Valdai Club

Do the historical lessons of the aftermath of both 1945 and 1975 teach us that no lasting peace is possible? That in a divided world only three constants are constant, only three “no’s”: no trust, no dialogue and no rules? Trump is now trying to change this.

2025 is a year of important historical anniversaries. May 9 marks the 80^th anniversary of the Soviet and Allied victory over Nazi Germany, and in September – the end of the fighting in the Asia-Pacific theatre and World War II as a whole. In 1945, the foundations of the post-war world order were laid in Yalta and Potsdam, and decisions were made to create a new global structure – the United Nations. There is another anniversary this year – the 50^th anniversary of the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975. It marked the pinnacle of détente – the greatest symbolic rapprochement between the two opposing poles of the Cold War until Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. This year also marks the 40^th anniversary of Gorbachev’s rise to power.

The historical significance of these anniversaries is great and understandable. But can the historical memory of them be applied to the current international situation? It is clear that amid the most acute geopolitical confrontation of recent years, even hints at a “new Yalta” or a “new Helsinki” seem completely unrealistic and unnecessary. You can’t step into the same water twice. However, who knows, given the absolutely unpredictable dynamics of Trump’s second term, swings between war and peace, maybe instead of a new Yalta, there will be a “new Riyadh”. In years to come, anniversaries will be celebrated as symbols of a completely different world order and world structure. We’ll see.

For now, we can state that the approaching anniversaries have come at a time when all the old guarantees have collapsed, when all the checks and balances in the global balance of power have been broken. The Ukrainian conflict, the escalation of the Middle East confrontation, and the crisis in the OSCE, the successor of that Helsinki conference, reflect the almost complete absence of mutual trust. Beyond all this, possible new conflicts loom, from a major clash in Iran to Greenland and who knows where else.

Both current anniversaries symbolise a turn from war to the triumph of multilateral diplomacy. But now the world has returned to the logic of hostile blocs and forceful pressure. The twenty-first century differs from the nineteenth only in technological differences and more acutely tuned social engineering – cyber wars and information attacks in the electronic social space, known as “cancel culture”. From the mid-twentieth century came the postulation of collective guilt. Here is where the difference is visible. Instead of the bitter understanding of this in the works of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, we now see its transformation into a direct tool of social engineering, into a mechanism for a total media agenda. In this regard, it is even strange that until now no voices have been heard that every American is guilty because of Trump, that every US citizen who does not openly rebel against Trump is sliding into the same banality of evil. Again, it is strange that this does not exist. Or is it really something else?

Almost immediately after the defeat of their shared enemies Germany and Japan, the allied powers were no longer connected to each other. Historical documents about Churchill’s plans under the name “Operation Unthinkable” became known. They meant the development of a military operation of UK troops against the Soviet Union immediately after the defeat of Germany. But the British staff analysts, when they were given this task, became afraid that they could lose in such a fight. In addition, the Americans were also against it; the USA was interested in friendship with the USSR until the defeat of Japan and hinted to the British that if they really wanted to fight, it would be better to wait a few months. As a result, the “Unthinkable” did not become reality and remained an archived staff calculation of forces. But very soon after the victory, the Cold War began, the same Churchill announced the “iron curtain”, and there was no trace left of the former alliance. In parallel, the nuclear arms race began.

Through the acuteness of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the achievement of nuclear parity between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Cold War transformed into its mature phase. It was characterised by a global bipolar balance of power based on mutual nuclear deterrence. This realisation led to a gradual path to détente in the 1970s, which resulted in the Helsinki Final Act. It recorded the recognition of the borders in Europe that had been established after 1945, and defined the initial confidence-building measures that began to form an inter-bloc security system. By the way, for the first time, human rights issues were included in the official inter-bloc agenda. As a result, the Soviet Union, due to its constructivist approach of “struggle for peace and peaceful coexistence,” which compelled it to agree to any negotiations with the West, received an unexpected gift in Helsinki: a Trojan horse of human rights protection. Despite the term “confidence-building measures” developed after Helsinki, détente turned out to be fragile, and trust was not that great in essence. By the end of the 1970s, this rhetoric of rapprochement had practically disappeared. Afghanistan became the first major proxy conflict between the USSR and the USA in the era of the “mature” Cold War. It was there, in our opinion (and not in Vietnam or Korea earlier) that the paradox began to form that the understanding of the impossibility of a regional conflict developing into a major inter-bloc escalation with nuclear scenarios could be more than just a deterrent. The Americans demonstrated something completely different in Afghanistan. The guaranteed feeling that whatever happens, it will remain only within the given regional framework, allowed them to gradually, step by step, expand the framework of this regional conflict, and increase the level of their intervention and military assistance to the Afghan opposition. The Soviet Union, whose behaviour model was fully calculated, behaved exactly as expected by American military strategists, without going beyond the self-restraint of red flags and lines. Thus, that Afghan proxy war became an example (and for some, a tempting example) of how one can fight the Soviet Union without great danger to oneself.

The current Ukraine conflict essentially follows the same model that was tested in Afghanistan decades before. Here, too, a clear a priori understanding is recorded that all the red lines that Russia draws will remain only at the level of threatening, but purely verbal rhetoric. Therefore, it is possible to expand the scope of the conflict and intervene in it without having to worry about any of its dangers. Trump is now trying to say that this approach is also dangerous. But so far it is not noticeable that his allies in the West are listening to his arguments. In their own way, they are right. Three years of the Ukrainian proxy war have shown that they themselves really have nothing to fear. The Afghan model of the post-Helsinki conflict works quite effectively, even now.

Does this mean that the historical lessons of the aftermath of both 1945 and 1975 teach us that no lasting peace is possible? That in a divided world only three constants are constant, only three “no’s”: no trust, no dialogue and no rules? Trump is now trying to change this. But will there be a “new Riyadh”?