‘Your world will collapse just like ours did”. I would often hear such sentiments from Moscow’s elites when I lived there two decades ago. The hegemony of the hypocritical West would soon end, they claimed.
Some revelled in it – anticipating a world of corruption and flux where might will mean right. A few lamented it. The historian Mikhail Gefter worried when he read Francis Fukuyama’s famous The End of History thesis: if history has no idea of progress, its ideals will dissolve and all that will be left are brutal power grabs.
Back then I dismissed these ideas as belonging to history’s losers. Defeated in the Cold War, having seen the vast, seemingly eternal system they grew up in collapse in a historical heartbeat, Russians were now projecting their experience onto ours.
Two decades later, as Putin, smirking with triumphant cynicism, took a seat in Trump’s limo to determine the future of Ukraine, it’s hard not to feel they were correct.
This war has always run in two dimensions. One is a kinetic, almost 19th-century struggle over land, with success measured out in miles. The other runs in the realms of perception. The more esoteric Russian military theorists like to talk about how the great conflicts of the world play out in the “psycho-sphere”, and are fought and won in the collective imagination. In that war it is Germany, Britain and France that are being dissected.
And in this sense, Russia feels it’s winning. Gone is any talk in Washington DC about protecting the “rules-based international order”, the right of a democratic nation such as Ukraine to choose its future, of its people under occupation, of the sovereignty of borders. All the rhetoric that America used so effectively in the Cold War is over. The institutions that projected them, such as the bureau of human rights or the once great broadcaster Voice of America, are dismantled. There’s an advert in
DC local news right now selling off the studio equipment from “an international broadcaster”. This is how the world order ends: with a garage sale.
As we move forward, the prospects for Moscow must seem even more delicious. The Russians are already running their well-worn trick of setting impossible terms – such as the surrender of non-conquered Ukrainian territory – and, while all search earnestly for “solutions”, increasing their bombardment. “Negotiations” are a cover to rachet up the violence, rather than turn it down.
They want Trump to grow so frustrated with Kyiv’s refusal to capitulate that America and Europe will begin to split apart. If the US then starts to relax sanctions against Russia, which the White House has indicated it will, and Europe won’t, as the EU has suggested, then Moscow’s opportunities widen. How will German car manufacturers or French energy consumers feel as America initiates business with Moscow? Will we sanction US companies that try? The whole scenario tears apart Transatlantic relations, and boosts the pro-Kremlin parties across the continent.
Already Kremlin propaganda is revelling at the idea of Russia and America teaming up to crush Europe together. Troll factories push out memes of Russian and US bayonets stabbing Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission. According to the cynical Kremlin line, the US has covertly controlled every pro-democracy movement in Europe – but now the conspiracy will be allied to Russia’s interests.
European leaders of course understand this. Thus Putin’s visit to DC was followed with the mass gathering in the Oval Office to display unity. But the very fact that Trump welcomed Russia and Europe as equals, each petitioning his graces, is already a victory for Putin. No longer is the West a Band of Brothers. Instead Trump is like The Bachelor on reality TV, comparing wooing suitors.
But there is a more effective way of striking back into Russia’s “psychosphere” than this defensive patching up. Putin’s and his ruling clique’s vulnerability lies in the place from which their cynical world-view emanates. Precisely because they saw the Soviet Union collapse so quickly they are also now over-sensitive to any perception they may be about to lose control. Whenever they feel they are doing so, they retreat.
One of the reasons Biden was so reluctant to apply maximum pressure on to Russia was because it was so careful not to upset the balance of the world order he was trying to preserve. But now there is no world order to protect, guardrails can come off. Russia might be relishing the end of the “international rules-based order”, but in a weird way that world order was also protecting it, allowing it to play the rule-breaking bad boy among ponderous adults. A recent piece by the military analyst Jack Watling might provide a roadmap for Western action, starting with the need to seize Russia’s illegal shadow fleet in the Baltic Sea, which is the lifeline of its oil economy.
One could follow up with pressure on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, more assertive information operations to undermine recruitment of soldiers and morale inside the army, and secondary sanctions on Indian and Chinese companies.
There is no one magic bullet. It’s more a case of piling on many pressures all at once so the Russian regime finally feels its system could be at risk. We can’t hope for imminent regime change – it will retreat way before that risk were realised. But we can make the Kremlin feel that its world could collapse just as it did before. And until we undermine Putin’s own sense of control, he will ensure ours continues to erode.
