What Does Vladimir Putin Want? Bret Stephens
http://online.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-what-does-vladimir-putin-want-1410218201?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj
Not money, power, territory or revenge. The Russian strongman is after bigger game.
Vladimir Putin aims to reconstitute the Russia of the czars. He wants to avenge the historic humiliation, as he sees it, that was the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s got to do what he’s got to do to stay in power, probably for life, if necessary by whipping Russians into nationalist frenzy. And he wants to have a lot of fun while doing all of it.
To adapt Mel Brooks : It should be good to be king.
All true. But maybe Mr. Putin is after bigger game. And maybe our failure to think about how Mr. Putin thinks about himself explains our consistent failure to anticipate his moves and check his ambitions. “What a novel my life has been!” said Napoleon on St. Helena. It wasn’t an idle remark: Napoleon had been an aspiring writer as a young man. Suppose Mr. Putin is also living his life as a novel. How would he write the next chapter?
Here’s a guess: Not by quivering in fear that a fresh round of sanctions is going to spark the third Russian Revolution, or that NATO is going to stop him from another advance into Ukraine or some other tempting neighbor. There’s a reason men who are on a roll never take a break: a udentes fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the daring.
Right now, fortune for Mr. Putin comes, first, in the shape of Barack Obama. The Russian was bound to see the American president as the classic self-infatuated liberal, half as clever and twice as weak as he imagines himself to be. As a former KGB agent working in East Germany, Mr. Putin would have had training, and perhaps experience, in reducing these types to human rubble.
Vladimir Putin ready for hockey in Sochi, Russia, Jan. 4. AFP/Getty Images
Nothing Mr. Obama has done since coming to office can have dissuaded Mr. Putin from that impression. The U.S. president isn’t an impediment to Mr. Putin’s ambitions. He’s an opportunity. When else will Mr. Putin have an American adversary who thinks that foreign policy is a global popularity contest, and that it’s OK for Russia to gain ground, territorially speaking, so long as the U.S. retains ground, morally speaking? Could anything be better?
Well, yes: Energy prices that remain stubbornly high, despite global supply increases, shoring up Russia’s export earnings in an economy that should be in free fall. A European recovery that remains stubbornly elusive, despite ultra-loose monetary policy, causing deep reluctance to increase military spending or impose punitive sanctions on Russia. The return of the politics of illiberalism to Europe, nowhere seen more clearly than in the rise of the Front National in France. (NF leader Marine Le Pen would defeat French President François Hollande 54% to 46% if the election were held tomorrow, according to a recent Ifop poll.)
All this is wind in Mr. Putin’s sails, and it does no good to say that, in the long run, Russia is in decline and possibly doomed. “In Russia,” historian Dietrich Geyer once observed, “expansion was an expression of economic weakness, not exuberant strength.” That may be a consolation for future generations, assuming the pattern holds. But it doesn’t help present-day Ukrainians, Estonians, Kazakhs or Poles.
In other words, Mr. Putin has the incentive, and probably the desire, to move with haste. He will want to finish his “land bridge” to Crimea by way of the port of Mariupol. He will be tempted by provinces in northern Kazakhstan where there are large Russian populations.
And he will give serious thought to a Baltic incursion, if only to showcase the hollowness of NATO’s military guarantees. Friday’s kidnapping by Russian forces of an Estonian counterintelligence officer named Eston Kohver, just as NATO was wrapping up its summit in Wales and in the same week that Mr. Obama visited Tallinn, was a carefully premeditated expression of contempt—and intent. With Mr. Putin, humiliating his opponents tends to be the appetizer; the main course is their destruction. Just ask former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, or now, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Which brings us, at last, to the question with which we began: What does Mr. Putin want?
It can’t be money, power or territory, all of which he has in effectively unlimited supply. It could be his own political standing, although that’s debatable: His political grip was plenty tight before he decided to intervene in Ukraine. It might be his concept of the Russian national interest, although that’s also debatable: For Mr. Putin, Russia is as much the vehicle of his self-interest as he is the vehicle of Russia’s. So it usually is with strongmen purporting to act for the sake of the nation.
In 1838, a 28-year-old lawyer gave a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., on the subject of “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” There were some men, said Abraham Lincoln, whose ambitions could be satisfied with a “gubernatorial or a presidential chair.” But that was not true for everyone. “Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?—Never!” Such men, Lincoln warned, would seek distinction at any cost, and if there was “nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would boldly set to the task of pulling down.”
Mr. Putin is no Bonaparte. But it’s beginning to look like he thinks of himself as one. A West that continues to pursue a policy of toothless opposition and de facto accommodation will feed his vanity, his ambitions and his illusions.
Comments are closed.
