The New Year Quote by Igor Ivanov

Ivanov’s sentence reads like a victory lap written in bureaucratic fog: the “real threat of war” has supposedly been neutralized, not by moral clarity or accountability, but by “the resolution.” The phrasing is doing careful political work. It shifts agency away from governments and onto a document, as if war is a weather system that can be dispersed by the right paperwork. That depersonalization is the point: it lets Moscow claim it helped avert catastrophe while avoiding any endorsement of Washington’s broader Iraq project.

The key move is the pairing of reassurance with open-endedness. “Made...go away” offers immediate relief; “opens the way for further work” kicks the can down the road into process. Ivanov isn’t promising peace, he’s promising procedure - the diplomatic equivalent of saying, “Let’s keep talking.” The hyphenated “political- diplomatic” is also telling: politics first, diplomacy second, a nod to power realities (oil, alliances, U.N. leverage) that sit underneath the etiquette of negotiations.

Context matters. Coming from Russia’s foreign minister era, this is the language of a state trying to restrain U.S. unilateral action without picking a direct fight. The subtext: the U.N. must be the arena, not the Pentagon; legitimacy must be manufactured through multilateralism; Russia wants influence preserved and costs contained. It’s not just about Iraq - it’s about who gets to decide when “the threat of war” is real, and who gets to declare it safely managed.