The War of Narratives and Diplomacy Made Impossible

Glenn Diesen’s intervention at the United Nations as an indictment of the Western media system

The War of Narratives and Diplomacy Made Impossible

Glenn Diesen’s intervention at the United Nations as an indictment of the Western media system

The intervention delivered by Glenn Diesen at the United Nations Security Council on February 22, 2026, and later published in Italian translation, was not a simple academic contribution on the Ukrainian conflict. It was, on the contrary, a genuine indictment of the way the West has narrated, distorted, and ultimately politically rigidified the war in Ukraine. The core of his argument is clear: the conflict is not fought only on the ground, in the trenches and command centers, but also in the information space, where the media shape public perception, define what is allowed to be said, and, above all, make certain political decisions possible or impossible. In that sense, propaganda is not secondary. It is an integral part of war itself.

Diesen was supposed to be present in person in New York, but his flight was canceled and no alternative could get him there in time. He therefore delivered his remarks remotely, explaining from the outset that he intended to address precisely this point: how the conflict in Ukraine has unfolded both on the battlefield and in the information domain, and why the manipulation of narratives by the media, together with the demonization of the adversary, represents a direct danger to any prospect of peace.

Walter Lippmann and the mechanism of wartime propaganda

To build his argument, Diesen invokes one of the great classics of reflection on political propaganda: Walter Lippmann. The reference is not ornamental; it is decisive. Lippmann, after working for the United States government during the First World War, came to understand that liberal democracies tend to present conflicts as absolute clashes between Good and Evil. This is not merely a rhetorical simplification: it is a tool for mobilizing consent, disciplining public opinion, and making the continuation of war appear morally mandatory.

The danger, Lippmann observed, and Diesen repeats, is that once public opinion has been convinced that the enemy embodies absolute evil, it becomes almost impossible to accept a realistic solution. In a war described as a moral crusade, compromise no longer appears as prudence, but as appeasement of evil. Peace is no longer the objective; the only acceptable outcome becomes the total defeat of the adversary. This is the crucial point: propaganda does not merely support war, it destroys the very ground on which a workable peace could be built.

Reciprocal security versus ideological moralism

Diesen insists on a basic principle of international strategy: security cannot be understood only from one’s own point of view. Every state seeks to increase its own security, but in doing so it often reduces the security of others. This competition for security lies at the heart of international politics. The first step toward a shared peace, therefore, is not to proclaim one’s moral superiority, but to place oneself in the position of the adversary and recognize the existence of reciprocal concerns.

This is where the most disturbing point of his criticism emerges. If the conflict is framed as a struggle of Good against Evil, then even trying to understand the adversary’s motives becomes an act of betrayal. Anyone who attempts to look at the world from another perspective is immediately branded a “Putinist,” a supporter of the enemy, an apologist. Diesen broadens the point beyond the Russian case and observes that the same pattern applies elsewhere, whenever dissent is dismissed through stigmatizing labels in other crisis theaters. In other words, strategic analysis is no longer permitted: what remains is only a moral liturgy of belonging.

He makes a particularly harsh observation here: if the generations of the Cold War had possessed this same degree of political immaturity, the world likely would not have survived. The point is not polemical, but historical. Managing nuclear confrontation required the capacity to understand the adversary’s point of view. Today, by contrast, that very exercise is often denounced as disloyalty.

The media as constructors of reality

According to Diesen, the media do not merely report facts. They often socially construct them, selecting what enters the frame, what must be omitted, and what may be interpreted in only one way. Journalists, in this context, cease to be observers and become combatants in the information space.

The examples he cites are highly specific. Openly acknowledging the losses of the Ukrainian armed forces becomes problematic because it might reduce public support for continuing the war. Admitting that sanctions are not achieving the promised results becomes equally inconvenient, because it could weaken support for the economic weapon. As a result, reality is often subordinated to the preservation of the narrative. The function of information is no longer to explain the conflict, but to prevent consensus from cracking.

This, according to Diesen, confirms exactly Lippmann’s warning: loyalty to the narrative ends by closing every space for a peaceful solution. If the public is trained to think that every doubt amounts to surrender and every negotiation constitutes a reward for aggression, then every diplomatic proposal is delegitimized before it is even made.

The construction of the Russian enemy: weak and all-powerful

One of the sharpest passages in the speech concerns the double image of Russia conveyed by Western media. On the one hand, Moscow is described as backward, inefficient, incapable of lasting success, marked by structural limitations and an inferior military apparatus. On the other hand, that same Russia is portrayed as an almost irresistible threat, potentially capable of overrunning Europe if not stopped immediately.