‘Your world will collapse just like ours did”. I would often hear such sentiments from Moscow’s elites when I lived there two decades ago. The hegemony of the hypocritical West would soon end, they claimed.
Some revelled in it – anticipating a world of corruption and flux where might will mean right. A few lamented it. The historian Mikhail Gefter worried when he read Francis Fukuyama’s famous The End of History thesis: if history has no idea of progress, its ideals will dissolve and all that will be left are brutal power grabs.
Back then I dismissed these ideas as belonging to history’s losers. Defeated in the Cold War, having seen the vast, seemingly eternal system they grew up in collapse in a historical heartbeat, Russians were now projecting their experience onto ours.
Two decades later, as Putin, smirking with triumphant cynicism, took a seat in Trump’s limo to determine the future of Ukraine, it’s hard not to feel they were correct.
This war has always run in two dimensions. One is a kinetic, almost 19th-century struggle over land, with success measured out in miles. The other runs in the realms of perception. The more esoteric Russian military theorists like to talk about how the great conflicts of the world play out in the “psycho-sphere”, and are fought and won in the collective imagination. In that war it is Germany, Britain and France that are being dissected.
And in this sense, Russia feels it’s winning. Gone is any talk in Washington DC about protecting the “rules-based international order”, the right of a democratic nation such as Ukraine to choose its future, of its people under occupation, of the sovereignty of borders. All the rhetoric that America used so effectively in the Cold War is over. The institutions that projected them, such as the bureau of human rights or the once great broadcaster Voice of America, are dismantled. There’s an advert in
DC local news right now selling off the studio equipment from “an international broadcaster”. This is how the world order ends: with a garage sale.
As we move forward, the prospects for Moscow must seem even more delicious. The Russians are already running their well-worn trick of setting impossible terms – such as the surrender of non-conquered Ukrainian territory – and, while all search earnestly for “solutions”, increasing their bombardment. “Negotiations” are a cover to rachet up the violence, rather than turn it down.
They want Trump to grow so frustrated with Kyiv’s refusal to capitulate that America and Europe will begin to split apart. If the US then starts to relax sanctions against Russia, which the White House has indicated it will, and Europe won’t, as the EU has suggested, then Moscow’s opportunities widen. How will German car manufacturers or French energy consumers feel as America initiates business with Moscow? Will we sanction US companies that try? The whole scenario tears apart Transatlantic relations, and boosts the pro-Kremlin parties across the continent.
Already Kremlin propaganda is revelling at the idea of Russia and America teaming up to crush Europe together. Troll factories push out memes of Russian and US bayonets stabbing Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission. According to the cynical Kremlin line, the US has covertly controlled every pro-democracy movement in Europe – but now the conspiracy will be allied to Russia’s interests.
European leaders of course understand this. Thus Putin’s visit to DC was followed with the mass gathering in the Oval Office to display unity. But the very fact that Trump welcomed Russia and Europe as equals, each petitioning his graces, is already a victory for Putin. No longer is the West a Band of Brothers. Instead Trump is like The Bachelor on reality TV, comparing wooing suitors.
But there is a more effective way of striking back into Russia’s “psychosphere” than this defensive patching up. Putin’s and his ruling clique’s vulnerability lies in the place from which their cynical world-view emanates. Precisely because they saw the Soviet Union collapse so quickly they are also now over-sensitive to any perception they may be about to lose control. Whenever they feel they are doing so, they retreat.
One of the reasons Biden was so reluctant to apply maximum pressure on to Russia was because it was so careful not to upset the balance of the world order he was trying to preserve. But now there is no world order to protect, guardrails can come off. Russia might be relishing the end of the “international rules-based order”, but in a weird way that world order was also protecting it, allowing it to play the rule-breaking bad boy among ponderous adults. A recent piece by the military analyst Jack Watling might provide a roadmap for Western action, starting with the need to seize Russia’s illegal shadow fleet in the Baltic Sea, which is the lifeline of its oil economy.
One could follow up with pressure on the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, more assertive information operations to undermine recruitment of soldiers and morale inside the army, and secondary sanctions on Indian and Chinese companies.
There is no one magic bullet. It’s more a case of piling on many pressures all at once so the Russian regime finally feels its system could be at risk. We can’t hope for imminent regime change – it will retreat way before that risk were realised. But we can make the Kremlin feel that its world could collapse just as it did before. And until we undermine Putin’s own sense of control, he will ensure ours continues to erode.