The West is consistently under the grave misimpression that other countries think like we do. Thus, because we have become materialists above all else, if we levy sanctions and threaten lifestyle harm, other countries will cave. This is parochial to the point of absurdity.

Putin will happily trade some short-term economic sacrifice for rebuilding an empire. China will gladly undergo some trade sanctions to take Taiwan. Iran will cheerfully be excised from global trade to destroy Israel.

Orwell correctly said this about Hitler in 1940:

There is a reason that Stalin is still the highest-polling leader in Russia. In her Nobel Prize–winning oral history Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich quotes a former Communist factory worker imprisoned and beaten half to death by the regime.

A year later, he was released. During World War II, he met his interrogator, who told him, “We share a Motherland.”

As an old man, the imprisoned worker said, “When I go into my grandchildren’s room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music...Savages! I want to die a Communist. That’s my final wish.”

The West is failing because it not only doesn't understand why other countries feel this way, but because we ourselves have given up any belief in a higher purpose.