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One thing at least is now indisputable. We live in a multipolar world. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted as much during his wide-ranging interview in January with Megyn Kelly. The recognition that multipolarity is now the kind of world we live in came about, in the first instance, because Russia has not been defeated in Ukraine. Rather the reverse.
To be sure, acceptance of the fact of multipolarity does not dictate the nature of our response to it. Secretary Rubio’s preferred response, as he made clear during his interview, is to embrace—one is tempted to say relearn how to do—the “hard work of diplomacy.”
Other responses are certainly possible. A team writing for Foreign Affairs last fall suggested reinstating a far-going policy of containment of Russia, such as existed during the first Cold War. Former British defense secretary Ben Wallace, for his part, went considerably further: he suggested, in an article published in January, placing Russia “in a prison” and “building the walls high.”
Which path is the right one? Rubio’s strikes me as the best approach, especially if supplemented by what is sometimes termed civilizational realism, a school that does not—as the pure realists are sometimes prone to do—exclude moral considerations from the practice of foreign affairs. Civilizational realists accept the necessity of virtue, but they also have the sophistication to recognize that liberal democracies are not the only states capable of practicing it. As for the idealists, their problem is a tendency to get divorced from reality, and they have an annoying habit of imposing their own version of morality on everyone everywhere—or at least, trying to.
The Catholic theologian and neoconservative political writer George Weigel, in an open letter published shortly after Trump’s re-election last November, outlined the case against Vladimir Putin. It is, perhaps, unfair to single out here only Mr. Weigel, who was simply presenting what has long since become the party line that one can hear repeated on all the cable news channels or read in the Washington Post. His open letter nonetheless conveniently summarizes in one place all the usual accusations against the Russian leader and lays out the usual definition of who Putin supposedly is. Weigel’s letter was addressed to J.D. Vance, then the newly elected vice president. It accused Vance, in effect, of feeling insufficient hatred for the Russian leader, which is immoral.
From Weigel’s perspective, Vladimir Putin:
… is a pathological autocrat whose warped worldview and homicidal treatment of political opponents were formed in the moral cesspool of the Soviet Union’s security services. [Vladimir Putin] has openly declared his intention to reverse history’s verdict on the Soviet system. He is conducting a genocidal war in Ukraine to further that ambition. Like the aggressors of the 1930s, he will not stop until he is stopped.
The notion that Vladimir Putin intends to keep rolling westward until Russia occupies Poland is easily dealt with. There is no evidence, first of all, for any such wish, which could only come at fantastic cost and without any clear gain. Those who claim to know better than Putin himself his own thoughts can, of course, assert whatever they like.
The emptiness of this charge is nonetheless strongly suggested by the repeated willingness of Vladimir Putin to forego Russian expansion even into Ukraine—other than the retention of Crimea – so long as its critical security concerns, such as no NATO in Ukraine, are observed. We saw this first with the Minsk Accords of Feb. 2015 (Minsk II), and then, I would argue, with the April 2022 peace agreement that was nearly finalized in Istanbul. Had the first of these agreements been honored by Ukraine and its Western backers, and the second not rejected by them, then the Donbas likely wouldn’t be Russian territory today, as Moscow was willing to recognize the region’s autonomous status within Ukraine.
Of perhaps greater interest are the rhetorical devices used by Weigel to associate Putin in the reader’s mind with Hitler and the USSR. He does so by such phrases as “like the aggressors of the 1930s” and by stating that Putin’s thought world was wholly formed “in the moral cesspool of the Soviet Union’s security services.” To drive this same point home, Weigel refers to what he terms Putin’s “homicidal treatment” of his enemies.
There have been cases of known enemies of Putin coming to a violent end; and some of those cases may well be traceable to the Kremlin. In the case of Yevgeny Prigozhin, we can be virtually certain of such a connection. In the case of Boris Nemtsov, it appears that Chechen forces at least potentially aligned with the Kremlin were involved. But in a surprising number of other supposedly cut-and-dried cases, including even that of Sergei Magnitsky, the facts are far less clear.
Today, after the West’s repeated rejection of terms of settlement that likely would have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men, by the simple device of permitting a neutral Ukraine, there is something simply grotesque about leveling this particular charge against the Russian leader.
