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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

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Civilizational Realism

Expanding the Integral Lens in Global Affairs

Joseph Dillard

Frank Visser's essay, “Realism and Idealism in the Ukraine War,” addresses one of the defining geopolitical questions of our time: how to interpret Russia's invasion of Ukraine through a lens that honors both moral accountability and geopolitical realism. He proposes a synthesis he calls “moral realism,” in which idealist concern for justice and realist sensitivity to power balance are joined through “strategic empathy.”

It is a promising attempt at integration. Yet, for all its balance, the piece remains deeply Western in its categories, language, and assumptions. It never quite enters the Russian worldview it claims we must empathize with. The result is empathy as reflection—Western self-examination—rather than empathy as translation into another civilization's logic.

What follows is not a defense of Russia's actions but a critique of Western interpretive limits. If genuine “strategic empathy” is to exist, it must begin with epistemic humility: the recognition that even our moral and theoretical vocabularies—realism, idealism, sovereignty, deterrence—are provincial expressions of Western history.

Western Categories, Western Mirror

Visser's central dialectic, between “realism” and “idealism,” derives from the canon of Western thought: Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, Hobbes' Leviathan, Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations, and Wilson's moral internationalism. Both sides of this binary are European inheritances: realism born of fear of chaos, idealism born of faith in law.

When applied to Russia, however, this framing already distorts. It interprets Russian behavior through the prisms of Western theory, rather than through the language in which Russia conceives its own identity and purpose.

In Visser's essay, there is no mention of Eurasianism—the view that Russia constitutes a unique civilizational pole distinct from both Europe and Asia. Nor is there reference to Russkiy Mir, the “Russian World,” which fuses language, Orthodoxy, and culture into a sacred geography. Nor does he touch on Russia's deep security trauma, born of repeated invasions—Mongol, Napoleonic, Nazi, that left cultural imprints of vigilance and existential defensiveness.[1]

By omitting these elements, Visser's “strategic empathy” remains a one-way mirror. He examines the Western debate about Russia, not Russia's narrative about the West. The result is a conversation between Western moral realists and Western structural realists, with Russia absent as an epistemic subject.

Structural Understanding Requires Cultural Depth

Visser's treatment of the security dilemma is accurate: NATO expansion following the Cold War violated a sense of post-Soviet equilibrium. Yet, in his essay, Russia's behavior is rendered mechanistic, an outcome of system logic. It is as if the Kremlin were an algorithm executing defensive realism rather than a civilization acting from myth, memory, and meaning.

A richer analysis would explore the cultural and civilizational content of Russian strategy, not to validate it, but to demonstrate a deeper empathy with the Russian perspective in order to critique it more adequately.

Sovereign Democracy: Coined in the 2000s, this doctrine redefines democracy as self-determined governance reflecting national traditions rather than Western liberal norms. It legitimizes political centralization as moral autonomy.

Post-Soviet Humiliation: The 1990s “shock therapy” and perceived Western betrayal, including broken verbal assurances on NATO non-expansion and the economic collapse of the Yeltsin years, arguably deeper and more profound than the US depression of the 1930's, produced a trauma narrative of deception and recovery.

Orthodox Moral Order: Within Russian discourse, especially under Patriarch Kirill and cultural conservatives, Russia is cast as guardian of traditional morality against Western decadence. The geopolitical becomes metaphysical: the defense of divine order against chaos.

These are not mere rhetorical devices. They shape how Russia frames threats and legitimacy. When Putin speaks of “denazification,” he invokes not Nazi ideology per se but a mythic pattern: Russia defending the sacred Motherland from Western moral contagion. Visser's “realism” omits this texture. In doing so, his analysis predicts Russian behavior without acknowledging its assumptions and priorities.

Strategic Empathy as a Prelude to Civilizational Empathy

Visser calls for “strategic empathy,” to recognize legitimate security interests on all sides. However, there are no Russian sources, no citations from Lavrov's speeches, no references to the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, which explicitly describes Russia as a “distinct civilization-state.”

The Russian Foreign Policy Concept (2023) opens with a telling assertion:

“Russia is a distinct civilization, a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power that brings together the Russian people and other peoples who share the cultural and civilizational ideals of the Russian world.”

This is not mere propaganda. It expresses the worldview within which sovereignty, morality, and destiny are defined. Strategic empathy must start by entering this language, even if only to understand how it legitimizes aggression.

There is no mention of thinkers such as Sergei Karaganov, Fyodor Lukyanov, or Alexander Dugin, each of whom articulates the philosophical and moral self-understanding behind Russia's geopolitical actions. Without engaging those voices, empathy remains abstract, a psychological attitude rather than an epistemological method. However, Visser has, in previous essays critiqued Alexander Dugin, although largely through a Western lens, and addressed Russophobia and Russophilia in Western countries, as well as pro- and anti-Western perspectives in Russia.

