Philippa Kaur

More stories

  • 75 Shares169 Views

    in World Politics

    Paranoia and the Perils of Misreading

    In the summer of 2021, genocide scholar Dirk Moses published an article in the Swiss online journal Geschichte der Gegenwart (History of the Present) titled, “The German Catechism.” He argued that Germany’s sense of its special obligation to Jews after the Holocaust has become a debilitating blockage to thinking through some of the most pressing issues of the present.

    Practice and Practitioners of Holocaust Denial

    READ MORE

    In Moses’ words, the “catechism” consisted of five strands: 1) the Holocaust is unique because it was the unlimited extermination of Europe’s Jews for the sake of extermination, without the pragmatic considerations that characterize other genocides; 2) it was thus a Zivilisationsbruch (civilizational rupture) and the moral foundation of the nation; 3) Germany has a special responsibility to Jews in Germany and a special loyalty to Israel; 4) anti-Semitism is a distinct prejudice and a distinctly German one — it should not be confused with racism; 5) and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

    Leading to Debate

    Moses’ claims, not least his use of the term “catechism” with all of its religious connotations, gave rise to considerable debate in Germany and beyond. (The key texts are now collated on the New Fascism Syllabus website.) Notably, many female scholars, especially women of color, engaged in this debate, which opened a space for a discussion of issues relating to German colonial history, postcolonial approaches to German history and the Holocaust.

    Embed from Getty Images

    But when the discussion took place in the feuilletons of distinguished German-language newspapers, the authors were mainly middle-aged white men. Here, the criticisms, now bound up with the belated German publication of Michael Rothberg’s 2009 book, “Multidirectional Memory,” tended to be more defensive of German memory culture and critical of Moses’ supposed intentions. Left-liberal historians such as Gotz Aly and Dan Diner, who had been instrumental in freeing the federal republic from its self-exculpatory and conservative-nationalist postwar culture, bringing the Holocaust into the center of the national discussion, seemed especially incensed; though this is hardly surprising since these were the very people Moses had in his sights, using an Arendt-inspired tone that seemed designed to enrage.

    The “catechism debate” has revealed some intriguing fault lines in the German politics of memory. Moses’ insistence that the terms of his catechism mean that what began as a progressive movement to make Holocaust memory central to the Berlin republic’s self-understanding has gradually become a conservative shutting down of critical voices who want to address German colonialism and current-day racism has touched a nerve. The responses can be read on the New Fascism Syllabus website, where many fair-minded respondents, such as historian Frank Biess, have attempted to grapple honestly with Moses’ claims and to set out what they think their limits are.

    Yet the debate is significant not just in its own right, but because it has spilled over into the reception of Moses’ new book, “The Problems of Genocide,” a reception that is itself inseparable from the debate over Rothberg’s book, which turned — contrary to Rothberg’s intention to facilitate open discussion — on the extent to which the Holocaust in German memory culture prevents discussion of German (or wider) colonial atrocities or modern-day racism.

    What Does He Say?

    What does Moses argue in his book? The clue lies in the subtitle, “Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression.” By this, he signals that his argument is less about the politics of Holocaust memory — though this features in the book — than the way in which the concept of genocide, contrary to the intentions of many lawyers, historians and political theorists, facilitates rather than hinders atrocities and human rights abuses across the world.

    Critics, especially Holocaust historians, have been quick to condemn what they regard as a conspiracy theory at the heart of the book, namely that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and campaigned all his life to have it incorporated into international law, was a Jewish exclusivist who worked with non-Jewish groups in a way that allowed him to get them to take his concept seriously, but who was only concerned with the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule.

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    Moses does indeed set out something like this argument, saying that to “mobilise action about Jews … it made strategic sense to link the fate of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazis under a single conceptual umbrella. This is the task that Lemkin’s genocide concept was designed to perform. Far from unthinkingly eliding the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish victims as supposed by Lemkin’s critics decades later, uniting them was the point of the concept.” His conclusion is that “if anyone is to blame for the problems of genocide, it is Lemkin.” In response, Omer Bartov, exemplifying the critical reading of Moses’ book, claimed in an Einstein Forum debate that Moses was putting forward what sounds like a “Jewish–Zionist plot.”

    Moses’ reading is debatable. Putting it forward requires dismissing Lemkin’s own autobiographical claims that he was moved, as a child, by learning of the Ottoman Empire’s massacres of Armenians and, more importantly, asserting that Lemkin remained a Jewish Zionist-nationalist from the 1920s — an orientation well documented by James Loeffler — through to the wartime and postwar period. But this is a reading that, albeit contestable, is well within the norms of intellectual history.

    Revisionism is what historians do all the time, and there is nothing about Moses’ position that justifies reaching for one’s metaphorical gun. Besides, this is not the heart of the book, which has a far more expansive remit than Lemkin and Holocaust historiography, taking in a remarkable range of references in world history. He has set out his argument plainly and in detail on numerous occasions. (See, for example, his talk with Geoff Eley at the University of Michigan or his interview on the New Books in Genocide Studies website.)

    What Does This Mean?

    It seems that what is happening here exemplifies Moses’ argument that Holocaust studies is riven by paranoia. Why should seeing the Holocaust as exemplifying the “problems of genocide” — understood in Moses’ terms — mean that one is downplaying the Holocaust? The opposite is the case: The Holocaust should tell us something about the destructive potential of modern states, but it has been siloed in a way that reduces the force of its potential critique, permitting “business as usual” in the modern world. Why, to return to old debates in genocide studies, should placing the Holocaust in a comparative context diminish its significance?

    Embed from Getty Images

    If one were to compare the Holocaust with the Boston Tea Party or the Peterloo Massacre, the critics would be justified in objecting. But analyzing it alongside other horrific occurrences, such as the Armenian, Rwandan or Cambodian genocides or cases of genocide in settler-colonial contexts, not only allows one to understand genocide as a generic phenomenon, but it also throws into sharper relief what distinguishes the Holocaust from other genocides — since none are the same. One can be a responsible Holocaust historian and still subscribe to the idea that motivates genocide studies.

    This is a case of fighting the wrong enemy. In the same way that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) sometimes seems more concerned about which historians have signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and reinforcing its own singular and narrow definition of anti-Semitism than about combating the radical right, especially as it seeps into mainstream politics in the United States and elsewhere, Moses’ critics have embarked on seeking to have him “canceled” in a kneejerk fear that his critical takedown of the “genocide” concept paves the way to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

    What Dirk Moses is seeking to do is to show how the idea of genocide has had opposite effects to those intended, if not by Raphael Lemkin, then by his followers today. He is hardly proposing a world of anarchy or an opening the floodgates to scholarly anti-Semitism. One does not have to agree with everything that Moses says to accept that this is a serious book. Dismissing it as anti-Semitic is nothing more than paranoia in action.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 63 Shares149 Views

    in World Politics

    Judicial Creativity Makes the News

    The criminal justice system in the United States may not be the best imaginable model for producing effective crime control. Given the numbers of people incarcerated, neither does it appear to be an effective tool of dissuasion. Its rate of 629 people incarcerated per 100,000 is five times as high as France (119) and seven times higher than Italy (89), the home of Cosa Nostra, ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra. Only El Salvador begins to approach the US figure (572), an ungovernable, poverty-stricken nation in which criminality has become a way of life for its youth, largely deprived of any other perspectives.

    On the other hand, it has consistently demonstrated its creativity. American legislators at both the state and federal level have always found imaginative ways of improving the performance of a legal system designed to protect and sometimes even reward anyone who can afford an expensive lawyer (or team of lawyers) and crush anyone who cannot, especially if their ethnicity places them in a group reputed to be inclined to criminal activity.

    Yahoo’s Demonstration of How to Lie With Statistics

    READ MORE

    California’s creative legislators were the first to initiate the brilliant idea, subsequently followed by more than 20 other states, of “three strikes and you’re out.” The national sport, baseball, provided them with the perfect model for setting the rules of civil behavior. The law was apparently “crafted to be largely symbolic.” It quickly achieved its purpose of consolidating in the public’s mind the idea of an identifiable, always-to-be-feared criminal class.

    Legislators and jurists invested much of their creative energy in finding acceptable ways to avoid sending people with lavish lifestyles to jail for a broad class of antisocial behavior, corporate crime, despite the fact that it frequently provokes major societal disasters. Senator Mitt Romney and the Supreme Court insisted that we think of corporations as people. But when they commit crimes, even with catastrophic consequences for millions of people’s lives, the courts not only cannot send a corporation to prison, they refrain from being too hard on the people at the top of those corporations who implemented the crimes since, after all, they were just doing their (well-paid) job and serving the economy. The same logic applies to members of the political establishment whose job responsibilities occasionally include committing war crimes across broad swaths of the world in the name of America’s sacrosanct “national security.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Jeffrey Epstein clearly belonged to that same elite. Given the sums of money he controlled, he achieved something akin to a corporate identity. In 2008, he was convicted in a Florida court on an absurdly mild charge that had little to do with the crimes he was known to have committed. Thanks to arrangements that were made with federal prosecutors, he served a simulacrum of incarceration in which for 13 months he was free during the day but condemned to spend his nights in a public jail.

