Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It?Russia’s invasion has also provided the geopolitical equivalent of CPR for NATO. Washington’s perennial requests that Europeans pay their share for the security organization that defends them has been met with an unprecedented vote in Germany to increase its country’s military budget and its contribution to the alliance. ....
The unification in Europe that Mr. Biden speaks of is certainly real, but in a cruel paradox, European cohesion appears achievable only by further binding itself to the mast of American power and prerogatives. The idea of a geopolitically autonomous Europe acting independently of the United States — a vision historically dear to the French — is rapidly becoming unutterable. ....
As former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO expansion, he [Putin] shifted to a more civilizational understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, anti-homosexuality edicts, as well as a notion of a greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient wellspring is inconveniently Kyiv, Ukraine. Protesters such as Pussy Riot and others who struck directly at this neo-civilizational image came in for swift retribution.
Mr. Putin’s turn reflected a broader phenomenon of authoritarian-led liberalizing economies trying to fill an empty ideological space that seemed poised to be filled by Western idolatry. In China, too, in the late 2000s, there was a turn to a civilizational understanding in Beijing, where dutiful readers of Mr. Huntington have spread notions of Chinese civilization in the forms of global Confucius Institutes or a program for “cultural self-confidence,” and which President Xi Jinping today expresses in his elliptical “thought.”
Turkey, too, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has pushed a vision of a neo-Ottoman sphere stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, which is a direct repudiation of Ataturk’s more bounded vision of Turkish nationalism. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has revived ideas about Hindu supremacy, glorifying his nation’s ancient past — Hindustan is his Kyivan Rus — and using it as a bludgeon against his opponents. The turn to civilizational imagining provides a useful lever for ruling elites who want to suppress other forms of solidarity, whether class, regional or ecologically based, and to restrict the attractions of cosmopolitanism for their economic elites.
For all the talk about how Ukraine is — despite whatever losses on the battlefield — winning the P.R. war, there is a sense in which Mr. Putin has already won at another level of framing the conflict. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.
Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian invasion, but they do not seem prepared to follow the West in its preferred countermeasures. Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result from, as Senator Rob Portman phrased it, “putting a noose on the Putin economy.” North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basics from fertilizer to wheat; Central Asian populations rely on its remittances. Major disruptions to these economic networks seem unlikely to relieve Ukrainian suffering.
Mr. Putin himself came to power atop the rubble of Russia’s 1990s economic chaos. It would be rash to think that out of the new economic chaos inflicted, a phoenix to the liking of the West will rise.
That vision of clashing civilizations feels like it has significant grounding in reality. Some others suspect that Putin's agenda is deeper than just obliterating Ukraine.[1] If so, it raises the question of what should we do differently, if anything? Maybe it is true that Russia will never culturally integrate with the West.
Footnote:
1. An interview with Russian journalist Masha Gessen got the title, Putin Is ‘Profoundly Anti-Modern.’ Masha Gessen Explains What That Means for the World. The transcript is here. It includes this:
And as of today [March 10], the two polls I’ve seen out of Russia found majority support for the war in Ukraine. But the question that raises is what are Russians supporting? What do they know of the war being waged in their name by their government? Do they even know it’s war? The Russian government does not call it a war. It’s a special military operation.
And under a new law, to say anything that Putin’s government thinks is false about his war in Ukraine is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He’s wiping out independent news operations. He’s tightening access to social media. This is a country that already was filled with propaganda where information and untruth were in an unusually intense competition and information is being choked off that much more and that much more rapidly.
The state narrative is already that — and, in fact, it has been the narrative since at least 2014, since the sanctions imposed on Russia for its first invasion of Crimea — the narrative has been the West is waging an economic offensive against Russia, an unmotivated, unprovoked economic offensive, which makes sense because it’s always us against the world. It’s always as against the West. And the West is just doing the thing that it does, which is wage war against Russia.
The idea that sanctions could possibly change Putin’s behavior, or motivate the elites or the masses to coalesce and protest and overthrow Putin is wrong. It is demonstrably wrong. It’s been tried over and over and it doesn’t work. Now, obviously we’ve never seen sanctions on this scale and it is mind-boggling.
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