A prolonged struggle in Ukraine would not necessarily work to the West’s advantage. Biden has handled the crisis reasonably well. Yet there can be no certainty regarding American policy after the presidential election in November 2024.
The Republicans are divided on whether – or more precisely, how – to continue Donald Trump’s style of politics. When he defends Putin, the influential Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks for a large and growing section of the American right, who regard the Russian autocrat as an ally in the American culture wars. On 22 February Trump praised Putin’s recognition of the two Donbas pseudo-states as “genius” and described his invading troops as “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen”. Many in both the main US parties regard Ukraine as a distraction from the challenge posed by China. The US is bound to Europe by Nato, which remains the cornerstone of Western defence. The alliance is strengthening its forces in Poland, the Baltics and elsewhere. But can future presidents be relied on to honour the US’s commitments? If not, Europe could be left to fend for itself.
Many will say this would be no bad thing: Europe has freeloaded on America’s security guarantee for too long. But building an autonomous European defence capacity will take time. France is a serious military power but lacks anything like the logistical, intelligence and high-tech warfare capabilities of the US and its allies. Emmanuel Macron’s project of a European army remains a chimera. Lulled into torpor by the belief that major wars between states belong in the history books, Europe has run down its capacity to engage in conventional warfare. (So, too, has the UK.) While Putin was systematically upgrading Russia’s military forces, Europe was disarming itself.
The fundamental question is whether European states have the will to defend themselves. Aside from Poland, the Baltic states, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, there is room for doubt. Some in the French political classes may have a personal interest in good relations with Russia. François Fillon, the former prime minister and one-time frontrunner in the 2017 presidential election, joined the board of the Russian petrochemical company Sibur in December 2021. In Germany Nord Stream 2 has been paused, not decommissioned. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced a raft of measures, including increased defence spending and building up energy reserves, that have rightly been described as a turning point in German foreign policy. Yet Germany is still reliant on Russian gas as a result of Angela Merkel’s policies. The ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder heads the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG. He is also chairman of the board of the Russian state oil company Rosneft, and in early February was nominated to serve on the board of Gazprom. He has issued statements deploring military conflict in Ukraine, but there is so far no sign of him renouncing these posts.
If Putin’s larger plan is to overturn the post-Cold War settlement in Europe, sections of its elites might not be too discomfited if he succeeds. Against this background, his ruthless gamble does not look so irrational. But could this war nevertheless be his undoing, as so many in the West want to believe?
Certainly, there are risks. Contrary to the stupefying cliché, he does not rule Russia with the authority of a tsar. His power is transactional and precarious. If the invasion stalls, a coup mounted by oligarchs fearful of a costly conflict must be a real possibility. (Ironically, isolating Russia from the world’s financial system could strengthen Putin’s hold over the oligarchs, since it would force them to keep their wealth in the country.) The scale of popular dissent is hard to judge. There have been demonstrations against the war in cities throughout Russia and thousands of protesters have been arrested. Many Russians, on the other hand, consider the West the enemy – a view that could become more widely held if sanctions impoverish the majority.
Putin’s war has torn up the view of history that guided the West for the past 30 years. When Tony Blair told Labour’s party conference in September 2005, “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer,” he encapsulated the ruling myth of the age. Across the world thousands of economists nodded sagely. Fervent internationalists cheered the dawn of a universal regime of human rights. But the millennial transformation Blair announced did not come to pass.
[See also: The Klitschko brothers face the fight of their lives]
In order to see the world clearly, we need to understand the fall of communism. The West misread the forces that overthrew the Soviet state: it was brought down not by intellectual dissent or economic inefficiency, which dogged the system from the start, but by nationalism, religion and working-class revolt. In Russia the trigger for the communist collapse was the failure of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Westernising reform programme. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 19th century, “the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself”. Positioned ambivalently between Europe and Asia, Russia was never going to become a facsimile of the West.
The triumph of liberalism was a mirage. There were wars in the Gulf, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Many were wars of resources or religion – types of violent conflict that were supposed to be fading away. The war in Ukraine continues this pattern. The role of resources will become apparent as sanctions fail or rebound. The influence of religion will remain obscure or incredible for most in the West. Some have noted Putin citing Ivan Ilyin, a 19th-century émigré Orthodox theologian and supporter of the White armies in the Russian Civil War, as one of his favourite writers. Not many noticed when last August Tass reported that Putin’s Mephistophelian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had denounced the West for backing Ukraine’s church, which in October 2018 split from its Russian counterpart after three centuries of accepting Moscow’s authority. While calling for peace, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia has come out in support of Putin. Ukraine is being invaded, it seems, in order to reclaim Kyiv for Holy Russia. Western observers are baffled by the way Putin has invoked Russian spiritual values to justify the bloody conquest on which he seems bent. Some dismiss his profession of faith as a cynical ploy, others diagnose insanity. A few – of whom I am one – suspect his Orthodoxy could be genuine. But while he may hold the fate of Europe in his hands, it is a mistake to focus on him as the sum of all our fears.
Putin is the face of a world the contemporary Western mind does not comprehend. In this world, war remains a permanent part of human experience; lethal struggles over territory and resources can erupt at any time; human beings kill and die for the sake of mystical visions; and saving the victims of tyranny and aggression is often impossible. These are hard truths, to be sure. But the time for pretence and illusion has passed. The enervating dream of a global liberal order must be abandoned, and the reckless disarmament of the past decades reversed. Only then will we be prepared for whatever Putin’s war brings.
www.newstatesman.com