    In 2019, the mounting evidence of his criminality made the decision to arrest him unavoidable. Possibly in consideration of his powerful friends and associates, Epstein had the good sense to commit suicide in his jail cell when nobody was looking. Could there have been some complicity in his noble self-sacrifice? As Bill Gates famously said, “he’s dead, so in general you always have to be careful,” meaning that once he could no longer talk, Epstein’s friends conveniently no longer needed to be so careful.

    Epstein’s demise in jail — whether assisted or self-inflicted — was a new crime scene. The criminals, in this case, were identified as the two black prison guards who were charged with monitoring his cell. Instead, they slept or surfed the web on that fatal night. They falsified their report and, like everyone else in the institution, were totally unconcerned by the fact that the video surveillance system was not working. Being the kind of people they were (black working class), they were duly called to account for their crime.

    Last week, the BBC reports, “US prosecutors have dismissed charges against two prison guards who falsified records the night Jeffrey Epstein killed himself on their watch.” The prosecutors “asked a judge to dismiss their case, saying the pair have complied with a plea deal.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Plea deal:

    A procedure that allows judicial authorities to avoid the literal application of the law and to arrange things in whatever they deem the public interest to be, either in the interest of identifying the true, powerful, higher-level culprits hiding in the wings or in the interest of protecting them.

    Contextual Note

    The case of these two prison guards undoubtedly deserves a bit more reflection than US media seem willing to offer. The briefest attempt at reflection might include the consideration that subjecting the guards to the full force of the law in a trial involve the risk that they might implicate other people, including their own superiors, to prove their innocence.

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    In the imagined case that the two guards were not just neglectful but had received specific instructions not to carry out their normal duties that night, faced with the prospect of prosecution, they would undoubtedly be inclined to reveal in a public courtroom that they were simply following orders. In the equally imagined case that they were offered a chance to live their lives in peace after some sort of agreed settlement, part of the settlement would obviously include the dismissal of any charges against them.

    Instead of entertaining and investigating such hypotheses, the prosecutors issued this statement: “After a thorough investigation and based on the facts of this case and the personal circumstances of the defendants, the Government has determined that the interests of justice will best be served by deferring prosecution.” How, we might ask them, do they define “the interests of justice,” and justice for whom?

    Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, found the procedure suspicious. He called the plea deal “unacceptable” and demanded “a report detailing the prison agency’s failures.” The BBC article subtly expresses its own doubts in the following remark: “It is unclear why the document was not filed until 30 December.” Let the reader wonder about that.

    “As part of a plea deal,” the BBC reports, “the pair agreed to complete 100 hours of community service and co-operate with an investigation by the justice department’s inspector general.” What about the other parts of the deal? And what does cooperating entail? Could it involve agreeing to a law of silence? The reader is still wondering.

    A classic plea deal seeks to implicate people higher up on the criminal ladder. But nothing prevents it from doing just the opposite.

    Historical Note

    Ironically, just this week, Glenn Greenwald exposed a different, equally suspect story of a possible plea deal, this one concerning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Denouncing the control intelligence agencies have achieved over corporate news media, exemplified by the permanent presence of former high-level officials of the CIA and FBI as salaried staff of the networks, Greenwald cites former FBI Assistant Director and MSNBC employee Frank Figliuzzi. He argues that if extradited from the UK, “Assange may be able to help the U.S. government in exchange for more lenient charges or a plea deal. Prosecutions can make for strange bedfellows. A trade that offers a deal to a thief who steals data, in return for him flipping on someone who tried to steal democracy sounds like a deal worth doing.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    This would be a plea deal with purely political ends and no relation to any form or idea of justice. Instead, it relies on the radical injustice of obsessively prosecuting whistleblowers. The enmity between the intelligence agencies and Donald Trump is such that any prospect of legally embarrassing the former president appears worthwhile in the eyes of many people at MSNBC and in the establishment of the Democratic Party.

    Then there’s the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted last week of sex trafficking as Jeffrey Epstein’s partner and accomplice. Many in the media are speculating about the possibility of a reduced sentence if she is willing to name names. The prosecution ” confirmed no plea bargain offers were made or received,” according to Ghislaine’s brother, Ian Maxwell, who expects “that position to be maintained.

    Plea deals clearly offer scope for impressive feats of creativity by those in the judicial system who know how to use them.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 238 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    Describing the U.S. Capitol attackers as out of a ‘zombie movie’ was unsurprising, given the rise of apocalyptic narratives

    One year ago, some witnesses to the assault on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., referenced zombies when describing the mayhem as the mob of Donald Trump supporters broke into the building and people sought safety.

    “It was like something out of a zombie movie,” recalled a photographer who was at the scene, speaking of seeing hordes of rioters. Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it “almost felt like a zombie movie” as she described hiding and seeking shelter.

    In the 20 years that zombie apocalypse narratives have grown and reached critical mass in popular media, such comparisons at an insurrection at the seat of American democracy — where five people died and scores more were injured and traumatized — are disturbing, but unsurprising.

    More significant, however, is that zombie apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives have become popular during the same economic and cultural currents that gave rise to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and his presidency.

    Rioters loyal to Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
    (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

    Glut of post-apocalyptic narratives

    Depictions of the end of civilization on Earth, especially after the advent of nuclear weapons, have often focused on the spectacle of disaster, as discussed by writer Susan Sontag in her classic 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.”

    In many post-apocalyptic narratives that have become prevalent in the past two decades, like Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road or the television series The Walking Dead, the actual disaster itself is less significant than life in the aftermath.

    Literature scholar Connor Pitetti notes this diversification of the apocalyptic imagination in his essay “The Uses of the End of the World: Apocalypse and Postapocalypse as Narrative Modes.” He writes that in the 21st century, narratives about the bomb have been joined by those pertaining to more diverse “eschatological powers” — forces bound in some transcendent and otherworldly way with end times and the final history of humankind.

    Actors portraying zombies in ‘The Walking Dead’ rehearse at Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles, in June 2016.
    (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

    Cultural critic Laurie Penny writes that “more post-apocalyptic entertainment has come out in the beginning of this century than in the entirety of the last one.”

    Broken civilization?

    But why should this be the case? Some scholars of history, literature and culture suggest that if people come to believe civilization as we know it is irreparably broken, the prospect of its end may become an appealing fantasy.

    One factor may be the desire for alternatives in a world where contemporary consumer capitalism is often presumed to be inevitable, rather than a human choice, as noted by the late historian Tony Judt in his book Ill Fares the Land.

    It becomes easier, says literary critic Fredric Jameson, “to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and of nature than the breakdown of capitalism” — or even
    “to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”
    in the words of cultural critic Mark Fisher.

    Economic insecurity, inequality at play

    Writing about the dangers posed by Trumpism, interdisciplinary political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon notes the key factors giving rise to it “include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity and rising inequality.” Additionally, he writes, while “returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared,”
    right-wing ideologues inflamed white fears that whites are being “replaced.”

    Trump’s principally white constituency views the increasing diversification of the American populace as a threat.

    Smoke fills the walkway outside the Senate chamber as rioters are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers inside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
    (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

    During his campaign, Trump — elected amid this populist, nativist backlash — vowed to be a wrecking ball laying waste to the edifices of the Washington, D.C., establishment. The sentiment was similarly voiced by his former senior strategist Steve Bannon, who in 2017 characterized Trump as a “blunt instrument” with which to “deconstruct the administrative state.”

    This appetite for destruction wasn’t Trump’s creation; rather, Trump has given voice and license to the forces of reaction and backlash.

    Reaction, backlash

    A sense of perverse pleasure in imagining the end of democratic law and order was evident in the Capitol assault a year ago, especially in the often absurd and mythically styled costuming of some of the insurgents. It ranged from sinister white supremacist, extremist paramilitary garb to the familiar 1776 getup of Tea Partiers, but also vaguely frontiersman-like furs and pelts, and of course the pseudo-tribal cosplay of Jacob Chansley, the notorious QAnon shaman.

    As news footage from the day shows, bizarre outfits did not mitigate the rage and violence that marked the attempted coup. Nor do they detract from the dangers posed by the MAGA movement.

    Commentators have noted how the extremist ideologies of Trump supporters are entwined with a revival of religious impulses. These are often focused on stark contrasts between goodness and evil and the possession of secret knowledge that fuels conspiracy theories and “end times” apocalyptic speculation.

