This past week, Tucker Carlson travelled to Moscow, Russia to have a sit-down interview with President Vladimir Putin. Before the almost two hour interview was conducted, Tucker Carlson explained his motives for being in Russia – a now pariah state in the Western mind – as trying to get the “other side” of the story.

After all, it has been almost two years since the greater war in Ukraine began, with the invasion of Russian forces in February of 2021. Yet no media outlet in the West has either sought, or been bothered to get a deeper understanding of the Russian motivation, instead painting the conflict with broad strokes as a Marvel-esque “good guys against bad guys” situation.

Credit where credit is due, Carlson is doing the job that most journalists these days refuse to do – report, and let the audience make up their mind. But what became very apparent from the offset of the interview conducted on the evening of 7th of February was just how unexpectedly out of his element Tucker Carlson appeared to be.

After the now infamous 45-minute long history lesson of Russian-Ukrainian relations going back to the eighth century, Tucker Carlson found himself getting overwhelmed with the offload of  (possibly far-too-detailed) background context of the war and its causes.

This, for many, seemed to be shocking revelations.

“We didn’t know a world leader could be so detailed with historical knowledge!”

“He didn’t even need notes, meanwhile our leaders can barely read off of a teleprompter! Shameful!”

But Putin’s narrative and historical tangent shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it is the same reasons he gave in a published essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians which justified his reasons for the invasion and interest in bringing Ukraine (or at the very least, parts of Eastern and Southern Ukraine) into the Russian Federation.

Hardly new, shocking, or insightful – it’s the same point he has been making, very publicly, for the last two years – of course always ignored, filtered, or taken out of context by the Western news media.

When pressed to talk about NATO expansion being a possible provocation of Russia’s actions, Putin, once again, stuck to the same story he has been telling the world for the better part of a decade.

Russia is willing to cooperate with the West, and is even willing to allow an independent Ukrainian state partner with the EU and become more friendly with Western Europe and America, as long as Russia’s strategic and security interests are respected and cooperated with.

This was why for decades prior to the Maidan, Russia had not escalated provocations – beyond a few strongly worded statements – with NATO despite NATO expansion beyond Germany into the Baltics and Balkans.

Our leadership – more specifically – the warhawks and ideologues who make up the body of the US State Department and inner-mechanisms of Washington D.C. body-politic who are heavily benefiting from, and invested in the superfluous military contacts and deals, have had no interest in playing ball – even after the Cold War and the fall of the Communism in the Eastern Bloc.

Putin suggested that it wasn’t that he had poor relations with elected leaders, but rather that any time he had approached NATO, American or European leaders with opportunities for cooperation, it was always received enthusiastically, but then quickly shut-down by the “expert” teams that inform Western elected officials.

Perhaps this is just posturing and expert narrative-building that Putin tells himself to sleep better at night, and wants to manipulate the narrative to better suit his own image as a victim of the Western machine.

But speaking as a Westerner, and as someone who has seen the actions of elected governments of both left and right-leaning factions, has anything our governments done in the last thirty years, especially in the realm of foreign policy, actually benefited the world or made it better?

The Iraq War? We manufactured a false narrative about weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein working with Al-Qaeda in order to invade. We left millions dead, radicalised millions more to become vehemently anti-West, and left the vacuum for ISIS to grow in the wake of our “victory”.

The deposing of Gaddafi in Libya? We left a nation in ruins, which has now become a hotbed for open-air slave-trading, terrorism – and we now have no buffer state between Africa and the Mediterranean Sea, feeding the immigration problems of the last two decades.

The War in Afghanistan? Not only did we have no real long-term objective being there, we helped fuel the opioid crisis by encouraging, and protecting the cultivation of poppy – which would wind its way into the US through the illegal drug trade, leading millions of Americans to be hooked on literal poison. Not only this, once we left, the government we installed collapsed like a warm Easter egg and the Taliban became a regional power by seizing the weapons the U.S. military had left behind.

The Syrian Civil War? We armed “rebel” groups to topple the Assad regime, leaving a country devastated, millions of people displaced, and causing the refugee crisis in the 2010s.

I could go on and on, these are just a few of the glaring examples – but how has any of our “democracy building” fared? Did we build democracy, or did we just ruin perfectly stable countries because Washington policymakers were so convinced of their own excellence and patting themselves on the back for “safeguarding democracy” that they couldn’t see the looming disasters that would result from their insane actions?

When our reasons for going to war and causing untold levels of devastation have been as vague as “protecting/promoting/building democracy” for every single one of these conflicts, I’m not surprised that when a world leader outlines very different, very detailed reasons as to why he wants to conduct military action – analysts and intellectuals are hardly able to pick up their jaws from the floor.

Despite the fact that this has always been the way the world has always worked, it just goes to show how removed Western governments and foreign policy decision makers have become from reality.

Within a century and a half, we went from the brilliance of Bismark to the nonsensical politicking of Nuland. A truly astounding fall from grace.

Coming back to Ukraine, we had peace-talks and negotiations ready to go in Istanbul, which most likely would have resulted in an end to the bloodshed, and perhaps a North Korea type DMZ along the Dnieper that may not have made either country happy but would’ve at least established a firm red-line that neither party could justifiably cross.

But that was stifled by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who I assume was working at the behest of Washington and seeking his own Churchill moment, who instead encouraged Zelensky and the Ukrainian government to “fight on!”.

