This document is born and sustained by the inspiration, impulse, and extensive comments provided by the philosopher José Luis Villacañas. The intellectual dialogue that took place during the months of July and August built this manuscript. I am deeply grateful for the editing and the comments that José Luis made on my text. I can do nothing but dedicate my humble work to him.
Thank you for pushing me to continue, José Luis.
Thanks to comrades Noam Chomsky and Boaventura de Sousa Santos for their support and trust.
Thanks to Simone Medina Polo, a magnificent intellectual and a faithful comrade, for the comments.
We are entering a “new normality” that is being configured and constructed in plain view for everyone to see. The only ones who refuse to think and define our present time as the entrance into a new form of normal existence between wars are precisely those who carry out this transformation. They pretend to advance strategically amidst silence. Headlines such as “Global instability is the New Normality” (Alonso, 2022); “New Normality of a Possible War” (Cuesta, 2022) “Today war is the new normality” (Mendoza, 2024); “Armament, the ‘new normality’?” (Vallejos 2024) do nothing but confirm the urgency of the hypothesis that the “construction of a new normality” (Barria-Asenjo, 2021; 2024) is different from the one that we are supposed to live in. The renewal of ideology today is undeniable (Barria-Asenjo, 2025).
Let us now delve into key points of this issue. I will begin by establishing the concept of proxy wars as a strategic move in which two or more rival powers indirectly confront each other in a war scenario that affects other countries. It is a confrontation between those who have or aspire to have or increase their power and influence, but by indirect means. For this reason, other countries are used as substitutes.
It is a war strategy that is currently being used in the U.S.-Russia rivalry. Ukraine is nothing more than the disguise and the country sacrificed for U.S. ambitions and strategic objectives — it is a direct challenge to Russia’s geostrategic aspirations. This is a move that allows indirect friction between the enemy sides, which sustains the confrontation, the rivalry, and increases the tension and pressure that occurs between the two powers. In this sense, we have to understand that Russia invades Ukraine as a direct reaction to the US and against the presence of NATO at its borders. NATO is nothing but the living and expanding presence of the US’s spectre.
In this proxy war, if the United States beats Russia, it also beats another of its direct rivals: China. China’s advance in recent years positions it as the most direct economic rival to U.S. interests[1]. This economic rivalry implies a geostrategic rivalry derived from the control of trade routes and military bases. Ukraine in the Russian-Chinese sphere will make possible the completion by land and sea of the Silk Road, the road that would link Eurasia for Chinese trade.
Europe has been dragged into this war that breaches its borders, like a beached whale, forced into a war that breaks all the trade links it had previously woven with Russia and involves it in a war against its constituent proclamations as a sphere of peace. It is thus involved in a conflict which it did not provoke, showing once again its inability to control what is happening on its own borders. Its hands are thus tied on the wrong side of history, as it is seen in its complicity with Israel. This lack of strategic autonomy allows us to say that Europe has no chance of providing security for the European population.
It is undeniable that the European Union has not been able to build a hopeful horizon for its own population in a manner consistent with its own founding premises. Hopelessness is shown in the lack of security and stability of the EU in the restlessness of its populations as well as in the emergence of authoritarian and securitarian political phenomena. The instability of the EU puts the whole world in a situation of vulnerability. Let us remember that Yugoslavia, with its strict federalism, showed a constitution akin to the one that the European Union intended to propose as its own. Yugoslavia promised a new mode of co-existence between ethnic differences and peoples perfectly compatible with the EU. However, a war was declared on it as if it were the enemy of the world because it escaped the proposals and lines of existence promoted by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the entire West.
The destruction of Yugoslavia[2] created a return to hatred and a dissolution of the climate of peace that deeply marked history. This showed that the expansive aspirations of the EU were not exactly peaceful. Today, there is an attempt to forget this moment of war in order to once again incorporate peace, international solidarity, and new normalities. But in reality, these appeals take place against the backdrop of a conflictual scenario that makes them impossible to sustain. We live in a world whose only reality is that of conflict, war, and therefore the entry into a new normality between wars. The end of this process cannot be anticipated. But we cannot discount that it will be the end of the West as we know it. This is in itself a possible horizon if these processes move forward repeating the bad decisions of history.
