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Chapter 10: Regret Is Not a Policy

It is March of 1998. The scene is the sun-blasted tarmac of Kigali International Airport. The heat is a physical presence, shimmering in waves off the asphalt. At the center of a delegation of men in dark suits, President Bill Clinton stands at a podium, his face a carefully composed mask of pained sincerity, speaking to a small, silent group of survivors. Four years ago, during the one hundred days of slaughter, they had prayed for the world to look. Now the world has arrived, four years and one million lives too late.

"We did not act quickly enough after the killing began," Clinton says, his voice heavy with a practiced and genuine emotion. "We did not fully appreciate... the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." Outside the airport's security cordon, the overwhelming smell of death, a scent of chemical lime and human decay, still hangs heavy in the humid air, a scent his words cannot wash away.

The scene shifts. It is July of 2015, the twentieth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica. The air is warm and still, heavy with the scent of freshly cut grass. A high-ranking United Nations official stands on a stage, looking out over a sea of pristine white headstones, thousands of them. In the front rows sit the Mothers of Srebrenica, women in black headscarves whose faces are living monuments of grief.

The official speaks of the UN's "shame" for its failure to protect the enclave, the "stain on our history" for abandoning 8,000 Muslim men and boys to the butchers. As he delivers his eloquent speech, another sound rises from the crowd—the raw, keening grief of the mothers. A woman in the front row quietly traces the engraved letters of her son's name—Adin, 1979-1995—on the sun-warmed marble. The official's apology is a vague, collective noun; her loss is a specific, singular proper noun. The two cannot connect.

The scene shifts again, to the brutal, immediate present. It is the spring of 2024, in the Saltivka district of Kharkiv. The German foreign minister stands amidst the skeletal, hollowed-out ruins of a nine-story apartment block. The air smells of wet, pulverized concrete, of scorched metal, and something acridly chemical.

Her face is etched with a sorrow that feels both personal and historical. "We got it wrong," she says, her voice clear and unambiguous, admitting to Germany's naive and self-serving energy policy that fed the Russian war machine for two decades. The apology is heartfelt, honest, and brave. A thin wisp of grey smoke curls into the sky from the smoldering upper floors of the building behind her, a silent, rising rebuttal to her words.

The scenes change, but the ritual is the same. The regret is always sincere. The apology is always delivered after the graves have been filled. It is a predictable, almost liturgical performance: catastrophic failure, followed by a period of silence, followed by a public display of remorse. This ritual serves a purpose. It allows the powerful to express a genuine human emotion, to assuage a collective guilt, and to publicly turn the page on a shameful chapter. But it is not a policy. It is a eulogy.

And so we are left to imagine the next performance. We see a future leader, a decade from now, standing on the rubble of a city whose name we do not yet know, delivering the exact same speech. 'It was a failure of imagination,' the future leader will say. 'We did not fully appreciate the scale of the threat. We were too slow to act.' The words, polished by the speechwriters of the future, will be as sincere and as utterly useless as they were in Kigali, in Srebrenica, and in Kharkiv. The question that hangs in the air is when, and how, we finally decide to stop perfecting the art of the eulogy and start practicing the hard science of prevention.

The Discourse 10: The Doctrine of Post-Facto Remorse

10.1 The Birth of a Doctrine: A Lesson Unlearned from Rwanda
In modern international relations, public regret has been elevated from a simple expression of sorrow into a quasi-doctrine, a predictable and recurring post-facto diplomatic tool used by Western powers to manage the political and moral fallout of their own inaction. This uncodified but clearly observable "Doctrine of Post-Facto Remorse" is not only an insufficient response to past failures but has become a dangerous end in itself. By creating the powerful, media-friendly illusion of learning from tragedy, it allows leaders and institutions to sidestep the difficult, proactive, and costly policy changes required to actually prevent future atrocities from occurring. The doctrine serves not as a foundation for change, but as a substitute for it. The catastrophic failure of the international community to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide served as the crucible for this modern doctrine. The profound shame that followed created the direct political momentum that led to the development and eventual adoption of the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine by the UN General Assembly at its 2005 World Summit. See [citation 1]. President Bill Clinton’s meticulously choreographed apology in Kigali in 1998 was a key political moment that helped establish the initial pattern: catastrophic failure, followed by profound public regret, followed by the creation of a new, supposedly binding, principle. See [citation 2].

10.2 Selective Application and the Death of "R2P" in Syria
The promise of this new, post-Rwanda era of responsibility was shattered by the doctrine's inconsistent and highly selective application. The 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya, though authorized by the UN Security Council under the R2P framework, quickly morphed into a mission of opportunistic regime change. This was seen by many in the Global South, and deliberately exploited by Russia and China, as definitive proof that R2P was not a genuine humanitarian principle, but a cynical neocolonial tool the West could weaponize against regimes it disliked. See [citation 3]. The true death knell for R2P as a binding norm, however, was the protracted agony of the Syrian Civil War. Confronted with years of unambiguous, documented mass atrocities, the international community, led by a hesitant United States, explicitly chose not to intervene in any decisive military fashion. Syria demonstrated that R2P was not a "responsibility" at all, but a "policy option" to be applied or ignored based on the national interests and risk tolerance of the great powers.

10.3 Regret as a Moral Hazard and a Strategic Enabler
In the post-R2P era, the ritual of regret has become fully detached from any meaningful policy outcome. It has become a political end in itself, a performance that creates a dangerous "moral hazard" at the heart of Western statecraft. The well-established political pathway of "failure followed by an eloquent apology" reduces the perceived cost of inaction in the present. Inaction becomes the safer political bet, because its eventual consequences can be managed through the theater of public remorse. This doctrine is not merely a postscript to failure; it is a hidden enabler of it, directly contributing to the other failures in this architecture:

• It enables the High Price of Hesitation (K8). A Finance Minister who withholds critical weapons knows that if his calculation is wrong, the worst-case political scenario is a future in which his successor has to give a very solemn speech. This dramatically lowers the perceived risk of gambling on inaction.

• It enables Sanctions as Theater (K7). A deliberately leaky sanctions regime is politically palatable because its architects know that if it fails to stop the war, an apology for its "unforeseen loopholes" will be an acceptable political recourse years down the line.

• It provides fuel for the Weaponization of Whataboutism (K9). Every Western leader who apologizes for Iraq or Libya is, in effect, re-validating the core of Russia's propaganda narrative for them. Our own doctrine of remorse has become their most effective propaganda weapon. When confronted with evidence of their failures, Western leaders now routinely offer apologies—as Germany has for its decades of failed Russia policy—but these are a poor substitute for the risky decisions needed to stop a current crisis. See [citation 4].

The purpose of this book is to argue for a new doctrine that focuses on preventing the need for apologies in the first place. A doctrine of prevention would require a credible and permanent commitment to massive defense industrial capacity, a willingness to bear short-term economic pain for long-term strategic gain, and a clear-eyed rejection of the comfortable fiction that an eloquent eulogy is a substitute for a successful defense.