This contradiction is not accidental. It serves to produce two simultaneous effects: to fuel fear and, at the same time, to reassure Western public opinion about the possibility of victory. The enemy must appear dangerous enough to justify sacrifices, but also vulnerable enough to make the promise of final success believable. This is a classic mechanism of wartime propaganda: create a monstrous adversary who can still be defeated, provided the conflict continues.

The “unprovoked invasion” as political dogma

Diesen identifies the phrase “unprovoked invasion” as the foundational narrative of the entire conflict. It is politically decisive because it does not merely describe the Russian military act: it also sets the boundaries of permissible discourse. If the war is “unprovoked,” then Russia appears as a purely expansionist and imperial power, driven by a will to conquest unrelated to any prior strategic context. Consequently, discussing causes, red lines, or security dynamics becomes suspect. Any such attempt is accused of trying to “legitimize” the invasion.

Diesen considers this narrative extremely dangerous for one precise reason: if the dimension of provocation is excluded from the outset, then every compromise is presented as a reward to the aggressor. Peace can therefore no longer come through diplomacy, but only through increasing the military costs imposed on the enemy. From this follows the idea, now almost taken for granted in many Western circles, that peace is achieved by sending more weapons. It is no accident, Diesen recalls, that even senior figures in the Atlantic Alliance have argued that “weapons are the path to peace.” This is the complete inversion of political language: war is sold as an instrument of stabilization, while diplomacy is pushed into the realm of complicity.

The risk of escalation with a nuclear power

The strategic consequence of this narrative blindness is, for Diesen, terrifying. If the conflict was in fact provoked by the systematic erosion of Russian security, by the advance of NATO, and by the transformation of Ukraine into a frontline state, then the West is not dealing with a peripheral war, but with an escalating spiral involving the world’s largest nuclear power, one that believes it is engaged in an existential conflict.

Here his thesis is not moral, but military. A nuclear power that perceives its survival to be under threat does not reason according to the reassuring formulas of Western political communication. Ignoring that perception makes the crisis more unstable and more dangerous. That is why Diesen calls for a return to the language of reciprocal security: not in order to absolve Russia, but to avoid a potentially catastrophic miscalculation.

NATO expansion and the destruction of European security

To support the argument of provocation, Diesen recalls a long series of warnings issued since the 1990s by major Western figures: politicians, intelligence chiefs, ambassadors, diplomats. All had warned about the consequences of NATO’s eastward expansion. According to him, that expansion did not enlarge security, but destroyed the foundations of a shared pan-European security order, replacing it with a new logic of continental division, with increasingly exposed lines of fracture and strategic borders.

The reference to George Kennan is central. Kennan had predicted that NATO enlargement would trigger a new Cold War. He also made a remarkably lucid observation: once the Russian reaction had been provoked, the very same advocates of expansion would use it as proof that “the Russians are like that.” This is a circular mechanism: first create the dynamic of confrontation, then present the adversary’s reaction as confirmation of its original aggressiveness.

Diesen denounces the refusal of the media to acknowledge this evidence, because doing so would mean admitting that the West helped create the conditions for the conflict. And to admit that, under the current narrative regime, would mean cracking the dogma of Western innocence.

The ignored red lines: Merkel, Lyne, and Burns

The speech then turns to a series of Western statements which, taken together, define with striking clarity what a “provoked war” means.

Angela Merkel, Diesen recalls, had acknowledged that offering Ukraine a Membership Action Plan for NATO would be interpreted in Moscow as a declaration of war. Former British ambassador to Russia Roderic Lyne described that course as “stupid on every level,” adding that if one wanted to start a war with Russia, that was the best way to do it. And William Burns, then director of the C.I.A., had warned that attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO would very likely trigger Russian military intervention, something Moscow would have preferred to avoid but would regard as necessary.

For Diesen, these statements are so explicit that they effectively amount to a definition of strategic provocation. And yet, he notes, the term remains forbidden in Western media discourse. It is prohibited not because it is false, but because it is politically intolerable.

2014: the coup, Maidan, and Ukraine’s entry into the Atlantic orbit

Diesen’s reconstruction gives broad attention to 2014, presented as the decisive turning point. According to him, NATO countries supported the coup that brought Ukraine into the Western orbit, presenting it as a triumph of democracy. But in his view, that representation concealed the substance of what took place.

