fragmenting societies from within.
It is already international: Iran has supplied Russia with Shahed drones, North Korea has sent thousands of soldiers, and China has provided essential electronic components. These five dimensions paint a picture of a genocidal and total war in the most rigorous sense. The nature of the war cannot be understood without grasping the nature of Putin’s regime and the continuity of its policy with that of the USSR, as well as the axis of totalitarian powers6.
The vagueness of empty phrases
A war aim is not a moral stance. It is the explicit agreement between a political end and appropriate means, assessed in terms of time, space, economics, opinion, and willpower. As long as the West is content with formulas that elude these dimensions, it is not pursuing a strategy, it is administering hesitations.
This hesitation betrays a conceptual flaw that can be traced back to American doctrine. In 1989, Colonel Arthur Lykke formalized an equation for the War College that has since become canonical: Strategy = Ends + Ways + Means7. Generations of officers were trained on this triptych. Admittedly, Lykke pointed out that military strategy should serve national policy. But the equation itself contained a flaw: its “ends” referred to military objectives—not the desired final political state, which overshadowed the model without appearing in it. One could line up means, sketch out ways, name partial objectives—without ever having to answer the question: to achieve what, at the end of it all? Lykke offered an addition; Aron demanded inferences.
Meditating on Clausewitz, he had posited the reverse hierarchy: politics determines the end; the end dictates strategy; strategy orders the ways and means. Removing the first term condemns the others to wandering – the final political state governs strategy, which is subordinate to it by articulating military objectives, ways and means.
We recognize the Western pathology in Ukraine. “As long as it takes” is a formula for endless means. “Putting Ukraine in a position of strength to negotiate” is a vague strategic concept, detached from any final state. “Not letting Russia win” is a negative objective that no one has verified would be sufficient to produce a viable political outcome. Each of these slogans fills one box in Lykke’s triptych – and leaves the only one that matters empty.
The phrase “as long as it takes” seems to emphasize determination, but it is based on a misunderstanding of the time frame of democracies—punctuated by elections, exposed to divisions, and readable by the adversary. Proclaiming indefinite endurance without defining its purpose amounts to ceding control of the tempo to the enemy and transferring the privilege of duration to them.
Above all, this phrase erases time as a moment: in the summer of 2022, the strategic initiative was Ukrainian. Massive and rapid aid could have turned a Russian operational defeat into a lasting strategic failure. The refusal to provide certain capabilities, in the name of fear of escalation, gave Russia time to entrench itself, mobilize, and adapt its economy.
Space reveals the same asymmetry: Russia exploits its strategic depth while Ukraine is denied the means to strike far away. The economy prolongs the dissonance: Russian war economy versus slow, partial, circumvented sanctions; assets frozen but not confiscated; ghost fleet exporting oil.
What remains is the most neglected dimension—the one that Clausewitz placed at the heart of his “strange logical trinity8”: the people. Yet Western governments have given up on explaining the war to their publics. In France, as in the United States, the conflict floats in a public space where it is neither debated nor appropriated—real but parsimonious material support and non-existent strategic discourse. Empty phrases do not mobilize because they do not explain—and they do not explain because, to do so, it would be necessary to make a diagnosis that leaders refuse to formulate. This void is not neutral: it is being exploited. While democracies leave their opinions in the dark, Russia is intensifying its cognitive warfare – narratives of weariness, nuclear specters, false dilemmas between “peace” and “escalation.”
European public opinion is a strategic objective for Russia, and this asymmetry is fundamental: in a democracy, public opinion constrains policy; in a totalitarian regime, it is shaped by those in power. Putin does not have to fear the weariness of his public; Putin does not have to deal with the weariness of his public—he shapes it, anesthetizes it, or silences it. All he has to do is wait for ours, because the effectiveness of Russia’s cognitive warfare is inversely proportional to the clarity of Europe’s war aims. The less Europe says what it wants, the more Moscow can say on its behalf what it should fear and accept. Defining the end arms public opinion; avoiding defining it gives Putin the ground he cannot conquer by force of arms.
