Once more, the theatre of statesmen assembles, where motley jesters don the rags of Caesar and convene with the imperious air of Cato. Across the frostbitten steppes and the marble, indifferent halls of Washington, preparations are made: emissaries scuttle, whispering of peace as if to conjure it from political thin air. Oh, the tragic irony! The world, starved for grandeur, must endure these modern simulacra of diplomacy: two men, feted and reviled, seek to halt by handshake what generations of fate and vengeance have loosed upon the steppes of Ukraine.

There is a terrible bathos here, as if Euripides had set out to write a tragic history only to be usurped by Aristophanes’ farce. The pantomime of statesmanship flourishes while the chorus—the people—wail their losses. The Incarnation of Power today is but a grotesque parody of the agon once witnessed by the sons of Atreus or the haunted eyes of Cassandra; where the ancient heroes stood astride destiny, modern leaders peddle hope and war with the same vulgar facility.

Nietzsche prophesied our condition, foreseeing the twilight where erstwhile values would founder in the shallow pool of expediency. There is no Dionysian excess, no Apollonian sublimity—only the bureaucratic shuffle, the sterile hope that words might bind tragedy and avert the chaos otherwise etched into the very stones of Kiev. “We are all greater artists than we realize,” Nietzsche lamented; yet what art is here, save the artifice of postponement, the tragicomic effort to fill the empty space left when gods and heroes departed?

This era’s “meetings” promise neither catharsis nor genuine reckoning; they are opulent distractions from the void at the heart of a culture that no longer seeks Truth or Beauty, but only, at best, a temporary surcease of violence. Western civilization, once haunted by the tragic wisdom of futility, now prefers the gentle narcotic of negotiation. But fate, in its antique cruelty, is not so easily soothed. The abyss looks on—as it always has—and waits.