Viktor Yanukovych, he reminds the audience, had been elected in free and fair elections. His removal was not a normal political alternation, but a rupture that violated the Ukrainian constitution. Even the Maidan uprising, he adds, did not enjoy the support of the majority of Ukrainians. In other words, the Western narrative of a spontaneous and linear democratic revolution erased the deeply divisive and conflictual nature of that moment.

Diesen also highlights a significant fact: for a brief time in 2014, Western media themselves reported that the new government in Kiev was attacking the Donbas and striking civilians who rejected the legitimacy of the new political order. C.N.N. even asked whether the population of the Donbas would ever again accept being governed by Kiev. But that window was short-lived. Very quickly, Diesen argues, the full narrative of Russia’s demonization took hold, and resistance in the Donbas was reduced to a mere Russian operation against Ukraine’s democratization.

Intelligence services, purges, and Ukraine’s internal transformation

After 2014, Diesen continues, a reality emerged that the media treated with extreme caution or simply ignored. From the day after the change of power, American and British intelligence services allegedly established a partnership with the new head of Ukrainian intelligence to rebuild the security services as an instrument against Russia. Ukraine’s prosecutor general, he notes, even stated that the United States was governing Ukraine after the coup.

To this were added arrests of members of parliament, revocations of citizenship, media purges, marginalization of the Russian language, attacks against the Orthodox Church, and, year after year, the killing of civilians in the Donbas. All of this, according to Diesen, was largely erased from the dominant Western discourse because it conflicted with the image of a purely democratic Ukraine fully aligned with the values proclaimed by the West.

The sabotage of the Minsk agreements and the peace mandate denied to Zelensky

Another central point concerns the failure of the Minsk agreements. Diesen argues that Ukrainian nationalists, journalists, and Western political figures undermined from within that opportunity for settlement, preventing a solution that might have stabilized the country. In this context, he recalls that Zelensky came to power in 2019 with a mandate oriented toward peace, but was immediately surrounded by internal “red lines” that prevented him from carrying it out.

This is not a minor detail. For Diesen, the sabotage of Minsk shows that the problem was not only Moscow’s intransigence, but also the existence of a political and media bloc that prevented the path of compromise even when it formally existed.

To reinforce this point, he cites the assessment of the principal adviser to the former French president, according to whom the signing of the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership Charter in November 2021 convinced Russia that it had to “attack or be attacked.” This is a passage of major significance, because it places escalation not in a vacuum, but in a precise sequence of political and strategic choices.

If this had happened in Mexico

Diesen then uses a deliberately provocative but effective comparison. If Russia or China had carried out in Mexico the same moves the West carried out in Ukraine, he argues, no one in the West would have hesitated to call them intolerable provocations. This double standard, in his view, proves that the issue is not factual analysis, but the subordination of judgment to the geopolitical position of the actor involved.

The strategic importance of this point lies precisely here: the principle of security cannot apply only to oneself. If a certain political-military penetration in a sensitive area is judged legitimate when carried out by the West and intolerable when carried out by others, then we are no longer in the realm of law or security, but in that of pure hegemony.

Russia’s objectives in 2022 and the question of neutrality

Diesen also challenges another key element of the media narrative: the idea that from the very first day Russia intended to use all its power to conquer the whole of Ukraine. In his interpretation, the relatively limited number of troops deployed at the start and the nature of the initial military operations were inconsistent with a plan of total conquest. They pointed instead to a more limited political-strategic objective: forcing Kiev to restore neutrality and renounce entry into NATO.

For Diesen, this is not about absolving Russia’s military initiative, but about understanding its strategic rationality. The media, in his view, avoided this analysis because admitting it would have meant acknowledging that the war was not born from an irrational urge to conquer, but from a struggle over Europe’s security architecture.

The March 2022 negotiations and the sabotage of Istanbul

One of the most consequential passages concerns the very first days of the invasion. Diesen states that the media failed to properly inform public opinion that, from the first day of the offensive, Ukrainian leaders had confirmed being contacted by Moscow to discuss peace negotiations based on Ukraine’s non-membership in NATO. Zelensky himself, he recalls, had agreed to that framework.

Diesen then cites a statement by Zelensky from March 2022 in which the Ukrainian president observed that, in the West, some people were not troubled by a long war because it would exhaust Russia, even at the cost of Ukraine’s disintegration. In Diesen’s reconstruction, this sentence shatters the idea of a complete convergence between Ukrainian interests and Western interests.

He then recalls the episode of the Istanbul negotiations, which he says were sabotaged by Boris Johnson. He also cites the Turkish foreign minister, who declared that he had the impression that, within Western states, there were forces that wanted the war to continue in order to weaken Russia, with little real concern for Ukraine’s fate. For Diesen, this is one of the most revealing elements of the whole affair: a negotiating opportunity was sacrificed on the altar of broader strategic goals.

