He's Living In The Past

For quite some time, I have suspected that Putin was living in the past - quite specifically, the Cold War. His "State of the Nation" speech today confirmed that.  

Most news outlets are pointing out two major features of the speech:  

1.  Putin blaming "The West" for the war in Ukraine

2.  The suspension of Russia's participation in the "New START" nuclear arms treaty.

There are other dimensions to his speech, a lot of it being pretty much classic, old school propaganda tropes. Playing to the notion of "Russia the Great", and boasting about the regions of Ukraine that Russia annexed (but doesn't really control at this point).  

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, this is all old hat. Not a single part of this pattern of propaganda is surprising - it's all happened before with different Soviet leaders at one time or another.

My guess is that this stems from two major motivations.  First, Putin needs an adversary to hang on to power.  If he can convince the bulk of Russia that "The West" is coming for their great nation, it provides a strong impetus for his inner circle to continue to support him.  Second, of course is that pushing Russia's internal economy onto a "war footing" is one of the most obvious ways to invigorate a sputtering consumer and trade economy.

Let's explore the economy picture a bit.  Russia's foreign trade picture has been narrowed considerably since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The rise of territorial expansion ambitions on Putin's part demonstrated that one of the underlying assumptions of economic globalization was false. The idea of globalization was that if everybody is economically interconnected, the cost of conflict would be so great that it would serve as a stabilizing force. Both Putin's Russia, and Xi Jinping's China have shown us that authoritarian dictators will always find ways to subvert that - usually rooted in old territorial grievances. 

At this point, Russia's major routes of international trade are either with China, or Persian and Middle Eastern powers like Iran and Syria. This represents a significant narrowing of access to world markets for Russia. Putin, however, has not really reacted to this in the manner that one would expect. Instead, he has turned to the old Soviet strategy of doing everything possible at home - which is part of why the Ukraine War is so important to him - he needs it going to transition the Russian economy over to a "war economy", where the bulk of the nation's efforts are focused on defeating the enemy. 

Ongoing sanctions against both Russia and China are likely to push the two powers together in a trade and military alliance as each sees opportunity in distracting "The West" (especially the United States) with the possibility of major conflict both in Europe and in Taiwan. Two front wars are extremely hard to fight effectively.

Russia's claims about the "threat" they face from Ukraine are an interesting study in how propaganda often takes a "kernel of truth", and then wraps an enormous ball of bullshit around it. Putin's approach comprises 3 major elements - history, NATO, and alleged fascism. 

Historically, Ukraine has often fallen under the sway of Russian territorial ambitions, so there is a long standing claim that Ukraine is really just a province of Mother Russia - a wayward child, if you will. This is not unlike how China views Taiwan.  

In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, more and more former Iron Curtain countries and former Soviet republics have joined NATO. Under Putin, this has been described as "NATO Expansionism", and he has portrayed it within Russia as an overt threat to Russia itself. Given that NATO itself is not a "mandatory membership", rather it's a voluntary alliance of members, one has to question this portrayal's objective truth.  BUT - it's classic, old school Cold War propaganda. 

When the USSR set up the old "Warsaw Pact", it was after installing sympathetic puppet governments in much of Eastern Europe - sometimes by force, other times by simply taking advantage of the chaos in the post-WWII years. Soviet-era propaganda often portrayed the Warsaw Pact and NATO as equivalent in all respects.  Of course, the difference was always that the Warsaw Pact was held together by the coercive power of Russia to roll into a wayward state with heavy armour (e.g. the 1956 invasion of Hungary, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia). 

This differs considerably from NATO where to my knowledge, no NATO country has ever been invaded by another NATO power. This isn't to say that the US and NATO are by any means angels on the world stage, but rather it demonstrates a key difference - NATO continues to operate as a defensive alliance, and membership is voluntary. Russian propaganda has always carefully ignored that point, and the latest incarnation under Putin is no different. 

Then there is the claims of "Nazis in Ukraine", which seem little different than the usual claims made to justify invading another country - like the "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction" nonsense in 2002 - a load of lies layered over very tiny kernel of truth.  That Ukraine - or any other country - might have its own flavour of right wing extremism is unsurprising, but of course Putin has chosen to amplify that with his own brand of exaggeration. 

To be blunt, Putin is living in the past. He's relitigating old Cold War era conflicts, and in all probability it's not about Russia's safety - until he invaded Ukraine in 2022, there was little appetite in the world for directly intervening in what was seen as a minor squabble between nation-states. But, as he escalated things in 2021, Putin demonstrated that even if Ukraine were to agree to his demands that they not join NATO, that was not enough to stay his territorial ambitions. 

Needless to say, other former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact countries in Europe have looked at that and said internally "oh crap, he's trying to reassert the old Russian Empire", and stepped up their efforts to become part of NATO. Both completely predictable reactions given the inner brutality of any authoritarian political power. 

So, where does this end? It ends, I suspect when Putin and his inner circle falls from power. Putin appears to have been cleaning his inner circle of anyone he thinks of as "weak links" if the spate of highly placed people "falling out of windows" (and other fishy deaths) is anything to go by. 

But, removing Putin from power is unlikely to be the end of the story. Actions will need to be taken to unwind years of propaganda, and some of that may require dramatic actions that symbolically and practically dismantle the power structure and its symbols before a new system is able to arise. 

This means that some really ugly decisions need to be made within NATO and the US in the next few months.