The double negative – “not letting Russia win,” “not letting Ukraine lose” – carefully avoids saying what winning or losing would be. It paints a negative picture where the goal is no longer victory but avoiding the worst: containing without deciding, supporting without committing, enduring without deciding. Clausewitz would judge this stance harshly: Halbheit, irresolution, inconsistency, half-measures9. In a long-unpublished manuscript from 1969, Aron noted that Clausewitz described this situation accurately: “The entire art of war is transformed into simple prudence, whose main purpose will be to prevent the unstable balance from suddenly tipping to our disadvantage and the half-war from turning into a full-scale war10 .” “It takes a form consistent with the nature of the policy from which it emanates11,”adds Aron. But a policy still needs to emanate. When prudence boils down to a refusal to define Putin’s defeat, it ceases to be the instrument of a policy and becomes the residue of all the choices we have refused to make.
Evolving formulas – “putting Ukraine in a position of strength to negotiate,” “bringing Putin to the table” – assume that negotiation is an end in itself. However, in a war where one side denies the very existence of the other, the negotiating table becomes a tactical instrument: to gain time, divide allies, and freeze conquests. The Minsk agreements have demonstrated this. As long as the goals of war are formulated only in terms of negations and vague horizons, there will be no strategy. And this void will be filled—not by our intentions, but by the logic of our adversary.
Emmanuel Macron embodies this drift with astonishing consistency. From “not humiliating Russia” in June 2022 to hesitations over arms deliveries, from fruitless phone calls to the European Council’s about-face in December 2025—where he renounced the confiscation of Russian assets and abandoned Friedrich Merz in order to “open dialogue” with the Kremlin— the French president illustrates what happens when one refuses to think about the nature of war: constant improvisation dressed up as diplomatic subtlety.
Cruelly ironic, “not humiliating Russia” has been the Kremlin’s own narrative since the 2007 Munich conference: “Russia has had more than enough of humiliations, of constant attacks on its interests..”Russia is tired of humiliation, wounded in its dignity, forced to react. By adopting this rhetoric, Macron was not acting cautiously; he is serving as a ventriloquist—has he realized this since?—for Russia’s cognitive warfare from the Élysée Palace.
This wandering expresses a deeper European drift: the abandonment of politics in favor of procedure. For Aron, politics is the intelligence of the state, which assesses the nature of the situation before setting goals. But Europe has reversed the Clausewitzian order: military fears—escalation, nuclear blackmail—dictate political goals, instead of politics setting the ends and then calibrating the means. When the coalition of the willing proposes to send troops after a hypothetical ceasefire rather than before, it reveals this fatal reversal. Postponing to an uncertain “after” the commitments that the urgency now demands is once again letting the adversary set the tempo.
I got you Ukraine
In Groundhog Day, repetition is the theme. “I Got You Babe12,” the hit song that wakes Phil up every morning, promises emotional security: “I’ve got you, you’ve got me, everything will be fine.” But the promise rings false—Phil is alone, no one has him, no one believes him. The film chooses a sunny tune to herald a day that has become a prison—an almost Orwellian discordance and denial of reality. The song immediately establishes the idea that repetition is not only a comic device but a test of truth. As long as Phil hopes for an escape through cunning or resentment, the same tune taunts him; when he stops running away from repetition and fills it with meaning, “I Got You” ceases to be a curse—the loop is broken.
The transposition to Zelensky is fruitful. “I got you” as a European promise tested by actions. The West says to Ukraine: “We are with you.” But if every morning the same phrase comes back without acceleration, without production, without decisions, it ends up sounding like a jingle—repeated compassion that does not break the loop. Repetition becomes what Clausewitz would have called a form of moral and political friction13, wear and tear that alters the will, while the adversary converts time into material advantage.
Hence the possible reversal: turning the refrain into a strategic pact. “You have us, and we have you,” in the Clausewitzian sense: our destinies of security are linked. Ukraine holds part of the European front; Europe must hold Ukraine by means commensurate with the scale. It is no longer a question of supporting each other as a form of consolation, but of binding ourselves together as a form of commitment: setting an intelligible political goal—that the aggressor be defeated, that Russian troops be driven out of Ukraine—and then marshaling all available resources to achieve that goal, so that the repetition of summits and promises ceases to be a ritual and becomes the cadence of a strategy. Only then will the refrain no longer sound like denial: it will become the formula for solidarity that is not spoken, but proven.
Aron’s labyrinthian thread
Faced with this confusion, Aron offers us a thread. His discipline begins with the primary requirement: to accurately assess the nature of the war. Not according to our comfortable categories, but according to the circumstances that condition it.
