Raison d’Etat: Richelieu’s Grand Strategy During the Thirty Years’ War

Morality in Geopolitics

By George Friedman at Geopolical Futures on February 26, 2025

The negotiations over a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war bring to light an uncomfortable truth: In geopolitics, ethics tend to be coincidental, not causal. There are those who argue that it is morally necessary to universally and absolutely oppose aggression in all forms. For them, accommodating Russia would be a moral failure. But for those who value geopolitical imperatives over moral imperatives, accommodation isn’t only preferable – it’s just.

The outcome of this – the struggle between geopolitics and morality – is national policy, however discordant it may be. The geopolitical is built around national interest – the safety and the well-being of the nation. The geopolitical sees morality as subordinate to national interest, and to think otherwise is irrelevant or, worse, counterproductive. In the pursuit of geopolitical imperatives, morality is useful insofar as it binds the nation together culturally or subverts and dominates another nation.

Morality defines the good, and threats to the good, whatever it might be. A moral code is not the exclusive purview of any nation or society, and many, if not most, nations juggle various moral codes within their respective societies. Religion can influence these codes but is not always their point of origin. There are moral codes that frown on war and those that regard war as a moral necessity. Unsurprisingly, morality has been invoked to wage war on nations with different moral codes and even similar ones.

Geopolitics regards the nation as an absolute to be protected. National power is a necessary adjunct to this end. It is also necessary to uphold moral codes and to advance national interests using political, economic and military tools. Geopolitics understands that wars have been fought for moral reasons but argues that moral imperatives were the nation’s interests.

World War II was fought by nations with generally similar moral codes, but as those codes shifted, the war became as much a geopolitical enterprise as a moral one. This extended into the Cold War, which was seen as a fight between a coalition of liberal democracies and communism. Each side saw moral action in different ways and, to varying degrees, sought to convert the citizens of its opponents to its moral code. Some in the United States and Europe converted to Marxism, while others in Russia converted to liberal democracy, a political philosophy that evolved from Christian doctrine. Russia’s moral code was undermined by the failure of the Soviet Union to honor its promise to eliminate inequality, poverty and war. It was a moral and geopolitical collapse, caused in part by the subordination of geopolitics to morality.

During the Cold War, the West was not a moral concept but a geopolitical one. It comprised the European nations that had not been occupied by the Russians but were heavily dependent on the U.S., which revived or imposed its own moral code on Europe. It was a doctrine that originated in Europe during the Enlightenment. Liberal democracy held all men to be equal and to have equal legal rights. It did not guarantee equal economic outcomes. It guaranteed political rights, including freedom of speech and a free market. It did not guarantee political equality or democracy. Monarchs continued to rule after the Enlightenment, supported as it often was by the Catholic Church, which didn’t necessarily see equality in those terms. The governing moral principle was “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Protestantism was a revolt against the Catholic Church and the midwife to the Enlightenment, which, in turn, set the stage for republics to replace kingdoms, freeing individuals and challenging norms along the way.

Moralities tend to have two similarities. One is the need to convert the unconverted. The other is to crush those who refuse to convert. True liberal democracies are unique in that they don’t proselytize or see dissent as a threat. In them, dissent is crushed by popular wisdom. Liberal democracies do, however, generate factions that compete for political power and frequently seek to demonize and marginalize those who don’t agree with them. Repression is social, left in the hands of the public factions.

Nations are like individuals, filled as they are with lust and fear. They lust for prosperity and fear threats to prosperity. Regardless of their moral character, they will take all steps necessary to increase their wealth and power. World War II was a war against tyranny. But the Soviet Union was allowed to join the coalition of liberal democracies out of geopolitical necessity.

The moral claims of liberal democracy, like the moral claims of all tribes and nations, must be based on survival. It cannot be moral. Liberal democrats are troubled by the price that must be paid to be moral, for the price is immorality. Liberal democracies must ally with nations with differing moral codes when necessary, just as they did with the Soviet Union. To many in the West, this was an abomination. But they did what they knew to be unsavory because more was at stake than moral purity: Germany had the power to conquer other nations.

World War II proved it was better to avoid war than to wage it. That lesson was the foundation of the Cold War – geopolitics on the edge of war but never a world war. The moral nature of the nation mattered but was not decisive. Geopolitics avoids absolutes in favor of flexibility and moral relativity. It can accommodate what seems morally reprehensible. Geopolitics regards the moral absolute as dangerous to the national interest. Morality is not the sole domain of formal religions but a dimension of secularism alongside geopolitics. But the deep divide between what is right and what is necessary still defines the human condition.

This moral imperative relativity of geopolitics and the moral absoluteness of ethics make reconciliation difficult but not impossible. It falls to political structure to narrow the gap. The current argument over the absolutism of repelling aggression and the geopolitical understanding of accommodating the reality of Russo-American relations necessarily triggers a crisis between and within nations.

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