For Mr. Weigel, as for the neocon crowd generally, all one needs to know about Putin is that he began his career in the Soviet Union’s security services, the KGB. Reference to this fact about the Russian president’s biography triggers the desired Pavlovian response of fear and loathing, which is why it is constantly repeated, and why the subsequent steps in Putin’s long career are studiously ignored. Let’s fill in some of those lacunae.
After the USSR collapsed, Putin served as first deputy to Anatoly Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg and one of Putin’s former law school professors. When efforts were made to restore the Soviet system in 1991, and then to overthrow Yeltsin in 1993, in both cases Putin stood with those who wanted to continue the process of moving away from the Soviet experience. While serving under Sobchak, Putin became known, as even the harsh Putin critic Masha Gessen has acknowledged, as one of those rare well-placed public servants who never accepted bribes. Philip Short’s 800-page biography of Putin, though not particularly flattering, does not support Weigel’s portrait of a morally corrupt Russian leader allegedly obsessed with restoring the Soviet system.
The canard that Putin “openly declared” his “intention to reverse history’s verdict on the Soviet system” traces to the endlessly repeated phrase from Putin’s April 25, 2005 speech to the Federal Assembly. It was here that he famously referred to the collapse of the USSR as a great (or the greatest) geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. The Russian language has no definite or indefinite articles, and so the wording is ambiguous and does not make clear whether Putin meant ‘a very great’ or ‘the greatest’ catastrophe.
In any case, for many Russians, it was indeed very great. As Putin immediately stated, explaining his characterization, it was after this collapse that tens of millions of Russians were rendered aliens in foreign countries. After the collapse of state authority, and of the economic system as a whole, and of nearly all institutional structures, the majority of Russians suddenly found themselves destitute and without bearings. This was indeed a most catastrophic experience for his Russian listeners.
And yet, the upshot of Putin’s April 2005 speech was that Russia had successfully come through this terrible trial, that it was now a new country committed to democracy and individual freedom. Crucially, this new Russia, Putin emphasized, rejected the Bolshevik idea of engaging in social experiments. “We are not implementing any innovations here,” Putin said. “We are striving to use everything that has been accumulated by European civilization.”
Earlier in that same speech, Putin summarized Russia’s goals in the international arena: border security and favorable external conditions for solving Russia’s internal problems. Putin later, in an interview with German reporters, offered his position on the USSR: “any Russian who does not regret the shattering of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who thinks it can be restored has no brain.”
In March 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan coup, Putin famously urged his governors to read, along with books by more mainstream Russian philosophers, a work called Our Tasks by Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954), the conservative Hegelian and legal scholar.
In it, Ilyin cautions Russia’s future leaders about the dangers that will arise for Russia after the USSR ceased to exist—something he was certain would eventually happen. The rest of the world, in its ignorance of the consequences, would seek the breakup of Russia and, to this end, would provide lots of development assistance and ideological encouragement to those willing to carry out this assignment. These same outside forces would encourage civil wars and bring about all sorts of crises, including for world peace. To avoid that fate, Russian leaders, Ilyin counseled, would need to embrace authoritarian rule for a time, thereby preserving the unity of the state and providing a breathing space for Russia to recover.
The political evolution of Putin between 2005 and 2014 is clear enough: He became more hostile to the U.S.-led West. Also clear are the reasons for his growing suspicions. Pressure from the West, including but not restricted to the pressures of an expanding NATO (both de facto and de jure) pushed not only Vladimir Putin, but Russia’s political order more generally, back into a ‘czarist’ framework that has, for centuries, come naturally.
Now, by using the word czarist, I mean to emphasize, mainly, the Russian political order’s hierarchical, vertical, and centralizing logic—not the literal restoration of the czarist order per se, which likely will never return. Democracy too is a noteworthy feature of political life in Russia today, contrary to the confident pronouncements of American cold warriors, though admittedly it exists in an unstable balance with other elements, including that of Christianity, as I have explored elsewhere.
What if Nicholas II was still in power, along with a weak parliament, the Russian Orthodox Church, and even one Pyotr Stolypin hard at work modernizing Russia’s economy? As it happens, such a scenario is surprisingly similar to the Russia we see right now, under Vladimir Putin. Granted, Putin’s Russia is not a liberal, secular democracy. But why should that be a problem for us? It isn’t, and Trump and J.D. Vance are to be congratulated for recognizing that Russia can be dealt with diplomatically to resolve the Ukraine war, and indeed, perhaps even to end a Cold War that seemed to rear its monstrous head during the Biden years.