Western incoherence and Russian opportunism have led Ukraine into disaster.

As Russian troops pile into Ukraine, and Russian bombs fall on Ukrainian cities, what are the security services in the UK focusing on? White privilege. This is not a joke. As the Daily Mail reports today, ‘Britain’s spies are being urged to consider their “white privilege” and declare their pronouns as Europe descends into war’. This comes from a leaked report on ‘improving diversity’ in the security services, written by Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the UK’s national security adviser. It also advises against using gendered terms like ‘manpower’ and even words like ‘strong’ and ‘grip’, which can ‘reinforce dominant cultural patterns’. And there you have it: as Putin plays the strongman, our security bosses are saying ze and zir and advising against inappropriate usage of upsetting words like… ‘strength’.

You couldn’t ask for a clearer snapshot of the divide between the West and Russia today. In the West, institutions are riddled with political correctness, incapacitated by wokeness, and increasingly incapable of being serious about any almost any issue, including geopolitics. And in Russia there is a leader who is a keen observer of this Western ‘decay’, as he sees it. The West is beset by ‘sociocultural disturbances’, Putin recently said. Where Russia under Putin is reviving pride and nostalgia for Russian history – at least the version of history that the Putin regime prefers – in the West they pursue ‘the aggressive deletion of whole pages of their own history’, Putin says. The West is too busy ‘[teaching] that a boy can become a girl and vice versa’ to be able to defend its own traditions and truths, Putin chastises. And now we have British security bosses obsessing over pronouns as Putin spies more territory for the Russian Federation. Fiddling while Ukraine burns.

What has become clear in recent years is that there is a strange symbiotic relationship between Western incoherence and Russian opportunism. Between this ‘decay’ in the West that has led to a rejection of our own history and founding values, and even of basic scientific truth, and a seemingly emboldened Putin regime that increasingly positions itself as the opposite to all of that, as the political grown-up to the infantile West rocked by ‘sociocultural disturbances’. On sex, family, tradition and history, Putin put it as clearly as he could towards the end of last year. ‘We have a different viewpoint’, he said, addressing virtually the entire West.

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