On August 17, 2025, Ukraine’s
president Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the
E.U., as a precursor to both of them meeting with Don Trump, president of the
U.S. on ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. President Von der Leyen had
decided to accompany Zelensky to Washington in part to potentially play
interference should the U.S. president again publicly berate Zelensky to his
face and in part to protect Zelensky should Trump’s position/pressure be too
pro-Russia (i.e., pro-Putin). To virtually all Europeans and to many Americans,
Trump’s verbal outburst at Zelensky in the Oval Office had been shocking,
especially as it seemed to be pre-meditated and orchestrated. Taking emotional
advantage of the head of a state being invaded by the empire-scale Russia can
assuredly be reckoned as being a bad host, and even low class for the president
of the empire-scale United States. International relations do indeed contain a
very human element, and in fact leaving it out of an analysis of an
international situation is nothing short of negligent.
Our political entities are,
after all, artifacts made by us and thus can at best restrain our most base
instincts. Even as such, as Hobbes points out in Leviathan, living under
a sovereign is much preferable to being in the brutish state of nature. It is
important to remember in assessing international relations that Hobbes’ state
of nature is not completely extinguished or blocked by the establishment and
maintaining of government. As for Hobbes’ social contract, I would be surprised
if there even was a group of humans living in proximity without some hierarchy
of power, and thus de facto government, in which case the scenario of a number
of free individuals social-contracting from nothing, ex nihilo, to form
a government is, as Aristotle wrote of Plato’s theory of the Forms, “beautiful
but false.” By the way, Plato eventually rejected his own theory wherein forms,
or pure ideas, are metaphysically real.
Lest I be presumed to have digressed,
my point with all of the historical philosophy was not to put you to sleep;
rather, I contend that Von der Leyen’s presence with Zelensky in Washington is
not only to be analyzed in terms of Europe’s geo-political interests in
countering any plans that Russia’s president might develop to invade any of the
E.U.’s eastern states, but also of the human, all too human—to borrow a phrase
from Nietzsche—element. The latter is also highly relevant to the E.U.
president’s trouble with the governor of the E.U. state of France, whose
efforts to upstage the federal president as the figurehead of the E.U.,
including in speaking for the E.U. rather than just for his own state,
have not gone unnoticed in Europe. By the way, the U.S. avoids such a pitfall
by making foreign policy an exclusive competency, or enumerated power, of the
U.S., such even the governor of California or Texas cannot publicly state a
foreign policy for the United States.
In stating after his meeting with
Von der Leyen that Europe “needs to stand united in any further negotiations to
stop Moscow’s all-out war in Ukraine, Zelensky was essentially saying that the
governors of even large E.U. states should get behind the president and foreign
minister of the E.U. rather than go it alone in foreign policy with respect to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moreover, because Russia is on
the scale of an empire whereas E.U. states are “kingdom”-level, the E.U. is
needed to face off against President Putin of Russia, especially of the
president of the empire-scale U.S. leaned in Putin’s favor to end the invasion
even if that means rewarding an invasion with additional territory. On this point,
Von der Leyen stated, “Our position is clear: international borders cannot be
changed by force; these are decisions to be made by Ukraine . . . and not
without Ukraine at the table.”[1]
To be sure, this statement can be viewed as naïve, for it omits any mention of
the E.U.’s role in safeguarding Zelensky from being faced with intense political
pressure from Trump and military threats from Putin to “help” Zelensky make the
“right” decision. Considerable military and political pressure from two
empire-scale polities can be brought to bear on a single kingdom-level polity. Hence,
Zelensky also said after his meeting with Von der Leyen, “It’s crucial that
Europe is as united now as it was at the very beginning, as it was in 2022 when
the full-scale war began.”[2]
Ukraine desperately needed the support of at least one empire-scale polity,
especially if the American and Russian empires were actually on the same side.
American support for Putin would mean that America was at the time in favor of two invaders: Russia and
Israel. There was a time when the U.S. stood for freedom-fighters rather than
bullies. Whether a person or the head of a militarized polity, a bully is a
bully. That is to say, the human, all too human element should not be left out
of the equation.
I submit that militaries around the world, whether voluntarily
or through a semi-sovereign world federalism, as discussed by Kant in Perpetual
Peace and has seemed definitively necessary after Russia’s unimpeded
invasion and Israel’s genocide and holocaust in Gaza, should try to counter rather
than enable or ignore the worst of human nature. We cannot assume that Hobbes’ infamous
state of nature has been, or even would be, replaced by the institution of government, especially
in international relations, but our species could do much better, and it is not at all utopian to say so.