Consider Karaganov's 2023 essay, “A Difficult but Necessary Decision,” where he argues that Russia's nuclear deterrence is not only strategic but moral: to prevent Western domination, Russia must be willing to assume the “burden of historical responsibility.”

Such texts reveal a moral grammar utterly different from Western utilitarianism. They speak the language of sacrifice, destiny, and providence, echoes of Orthodox eschatology rather than Enlightenment rationality.

Visser's essay gestures toward empathy but never crosses into this terrain. He acknowledges Russia's fear but does not inhabit it. He interprets anxiety as a structural variable, not as a lived cosmology. Thus, “strategic empathy” remains performative: an exhortation to empathize without a method to do so.

Toward Civilizational Empathy

To move beyond this impasse, empathy must be reconceived not merely as emotional identification or diplomatic understanding, but as civilizational translation. True empathy translates worldspaces, not just intentions. It requires seeing how entire civilizations enact meaning, how they define truth, order, and the sacred. In integral terms, Visser's essay operates within a single cognitive holon: the Western modern rational worldview. It fails to include the mythic-traditional consciousness that structures Russia's moral self-concept. “Transcend and include” here would mean recognizing that modern rational analysis is itself a partial mode of knowing, one layer within a broader civilizational ecology.

Civilizational empathy asks:

• What does “security” mean in a worldview shaped by collective trauma?
• What does “law” mean where Orthodoxy conceives justice as harmony with divine order in addition to contractual fairness?
• What does “truth” mean in a political culture that privileges both symbolic coherence and factual transparency?

These are uncomfortable questions because they decentralize Western epistemology. Yet without them, empathy becomes moral narcissism—the projection of our categories onto the Other.

Beyond the Western Mirror

While Visser's effort to balance moral principle and geopolitical realism is commendable, the synthesis he seeks, in the form of moral realism. remains incomplete without cultural pluralism. It reconciles Western moral idealism with Western political realism, yet never leaves the Western frame itself.

To genuinely embody “strategic empathy,” we must grant Russia epistemic agency, the right to define its own worldview, even when we reject its consequences. Empathy, in this sense, does not mean agreement. It means understanding the logic of the Other well enough to negotiate, deter, or transform it.

The alternative is what we now witness: two civilizations shouting across a cognitive gulf, each convinced of its moral self-evidence. The West speaks the language of law and rights; Russia replies with that of destiny and security. Both are coherent within their own moral cosmologies; both appear pathological to the other. Until our analyses account for this, “strategic empathy” will remain a noble slogan, not a functional strategy.

Toward Integral Geopolitics

An integral approach to geopolitics would expand the field of analysis from structure and morality to ontological diversity. It would ask not only what nations want, but how they construct the real. In this frame, realism and idealism are not opposites but nested perspectives within a larger evolutionary process. Realists like John Mearsheimer attend to power and survival, evolution's homeostatic pole. Idealists attend to value and justice, evolution's emergent pole. Civilizational empathy would balance both through evolutionary repair, restoring coherence across fragmented worldspaces by understanding the lawful interiority of each. Only by seeing Russia not merely as a power but as a meaning-system, one with its own internal logic and mythic coherence, can Western analysis mature beyond reaction to comprehension.

From Moral Realism to Civilizational Realism

Visser's essay invites moral realism but stops short of what might be called civilizational realism, the recognition that civilizations, like organisms, act from self-constructed meanings, not merely from strategic interests. To “practice strategic empathy” is therefore not to sympathize with an aggressor but to see through its eyes long enough to anticipate its moves, comprehend its logic, and re-enter dialogue at the level of worldview. Until we do that, the West will continue debating itself. Moralists and realists will continue arguing in English about a war whose grammar is written in Russian.

While empathy at any depth is important, as long as power remains unconstrained by international law, it is unlikely to amount to much more than virtue signaling. That is because empathy itself can be expressed as an intent and a value, independent of external quadrant behavior. Until and unless empathy is operationalized in ways that meets with broad global acceptance, it is unlikely to result in solutions that stand the tests of time.

References

The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, March 31 2023.

Sergei Karaganov, “A Difficult but Necessary Decision,” Russia in Global Affairs, June 2023.

Fyodor Lukyanov, “Russian Dilemmas in a Multi-Polar World,” Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2010, Vol. 63, No. 2.

Alexander Dugin, Foundations of Geopolitics, Arktogeja, 1997.

NOTES

[1] This is covered in: Frank Visser, "Inside the Russian Frame: Civilization, Sovereignty, and Security Trauma", www.integralworld.net, November 2025 (FV).