    Read more:
    QAnon and the storm of the U.S. Capitol: The offline effect of online conspiracy theories

    Seeking authenticity in ashes

    Penny argues that the proliferation of apocalyptic narratives exist “somewhere between wish fulfilment and trauma rehearsal.”

    An example of this can be seen in discussion groups and message boards enthusing over the prospect of a zombie apocalypse.

    A common refrain, widely merchandized on decals, T-shirts, mugs and beyond, has become: “The hardest part of the zombie apocalypse will be pretending I’m not excited.”

    Such statements reveal a sort of hopeful nihilism: a sensibility that seeks, gleefully, to demolish and destroy in the vague assumption that life in the ashes will be better, truer and more authentic.

    In a zombie apocalypse, this may be seen in characters who come into their own as hyper-competent bad asses when resisting zombies (a trope notably parodied in the British zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead), but also characters who face zombie enemies against whom violence is not merely sanctioned but morally imperative.

    The Capitol dome is seen beyond a perimeter security fence at sunrise in Washington, D.C., in March 2021.
    (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

    Zombie warnings

    So have the zombies been trying to warn us about Trumpism this whole time?

    The question is not nearly as glib as it seems. Cultural preoccupations, such as the disaster films Sontag wrote about in 1965, almost invariably provide a window into societal anxieties and fears on one hand, and wishes and desires on the other. Unfortunately, such insights often only reveal themselves with the benefit of hindsight.

    Sontag’s writing articulated the pervasive fear imbued by the Cold War’s threat of nuclear war. At the same time, however, they expressed faith that societal institutions — government, the military, science — would prevail.

    Sadly, our obsession with post-apocalyptic scenarios is largely borne of the loss of such faith. More

  • 238 Shares99 Views

    in US Politics

    Why it’s grim, but unsurprising, that the U.S. Capitol attack looked like it was out of a 'zombie movie'

    One year ago, some witnesses to the assault on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., referenced zombies when describing the mayhem as the mob of Donald Trump supporters broke into the building and people sought safety.

    “It was like something out of a zombie movie,” recalled a photographer who was at the scene, speaking of seeing hordes of rioters. Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it “almost felt like a zombie movie” as she described hiding and seeking shelter.

    In the 20 years that zombie apocalypse narratives have grown and reached critical mass in popular media, such comparisons at an insurrection at the seat of American democracy — where five people died and scores more were injured and traumatized — are disturbing, but unsurprising.

    More significant, however, is that zombie apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives have become popular during the same economic and cultural currents that gave rise to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and his presidency.

    Rioters loyal to Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
    (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

    Glut of post-apocalyptic narratives

    Depictions of the end of civilization on Earth, especially after the advent of nuclear weapons, have often focused on the spectacle of disaster, as discussed by writer Susan Sontag in her classic 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.”

    In many post-apocalyptic narratives that have become prevalent in the past two decades, like Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road or the television series The Walking Dead, the actual disaster itself is less significant than life in the aftermath.

    Literature scholar Connor Pitetti notes this diversification of the apocalyptic imagination in his essay “The Uses of the End of the World: Apocalypse and Postapocalypse as Narrative Modes.” He writes that in the 21st century, narratives about the bomb have been joined by those pertaining to more diverse “eschatological powers” — forces bound in some transcendent and otherworldly way with end times and the final history of humankind.

    Actors portraying zombies in ‘The Walking Dead’ rehearse at Universal Studios Hollywood in Los Angeles, in June 2016.
    (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

    Cultural critic Laurie Penny writes that “more post-apocalyptic entertainment has come out in the beginning of this century than in the entirety of the last one.”

    Broken civilization?

    But why should this be the case? Some scholars of history, literature and culture suggest that if people come to believe civilization as we know it is irreparably broken, the prospect of its end may become an appealing fantasy.

    One factor may be the desire for alternatives in a world where contemporary consumer capitalism is often presumed to be inevitable, rather than a human choice, as noted by the late historian Tony Judt in his book Ill Fares the Land.

    It becomes easier, says literary critic Fredric Jameson, “to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the Earth and of nature than the breakdown of capitalism” — or even
    “to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”
    in the words of cultural critic Mark Fisher.

    Economic insecurity, inequality at play

    Writing about the dangers posed by Trumpism, interdisciplinary political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon notes the key factors giving rise to it “include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity and rising inequality.” Additionally, he writes, while “returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared,”
    right-wing ideologues inflamed white fears that whites are being “replaced.”

    Trump’s principally white constituency views the increasing diversification of the American populace as a threat.

    Smoke fills the walkway outside the Senate chamber as rioters are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers inside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
    (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

    During his campaign, Trump — elected amid this populist, nativist backlash — vowed to be a wrecking ball laying waste to the edifices of the Washington, D.C., establishment. The sentiment was similarly voiced by his former senior strategist Steve Bannon, who in 2017 characterized Trump as a “blunt instrument” with which to “deconstruct the administrative state.”

    This appetite for destruction wasn’t Trump’s creation; rather, Trump has given voice and license to the forces of reaction and backlash.

    Reaction, backlash

    A sense of perverse pleasure in imagining the end of democratic law and order was evident in the Capitol assault a year ago, especially in the often absurd and mythically styled costuming of some of the insurgents. It ranged from sinister white supremacist, extremist paramilitary garb to the familiar 1776 getup of Tea Partiers, but also vaguely frontiersman-like furs and pelts, and of course the pseudo-tribal cosplay of Jacob Chansley, the notorious QAnon shaman.

    As news footage from the day shows, bizarre outfits did not mitigate the rage and violence that marked the attempted coup. Nor do they detract from the dangers posed by the MAGA movement.

    Commentators have noted how the extremist ideologies of Trump supporters are entwined with a revival of religious impulses. These are often focused on stark contrasts between goodness and evil and the possession of secret knowledge that fuels conspiracy theories and “end times” apocalyptic speculation.

    Read more:
    QAnon and the storm of the U.S. Capitol: The offline effect of online conspiracy theories

    Seeking authenticity in ashes

    Penny argues that the proliferation of apocalyptic narratives exist “somewhere between wish fulfilment and trauma rehearsal.”

    An example of this can be seen in discussion groups and message boards enthusing over the prospect of a zombie apocalypse.

    A common refrain, widely merchandized on decals, T-shirts, mugs and beyond, has become: “The hardest part of the zombie apocalypse will be pretending I’m not excited.”

    Such statements reveal a sort of hopeful nihilism: a sensibility that seeks, gleefully, to demolish and destroy in the vague assumption that life in the ashes will be better, truer and more authentic.

    In a zombie apocalypse, this may be seen in characters who come into their own as hyper-competent bad asses when resisting zombies (a trope notably parodied in the British zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead), but also characters who face zombie enemies against whom violence is not merely sanctioned but morally imperative.

    The Capitol dome is seen beyond a perimeter security fence at sunrise in Washington, D.C., in March 2021.
    (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

    Zombie warnings

    So have the zombies been trying to warn us about Trumpism this whole time?

    The question is not nearly as glib as it seems. Cultural preoccupations, such as the disaster films Sontag wrote about in 1965, almost invariably provide a window into societal anxieties and fears on one hand, and wishes and desires on the other. Unfortunately, such insights often only reveal themselves with the benefit of hindsight.

    Sontag’s writing articulated the pervasive fear imbued by the Cold War’s threat of nuclear war. At the same time, however, they expressed faith that societal institutions — government, the military, science — would prevail.

    Sadly, our obsession with post-apocalyptic scenarios is largely borne of the loss of such faith. More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in World Politics

    America Is on the Edge of a Critical Precipice

    As we enter a new year, there is every warning you can think of that the Biden presidency, its promise and its transformational potential will come to a crashing end in 2022. When circumstance, willful ignorance and an utter disdain for governmental achievement and good governance conspire together to undermine aspiration, no amount of policy response will win the day. Only passion and anger have any chance at success.

    Will Joe Manchin Remain a Democrat?

    READ MORE

    Into that mix, up steps Joe Manchin, a US senator from West Virginia to put the transformational agenda of the progressive movement in America on life support. Amid the cascade of bad news here, there is also plenty of “democratic” absurdity. In his last reelection in 2018, Manchin won a six-year US Senate seat from West Virginia with a whopping total of 290,510 votes. Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 with over 81 million votes. So what? In the land of the free, Manchin’s personal agenda, the agenda of the fossil fuel industry and apparently that of a sliver of America trumps that of a president elected by a significant majority of all Americans who voted in the presidential election.

    It is largely the ongoing institutional paralysis of the US Senate that gives Manchin and a handful of other US senators veto power over virtually all legislative initiatives. This paralysis is now so deeply ingrained that the results are almost always foreordained. In America’s two-party system, the Republican Party is presently committed solely to a scorched earth drive to political victory at the cost of even the most basic of policy discussions.

