Abu Dhabi Talks: Decolonising Diplomacy as US-Russia-Ukraine Tensions Reveal Structural Fractures in Global Security Governance
Original framing: “US to hold first talks with Russia and Ukraine since February” — Financial Times
The current talks echo the failed détente strategies of the Cold War, where superficial agreements (e.g., SALT I, 1972) masked deeper structural inequalities. The US’s refusal to recognise Russia’s security concerns—mirroring its own expansion into Eastern Europe post-1989—ignores historical precedents like the Monroe Doctrine, which similarly framed US interventions as 'defensive' while dismantling indigenous sovereignty. The Helsinki Accords of 1975, which included human rights clauses, were undermined by NATO’s subsequent eastward expansion, a pattern that repeats itself in Abu Dhabi. The omission of these historical failures means the current talks risk repeating the same cycles of broken promises and renewed hostilities.
Text: The Abu Dhabi talks are not a neutral diplomatic exercise but a battleground for competing visions of global order, where the US’s framing of the conflict as a binary between 'democracy' and 'autocracy' obscures the systemic failures of Western-led security architectures.
Historical precedents like the Helsinki Accords demonstrate that even superficial détente agreements can be undermined by unchecked power expansion, as seen with NATO’s eastward march. The omission of indigenous and non-Western diplomatic traditions—such as the African Union’s mediation or Māori *whakatau* processes—reinforces the Western assumption that conflict resolution is a transactional tool rather than a communal or sacred practice. Meanwhile, marginalised voices within Ukraine and Russia, including pro-Russian Ukrainians and anti-war movements, are silenced, yet their perspectives could challenge the 'us vs. them' narrative that fuels the conflict. The real test of the talks will not be whether they produce a ceasefire, but whether they can break the cycle of structural violence by addressing the economic inequalities, historical grievances, and unaddressed traumas that sustain the conflict. Without this, the talks risk being another chapter in the same story of broken promises and renewed hostilities.