One of the theses I am inclined to defend is that: today the role, the duty, and the responsibility of intellectuals becomes imperative more than ever. This is another battlefront in the midst of this new normality between wars. The privileged place of intellectuals in the 21st century brings with it the need to incorporate critical perspectives into dominant discourses by way of a daily task of avoiding intellectual laziness — instead working for the benefit of new horizons to deploy political commitments and the construction of new modes of international collaboration. The warning, the critique, the invitation to reflect, the rigorous analysis, and the contrast of information are places that must be taken up by the intellectuals of our time. Thus they must actively join the field of the battle for the history of ideas of the 21st century (Barria-Asenjo 2025, 2026).
Returning to the context of war conflicts, let us recall that the British economist John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, where he detailed that the agreement signed under the name “Treaty of Versailles” was a document that contained an excessive punishment towards Germany. Keynes consequently announced that these measures would lead to the collapse of Germany, causing deep wounds to Europe — that is, it would lead to catastrophic consequences not only for Europe but for the world. The passage of history only confirms his thesis. The lesson we draw from this historical moment is that the negotiation of peace is often the seed of future wars, even more ruthless than those left behind. Peace can also become an ideology that hides its conflictual productivity.
In this sense, we can affirm that the search for authentic discourses for peace and the criticism of the ideology of peace become more necessary than ever today. We must apply appropriate critical studies to these fields. Are we entering the historical moment in which Europe is coming to an end? What path will Europe choose amid the evident tension in the quest for power and hegemony between Russia and the United States? What options does it really have?
In personal exchanges, the Spanish philosopher José Luis Villacañas (2024) stated the following:
Europe has to find its own way, this is true. But today the war between the Arab world and Israel makes it unviable. This complicity with Israel is contrary to all its theoretical premises, to all its intellectual and moral commitments to human rights. But let us broaden our view: it is about the Palestine/Syria front, Ukraine, Iran. Once again, it is about controlling the heart of Asia. With this, Europe, which is supposed to be a Union based on peace, has war on its border, at its doors, of which it must be a part… And that is because today there is a decision for war. This is not related to one leader or another, but to a very strong lobby of the arms industry, media industry, oil industry, and security industry which requires very firm geostrategic decisions. Today, thinking about peace is a fundamental discourse[3].
For his part, the Portuguese sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2024) in personal exchanges highlights the following:
One hundred years after the First World War, European leaders are sleepwalking towards a new total war. As in 1914, they think that the war in Ukraine will be limited and short-lived. In 1914, it was said in the ministries that the war would last three weeks. It lasted four years with more than twenty million dead. Just as in 1918, today the dominant position is that it is necessary to punish the aggressor power in an exemplary manner to leave it prostrate and humiliated for a long time. In 1918, the defeated power was Germany (and also the Ottoman Empire). There were dissenting voices (John Maynard Keynes and others) for whom the total humiliation of Germany would be disastrous for the reconstruction of Europe, for lasting peace on the continent and the world at large. They were not heard, and 21 years later Europe was again at war. Five years of destruction followed with more than seventy million dead. History repeats itself and apparently teaches nothing[4].
Let’s try to undertake a chronological analysis and explanation. During 2021, in the midst of the global crisis due to COVID-19, when the entire world was focused on surviving and facing the threat of a new virus, other viruses quietly settled on the political scene. Just to mention one event, during this period the AUKUS agreement was announced, which links the United States, Australia and England producing a new provocation for Russia and a new marginalization of Europe[5].
We are facing what the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia (2021) defines as a process of “Metamorphosis,” something that is beyond teleological and evolutionary proposals that view progress as a royal road for humanity. There is a developmental metamorphosis that does not imply a dualistic division or a simplistic good/bad difference in relation to the stages of history, but rather a constant development that impacts the future of the species as well as the future of societies and their democracy. It is worth asking: on which side of history is and will Europe be? Could it be that European leaders are not up to the challenges that history today imposes on them? On which list will the names of current European leaders be placed, when the dust of history settles into confronting current conditions and the future repercussions tied to their decisions? Everything indicates that both Europe and the US fear for their future. They no longer see themselves as undisputed hegemonic actors. They feel alone and in decline, living the repercussions of the steps and strategies that they have promoted, maintaining their impeccable and unquestionable positioning on the wrong side of history. In short, they are insecure and they move in search of radical assurances of their hegemonic victory driven by their own insecurity. And this perspective depends on the hidden premise of the whole new process: the consideration of Russia as the heir of the defeat suffered by the USSR and the illusion that Russia would cease to be a strategic actor. Obviously, this was an illusion that they could not get rid of.
