Russia the Decadent

 There was a school of thought that said that NATO expansion was the root cause of the confrontation between Russia and the West. Mearsheimer is one of the principal exponents of this view.

The West has been guilty of mismanaging the post-Soviet world. The Soviet Union was a dying empire, and it was economically mismanaging itself into obsolescence. They were waging wars all over the world, rattling their sabres. Part of this was due to the way they were governed: because they were a dictatorship, it was always easier to create a rally around the flag situation to get their people in line. Part of the reason is because one of the main sources of their geopolitical power came from the military: if they weren't rattling their sabres all the time, nobody would take them seriously. They had military adventures in Angola, Afghanistan, Congo.

During the unipolar moment, Russia repeatedly had a lot of doors slammed in their faces. Their transition to a free market economy did not go well. In the negotiations for the reunification of Germany, the Americans tried to reassure the Russians that NATO would not expand to the East. If this was a promise, it was broken over and over and over. Russia tried joining NATO, but was rebuffed time after time. You could not avoid thinking that NATO's founding philosophy was that it was to be a bulwark against Russia, and it would stay that way for a really long time.

NATO tried to bomb the shit out of Serbia. In one reading, the Serbs were behind some of the most appalling human rights abuses in the Balkans conflict against Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. But when the US allowed Kosovo to be carved out of Serbia, they just rode roughshod over the objects of Russia, who had reasons to believe that the Serbs were allies. Russia tried to play nice at first with George W Bush by supporting its war on terror. But I don't think that the US modified its behaviour. There were plenty of revolutions in Ukraine that indicated that they wanted to be more European, rather than more Russian. Putin could feel that his grip on the Ukraine was slipping away.

So the school of thought is that Russia was provoked into lashing out like a cornered animal and trying to grab Ukraine. If the West had done better by Russia and treated it more graciously, rather than as a defeated power, to forever be in disgrace,

But then again, you have to think about the military adventures that unfolded under Putin. He started a war in Georgia, because it was another ex-Soviet state that was slipping away from him. Then he expanded the war to a few provinces of Georgia which were a little more pro-Russian. Then he gave support to Syria during the “Arab Spring” in an attempt to try to retain some influence in the Middle East. Because of the Russian intervention, the civil war in Syria became some of the most brutal conflicts in the Middle East. People barely remember a time when Syria was such an oasis of peace and calm that it was one of the top tourist destinations in the Middle East.

Russia's impact on the rest of the world isn't a positive one. You could argue that America uses more military force on the world than most other major powers. But when you're part of the American-led World Order, you get to partake in free trade, you have conflict-free trade routes, you participate in fruitful exchanges in science and technology. It isn't a bad place to be. What does Russia have to offer, in its place?

The other thing has to do with how Russia was run. Because of how the Soviet state was dismantled, a large part of the former Soviet economy landed up in the hands of relatively few oligarchs. Gradually, one by one, Putin dealt with all the oligarchs. Either they allied with him and gave him access to their own riches, or Putin just had them defenestrated. Then slowly, Putin killed democracy in Russia. He turned the state broadcasting into a propaganda unit. He intimidated his enemies so that they would never try to displace him. He got around Russia's term limits for his presidency, first by installing Menyedev as a stand-in president, then getting the constitution amended. The end result was that instead of building a great society with a flourishing economy and technological advancements, he was turning the country into a mafia state, whose economy basically had only one pillar: fossil fuel extraction. The intelligent and capable members of his society ran away and left for greener pastures.

So while I understand that Russia feels aggrieved by how the West had treated it over the 30+ years since the end of the Cold War, Russia isn't becoming a great country, the way that China is, in spite of China not being run like a liberal democracy. It is corrupt, dictatorial, regressive, repressive, feckless. If Russia were more like China, I would be a bit more indignant about its treatment. But now Russia is going down in this world, and run in a fairly self-destructive way. I wouldn't be too upset to see the iron curtain move closer and closer to Moscow and St Petersberg.

Even though Stalin was a monster who murdered millions of his own citizens, he had some vision of how he wanted his empire to progress. There were times when they seemed to be technologically advanced, and able to challenge the West in some very specific areas in technology. But it would start to rot and decay after years of dictatorship. Putin isn't even trying to make Russia great. He's just interested in his hold on power, and being some kind of parasitic force on Russia.