    West Virginia and More

    This is the fertile ground in which corruption and influence peddling thrive. Here again, Manchin steps up to the plate, this time to institutionally piss on the 93% of West Virginia’s children who are eligible to benefit from a child tax credit that is about to expire. Since this should be a huge incentive for him to support the extension of the child tax credit, Manchin’s singular effort to kill the legislation can only be explained by fealty to some special interest that surely doesn’t give a damn about those children.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Moreover, the child tax credit is just one pillar of the transformational safety net legislation that Senator Manchin and those who have likely bought his vote are attempting to bury. Corrupting special interests and their right-wing Republican allies are also hard at work scuttling universal pre-school education, childcare and elder care assistance, increased nutritional security for children, paid family leave, some measure of drug price controls, improved Affordable Care Act access and Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and support for affordable housing alternatives.

    Critically, as well, the proposed transformational social legislation that has already been passed by the US House of Representatives includes a significant (yet modest) effort to meet our national and international commitments to confront climate change. In fact, it may be antipathy toward these latter provisions that has pushed Manchin to abandon the West Virginia children and their families he would like you to think he cares about.

    Much of this should come as no surprise. After all, the legislative process in America is working as it was designed to work, ensuring that corporate interests, corrupt influence peddlers and wealthy Americans are able to bludgeon democratic reform with impunity. Unfortunately, no amount of policy response will win the day tomorrow in the face of the perfidy that is winning today. It will take a street fight to even begin to turn the tide.

    No Other Way Forward

    I do not say this lightly, but I see no other way forward. Adding voting rights, abortion rights, gun control and police reform to the scrapheap of history will make the rout complete. So, all Americans who understand the nation’s peril either seize this moment or they will continue to live in a country rife with inequality, racial and social injustice, gun violence, fundamental inequity and corruption. America will never be better if no one forces it to be better.

    To start, President Biden has to step up and demand that the key elements of the social safety net and climate change legislation be passed now. He must identify a legislative path forward and demand in no uncertain terms that all applicable legislative tools need to be utilized to that end. He must also make it clear that he will go directly to the people as their president to forge the necessary alliances to meet his legislative objectives. Then, every senator and every representative must be required to cast a vote, for or against. There is no choice.

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    If the legislation fails to pass the Congress, then Biden must call the people to the streets. This means that those of us who care on our own behalf or on behalf of others either answer the call or accept an America unworthy of our allegiance. There is no choice.

    Meanwhile, it is way past time to eliminate minority rule in the US Senate, not just for the moment but forever. Understand that there will be no voting rights legislation, no abortion rights bill, no gun control measures and no police reform measures if a Republican Party in the minority in Congress can effectively prevent the majority party and its president from confronting the issues they were elected by the majority to confront. Again, back to Biden and his legislative allies, this time to demand an end to the filibuster to move critical legislation forward. There is no choice.

    Although much attention has been focused on the social safety net, climate legislation and infrastructure funding, critical voting rights legislation must now be moved front and center. Any talk of seizing the moment based on today’s majority will be rendered meaningless if today’s majority cannot vote in tomorrow’s elections.

    Voting

    The vilest forces on America’s political landscape are now laser focused on control of the right to vote at all levels of government and then using that control to ensure electoral outcomes that reflect a narrow right-wing and racist agenda. If successful, this path will enshrine economic, racial and social inequality for generations to come. That pernicious work is well underway and advancing with success.

    In this context, I am hardly the first person to suggest that a democracy that properly encourages a minority voice in its political discourse ceases to be a democracy when that minority is permitted to rule with no corresponding responsibility to govern. This, unfortunately, is the state of play in today’s Congress. It can only change if President Biden and his allies call us to the streets and we respond in numbers unseen before in this nation.

    *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

  • 250 Shares159 Views

    in US Politics

    One year after the January 6 Capitol attack, the US is still dealing with the fallout from Trump’s ‘Big Lie’

    The year 2021 will be remembered for an unprecedented event in U.S. history: the January 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 election results.

    This was not an attack on a building, but on Congress itself. Its members were in session and had to stop their vote, hide under their seats and the building was urgently evacuated in a state of panic.

    Five people died during the riot and its immediate aftermath, and hundreds have subsequently been charged with federal crimes. Since July, the events of January 6 have been under investigation by a bipartisan House Select Committee in charge of investigating “one of the darkest days of our democracy”.

    The “Big Lie” and its consequences

    While the Capitol has been the scene of much violence in the past, it has never been attacked on this scale by US citizens emboldened by a president attempting to overturn a legal and legitimate election. Beyond the question of whether this amounted to an attempted coup, this violent assault was certainly the dramatic culmination of a long process of undermining America’s democratic institutions.

    In the preceding weeks, a small circle of Republican lawmakers from the ultra-right Freedom Caucus that includes former Tea Party members, worked with the president and the White House through chief of staff Mark Meadows to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

    They pressured local elected officials, lobbied the Department of Justice, and flooded the courts with appeals that always lost. Yet even today, Donald Trump and his allies continue to promote the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from them, amplifying false allegations and conspiracy theories, with the help of media allies like Fox News and the One America News Network.

    A rioter holds a bust of Donald Trump after storming the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
    Roberto Schmidt/AFP

    In the aftermath of January 6, it might have hoped that such an appalling event would unite the country, and that elected officials on all sides would put aside their divisions in the face of such an assault on democracy.

    Yet just hours after the riots ended, as Congress reconvened on Capitol Hill, the vast majority of Republican representatives and several senators objected to the certification of the vote.

    And even though Republican leaders – Kevin McCarthy in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate – spoke of the moral responsibility of Donald Trump in the attack on the Capitol, they refused to support the impeachment of the former president and opposed bipartisan commissions to investigate the events.

    In the end, only ten Republicans voted to impeach Trump over the events of January 6, and seven voted to convict.

    The role of right-wing media

    The reason for this reluctance to hold the former president accountable may be that a large majority of Republican voters seems to have bought into the big lie, a belief now shared by some 65 million Americans that has persisted for more than a year.

    An astonishing 9% even think that the use of violence is justified. That is potentially 23 million Americans.

    These polls also show a correlation between willingness to believe in the most far-fetched theories and news sources such as Fox News and the far-right media.

    Outflanked on its right by the small but rising extremist channels Newsmax and the One America News Network, Fox News personalities like Tucker Carlson and their congressional darlings (Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz) quickly promoted revisionist narratives: the events of January 6 were mostly a peaceful exercise of free speech, and the violence was committed by the radical left or undercover FBI agents who infiltrated the crowd, or, alternatively, it was justified by the desperation of patriots fighting for the survival of the republic and democracy.

    Trump, for his part, still gives a clear alternate version of the events of January 6: “The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” he wrote in a statement released by his fundraising group in October.

    Red states and midterms

    The reality is that massive national electoral fraud is nearly impossible precisely because elections are the responsibility of the states, which means the real issues are at the local level.

    Those issues include gerrymandering, which on its own could give Republicans a majority in the house in the 2022 midterm elections. In the senate, where the Republicans are already over-represented compared to their real electoral weight, ten races will determine the next majority. In the end, there is the real possibility of a Congress being ruled by a minority.

    Beyond the issues of congressional control, these midterm elections will be important for new laws enacted at the state level under the guise of “election integrity.”

    Currently, 19 red states (where Republicans control both the legislature and the governorship) have passed laws making voting more difficult. In other key states, laws have been or are being passed that many fear would allow legislatures to disregard the results of an election.

    All this increases the possibility of a constitutional crisis that would end up in front of the heavily politicised Supreme Court.

    Project Trump in 2022

    The other major issue in 2022 will be the Republican primaries. Donald Trump has signalled his intent to primary any Republicans who dared to criticise him. This includes those who voted for his impeachment or conviction, including Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Wyoming’s Liz Cheney. The latter is also participating in the congressional committee investigating the January 6 uprising.

    Liz Cheney has provoked Trump’s ire by voting to impeach and participating in the investigation into the events of January 6.
    Olivier Douliery/AFP

    Conventional wisdom says that Trump will only run in 2024 if he is sure he can win, which seems more likely as the deck is stacked in his favour. His power could be undermined if his candidates lose out in the primaries, especially after he lost his bid to oust McConnell. He also faces numerous legal challenges, though the GOP has agreed to pay some of his legal fees.

    His recent rallies have been poorly attended, and according to a recent poll, 44% of Republicans want him to run for president in 2024.

    He may also be outpaced by his own movement as he was recently booed for promoting vaccination.

    The point of no return?

