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# God, War, and the Wrong Mediator
- URL: https://www.sigcryptal.com/god-war-and-the-wrong-mediator/
- Published: 2026-09-04T11:00:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T11:00:39.000Z
- Author: Jacob Barrow
- Tags: News

## Building the Scene/Premise

### 1\. The Political Pope

Pope Leo XIV does not enter the geopolitical arena as an ideologically blank mediator. Before becoming pope, Robert Prevost publicly circulated criticism of both Donald Trump and JD Vance, including opposition to Vance’s interpretation of *ordo amoris* and criticism of Trump-era deportation policies. As pope, Leo sharpened that divide, describing aspects of American immigration enforcement as “inhuman” and later emerging as an increasingly direct critic of Trump’s foreign policy.

That does not establish that Leo is a “deep-state puppet.” There is presently no public evidence sufficient to make that claim as fact. What it does establish is something strategically more useful: **Leo is politically legible**. His positions overlap significantly with the institutional humanitarian and internationalist worldview that dominated much of Western policy during the preceding decade. Therefore, any intelligence assessment presenting Leo simply as an apolitical or inherently “neutral” intermediary should first account for how Moscow, Washington, and conservative Catholics themselves perceive his ideological positioning. Leo’s worldview aligns far more closely with the Western institutional policies Putin has spent years opposing than with Russia’s sovereignty-first political framework. Trump and Putin communicate more effectively in part because both approach geopolitics transactionally, through nationalism, power, and personal leverage. Equating Leo’s worldview with what Moscow is most likely to trust is therefore the illogical premise at the center of the assessment.

### 2\. Europe Fractures as Traditional Catholicism Hardens

France embodies the contradiction: one of Europe’s strongest secular republics is also the **global stronghold of the SSPX**, with 46 priories, 186 chapels, and 63 schools. As France and Britain endured major political unrest from 2022–2024, traditionalist Catholic resistance hardened alongside declining confidence in established institutions, even if that correlation does not prove causation. By July 2026, the divide became open confrontation when the SSPX consecrated four bishops without Leo XIV’s approval and the Vatican declared the act schismatic.

One could ever conclude that France’s increasingly secular and socially liberal political culture created a direct counterpressure that **emboldened traditionalist Catholic resistance**, with the SSPX becoming its strongest institutional expression. The correlation is striking: **the harder liberal values were promoted through European institutions and culture, the more aggressively the SSPX positioned itself as their Catholic opposition.**

If the SSPX’s growth was partly a reaction to increasingly overt liberal secularism in Western Europe, then the movement’s appeal can be understood as a counterreaction to ideological pressure rather than simple nostalgia. **Putin’s Russia, built around sovereignty, tradition, and resistance to Western liberal norms, is likely to respond to the same ideological pressure in a similarly oppositional way.**

### 3\. The Wrong Mediator—and Possibly the Wrong Intelligence Lens

*The Cipher Brief* presents Leo XIV and Vatican diplomacy as a potentially powerful neutral channel to Moscow, but that premise assumes Vatican prestige translates into Russian trust. Russia has already challenged that assumption, with Lavrov questioning the Vatican as a venue and Moscow showing that **access is not the same as trusted mediation**. The Central Intelligence's failure may therefore be selecting a mediator through a skewed Western institutional lens rather than through Russian perceptions of ideological and cultural legitimacy—**which is where the SSPX becomes relevant.**

## Little COAs

### 1\. Orthodox Back to Catholicism

Putin has already signaled that he is unlikely to accept meaningful Vatican intervention: Lavrov rejected the Vatican as a peace venue in May 2025, while the Moscow Patriarchate later stated that it **“firmly opposes any Vatican involvement in the peace negotiations.”** The irony is that Russia holds an unusually important place in SSPX spirituality through Fatima and the anticipated **“conversion of Russia.”** SSPX's teaching interprets that conversion not merely as a Christian revival, but as Russia’s eventual return to **Catholic unity with Rome**. That gives the SSPX a fundamentally different religious framework for engaging Moscow than Leo XIV’s Vatican currently possesses.

