By Alexander Yakovenko

Not so long ago former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited London and spoke at the London Stock Exchange. I was invited to a lunch in his honour by the president of the Stock Exchange. I was seated right by the patriarch of the US establishment. We discussed many things, including, of course, the Arab Spring. Literally a week later I received the new issue of my favorite magazine ‘Russia in Global Affairs’ which included Mr Kissinger's article ‘The limits of universalism’. I was fascinated by his thoughts on the neo-conservatives' ideas. He writes that the neo-conservative approach postulates that universal peace is achievable by engineering a world of democratic institutions and that, if history does not move quickly enough; we can move it along by military force. My concern is that this ultimate goal is in practice so remote, and the method of reaching it so uncertain, that it leads to an interventionism exhausting our society and ultimately to abdication, as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The difference is less one of destination than of pacing. The point is not that what exists is unalterable, but that the effort required to implement change will be more sustainable, if we temper the visionary aspect of policy with the recognition of the variety and complexity of circumstance.

The current situation in the Middle East is instructive. The Arab Spring was initially greeted with exuberance as a regional, youth-led revolution on behalf of liberal democratic principles. But, as Burke recognized, revolution succeeds through the confluence of many disparate grievances; the dissolution of the old regime inevitably brings with it the need to distil from these grievances a new version of domestic authority. This process is often violent and far from automatically creates a tradition of civil tolerance and individual rights; it is, at best, the beginning of a journey toward these goals. America can, and should, assist on this journey. But we will fail if we settle for one-party elections and sectarian dominance as a democratic outcome".

And here is what Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said to Russian political scientists in December 2012: "Imposing one's own political and socio-economic system on others in most cases provokes the opposite reaction and may contribute to extremist, repressive forces putting off the prospect of real democratic change. This is one of the fundamental issues of contemporary international politics directly related to the topic of a future world order. And it is not about Russia, "by inertia", confronting Western influence, or throwing a spanner in the works of the Western-inspired projects just "out of its meanness". The fact is that the policy of promoting democracy by blood and iron simply does not work. We see evidence of this today; we have been seeing it in the last year and a half, even over the last decade. Iraq, the continuing problems in this country have become an ongoing concern. Nobody fully understands what will happen in the Middle East in the near future.

The risk of the forcible imposition of democracy is that it leads to a growing chaos and it can evolve into a serious crisis of manageability on a global scale". The Minister refers to H.Kissinger's words and stresses the grotesque nature of juxtaposing the so-called realpolitik and the values-based policy. Apparently, the world today needs reasonable combination of these two concepts, taking into consideration that "crusades" and policies not based on moral values are equally senseless.

We stand for agreeing a fundamental set of values that can help to build a system based on the partnership of civilizations. If the values are shared, than we have to define them together, giving up on messianic ideas, which can only do harm to politics. Is the West ready for this?

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