    In the end, the main question may be about whether the events of January 6 and their consequences are a sign that the country has reached a critical level of polarisation from which there is no return, even in the face of a common enemy like a pandemic.

    The congressional investigation should not have much of an impact: 77% of Republicans do not believe it will be fair and reasonable, and fewer and fewer think it is important for law enforcement to prosecute the rioters.

    The real battle will play out in the ballot box. What types of Republicans will win in 2022? Can traditional conservative Republicans like Liz Cheney win back the party? Even if Trump were to disappear, there is the possibility that Trumpism sill outlive him.

    Many scholars and journalists have sounded the alarm about the threats to American democracy, including the threat of a simmering coup d’état, further political violence, and even civil war.

    But there are other risks, including that of low electoral turn-out, which could lead to a less spectacular but more likely slow death of democratic institutions amid the generalised indifference of a population more concerned with immediate cultural, identity or economic issues than the fate of democracy. More

  • 150 Shares99 Views

    in US Politics

    Not all polarization is bad, but the US could be in trouble

    For the first time, the United States has been classified as a “backsliding democracy” in a global assessment of democratic societies by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental research group.

    One key reason the report cites is the continuing popularity among Republicans of false allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

    But according to the organization’s secretary general, perhaps the “most concerning” aspect of American democracy is “runaway polarization.” One year after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Americans’ perceptions about even the well-documented events of that day are divided along partisan lines.

    Polarization looms large in many diagnoses of America’s current political struggles. Some researchers warn of an approaching “tipping point” of irreversible polarization. Suggested remedies are available from across the partisan spectrum.

    There are two types of polarization, as I discuss in my book “Sustaining Democracy.” One isn’t inherently dangerous; the other can be. And together, they can be extremely destructive of democratic societies.

    Two kinds

    Political polarization is the ideological distance between opposed parties. If the differences are large, it can produce logjams, standoffs and inflexibility in Congress and state and local governments. Though it can be frustrating, political polarization is not necessarily dysfunctional. It even can be beneficial, offering true choices for voters and policymakers alike. Deep-seated disagreement can be healthy for democracy, after all. The clash of opinions can help us find the truth. The clamor of ideological differences among political parties provides citizens with shortcuts for making political choices.

    Belief polarization, also called group polarization, is different. Interaction with like-minded others transforms people into more extreme versions of themselves. These more extreme selves are also overly confident and therefore more prepared to engage in risky behavior.

    Belief polarization also leads people to embrace more intensely negative feelings toward people with different views. As they shift toward extremism, they come to define themselves and others primarily in terms of partisanship. Eventually, politics expands beyond policy ideas and into entire lifestyles.

    But that’s not all. As I explain in my book, as society sorts into “liberal” and “conservative” lifestyles, people grow more invested in policing the borders between “us” and “them.” And as people’s alliances focus on hostility toward those who disagree, they become more conformist and intolerant of differences among allies.

    People grow less able to navigate disagreement, eventually developing into citizens who believe that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees with them. That is a profoundly antidemocratic stance.

    Even when demonstrators are part of the same group, as the photographer reports these two are, they can have differing views.
    John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

    The polarization loop

    Belief polarization is toxic for citizens’ relations with one another. But the large-scale political dysfunction lies in how political and belief polarization work together in a mutually reinforcing loop. When the citizenry is divided into two clans that are fixated on animus against the other, politicians have incentives to amplify hostility toward their partisan opponents.

    And because the citizenry is divided over lifestyle choices rather than policy ideas, officeholders are released from the usual electoral pressure to advance a legislative platform. They can gain reelection simply based on their antagonism.

    As politicians escalate their rifts, citizens are cued to entrench partisan segregation. This produces additional belief polarization, which in turn rewards political intransigence. All the while, constructive political processes get submerged in the merely symbolic and tribal, while people’s capacities for responsible democratic citizenship erode.

    Managing polarization

    Remedies for polarization tend to focus on how it poisons citizens’ relations. Surely President Joe Biden was correct to stress in his inaugural address that Americans need to “lower the temperature” and to “see each other not as adversaries, but as neighbors.”

    Still, democracy presupposes political disagreement. As James Madison observed, the U.S. needs democracy precisely because self-governing citizens inevitably will disagree about politics. The response to polarization cannot involve calls for unanimity or abandoning partisan rivalries. A democracy without political divides is no democracy at all.

    The task is to render people’s political differences more civil, to reestablish the ability to respectfully disagree. But this cannot be accomplished simply by conducting political discussions differently. Research indicates that once people are polarized, exposure even to civil expressions of the other side’s viewpoint creates more polarization.

    This is a case of the crucial difference between prevention and cure. It’s not enough to pretend polarization hasn’t happened, or to behave as if it’s a minor concern. In the current situation, even sincere attempts to respectfully engage with the other side often backfire.

    Yet Americans remain democratic citizens, partners in the shared project of self-government who cannot simply ignore one another.

    [Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

    Polarization is a problem that cannot be solved, but only managed. It does make relations toxic among political opponents, but it also hurts relations among allies. It escalates conformity within coalitions, shrinking people’s concepts of what levels of disagreement are tolerable in like-minded groups.

    It may be, then, that managing polarization could involve working to counteract conformity by engaging in respectful disagreements with people we see as allies. By taking steps to remember that politics always involves disputation, even among those who vote for the same candidates and affiliate with the same party, Americans may begin to rediscover the ability to respectfully disagree with opponents. More

  • 88 Shares119 Views

    in World Politics

    Making Sense of Vladimir Putin’s Long Game

    On November 21, Bloomberg reported that US intelligence had shared Russian plans for a potential invasion of Ukraine with its NATO allies. Estimates indicated about 100,000 soldiers in around 100 battalion tactical groups were deployed on the Ukrainian border. Since then, this troop buildup has continued with “tanks, artillery, armoured units, drones, [and] electronic warfare systems” poised on Ukraine’s border.

    Reports indicate that Moscow has called up tens of thousands of reservists, the first time since the end of the Cold War over 30 years ago. They could secure territory that regular troops capture. Moscow already has a blueprint to follow. In 2014, Russian troops took over Crimea. This time, they could gobble up significant territory in Eastern Ukraine.  As with the Crimea, Russia claims that Ukraine is historically and culturally an integral part of Russia 

    The Response to Russia’s Brinkmanship Over Ukraine

    Read More

    In response to this threat, US President Joe Biden has warned Russian President Vladimir Putin of “severe consequences.” for any aggression. Though Biden has ruled out putting American troops on the ground, the US president has promised Putin “economic consequences like [he has] never seen.”  Almost simultaneously, the foreign ministers of the G-7 group of the world’s seven most powerful economies warned Russia of “massive consequences and severe cost” if Russia were to invade Ukraine. 

    Biden has continued to ratchet up his threats of severe countermeasures. On 19 December, influential columnist David Ignatius wrote that “a knowledgeable official” revealed US plans to arm future Ukrainian “insurgents” with advanced weaponry should Moscow invade. The official mentioned that “the CIA and other key agencies, [have] been studying how insurgencies were organized against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Russian-backed forces in Syria — and also against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.” If Putin invades Ukraine, the Biden administration wants “to make it hurt.”

    Even as Biden has been warning Putin, on the other side of the Eurasian landmass 7,500 kilometers to the east, Moscow and Beijing have been romancing one another, in a straightforward diplomatic counterbalance to the US and NATO. In October, China and Russia conducted a joint naval exercise that set alarm bells ringing in many international capitals. A joint Russian-Chinese flotilla of 10 warships sailed through the Tsugaru Strait that separates the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. This flotilla headed down Japan’s eastern coast and then back toward China through the Osumi Strait north of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu.

    Embed from Getty Images

    This joint naval exercise is significant. For the first time a Russian-Chinese flotilla passed through the strait, in what was likely a countermove to heightened naval activity by the rejuvenated “Quad” alliance that includes India, Japan, Australia and the US. The flotilla’s circumnavigation of Japan’s main island of Honshu was clearly intended to threaten Tokyo and send a signal to Washington.

    What is going on?

    Russian Resentment

    Over the years, both authors have spoken to and interacted with numerous Russians in intelligence, defense and diplomatic circles. One theme repeatedly crops up: The US and the West treated Russia imperiously and dismissively after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Most of our Russian interlocutors have believed that the US has long sought to weaken, even destroy, Russia, and interpret almost every US action and statement as pieces of a long term, coherent plan to undermine Russia and the government of Vladimir Putin.

    Dangerously, even seasoned diplomats and intelligence officers tend to ascribe a strategic coherence and hostility to rival states, when the rival states in fact almost always have competing and contradictory power centers, mutually incompatible objectives, and struggle to pursue a sustained and coherent policy. Accurate or not, the Russians have tended to view their American rival as strategically competent, and malevolent.  