All this explains why we have been immersed in an exponential growth of war conflict since 2000. The global situation today is tense and the dangers that emerge are felt with greater intensity while the wheels of history move along. There are various elements that must be analyzed today, when we have on the one hand the global crisis derived from the slowdown in world trade as well as the economic and technological transformations that were largely intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This brutal wave of events has produced an intensification of authoritarian impulses in the West and the impotence of the left — a left that has lost its way discursively to the extent that it does not respond clearly to this international situation, actively joining the dominant struggle. We are facing a fierce international competition also from the intellectual point of view, in which any critic of current conflicts is publicly sacrificed.
In communication theory, we find the interesting phenomenon of “character assassination” that can shed light on this moment. It is a phenomenon that can be applied here if we analyze the productions of the Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek. In his case, we see the demonization and sacrifice of the author, without analyzing, contrasting or refuting his arguments and ideas. It does not matter what position Žižek took in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic (Žižek, 2021; 2022), Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Žižek, 2023;2024) or his position on the Israel-Palestine conflict; (Žižek, 2023; 2024) in all cases he was used as a scapegoat and his proposals were sacrificed. The response was always an accelerated empty criticism, even though it should not leave anyone on the current left indifferent. We are faced with a phenomenon that is mostly identifiable in Slavoj’s work, but which transcends intellectual work throughout the world. Everywhere we see the left against the left. Thus, we are condemned to live in a time of war that increasingly fuels war in various spaces. Thus, the confrontation is fueled on all fronts.
We are faced with a situation of compact confrontation with a firm position that embraces and decides on war as its only goal in which any discourse that seeks peace, criticism, information, unity, and the end of war is quickly translated and interpreted as an ally of the enemy. Today, any critical perspective, any problematization of war conflicts, or any philosophical perspective on the current situation oriented towards peace is considered treason. This condemns the best contemporary critics to rejection, humiliation, and merciless attack for defending some non-aligned position. In the end, the argument does not matter. Everyone agrees that any attempt to talk about peace and international solidarity is absurd. There is a decision for war, a simplistic approach to the division of good and evil, and a global moral panic that goes against any contrast or contextualization.
The real absurdity is that, in the 21st century, after all the knowledge and experiences of the First and Second World Wars, it is still impossible to talk about peace even in Europe officially unified under the Kantian sign of moving towards perpetual peace. The real absurdity is that after global public knowledge of the ecological crisis and the repercussions of technological advances, this path continues. Another end of the world is still possible.
We must identify the extraordinary influence that this international situation has on the way in which national policies are developed. Peace discourses today become essential to eradicate the power and importance that hate speech has today. The other, the presence of the other, of the different, closeness, and solidarity were increased with the appearance of the COVID-19 virus. The curious thing is that the time of pandemics persists, that viruses have become normalized, whose threat has become potentially omnipresent. Today, new forms of viruses even more lethal than COVID-19 can be present in the contemporary world. However, the global mentality that this threat requires is not present. Why is there no international alarm around the virus of war? The virus of war which today continues to spread with the same power throughout the world, hindering the present and blocking the future. Are we entering a fragmented Third World War that will disrupt and exterminate a good portion of the world?
The betrayal of global historical memory implied in this whole situation is felt and experienced today around the world, preventing the elaboration of historical traumas and preparing us to repeat them. Once again, a battle without limits has been undertaken that directly threatens the future of humanity and the well-being of the species.
To conclude my reflection, I consider it relevant today to think about the psychic repercussions of these attempts at compact colonization of subjectivity through the incorporation of radical dualities of friend/enemy in which an attempt is made to indoctrinate the masses, censoring certain information, and allowing only some discursive perspectives to corrupt the capacity for analysis and reflection. War seems to be made invisible in some media. It is seen as a natural reality, as a necessary consequence, and thus a fierce competition is promoted to achieve success. And all this at a time that could mean the historical failure of the species as such.
