About the new Minsk agreements, I think you’ve all already read them and, as usual, formed your conclusions. So I won’t write about them. I’ll write about things that seem more important to me. The discussion of the Minsk agreements, and indeed this entire conflict, clearly shows one thing—there are no longer (or let’s write “no longer exist” for our own comfort) any analytical tools, not only for forecasting, but also for substantive discussion about what is called “politics.”
Simply try reading any text on war and forecasts about it impartially, keeping my thesis in mind. You will see that most of them are internally logical. Reading the “doom-sayers” like Illarionov—everything aligns, everything is correct. Reading the “victory-shouters” like the Rabinovich-Arestovich duo—also everything is true and logical. Where is the truth? Whom should we believe? I will be told there is serious analysis, that whole institutions are working on this. There is. This “serious analysis” differs from the texts of the aforementioned authors only in its academic jargon, but otherwise it’s exactly the same. Don’t believe me—search and read for yourself.
I think those interested in economic analysis will understand me better—not macroeconomics, where the same diseases of aimlessness are observed, but analysis of enterprise activity. Forecasts here can also be different and even opposite, but it cannot be that both forecasts are correct simultaneously. If the analysis shows different results, it is obvious that one of them contains an error, either in methodology or in the factual material used for analysis. Forecasts cannot radically diverge at a qualitative level, and that is exactly what we constantly observe in the political analysis market.
What does this indicate? It indicates that a huge number of people drew salaries and grants, wrote reports, gave interviews, and pretended to be smart, but as soon as it came to something serious, it turned out that all these people were useless. And it’s not because they are bad people or bad specialists; it’s because they are specialists in a science without a subject. They study and analyze nothing. In microeconomics, we analyze the activities of an actor whose goal, as a rule, is to make a profit. We can err as much as we like in our understanding of how this profit can be made, but those will only be our own errors, and they say nothing about the possibility of such analysis itself. In political science—especially in its “geopolitical” part (and of course in macroeconomics, but let’s not talk about the sad here)—it is about nothing. There, “states,” “countries,” at best “elites” act. That is, no one acts, because such actors do not exist in nature.
I will easily prove that any development of events is “advantageous” or “disadvantageous” from the standpoint of “national security” of any country. And this is not because I am so cunning or corrupt, but because there is no such thing as “national security.” There is no such actor as a “nation,” and accordingly no national security, no national interests, or other such frills. Quite another matter if we understand that usually “national interests” is not even the interests of the so-called majority (if we suddenly admit the possibility of their aggregation), but the interests of specific ruling groups. Here, analysis already becomes possible. But another problem arises—the lack of appropriate terminology, vocabulary, and analytical apparatus in general. In the overwhelming majority of cases, all of this is “tuned” for non-existent actors in the form of “states” or “nations.”
Forecasting is possible only where there are people, their activities, and their motivations. Take sanctions, for example. If people associate the deterioration of their lives with the authorities, then the authorities lose legitimacy. They also lose legitimacy when people do not directly associate deterioration with the authorities, since they are still forced to take more care of themselves and have no time to love the Motherland—and without love, as Soviet experience shows, the Motherland dies. This is, of course, a “journalistic” statement, but it can be formatted in academic form; what I am saying is that where there are people, analysis becomes possible. But with actors like “Ukraine” or “Russia,” there can be no analysis. There can be guesses—including correct ones—premonitions, and revelations, but not analysis and forecast.
I think one of the reasons we are so exhausted by what’s happening is our search for understanding in a semantic field completely unsuited for this. This framework, so to speak, from peacetime; it was generated by the works of state grant recipients and pleasant pastimes at coffee breaks of round tables. It has nothing that would help us understand what’s happening.