From proclaimed solidarity to Ukrainian disaster

The picture that emerges from his analysis is merciless. Instead of promoting a new European security architecture capable of containing strategic competition and preventing Ukraine from becoming a battlefield, Western media chose to demonize Russia to the point of making diplomacy itself suspect.

While hundreds of thousands of men were dying in the trenches, the dominant narrative continued to insist on an imminent Ukrainian victory, on Russia’s alleged desire to restore the Soviet Union, on minimizing Kiev’s losses, and on remaining silent about policies of de-Russification and the brutality of conscription. All of this was told under the banner of solidarity with Ukraine, yet—and this is the most cynical point Diesen highlights—without genuinely asking what the Ukrainian people wanted or what the real price of that “solidarity” would be.

The result, in his reading, is that Ukraine now faces a human, demographic, economic, and institutional disaster, while the West risks a direct war with Russia. And yet, despite all this, there is still no willingness to recognize that Moscow has security concerns that must be taken into account. Everything continues to unfold in a diplomatic vacuum, with the media firmly anchored to the image of an evil Russian enemy, and with the logical consequence of further escalation.

Diplomacy criminalized

The final sentence of Diesen’s first speech may be the most important: it is becoming impossible even to speak of peace, because diplomacy has been criminalized. This, more than the specific media omissions, is the decisive political point. A democracy that can no longer freely discuss the causes of a war and the conditions of peace is not merely misinformed: it is strategically paralyzed.

The second intervention: human nature, groups, and propaganda

After his formal intervention, Diesen adds a series of comments to develop the theoretical framework. His reasoning then moves onto anthropological and psychological terrain, but remains fully political.

Resolving conflicts, he observes, is difficult also for an elementary reason: human beings are group animals. They seek security in their group of belonging, distinguishing between an internal “us” and an external “them.” When a threat is perceived, the natural tendency is to strengthen internal solidarity and attribute increasingly negative characteristics to the outside group. The “white” becomes whiter, the “black” blacker, and the gray zone disappears.

It is within this dynamic that political propaganda inserts itself. It exploits an instinct already present in human nature: it creates stereotypes, simplifies the complexity of conflicts, and reduces everything to a clash between good and evil. But this is precisely why, Diesen argues, it makes conflict resolution almost impossible. If the other side is only evil, there is no space left to recognize its interests or predict its reactions. Yet in international politics, especially when facing a nuclear power that feels its survival threatened, that capacity is essential.

The precedent of the First World War

To illustrate the danger of this dynamic, Diesen returns to the case of the First World War. The United States government then presented Germany as absolute evil in order to mobilize an initially reluctant public. The war was sold as the war to end all wars, the war to make the world safe for democracies. In such a framework, only total victory appeared acceptable.

It was in this context, Diesen explains, that figures like Lippmann moved from supporting the use of propaganda to criticizing its effects: because propaganda prevented people from seeing and pursuing diplomatic solutions capable of turning war into a workable peace. More than that, even after Germany’s defeat, the logic of absolute evil prevented the emergence of a balanced and durable peace. Instead of reintegrating Germany into a stable European order, it was subjected to a humiliating defeat designed to keep it weak for the long term. And that humiliation, Diesen reminds us, helped create the conditions for another world war.

From this follows a fundamental lesson: it may seem patriotic to describe the enemy as absolute evil, but building a punitive and humiliating peace works against long-term interests because it destroys the foundations of stability itself.

Raymond Aron and the critique of idealist fanaticism

Diesen strengthens his argument by also invoking Raymond Aron, who in 1962 warned against the Manichean division between “good” and “bad” states. Idealistic diplomacy, Aron wrote, often slips into fanaticism: it imagines permanent peace achieved by punishing the wicked and allowing the good to triumph, but in doing so it ends up intensifying the logic of power rather than transcending it.

The reference is not accidental. Diesen sees in the post-Cold War West the gradual construction of a hegemonic identity founded on the belief that it is a force for Good. From that point onward, every conflict—Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria—has been narrated as a confrontation between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes. The labels change, but the moral structure remains the same: the good against the bad.

According to Diesen, this pattern has profoundly distorted Western strategic judgment. Conflicts are no longer evaluated for what they actually are, with their causes, balances, and limits; they are absorbed into a moral pedagogy that renders every intervention legitimate and every criticism suspect.