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    As per this narrative, the US first cajoled the new Russia to commit samoubiystvo — suicide. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US funded a project by Harvard economists to reform the Russian economy. In the memorable words of Janine Fedel, neophyte reformers enabled “the Harvard boys [to] do Russia,” causing the misappropriation of Western aid and the plunder of Russian wealth. Till date, Boris Fyodorov, Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar remain hated names in Russia. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, then a  high-flying 38-year-old who arrived in Moscow to transform the Russian economy, evokes similar sentiments.

    With the zeal of a Cold War free market missionary, Sachs advocated that Russia implement “shock therapy.” Sachs took the view that shock therapy would work even in societies where there was “no collective memory of free markets or history of evenhanded rules of contract law and property rights.” In those heady days, Sachs was regarded as the slayer of hyperinflation, and the savior of the Bolivian and the Polish economies. He envisaged “an industrial comeback” in Russia “worthy of postwar Japan.” At that time, Russian industrial exports were around $5 billion and Sachs predicted they would “reach $50 billion by the turn of the century.”

    Today, it is easy to conclude that Sachs suffered from hubris. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has been damning in his critique of Sachs’s shock therapy. For Stiglitz, the key point is that privatizing an economy before establishing a functioning legal and juridical system inevitably leads to overwhelming corruption and concentration of wealth; in other words, to a thug’s kleptocracy.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Many US officials foresaw this danger at the time, and even as Sachs was pushing for total and immediate privatization of the entire Russian economy, the US government was trying to foster the establishment in post-Soviet Russia of the rule of law, the establishment of private property and the regulatory and legal regime required to avoid corruption, abuse, and excessive concentration of wealth. In particular, American officials were working to prevent the de facto theft of the state’s assets, capital and natural resources. One of the authors knows this first hand, having worked on this very issue. 

    Sachs, however, “succeeded,” and this now infamous privatization led to asset stripping, massive impoverishment and runaway inflation, averaging 204.91% in 1995.  Even as price rises made it impossible to pay for goods, Russia’s annual per capita income cratered, dropping over 50% in nine years, from $3,440 to $1,710.  The result of Sach’s policy was that the Russian economy foundered, poverty soared and life expectancy sank. Sachs’s recommendations brought, as Stiglitz stingingly put it, “Gucci bags, Mercedes, the fruits of capitalism to a few,” and misery and humiliation to 148 million Russians.  

    This economic catastrophe tore apart Russia’s social fabric and the legitimacy of Russia’s nascent post-Communist democracy. Contrary to a common Russian belief, the US did not seek to destroy Russia, but to help it succeed in its transformation into a successful, democratic market economy. However, the view among many Russian officials is that Sachs was implementing a longstanding strategic plan by the US to destroy Russia as a functioning power. Tragically, this American-induced calamity became Russia’s grim reality for a dismal decade.

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    One of the authors still remembers a protracted, boozy conversation with a former Russian psychological operations (PSYOP) officer. This gentleman had served in Chechnya and was convinced that Sachs plotted the destruction of the Russian economy. This former PSYOP officer’s thinking is most revealing. In his view, the US sent Sachs to ruin Russia’s economy. Then, at a time when Russia was weak, NATO gobbled up the nations of Eastern Europe that until 1991 were Soviet satellites and constituted Russia’s “near abroad” security cordon. The PSYOP officer also argued that the US never dealt with Russia in good faith. In 2001, Putin offered the US complete support after the attacks of September 11. In Russian eyes, the US responded to Russian loyalty with treachery. On December 13, then US President George W. Bush announced that the US would pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an act that still infuriates Moscow. 

    The other author, when serving as a US official, heard the same zero-sum game viewpoints from his Russian counterparts. How, they demanded, could NATO expansion be anything but an aggressive anti-Russian act? They took any of the author’s counter-arguments as proof of America’s disingenuous duplicity and as confirmation of their convictions.

    Putin Distills Russian Resentment

    Putin expresses Russian resentment and suspicion best. In a lengthy article published on July 12, he argues “that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole.” He blames both Russian mistakes and outside forces for undermining that unity. In Putin’s words, “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus.” Language, economic ties and the Orthodox faith bind them together.

    Unsurprisingly, Putin evokes a particularly Russo-centric version of history in making his claim. He refers to the 17th century war of liberation of the Russian Orthodox people from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which he blames for “social and religious oppression” of Russians. The Russian president also blames outsiders like the Poles and the Austro-Hungarians for “the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians.” In Putin’s telling, this “idea” has no historical basis or much popular support.

    When Vladimir Lenin forged the Soviet Union in 1922, he gave constituent republics the right to secede, which was incorporated into the 1924 constitution. Putin blames this for the “parade of sovereignties” that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. He argues that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” Putin further argues that Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine “in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    In his article, Putin takes the view that the borders between Soviet republics were never state borders. Communists ran a highly centralized government from Moscow. With the sudden disintegration of the USSR, “people found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.” Notably, Putin blames the West for using “the old groundwork of the Polish-Austrian ideologists to create an ‘anti-Moscow Russia’.” He accuses the new Ukrainian elites of hobnobbing with neo-Nazis, attacking the Russian language and unleashing an anti-Russia project.

    Putin’s aggrieved and self-justifying version of history, however, grossly misrepresents the past.  A little perspective: It is true that many Ukrainians initially welcomed the Nazi invaders as liberators in 1941. They wanted relief from the oppressive and exploitative mass-murdering communist regime of Joseph Stalin, whom Putin has been rehabilitating as a Russian icon. Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis proved to be as murderous and imperial as the Soviet Union. Longsuffering Ukrainians were quickly and hideously disabused of the notion that the Nazis themselves offered Untermenschen Slavs anything but enslavement and death. In the end, the Nazis massacred 3 million Ukrainians, a lower number than the 3.9 million killed by the Soviets. In his self-serving version of history, Putin omits such awkward facts.

    Third Rome: Will Russia Save Europe From Itself?

    Read More

    Biden and his European allies are understandably worried by this amalgam of Soviet and pre-World War I pan-Slavic and imperial Russian historiography. On December 7, Biden and Putin spoke for about two hours to defuse rising tensions over Ukraine. Putin “demanded legal guarantees that NATO would not expand eastward toward Russia’s borders or deploy offensive weapons systems in Ukraine.” Biden “reiterated his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and called for de-escalation and a return to diplomacy.” Two days later, Putin used harsher language. He accused Ukraine of Russophobia and discriminating against Russian speakers in the country. He argued that Ukrainian action in the eastern Donbas region “certainly looks like genocide.” On December 23, Putin articulated Russian resentments in a four-hour press conference even as US officials announced possibilities of talks in January.

    On December 17, Moscow “demanded strict limits on the activities of the US-led NATO military alliance in countries in Eastern Europe.” Moscow wants no troop or weapon deployment in areas where they could be a threat to Russia. If Washington accepts this demand, NATO would no longer play a role in the three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia or, for that matter, in highly vulnerable Poland. Russia also wants a guarantee that Ukraine and Georgia would never join NATO.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Putin has long called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century” and argued that “the epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself.” He has repeatedly pointed out that 25 million Russians became foreigners in their own homes. From Lithuania to Tajikistan, Putin sees Russians as an oppressed minority instead of full citizens of a once mighty nation.

    But nowhere is this more galling than Ukraine, home to the historic Kingdom of Rus. His consistent objective as Russian leader has been to restore Russia to its historic greatness and global power. In his mind, the best defence for Russia is now offence.

    Ideas Animating Putin

    It is important and instructive to remember that Putin was a KGB officer for years. He was inspired by Max Otto von Stierlitz, the Soviet James Bond who infiltrated the German high command in World War II. Like Stierlitz, Putin served in Germany too and was posted in Dresden in 1989. Thousands of Germans took to the streets, the Berlin Wall fell and “Moscow [was] silent.”

    The collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union turned Putin’s life upside down. Recently, he mentioned moonlighting as a taxi driver during those days to make ends meet and, like many older Russians, is haunted by those memories. The collapse of Soviet theology allowed Putin and all Russians to return to their history, culture, Slavic ethnicity, and Orthodox religion as the essence of the Russian nation and greatness. Over 70 years of Communist internationalist ideology dissipated in an instant, and has left virtually no trace on Russian culture.  

    Instantaneously, Putin and millions of Russians have reverted to Russian nationalism for identity and pride. At its core, this nationalism is Orthodox, Slavic and autocratic. The Russian Orthodox Church, persecuted during the Soviet era, has made a spectacular comeback. Putin has been filmed dipping into the freezing waters of a cross-shaped pool to observe an Orthodox Christian ritual that marks the feast of Epiphany on more than one occasion. Cossacks, the glamorized sword arm of Tsarist Russia, are also back in fashion. 

