Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 26 – Putin’s
Russia is “a unique case” in which a country is surviving by paradox, Brookings
Institution analyst Liliya Shevtsova says, “converting weakness into strength,
tactics into strategy, exceptions into rules, defeats into victory and a civilizational
enemy into a resource for survival.”
In an essay in The American Interest that has now been translated into Russian by
Kyiv’s Novoye vremya, she says that
the Kremlin while it is still uncertain about what Donald Trump will do is “hoping
for the appearance of [still more] new life-saving paradoxes” for itself (nv.ua/opinion/shevcova/rossijskij-paradoks-kak-kreml-popal-v-tupik-708674.html).
It is possible,
she suggests, that Trump will “widen the space for maneuver of the Russian
system of personified power; but sooner or later the Americans will begin to
create problems for Moscow” because the Russian system is predicated on the
West behaving the way it did before Trump rather than in the way it may do so
in the future.
“The post-communist Russian system
has demonstrated a rare capacity for recovery under conditions of an extended
period of decline (yet another paradox),” Shevtsova continues. It has done so
by “continuing its own life” by taking advantage of what the liberal civilization
of the West has offered.
Earlier in Soviet times, Moscow
opposed the liberal world, then after 1991 it imitated its standards and now it
is doing both at one and the same time. It has been able to do so because the
West wanted to have a partnership with Russia and was all too often satisfied
by Moscow’s efforts to suggest that it “respects Western values” when in fact
it doesn’t.
The post-modern world with its “eclectic
relativism, double standards, the collapsing borders between law and
illegality, truth and lies, peace and war, principles and pragmatism,”
Shevtsova says, “is the ideal milieu for the flourishing of such a system as
the Russian one today.”
It allows Putin’s Russia to be at
one and the same time a partner of Western governments, a participant inside
Western countries, and an enemy of the West both internationally and by
blocking Western influence on Russian society. Because Putin is “more
post-modern” than any Western leader, he had remarkable success until the
Crimean Anschluss.
After 2004, Moscow became ever more
assertive but this “didn’t change anything” because “the Western community as
before wanted to see in Moscow a partner rather than an enemy, hoping that
cooperation would neutralize” what Putin was saying and doing – “even after Putin’s
2007 Munich speech.”
Barack Obama’s attempt at “a reset” confirmed
“the readiness of the West” to continue to seek good relations regardless of
the growing authoritarianism in Russia and even its aggression against
Georgia. But Moscow overreached: its
Anschluss of Crimea effectively “destroyed this ideal formula for co-existence.”
“The West was forced to react
(although unwillingly) and apply the tactic of containment. Russia in response
began its anti-Western mobilization,” Shevtsova says. The arrangements that had worked so well for
Moscow “came to an end” because the Russian regime felt it had no choice but to
challenge them and had a good chance to succeed anyway.
On the one hand, she writes, “the
Kremlin couldn’t allow Ukraine to run to the West because this would undermine
its status as a great power and would be viewed as a manifestation of weakness.”
And on the other, “the Kremlin sought to avoid a confrontation with the West”
even then.
Had it limited its actions to the seizure
of Crimea, Shevtsova says, Moscow might very well have gotten its way. But its launch of the war in the Donbass made
that Russian victory impossible and opened the way to a world which Moscow didn’t
want and had no good way to survive in.
“Russia wasn’t prepared for a new
Cold War or more a multi-polar world order, despite Kremlin calls for
this. The Russian political class, used
to the benefits of globalization and consumerism in the Western manner did not
want that the world, in the absence of American primacy, would move toward a
Darwinian struggle for survival.”
“The events of 2015-2016 showed that
the Kremlin as before is passionately trying to resume a dialogue with America,”
Shevtsova say, “although on this occasion, it is seeking to occupy a more
significant place at the table.” Trump,
whose election Putin supported, seems quite prepared to allow that.
And if that happens, it will
represent yet another paradox, albeit one that the Brookings analyst does not
mention in this essay.
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