Will there be a naval battle tomorrow?

In the 4th century BC, Aristotle, commenting on the prospect of one of his contemporary military operations at sea, discovered that statements about future events may not necessarily mean "true" or "false". Developing his ideas, centuries later, an outstanding representative of the Polish school of logicians Jan Lukasiewicz developed two three-valued logical systems with an intermediate value {1; 0.5; 0} for reasoning about such events - L-1 and L-2, laying the foundation for the multivalued formal-symbolic logicians. In one of them, with the values of the antecedent and consequent of implication equal to 0.5, the main sign gave 0.5, while in the other - 1, which, with the consistency and completeness of both systems, in the second case is considered to be a miracle of nature in the field of logic. We can say that Lukasiewicz's systems and others like them are a logical explication of the physical concept of bifurcation, and we can go into the intricacies of clarifying how, in a phenomenological sense, the statement about such an explication is justified. Since here we are talking about more mundane alarming current events on the Russian-European borders, an important consequence of what is mentioned here is a simple statement that the uncertain status of the truth of any judgment does not negate its cognitive value. This applies to both forecasting and decision-making tasks.

The criticism from different sides of the West's interest in importing the "Russian heritage" and blocking decisive actions by the "firsteiners" does not take into account almost from all these sides an important motivational component related to the economy: it seems that the establishment of the First World countries sees in obtaining this heritage a chance to save the global economy, restarting it - just as the "Spanish legacy" in the form of American gold, among other factors, launched the process of the formation of capitalism 500 years ago. The question is, what are these "additional factors" today, and whether they, in the aggregate, will be sufficient for this, different from what was the last time. For here the interests of tens of millions are opposed to the interests of a few billions - not voluntaristically, but against the background of a distinct phasing of the demographic cycle, which humanity has not yet learned to manage - just as it has not learned to manage the global climate and implement astro-engineering projects (even urban planning projects often turn out badly). And the question of the sufficiency of the trillions of dollars withdrawn from Russia to overcome the gesture that the Club of Rome once prophesied to the world is, at least in its affirmative part, the very case of the relevance of a judgment with an indefinite logical meaning and, accordingly, an absent unambiguous answer - the receipt of which however, presents a problem of not particularly difficult calculations. Another motivation of the "firsteiners", also hardly considered by their critics, is political, and consists in the fear of gaining fame as the gravediggers of the centuries-old Westphalian System, which determines the entire "splendid culture" of the European path of development. "Who are we to touch the 'sacred stones' ?!" - that's their motto. At the same time, the possibility of creating something comparable in scale and fundamental novelty is blocked by an acute crisis of strategic design and predictive analysis in the world, largely caused by a rather rigid linking of these design and analysis to the existing political and economic model of the world system's existence. Both motives have long been known to the expertise of the current Russian state and, until recently, have been used with obvious success in foreign policy.

However, Russian foreign policy in its essential, and not formal, bipartisan system is now determined not in the mainstream of global economic strategies (what the ISA RAS and the young reformers who emerged from it did, whose legacy is the current economic block), but the military and, in a broader sense of the word , power, structures, and the budget is aimed specifically at the latter, and not at the former. (The discourse about "children, mistresses and capital in the West" is discourse precisely in the economic vein.) At the same time, over the past ten years, a large multiplicity of single-level structures has been created in the "power" party, and the inevitable therefore strong competition for the budget between them (by the way, quite in accordance with the principle of "checks and balances", but without extending to the extra-force reality) is determined by a single and also far from a new basis for justification – the proof of departmental profile threats, which is proof of the right of these departments to exist. Moreover, the "economic party" in the battle for the budget always justifies the classic argument about the bottomless barrel of investment in the "defense industry". The exponent of the current situation leads to the risks of conflicts on the part of the "power party", which, in the same management classics, are compensated by either the reorientation of the budget towards the economic process (which is impossible under the current conditions - the trend is completely different), or the expansion of the power potential inside and outside the country. These things are well known to those involved in management and systems analysis. How exactly this "departmental usefulness" in the current conditions will be proved emanates of simple horror, but the fact that Marshal Zhukov took Marshal Beria by the gills seems to represent a universal historical pattern.

Renouncing war is a matter of trusting 50-year-old narratives and resuming international dialogue on them. What constitutes the intrigue of the current historical moment - especially if hesitation persists in resolving the situation by military means. But this agenda is much larger than the agenda of "restoring trampled greatness" (ISA / IIASA was created precisely as an international institution precisely in the awareness that "the meaning is more important than greatness"). Anyway, someone will restore this agenda and the corresponding expertise, if there is someone to restore it. Important news: the problems that have been pushed into the background by the events that have taken place in the past thirty years in the world have not gone away.