    Embed from Getty Images

    Putin has brought back the idea of a collective Russian identity, in which Western individualism and cosmopolitanism are decadent Western infections. The strength and stability of the state takes precedence over human rights. In this “new” (old) Russia, respect for the ruler is sacrosanct and Putin is a father figure for a powerful strong nation that can once again project its power. After the humiliating years of a weak Mikhail Gorbachev and a drunk Boris Yeltsin, Russians see Putin as a leader who has restored dignity to a great nation and people.

    A 2016 tour de force analysis by Charles Clover explains how the Russian leader has found inspiration in the ideas of the late historian Lev Gumilev. This son of Soviet dissidents Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova spent many years in the Siberian Gulag. Gumilev developed a fascination for “the irrational in history” as he watched his fellow prisoners “die of exhaustion and hypothermia.” Just as Italian Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli coined the idea of virtù, as a character of moral excellence devoted to the state, and Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun of asabiyya, the tribal solidarity of desert nomads, Gumilev came up with the idea of passionarnost, a human capacity for suffering.

    In his 2012 annual address to the Russian federal assembly, Putin noted that the world was becoming more unequal and competition for resources more intense. New economic, geopolitical and ethnic conflicts were likely. As per Putin, victory and defeat would “depend not only on the economic potential, but primarily on the will of each nation” and the inner energy that Gumilev termed passionarity.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Clover explains how Gumilev came up with the idea of Eurasianism, “the germ of a new Russian nationalism.” This idea seeks inspiration not from the westward-looking Peter the Great or Catherine the Great but from the nomads who swept out of the steppes to destroy everything before them. Gumilev took the view that European social theories like the Enlightenment and communism had led Russia to ruin. Instead, Russians were heirs to the Huns, the Turks and the Mongols, the conquering peoples who united the Eurasian steppes and the forests under “a single conquering imperial banner.” In Gumilev’s view, the Russians “were the latest incarnation of this timeless continental unity.” Putin seems to be deeply influenced by Gumilev’s ideas.

    Embed from Getty Images

    In this regard, one author recalls a memorable evening spent with a Russian counterpart nearly 30 years ago, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The discussion turned around what Russians believed in and the author asked in some frustration:  Are you European or Asian? Implicit in the question was the assumption that the Russians must choose between the two, and would surely finally embrace the westernizing approach of Peter the Great.  “Of course we are neither,” the Russian replied quite accurately, “and both.” 

    Putin also adheres to the views of Ivan Ilyin, an influential pan-Slavic Russian nationalist and fascist who exalted the Russian soul and who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922. He took the view that the 1917 October Revolution was the worst catastrophe in Russian history. As an exile, Ilyin first lived in Germany and then in Switzerland, where he died in 1954. His work strongly influenced mystical Russian nationalists like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Putin was personally involved in bringing back Ilyin’s remains to Russia and consecrated his grave in 2009. Noted historian Timothy Snyder has called Ilyin “Putin’s philosopher of Russian fascism” because he saw individuals as cells in the body of society, freedom as knowing one’s place in society, democracy as a ritual, the leader as a hero and facts as of no value whatsoever. Ilyin saw Russian nationalism as the only truth in the world and imagined “that his nation could redeem the world.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Gumilev and Ilyin are the modern Russian muses, and Putin the renascent tsar of the Eurasianist “neither European nor Asian” Russian culture and nation. But Putin’s Russian Eurasianism is the Russian strain of a widespread phenomenon called Traditionalism. It is a reaction to and rejection of the cosmopolitan, international, modernizing forces of Western liberalism and capitalism. Ironically, Traditionalism’s believers consist of a heterodox melange of French Catholic royalists, Muslim intellectuals, left-wing anti-materialists, social conservatives and nationalists brought together by their profound malaise at the culturally destructive and personally alienating forces of the technological and material developments of the industrial and modern era and, in their view, of the nihilism and imperialism of cosmopolitan Western liberalism.

    The philosophical roots of Traditionalism and Russia’s “Eurasianism” version reach back to one of the fathers of Fascism, an Italian philosopher named Baron Giulio Evola. Evola’s thought became the basis for Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, and — after World War II and the spread of democracy and the success of market economies — for the far-right across Europe, and the ascendancy of anti-Western Muslim extremism in Islamic societies.    

    One of the authors first encountered Traditionalism personally in the mid-1980s when he was assigned to follow and understand the neo-fascistic movements in Western Europe then called the “euro-right.” The “nation,” the “people,” and “tradition” became the roots of personal meaning for the euro-right in the progressively mutable world of capitalism, materialism, individualism, and democracy. The very successes of the Western economic and political model were the basis of the Euro-right’s indictment of liberal democracy and the Western Alliance.  

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    The author recalls sitting in a café in Paris and through the cigarette smoke listening in some astonishment and progressive alarm as the right-wing French political figure across the table confidently denounced American liberal decadence (that was no surprise), evoked the fascistic and conservatively Catholic ideas of the French politician Charles Maurras (again, no surprise)… and then spoke warmly of the concordance of the rejection of democracy, capitalism, and the West by Islam, Italian Fascism, and Russian Orthodoxy. The author has followed the Traditionalist movement in the 40 years since that cafe conversation and watched it wax in direct proportion to the speed and scale of social and political change caused by globalization and the end of the Cold War.

    Evola’s movement and the French politician from the cafe morphed into today’s “Rassemblement national” (RN) party (formerly the National Front) in France and to the other ascendant far-right parties in Europe today. These new Traditionalists consistently identify with Putin’s Russia, because both exalt the “nation” and reject “rootless” materialism. The Russian “Eurasian” manifestation believes “liberal” democracy would lead to the ruin of Russian civilization and to Russia’s domination by a nihilistic West. Under Putin, Russia’s intelligence services have also insinuated Eurasianist, Traditionalist ideas into populist and right-wing parties throughout the West.

    Putin clearly derives his worldview and policies from this coherent Traditionalist, Eurasian rejection of and hostility to the West. In his words, “The liberal idea [has] outlived its purpose….[Western views on gender, culture and power] must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.” For Putin, Eurasianists, and far-rightists across Europe, the postwar globalized, capitalist, democratic liberal world order, and US-led Western alliances are wantonly destroying faith, culture and, for Putin, the Russian soul and nation.     

    Could There Be War With Russia?

    Read More

    While Evola, Gumilev and Ilyin might be patron saints of Traditionalism, Eurasianism and Russian nationalism, the strident nationalist Aleksandr Dugin is the evangelist of Putin’s new (old) Russia. In 1997, he published “Foundations of Geopolitics,” a work that has deeply influenced the thinking of Russia’s military, secret services and political leadership. Ferociously opposed to US hegemony, Dugin advocates Russian Eurasianism as a response to Anglo-Saxon Atlanticism. Dugin’s views derive directly from the Eurasian and Traditionalist focus on the supposedly inevitable geopolitical clash of cultures, pitting Orthodox and continental Russia against the atheistic and cosmopolitan West. Instead of direct conflict, however, Dugin “advocates a sophisticated, asymmetric program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services, supported by a tough, hard-headed use of Russia’s gas, oil, and natural resource riches to pressure and bully other countries into bending to Russia’s will.”

    Putinism’s Strangely Unreal World

    Even as others provide ideas, Vladislav Surkov, a brilliant Putin aide puts them into operation. On a spring day in 2013, Surkov claimed to be “the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system.” In the words of Peter Pomerantsev, “Surkov [consciously and explicitly] has directed Russian society like one great reality show.” Through puppet political parties, fake social media accounts and manipulation of truth, in the press, on television and on the internet, this modern master of propaganda has blurred truth and falsehood, reasoning that, as the public becomes less able to discern the truth, the state can shape reality to discredit its opponents and to consolidate its power. Even as Russia maintains the illusion of democracy, political challengers find every path forward thwarted, by murder if need be, and one man rules.

    For ordinary Russians, Surkov has conjured up the specter of a deadly enemy and authored a new chapter of Putinism in Russian history. Putin “is the president of ‘stability,’ the antithesis to the era of ‘confusion and twilight’ in the 1990s.” Anyone who opposes Putin, by definition, is disloyal to Russia. Unlike Stalin’s iron-fisted oppression, Putinism “climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.” In Surkov’s Putinist Russia, “everything is PR” and only fools believe in anything. Putin, through Surkov’s cynical wizardry, reigns by turning Russia into a real-world combination of George Orwell’s 1984 and the Keanu Reeves starring The Matrix.  It is the dystopian triumph of the nihilism and solipsism of jaded postmodernists, literally weaponized by the State: Truth no longer exists, but it does not matter, because one can feel good through delusional self-regard and meaningless pageantry.  And Surkov, the Russian intelligence services and, above them both, Putin control the images, shape the public’s consciousness, and wield the real-world power.      