That's why I'm never going to side with Russia in this Ukraine conflict. I just want this version of Russia to collapse, so maybe a better, more competent and technologically progressive version can rise up in its place.

Russia has real problems, so it's a little harsh to say that you need to solve them before I recognise them as a legitimate state. Putin could have tried to make Russia great. It has the potential to be like China. It is adjacent to Europe, and it could choose to be a little more like Europe, setting up great centres of learning, creating some kind of Silicon Valley, creating an industrial and manufacturing base. Apparently it's not tried to do that. It's one of the hardest things in the world to replicate what China has done for the last 40 years, but that is how China and the USSR's fortunes diverged since the death of Mao. No doubt China has been greatly abetted by the Chinese diaspora (who probably didn't understand that one day China would turn into a frenemy). No doubt China has a better relationship with the Asian tigers than Russia with Europe. And quite possibly Russia has a lot of disadvantages in its geography, including its deadly lack of access to the ocean in the West.

But that could only raise one big question: why wasn't Russia willing or able to do the right thing to get ahead in the world, like China was? Why was Russia so weak in 1917 that it had to collapse under a Bolshevik revolution, and then turn into such a force to be reckoned with that so many people in the West looked towards it as a rising force before WW2, even when it was killing millions of people during their civil war? And how was it so incompetently run that it managed to get 20 million of their people killed during WW2, and yet was the country who earned the most credit for defeating the Nazis? How was it perceived as one of the superpowers of the Cold War conflict? Maybe that's why somebody called it the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. How Russia vaccilated between being a world superpower and being a basket case as a nation.

So some of this is personal. I'm sick and tired of seeing Russia underperform, of a nation's potential being wasted. I'm sick and tired of seeing it run as a mafia state, where Putin is the mafia chief among the mafia chiefs. About the dysfunctions in society that allowed it for many years to be a bunch of backward serfdoms. About Russia being run as Putin's personal fiefdom chasing away their brightest and most talented people. About the lying in the gutter and gazing at the stars.

Putin felt that he had to have his military adventures because the world was closing in on him. Well, the world was closing in on him because he was unable to move on up in this world, or move Russia onwards and upwards. The end result would have been an implosion of his society. There were plenty of stresses upon him. His security zone, the buffer between Kiev and Russia, was being stripped away. It was being salami sliced away. If Ukraine and Poland were to further Europeanise, then they would fall under the European sphere of influence, and this would be the first time that Europe is on your doorstep. It would be very alarming for Russia's pretentions to be a world power. That's the problem when you become weak as a nation.

Putin, in many ways, helped to set up a system where he either had to kill or be killed. He wasn't able to break the cycle of violence. I don't really know if he couldn't get off the tiger. He made too many enemies in Russia, and he had to create this super elaborate security apparatus just so that he could survive. He felt that he had to capture Ukraine and create this image of himself of a great leader who managed to poke the eye of the West. For a long time it worked. For Putin, it was about 2 things: consolidate absolute power within Russia for himself, then be a thorn in the side of the West, so that you can increase your prestige amongst your people. That approach worked for him, and in some ways he may have been smart as a tactician. But his strategy was a failure. He didn't make Russia a stronger country, and it had to engage in destructive behaviour in order for him to prove his strength. He's an autocracy fighting the online mob, and he can only withstand so much punishment before the armchair critics of the world start trying to quarter him or something.

So I hope that Russia gets squeezed and weakened. Unfortunately the geopolitical reality is that Ukraine is between the spheres of influence of Europe and Russia. If Europe and Russia are at peace, it's fine. But other wise it's a buffer zone in a no man's land. Even if Ukraine were to chase Russia off the 4 oblasts, Russia would be in a position where it would feel uncomfortable with Ukraine at its doorstep. One solution would be for Russia to renew and reinvent itself. I wouldn't feel bad if Putin were to be overthrown and some faction within Russia were to rise up and become more pro-Western, more open and democratic, and Russia were to be less corrupt, and sweep the Mafia out of power. But it would be an extremely difficult thing to do and pull off.