This war is not a territorial conflict but a total war waged by a neo-totalitarian regime. It will not be resolved by a territorial compromise but by the strategic defeat of Russia. It does not pit negotiable interests against one another but two irreconcilable worldviews. Accepting this truth is a prerequisite for any adequate policy. Where Lykke offered officers an equation with three variables, Aron imposes a diagnosis and a demand. The equation is reassuring, the diagnosis disturbing—because it may reveal that the evil is of a completely different nature. The Europe of 2026 still refuses to ask the question.
Once this diagnosis has been made, everything falls into place: withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory within its internationally recognized borders, return of deported children, integration of Ukraine into Atlantic and European security architectures. This is the only coherent political response to the diagnosis: when faced with a regime that denies the existence of its victim, anything less than the defeat of the aggressor is merely a respite that it will exploit – the lesson of Minsk, repeated ad infinitum.
From then on, the dimensions cease to float separately and align themselves. The boarding of the ghost fleet and the confiscation of the Russian Central Bank’s assets strike the war economy in its two vital arteries—oil revenues and financial reserves. This hemorrhage reverses the time factor: it is now Moscow that would see the hourglass turn over—its resources running out grain by grain under a time constraint it no longer controls. At the same time, providing Ukraine with deep strike capabilities restores spatial reciprocity: Russian logistics, bases, and military industry are no longer untouchable sanctuaries. And the protection of Ukrainian airspace – by a European air shield – removes the civilian populations of free Ukraine from the strategy of terror, Russia’s main pressure lever.
In this alignment, and not in the scattered addition of partial measures, the three paths converge toward a single effect – tightening the noose to the point where totalitarian rationality itself stumbles upon its own material limits: not to convince the regime, but to deprive it of the means to continue its aggression.
However, we still need to assess what these goals do not yet say: what kind of security order should Russia’s defeat establish, what future for a totalitarian regime deprived of its war, what tomorrow for the peoples of an empire brought back within its borders. Aron’s labyrinthian thread does not end on the day of victory; it requires that we know, before winning, what victory should be used for.
In Aron, France has a thinker on war who is still relevant today, just as it had a thinker on defeat in Marc Bloch. In L’Étrange Défaite14, Bloch showed that the defeat of 1940 was intellectual before it was military. Aron offers what Bloch could not: the need for diagnosis before collapse.
In the amphitheater of the Collège de France, he sought less the secret of victory than the lucidity without which all action is doomed to wander. In 2026, all of us, like Phil, are still living in Groundhog Day. It remains to be decided whether tomorrow will be the same—or the first day of a new strategy.
The author has a PhD in History. He specializes in totalitarianism and is a co-founder of French association Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre ! (For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!)
Footnotes
- Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, Volume I, Foreword: L’âge européen, Gallimard, Paris, 1976.
- Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day, Columbia Pictures, 1993.
- Brunswick Manifesto, Wikisource.org
- On War, Clausewitz, Volume I, op. cit., Part Three.
- Putin’s Total War, op. cit., Chapter 5: Putin’s intentions: to destroy the Ukrainian state and subjugate European elites.
- Pierre Raiman, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing: A Neo-Totalitarian and Anti-Western Axis, Cités (2024/4 No. 100).
- Colonel Arthur F. Lykke Jr, Military Review, vol. 69, no. 5, May 1989.
- On War, Clausewitz, op. cit., Volume I, Chapter 3.5: Why Wars of the Second Kind? Aron, Raymond. Penser la guerre, Clausewitz (Volume 1) – L’âge européen (p. 139). Éditions Gallimard. Kindle edition.
- Clausewitz, Vom Kriege [On War], Marie von Brühl, Dresden, 1832, Book VIII, chap. 3A: Internal Cohesion of War.
- ibid Chap 6 A. Quote taken from Raymond Aron, Clausewitz et notre temps, 1969. Revue Études internationales, volume XLIII, no. 3, September 2012.
- ibid.
- Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, July 1965, Atlantic Records.
- On War, op. cit., Book I, Chapter 7: Friction in War. – The transposition of friction from the military to the political and moral levels – the repetition of empty promises as a means of wearing down the will – seems to me to be a legitimate extension of Clausewitz’s concept, in accordance with his definition of ”what distinguishes real war from war on paper.”
- Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat, Franc-Tireur, 1946 (written in 1940).