### 2\. SSPX as the Hill Outsider

Russia’s faith-centric **Orthodox Christian worldview** increasingly collides with the liberalizing theological direction associated with modern Rome, particularly when Moscow believes that direction weakens traditional Christian morality. The Moscow Patriarchate’s condemnation of *Fiducia Supplicans* called its treatment of same-sex blessings a **“significant deviation from Christian moral teaching,”** while SSPX's coverage highlighted essentially the same theological objection. SSPX's reporting has also treated Patriarch Kirill’s alliance with Putin more descriptively than adversarially, noting that both increasingly present themselves as defenders of Russian Christian identity against Western liberalism and that Kirill characterized the Ukraine conflict as a **“metaphysical fight.”** That creates genuine ideological common ground: both the SSPX and Moscow emphasize traditional morality, Christian social order, family, and resistance to aggressive secularism, even though profound Catholic-Orthodox theological differences remain. The July 2026 SSPX rupture with Leo therefore creates a paradox—the SSPX’s estrangement from the Vatican may actually make it **less representative of the Roman establishment Moscow distrusts and more intelligible to Russia’s religious leadership**. Russia’s importance within SSPX theology completes the bridge: the Society praises Russia’s Christian resurgence while still anticipating the Fatima-centered **conversion of Russia and eventual return to Catholic unity**, giving it both theological disagreement and a powerful religious reason to engage Moscow rather than dismiss it.

### 3\. The Spiritual Overlap

**The SSPX could provide a uniquely useful religious backchannel to Moscow that Leo XIV’s Vatican presently lacks.** Its ultimate goal of Russia’s conversion to Catholicism remains unacceptable to Patriarch Kirill, but that theological divide does not erase substantial overlap on Christian civilization, family, secularism, nationalism, and Europe’s spiritual decline. **In practical terms, the SSPX may speak a religious and cultural language Moscow is more willing to hear.**

## Main COA

- The *Cipher Brief’s* core premise is fallacious: it treats elite access and political proximity in Russia and Iran as evidence that those regimes can be maneuvered toward de-escalation, when access says nothing about whether a leader can **survive the compromise being proposed**. That is the trap the Intelligence Community cannot afford, because rational-actor models fail when **regime survival and personal survival become inseparable from continuation of the war**.
- This week, *The Economist* reported that Putin has privately told people around him, **“They will hang me,”** if the war ends without Russia securing even its minimum objective in Donbas—unconfirmed, but an extraordinarily important indicator of how Putin may perceive defeat. Iran presents the same structural danger: despite war, crushing economic pressure, inflation nearing 70 percent, and collapsing oil exports, hardliners remain dominant and Tehran continues resisting compromise, demonstrating how regime-security incentives can overwhelm conventional cost-benefit logic.
- The analytical failure is therefore imagining that a Vatican intermediary can simply reason Putin—or Tehran—into peace when, for leaders who equate failure with removal, imprisonment, or death, **peace without decisive resolution may be more personally dangerous than continued war**.
- **My main COA is much narrower and harsher: it is moderately likely that the SSPX, working alongside Holy See channels, could at most generate religious pressure through Kirill and the Moscow Patriarchate against Kremlin authorization of a tactical nuclear strike—but ultimately, not compel Russia to end the war.**
  - That pressure becomes increasingly important as Russia faces strain across the entire hybrid battlespace—Ukrainian deep-drone attacks inside Russia, Germany’s attribution of the Leipzig/Halle drone attack to Moscow, explicit Russian threats against British military targets over Storm Shadow use, and repeated incursions into eastern NATO airspace.
  - The best the White House and the American Intelligence Community may ultimately hope for is to keep **the final nuclear threshold from being crossed**; fantasies of controlling the internal behavior of either the Russian or Iranian regime should be treated as exactly that—fantasies—and as a Christian nation we should still make every effort to try, because only time will tell, only God knows, and we are but specks contemplating a design greater than ourselves.
- **Erroneous Critical AoA Assumption:** Kirill and the Moscow Patriarchate would actually want the war to end **before Russia secures a Donbas victory**.