It is necessary to incline ourselves to think about some fundamental questions that invite us to have as a pillar the book Manufacturing Consent by the great intellectual Noam Chomsky. Let us look at the words of Noam Chomsky himself regarding this book:
The title actually is from a book by Walter Lippmann, written back around 1991 in which he described what he called the manufacture of consent as a revolution in the practice of democracy what it amounts to is a technique of control and he said this was useful and necessary because the common interests, the general concerns of all people, elude the public, the public just isn’t up to dealing with them. And they have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class….you can notice that is the opposite, for example, the stander view about the democracy, by the highly respected moralist and Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was very influential for on contemporary policymakers, his view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason but faith and this naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent over-simplifications, which are provided by the myth maker, to keep the ordinary person on course. It’s not the case as the naive might think that indoctrination is not consistent with democracy, rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes, and it’s the essence of democracy.
Democratic societies are faced with a major conflict: they no longer seem to be guided by the principle of the formation of a free, informed, responsible, and autonomous conscience but rather pose the opposite as their main problem: How to maintain control over what people think? Why is it necessary to have control in terms of human thought?
As Foucault and Deleuze saw in their day, this aspiration forged what the latter called control societies. What is specific to Foucault’s argument is that this control can be experienced in a form of freedom. It is about the birth of a “more human” form of control, a new, more accepted and normalized form of control — a structuring and domination that can be maintained within democratic orders without military forces, without physical torture, and apparently without visible repercussions. In this scenario, the new media have emerged as the mass media, the necessary auxiliaries of global capitalism which have become an important centre of control in societies by allowing certain discourses and certain ideological products to colonise the human psyche without leaving any trace of the colonisation process itself. A new form of colonisation is taking place in our time. And just as the commercial needs of a certain press led to the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars, the commercial forms of the new media impose a mentality which, even without the violence of arms, has already prepared the psyche to exercise it. This communicative violence is always the prelude to physical violence.
The repercussions of this indoctrination and mass numbing in the 21st century can be seen in the growing number of mental health problems, panic attacks, anxiety attacks, depression, and many other mental health dilemmas. All of these are repercussions of the processes of psychological domination and colonization that are imposed on human beings from the moment of birth.
These new technologies of our time are an important ideological element, something normalized and little questioned. They produce the illusion of mass control, giving the illusion of unlimited information and false freedom while enabling the creation and maintenance of a certain dominant reality and ideas. All of this is possible because they constitute the central part of the new worlds of life, stabilizing habits and experiences around a personality incapable of achieving a strong psyche equipped with cultural tools, beecause most digital pressures alter and hinder human creative potential and the configuration of new possible normalities. The information that is permitted and that which is filtered or censored is selected with the aim of avoiding tensions with the established order and of guiding primary expressive impulses.
This system, which tends to generate isolated subjectivities that only relate expressively to their network communities, produces hierarchical distinctions between knowledge and access to knowledge that break the dialogic forms of what Habermas called in his time “worlds of life.” It is at this level that we must situate the changes that we experience. In the world of conversational life, every human being is capable of gaining an idea of what is happening in the world today, through their particular experiences and fundamental responses. In the world of network life, on the contrary, the same indoctrination in networks and the forms validated by the system hinder these non-specialized forms of knowledge that were characteristic of societies. Noam Chomsky states the following: “What remarkable creativity ordinary people have, the very fact that people talk to one another is a reflection, and just in a normal way, nothing particularly fancy, reflects deep-seated features of human creativity, which in fact separate human beings, from any other biological system we know.” As Freud said, there is a drive to see and to know. Everyone wants information. That is why ideology and those who are in power (and want to stay in power) select and manufacture the information that will be given to the masses, giving them a completely passive view and knowledge that reminds them of the Egyptian forms of visual propaganda. They thus block all creative power and all social awakening. Today we all pay to submit to their control and we give up their freedoms through likes.
The current times dominated by the illusion of total control and a world in dispute are capable of dragging humanity into a much more chaotic moment than the one we are living in. The consequences of the picture I have tried to describe cannot but be increasingly serious. If we do not stop the war strategies that continue to advance slowly, we will only be able to announce the uncontrolled increase of new forms of crisis that still seem unimaginable to us but which will be normalized by permanent global destruction.
