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Please stop the self-congratulatory nonsense. How much more navel-gazing can we possibly take? Autocrats do not fear democracy -- they stay in power the longest of any type of regime, ffs. Putin did not attack Ukraine because he was afraid of it being democratic or an example for Russians who would -- miraculously, and totally out of the blue -- topple his regime because they admired its success. This is total delusional nonsense, and just another version of the narrative of "the West made him do it" -- not NATO or the EU but "democracy". Here's a very simple question that you should ask when you hear these narratives: how would a free and democratic Ukraine threaten Putin's regime? The implicit logic seems to be that Russians would see prosperity and become disillusioned with Putin's rule, and then somehow topple him. When you try to construct a plausible mechanism for this in the Russian context, you can immediately see the absurdity of this idea. Putin's popularity was very high (it went even higher when he annexed Crimea), the Russian opposition was hopelessly divided (and his penchant for murdering people who could organize anything against him helped), and the elites were profiting from this system so much that most did not see the invasion coming either. Putin did not invade because he was afraid. He invaded because his plan to subjugate Ukraine by other means (meddling in internal politics before 2014 and the plausible-deniability destabilization after) failed, and outright invasion was his only remaining option if he wanted to take control. It's an imperialist grab from a perceived position of power, not weakness.

Now you can get my book about the lost peace after the Cold War in English. The political West won the Cold War in the years between 1989 and 1991. But in the decades that followed, peace was lost. The political elites failed to understand that Russia’s imperialist ambitions remained intact - even after Putin’s speech in Munich in 2007. They failed to understand what China’s strategic project was really about - even after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. They failed to understand the Middle East - even after the Muslim Brotherhood won the election in Egypt in 2012. And they failed to understand that energy policy is geostrategy - even after two energy crises in the 1970s and repeated warnings against Europe’s growing dependence on Russia. That is why the West, and Europe in particular, has ended up in the dangerous and fragile situation we find ourselves in today. The mistakes were not made because warnings were lacking. They were made because the belief in the map was so strong that no one believed the messengers who said the map did not reflect reality at all. The book is therefore first and foremost a critique of the way political elites think and make decisions. The book was published in Danish in October 2025. It received a long series of positive reviews — first in Denmark, and later also in Norway and Sweden. In April 2026, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten nominated it for the paper’s award for the best non-fiction book of the year.