European reactions and the impossibility of dissent

Diesen notes that immediately after his speech at the Security Council, criticism came from certain European delegations. The meaning of those objections, he summarizes, was simple: the decision to go to war was made by Russia alone, and therefore any attempt to discuss the role of the West or the dynamics of provocation amounts to justifying Moscow.

His response is blunt. The point is not to side with “us” or “them.” The point is that a rational foreign policy requires taking the security concerns of adversaries into account precisely in order to anticipate their reactions and calibrate one’s own choices accordingly. If that is no longer possible, then public debate has turned into an ideological tribunal rather than an instrument of statecraft.

The strategic-military assessment

From a strategic-military standpoint, Diesen’s intervention highlights at least three fundamental questions. First, the West knowingly ignored red lines explicitly recognized by its own diplomats, intelligence services, and political leaders, turning Ukraine into a frontline state. Second, the propagandistic representation of Russia prevented a realistic assessment of the escalation risk in dealing with a nuclear power convinced it is fighting for its survival. Third, the refusal to seriously address the negotiating windows of 2014, 2015, and 2022 transformed a regional crisis into a continental war of attrition.

In military terms, this means that strategic prudence was replaced by emotional mobilization. And when strategy is replaced by propaganda, the risk is that the battlefield will produce outcomes far harsher than those imagined by rhetoric.

The economic scenarios of a prolonged war

Even though Diesen focuses above all on the informational and strategic dimension, his speech inevitably opens onto an economic reading. The prolonged war and its propagandistic coverage have legitimized the massive use of sanctions as a political weapon. But if, as he argues, the media cannot openly admit that sanctions are not working as promised, then the West becomes trapped in a mechanism of economic self-deception.

The consequences for Europe are severe: structurally higher energy costs, weakened industrial competitiveness, the redirection of trade flows into alternative circuits, increasing militarization of public spending, and the subordination of the European economy to Atlantic security requirements. Over the long term, a war with no real negotiating horizon risks producing two simultaneous effects: the economic destruction of Ukraine and the erosion of Europe’s productive base.

For Russia, by contrast, Western pressure has accelerated processes of geoeconomic adaptation: redirecting exports, strengthening ties with Asia, and turning to alternative financial channels. That does not mean Russia has borne no costs, but it makes Diesen’s central political point even clearer: if the public narrative cannot admit the complexity of the results, then Western strategy risks persisting in ineffective measures simply to avoid cracking the story it has told itself.

The geopolitical and geoeconomic dimension

On the geopolitical level, Diesen’s analysis leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion: Europe has given up being an autonomous strategic actor and has accepted being placed back within a bloc logic. The idea of a shared European security order, capable of including or at least neutralizing the relationship with Russia, was sacrificed in favor of a political-military expansion that reopened the continental fracture.

On the geoeconomic level, this means the continent has exposed itself to a double vulnerability. On the one hand, it has lost room for maneuver vis-à-vis the Eurasian space. On the other, it has deepened its dependence on American supplies, strategic protection, and political direction. In the name of security, Europe thus risks reducing its industrial, energy, and diplomatic autonomy. This is a contradiction that propaganda, busy mobilizing moral consensus, tends to conceal, but which will eventually impose itself in all its harshness.

The real political meaning of Diesen’s speech

The deepest meaning of Glenn Diesen’s speech is not the absolution of Russia, as his critics claim, but the denunciation of an informational and political system that has made strategic thinking impracticable. His accusation is directed at a mechanism in which the media do not inform but mobilize, do not clarify but select, do not open debate but strictly define its boundaries.

In such a system, anyone who recalls ignored red lines, missed negotiating opportunities, shared responsibilities, or the fears of the adversary is treated as a heretic. Yet it is precisely this kind of analysis that is needed to avoid the worst. Not because it erases Moscow’s responsibilities, but because it restores to politics its primary task: governing reality instead of reciting a moral catechism.

Conclusion

Diesen, in short, issues a warning that goes far beyond the Ukrainian case alone. Every time the media reduce a complex conflict to a moral fable of Good versus Evil, a double damage occurs: the understanding of events is distorted, and the space of diplomacy is destroyed. When propaganda takes the place of analysis, war ceases to be the last resort and becomes the only language allowed.

His final thesis is plain: if peace is genuinely desired, politics must return to recognizing interests, fears, red lines, and balances of power. As long as debate remains trapped in the demonization of the adversary and the sanctification of the Western narrative, peace will remain not only distant, but almost unsayable. And a civilization that no longer knows how to name peace, because it has criminalized diplomacy, is a civilization that has already lost the sense of its own historical responsibility.