FOOTNOTES
[1] To expand the argument: “Russia is at war with NATO’s presence at its borders and NATO is a military organization serving the geopolitical interests of the United States. Suffice it to recall that NATO’s supreme commander for Europe is ‘traditionally an American military officer.’ It is because of U.S. pressure that arms and fighters are being sent to Ukraine and that the military budgets of all European countries are being increased. This war is a sign of the post-Cold War era, because, like the Cold War, it is dominated by the doctrine of zones of influence. Russia still considers the countries around it (which belonged to the Soviet Union and before that to the Russian Empire) as countries in its zone of influence, just as the United States considers Central and Latin America as its zone of influence, which has recently moved from being a backyard to a front yard. Let us hope that this rise is not a poisoned gift. The two contenders share a very relative view of self-determination. They promote it only when it suits them. The gravity of this dimension of the military war lies in the fact that while Russia (then the USSR) recognized the US zone of influence in 1962 (the missile crisis), the United States does not recognize the Russian zone of influence. They assume that the end of the Soviet Union was a defeat for Russia and a victory for the US, which was obviously not the case. For the United States, all of Europe (which for them does not include Russia), not just the former ‘Western Europe,’ is now its zone of influence.” (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Manuscript 2025).
This is the fundamental thesis. The asymmetry of which Boaventura speaks, however, is broken by the presence of Russia in Nicaragua and Venezuela. With this, Russia is responding symmetrically to the USA. Naturally, those who suffer from this symmetry are Latin America and Europe, which are unable to deploy themselves as large independent spaces.
[2] Let us revisit a passage written by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos: “The new Balkan war, in the early 1990s, thus became the first war on European soil since 1945. All the contenders committed unprecedented violence: but for the West, the villains were only the Serbs, all the other peoples were heroic nationalists. Western countries (Germany at the head) were quick to recognise the independence of the new republics in the name of human rights and the protection of minorities. In 1991, Kosovo demanded independence from Serbia in a referendum and eight years later NATO bombed Belgrade to impose the will of the Kosovars. What is the difference between Kosovo and Donbass, where ethnically Russian republics held referendums in which they voted in favour of independence? None, except that Kosovo was supported by NATO and the Donbass republics are supported by Russia. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 provided for the large autonomy of these regions. Ukraine refused to comply with them. Therefore, these agreements were broken long before Putin did the same. What is the difference between the threat to its security that Russia feels from NATO’s advance and the “missile crisis” of 1962, when the Soviets tried to install missiles in Cuba and the United States, threatened in its security, promised to defend itself with all means, including nuclear war? The answer to the question of how and why we have come to this point lies fundamentally in a strategic error of the United States and NATO: that of not having seen that they were never in a unipolar world dominated by them. When the first Cold War ended, China was on the rise with the enthusiastic support of American companies seeking low wages. Thus, the new American rival germinated and with it the new cold war we are entering, potentially more serious than the previous one. Set on not recognizing its decline, from the chaotic exit from Afghanistan to the mediocre performance in the pandemic, the United States insists on escaping forward — and in this strategy, it intends to drag Europe along. Europe will pay a high price for what is happening. The highest of all will fall on Germany, the engine of the European economy and the only true competitor of the United States. It is easy to conclude who will benefit from the coming crisis, and I am not referring only to who will supply the oil and gas. At the same time, the attempt to isolate Russia, especially from 2014 onwards, is directed above all at China.”
This point by Boaventura is the central issue. What intensifies the need to occupy Russia’s zones of influence is the new geostrategic decision to consider China a potentially hostile competitor. This implies having a strategy on Asia and this implies reducing Russia’s control over North Asia. The whole issue therefore depends on China.
[3] Personal exchanges with the Spanish philosopher on the European situation, August, 2024.
[4] Personal exchanges with the Portuguese Sociologist regarding war conflicts. I am grateful for the fragments which are extracted from his manuscript to be published in 2025. In this text, he analyzes the war in Ukraine.
[5] Taking up Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2025) again: “The on-going peace negotiations are premised under an equivocation. It doesn’t make sense that they place between Russia and Ukraine. They should instead happen between Russia and the United States/NATO/European Union. The 1962 missile crisis was resolved between the U.S.S.R and the United States. Did anyone remember to call Fidel Castro for the negotiations? It is a cruel illusion to think that there will be lasting peace in Europe without a real compromise by the Occident. Ukraine, whose independence we all want, shouldn’t join NATO. Do Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, or Austria need NATO still to feel safe and to be able to develop? In fact, NATO should have to be dismantled as soon as the Warsaw pact has ended. Only then could the European Union have created a political and military force that would respond to its own interests and not the U.S.’s. What threat was there for European security that would justify NATO’s interventions in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2004), and Libya (2011)? After all of this, is it still possible to consider NATO a defensive organization?”
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