The latest intellectual fashion at the World Economic Forum in Davos has a name: “Value-Based Realism.”
Championed by Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, it is being marketed as a sophisticated survival manual for middle powers like Canada, the UK, and the European Union. It promises a path that is both principled and pragmatic.
In truth, it is a white flag in disguise.
The logic of this new realism is deceptively simple. We are told to stop waiting for a perfect world and deal instead with the brutal one we have. It is a great diagnostic tool for a “middle power” identity that accepts the end of the rules-based order as a permanent state of affairs. However, by rebranding our current limitations and post-Biden behavior as a strategy, we are effectively choosing to manage our own decline.
This framework offers no vision for victory or leadership; it merely offers instructions on how to survive the storm while the great powers decide our fate.
Pragmatism is often a necessity in life, but in geopolitics, it can become a cancer. It was pragmatism that convinced Europe that the Nord Stream pipelines were a purely commercial venture rather than a strategic noose. It was pragmatism that fostered a crippling dependency on Russia for energy, China for industry, and the United States for security.
When we call these dependencies pragmatic, we are just providing a polite euphemism for the short-term comfort that hollows out our long-term survival.
You cannot calibrate your way out of a dependency on someone who views you as a junior partner at best and a target at worst.
We cannot afford to depend on actors who wage any form of war against us. This includes the hybrid and economic pressures currently coming from an increasingly transactional and unreliable United States. It also ignores the reality that China is already waging a war on Europe through its proxies in Ukraine, using Russia as its kinetic instrument to exhaust our resources and resolve.
The current “Value-Based Realist” approach suggests we should “calibrate” these relationships and engage in “variable geometry”. In reality, this is a trap. You cannot calibrate your way out of a dependency on someone who views you as a junior partner at best and a target at worst.
If the democratic West wants to be taken seriously, it must stop acting like a victim of geography and start acting like a power. This requires more than just principled talk at Davos; it requires muscle.
If you are not capable of defending your own house, your values are nothing more than a hobby.
For Europe, this means moving beyond national silos toward a permanent rapid response force stationed on the Russian border. It means finally ending the single-country vetoes that allow a single leader to paralyze the security of an entire continent. If you are not capable of defending your own house, your values are nothing more than a hobby.
True realism demands that we stop being afraid of our own shadow. We must seize frozen Russian assets today to fund a total victory for Ukraine and arm our allies with long-term industrial commitments that strengthen our own defense foundations. We must help Ukraine scale up the production of missiles and drones to systematically dismantle the Russian war economy. Furthermore, we must treat Russia’s shadow fleet not as a commercial mystery, but as a stateless instrument of hybrid war to be intercepted and seized.
Power respects power. It does not respect pragmatic memos or diplomatic tea parties that lack the spine to enforce a red line.
“Value-Based Realism” tells us to accept our status as “middle powers” navigating a world of hegemons. I reject that. Between the European Union, Canada, and the UK, we possess the capital, the technology, and the industrial base to be a global titan.
We do not need to follow the lead of Washington or Beijing. We can be the third pole of global power, but only if we decide to grow up and grow a spine. Accepting managed decline is a choice. It is time we chose differently.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.