    Yet even Surkov seems to have some beliefs. In conversations with journalists, he reveals a “sharp nationalist edge.” Surkov claims that Putin did not abolish democracy. Instead, the Russian leader just “married it with the monarchical archetype of Russian governance.” Surkov claims, “this archetype is working. It is not going anywhere . . . It has enough freedom and enough order.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    If Surkov had confined his dark arts to Russia, he would not be one of the seminal figures of the 21st century. But he has deployed his skills to advance Russia’s national interests abroad, specifically by interfering in elections in other countries. The most famous examples are the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election of 2016. There is strong evidence to suggest that Russia interfered not only in these two elections but in many others. There have been spin doctors galore in the past, from Edward Bernays who invented PR in the US to Dominic Cummings who coined “Take Back Control” for the pro-Brexit campaign. Yet Surkov has taken propaganda to another level. He has created what documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has termed “HyperNormalisation,” a strangely unreal world of total inauthenticity.

    The Cold War Never Quite Ended

    In the heady days after the end of the Cold War, the likes of Francis Fukuyama heralded the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” In an iconic article, he called it the end of history and celebrated “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” Fukuyama’s celebrations were premature. For 15 years, from Gorbachev’s assumption of power in 1985 to the departure from office of Yeltsin on December 31, 1999, the Western-oriented views and aspirations of Peter the Great’s Russia dominated.  But as one author’s Russian interlocutor from years ago pointed out, Russia is neither West nor East — it is both.  And so after the catastrophe of shock therapy and the expansion of NATO, Russian resentment returned in the form of Eurasianist Putin.

    The Russian president has always sought to restore Russia’s greatness and reestablish hegemony over its “near abroad” — states in Central and Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union once forced into the Warsaw Pact. Of course, while making Russia great again, Putin seeks to solidify and perennialize his power, and, along the way, to enrich himself. He has always rejected the normative unipolar international order created and dominated by the US that, in Putin’s eyes, institutionalized American imperialism and hegemony. In the past decade, the Russian president has modernized his military, eliminated any potential rival at home, and embarked on a series of aggressive foreign moves that are changing the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East. Notably, he has constantly argued that “the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Putin realizes that, to prevail, Russia must leverage its strengths against the more powerful economies of the US and Europe, and he has been fortunate that many Western leaders have neither realized the scope of nor the power in the asymmetric warfare tactics of Dugin and Surkov. In contrast, Putin is very aware that the US GDP is 14 times larger than Russia’s, where oil and gas comprise close to 40% of the GDP.  Hence, he engages in a different “battle space” and, in so doing, has restored much of the influence Russia lost when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Putin’s military and intelligence services have reasserted Russian predominance all along the “near abroad” states and former Soviet republics. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus and the Baltics have all felt the sting of Russian operations, and have had to temper their pro-Western positions and accommodate Russian demands. 

    Bolstered by success, Russian confidence and aggression has been growing. In 2014, Russia invaded and (re)annexed Crimea. In 2015, Putin sent the Russian military into Syria. Since 2019, he has used “private sector” mercenaries, who act under the guidance of the Russian intelligence services, in Libya. By intervening in Syria and Libya, Putin has made Russia a key power broker in the Middle East for the first time since 1972. Russian mercenaries are also active in Mozambique, Sudan and the Central African Republic. As if this was not enough, Putin has actively sought to destabilize his greatest rivals, the UK and the US. Russia has conducted a series of intelligence operations to influence the attitudes of the British and American public, with an overall goal of delegitimizing and paralyzing the UK and US governments. 

    Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

    Even as Putin has ratcheted up pressure on Ukraine, he has also ostentatiously deepened relations with China, the other bugbear of the West. Russia’s new China play is a classic example of the balance of power and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” approach to geopolitics. The cruise of the Russo-Sino fleet around Japan’s main island is a clear signal by Moscow and Beijing that they will support each other against the West. Putin has also worked assiduously to bolster relations with India, a nascent global power that has reservations about recent US decisions such as pulling out of Afghanistan and entering into a nuclear submarine deal with Australia and the UK. As a former Soviet ally, India also has strong elements hostile to a strategic entente with the US. 

    Should Western powers implement tougher sanctions on Moscow, an allied China and neutral India are likely to stay close trading partners, attenuating Russia’s economic hardship. Relations with the two Asian giants also boost morale at home by demonstrating that a Putin-led Russia is a global power and Moscow will not bend to the imperial and arrogant US.

    Uncertain Times in a World Without American Hegemony

    Read More

    As a nimble judoka, Putin is also using gas diplomacy to pressure the West. On December 15, Putin and his new best-friend-forever, Chinese President Xi Jinping, had a highly-publicized conversation about the Power of Siberia-2 project, a mega pipeline through Mongolia that would deliver up to 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China every year. Beijing has long feared that the US Navy could block the Straits of Malacca, choking China’s energy supplies. Power of Siberia-2 serves both Russian and Chinese interests, weakening future leverage for both Europe and the US.

    To pressure Europe, Russia is planning to sell gas not only to China but also to other growing Asian economies, while always holding the implicit threat over Western Europe of restricting gas shipments, just as it has done before in its “gas wars” with Ukraine. Putin’s “gas pivot” is making Europe nervous because Russia remains Europe’s main gas supplier. On December 20, The Moscow Times reported that Russia had cut gas supplies to Europe even as temperatures dropped, a clear example of “gas-politik.” Gas prices have surged as a result, leading to added inflationary pressures in European economies. 

    Embed from Getty Images

    Russia is using gas diplomacy not only to cause economic pain to Europe but also to divide its opponents. For years, Russian companies have been building the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany, bypassing Ukraine to deprive the country of gas transit revenue and to leave Kyiv in no position to completely block Russian gas supplies to Europe. Berlin favored Nord Stream 2 because Germany is boosting natural gas imports to transition away from coal and nuclear energy, and the pipeline would double the supply of cheap natural gas from Russia. 

    However, Nord Stream 2 has caused a rift within NATO with allies like Poland and the US opposing Germany’s decision to go ahead with this pipeline project. Recently, the German economics minister has called the pipeline a “geopolitical mistake” and warned Russia that an invasion of Ukraine would lead to a suspension of this controversial project. Yet both Berlin and Moscow know that such a cancellation would depress the German and West European economies. The pipeline, even unfinished, gives Putin good sway over Germany and Europe.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Putin is also exploiting the refugee and migration crisis in Europe and the Middle East to pressure the West. Imitating Turkey’s use of Syrian refugees to pressure the EU, the Russian leader has massed thousands of migrants in Belarus, a country now firmly under Russia’s thumb. These migrants have been trying to enter Poland, a member of the EU. Polish police have used tear gas and water cannons to deter migrants from crossing the Belarusian-Polish border, under the keenly watchful eyes of the media. Images of such police action have portrayed Europe as uncaring and inhuman, damaging its reputation, causing internal European divisions, and diverting attention from Russia and Belarus, and especially from Russia’s threatening moves on Ukraine’s border.

    What Will Putin Do Next?

    Fundamentally, Putin is a cold and calculating practitioner of realpolitik. He wants to keep the pot boiling but not spilling over. He wants to avoid war if he can.  So, Putin will keep seizing the initiative, creating strategic dilemmas for the US, NATO and the West on multiple fronts.  He calculates that the West is decadent and unwilling to fight, despite the series of diplomatic and economic sanctions Western states have imposed in response to his actions, especially after his invasion of Crimea.  

    Now, Putin is focused on Ukraine, the “heart of Rus.” In his pan-Russian nationalist worldview, Ukraine is Russian land. Even so, the authors believe it unlikely, on balance, that Putin will invade. But he is likely to extract de facto changes to the status quo in Eastern Ukraine. He is also seeking to destabilize Ukraine’s government and to stop the West from bringing Ukraine within the western fold. He calculates, probably correctly, that the West does not view the Donbas or Luhansk regions of Ukraine, or the fates of ethnic Russians in Ukraine as worth a war between the world’s great powers. Biden did all but make this explicit in his announcement that the prospect of sending US troops to Ukraine was “not on the table.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    But Putin’s aggressive actions in Ukraine are merely parts of his larger worldview and strategy.  He has consistently pursued a sphere-of-influence international order, in part to bring the US down a notch, but in line with deeply held beliefs concerning existential Russian security needs in Russia’s “near abroad.” His Eurasianist worldview is coherent, resonates with traditional Russian Orthodox pan-Slavic ideology, and makes it possible for Russians to see themselves as heroes in the drama of world history. Whatever happens to Ukraine, Putin will always seek to reorder Europe and international relations to Russia’s advantage, to weaken his decadent US and European rivals, and to oppose the cosmopolitan, liberal West.

    The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More