Almost an entire generation of young Ukrainian men have been wiped out, millions have fled the country as refugees, and it has become a meat-grinding war of attrition – one that the Ukrainians cannot possibly win by their sheer lack of numbers, but instead they will be slowly grinded down into submission, regardless of how many arms and funds are sent by the West.

All of this, because we have been refusing to sit-down, have a little sense of humility in the changing world we live in, and compromise at any level.

We have been force-fed this phoney narrative that Vladimir Putin is this seething maniac, frothing at the mouth rabidly because he needs this war, and he needs to win it otherwise his entire rule is delegitimised, and his iron fist over Russia be brought down – that all we need to do is keep fighting and we will win! The good guys always win, right?

But Putin’s conduct and body-language in the Tucker Carlson interview spoke very differently to the narrative we have been fed.

This is not someone who is on edge about this conflict, nor feeling as if his administration and rule over Russia is under serious threat. His body-language was as if this whole conflict was simply just another day at the office – that he is willing to negotiate to end these hostilities, but if not all he has to do is wait.

And who can blame him for this certain calm confidence that he carries?

At the same time the Carlson interview was being broadcast on X, President Biden held a press conference in the White House to assure the press and general public that his brain hasn’t turned into mashed potatoes – in the same speech he said that President Assisi of Mexico would allow humanitarian aid into Palestine. Reassuring, of course.

While the United States, Great Britain, and the broader Western world are all on-track for domestic disaster – with severe economic inflation, political and social rifts that have turned people against each other and their governments, and self-imposed demographic suicide – why would Putin need to worry at all about what the West does?

All he has to do is wait – and he has the growing world of the East, namely India and China, that will continue to trade and maintain relations with Russia, and not seek to harass or get involved in Russian domestic affairs.

Ukraine is not the “last stand” of the West as it has been made out to be. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in the Western world who is actually enthusiastic about the idea of dying in the mud and snow-ridden trenches of Donetsk and Luhansk to defend… foreign democracy? If that even is what we are defending, after all, rival parties have been banned in the Rada.

No. Frankly, the United States is on the path to isolation one way or another. It will likely be because the domestic situation would become so bad that it has no other choice but to focus its efforts inwardly to prevent complete national fracture.

If push really comes to shove, even the warhawks in Washington would rather pull out from escalating into larger hostilities with a nation that can match the United States in terms of nuclear firepower. Having already made their billions of dollars in weapons contracts, what is the benefit of further plunging the world into a war which will surely lead to mass devastation, leaving no possible markets to sell their goods.

And when the United States withdraws much of its interest from Europe, where will that leave the EU?

Without American energy, and without American guarantees of protection, Europe will have to find its own ways of maintaining itself – which will be made all the more difficult since the position of the EU in regard to Russia, and the Russian supply of energy has been to sanction it and stop it, with no real viable alternative.

This will only exacerbate the pre-existing issues in Europe – when quality of life is severely lessened, and basic needs like warm homes in cold winters and steady food supplies are no longer guaranteed, the masses will lash out, first at each other, and eventually at the politicians and governments who led to this disastrous eventuality.

This is what the war has become. An international game of chicken, with one side holding a significant home-turf advantage. Sanctions have not worked, but instead pushed Russia to internally change to become less dependent on trading in US dollars and looking for foreign alternatives.

Funding and arming the Ukrainians has meant that a war that could’ve been over in a matter of weeks and months has now grinded into a war that will last for years, until the front lines simply cannot be maintained by lack of numbers. The humanitarian disaster that could’ve been averted almost a decade ago has left one of the largest countries in Europe devastated, decimated, and tens of millions dead and displaced – not just soldiers, but civilians.

Russia has been pushed further to work with other foreign global competitors like China and India, rather than European neighbours – both nations having some of the largest population centres on Earth. Pax Americana is dead and buried, never to return in our lifetimes – it was killed violently by the very people who were put in charge to maintain it. A sort of twisted ironic suicide.

One of the most important points brought up in the Tucker Carlson interview was Putin’s outlook on the changing world. He has seen the winds of influence and importance change from the West to the East, and he has adapted accordingly.

When discussing the opportunity to bring the conflict to an end via negotiating a peace deal with Ukraine (i.e. the United States) he stated that there were avenues to do so with dignity, that will allow the United States to have the PR victory it so desperately craves to save face from ultimately wasted efforts.

The avenue is there, and if I was one of the embedded decision-makers in Washington I would take a mutually beneficial deal as soon as possible – as the alternative will not be escalation into a hot war, but enduring diminishment of both hard and soft power in the continent, as European states begin to understand that they cannot rely on the United States to have their best interests at heart, or make sound policy decisions on their behalf – which is the ultimate function of NATO.

As T.S. Eliot once wrote:

“This is the way the world ends – not with a bang, but a whimper”.

The world we once knew is coming to an end, this much is overwhelmingly clear.

It is not our current flock of leaders or decision-makers – but rather it is up to us, the next generation of individuals and standard-bearers whether we will adapt to the changing world and rekindle the fire into something that endures, or whether we will let our civilization fade into obscurity and extinguish, never to return.

While we may not have learned anything all that new or groundbreaking from the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin, I think it serves a greater purpose than a simple “gotcha” to Western journalism or the current political class.

It is an insight into how the “other side” thinks of us, of our future, and our decline. We ought to wise up, prepare for the long, difficult road ahead, and ensure that the only thing that actually “declines” is the stupidity of our leadership and the influence of the unelected gaggle of fools that believe they can put a halt to the motions of the changing world we find ourselves in.

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