All it took to transform Vladimir Putin from a candidate for a foreign policy “reset” into a global villain was a change in presidents.
In 2012 Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for his 1980s view that Russia under Putin was our most serious global rival. Obama earlier had sent his Secretary of State to offer a cartoonish “reset button” to the Russians, and followed up a few years later by offering Putin “flexibility” after his reelection. After Hillary’s defeat and Trump’s campaign suggestions of outreach to Russia, Putin suddenly became a villain straight out of Joe McCarthy’s central casting, the Svengali who seduced Republicans into “collusion” with “fake news” and “hacks” in order to put into power a president beholden to him. At least Senator John McCain has been consistent, holding fast to his reductive view of Putin as a dead-eyed KGB thug with whom it is impossible to do geopolitical business.
Once again, our foreign policy lacks continuity and coherence because we ignore history and rely instead on gratifying caricatures that serve partisan interests or moral preening rather than our country’s security and interests.
As a result of this bad habit, we find it impossible to look beyond the media cartoons, received wisdom, and partisan trimming, and instead learn the full context of a nation’s motives and beliefs. We need to understand all the springs of a geopolitical rival’s actions, not to forgive or rationalize them, but to follow Sun Tzu’s advice to know your enemy so you can properly counter his designs. It may make us feel better and more righteous to reduce Putin to an autocratic illiberal “gangster” or “murderer” or “kleptocrat,” but that won’t help us manage our relations with a nuclear-armed geopolitical rival seeking to expand its reach and influence.
One important dimension of Russian culture that we slight is religious faith. We in the West have been undergoing secularization for two centuries, and now have reached the point where religion is either an archaic superstition impeding human progress, or a quaint life-style choice with holiday traditions, tolerated as long they stay out of the public square. But Orthodox Christianity has retained a place in Russia that Christianity has lost in the West. And faith remains one of the foundations of Russian national sovereignty and patriotic pride to an extent that our elites, committed to a transnational globalism and secular technocracy, find retrograde. Despite the historical truth that our own political order recognized faith as its foundation, today we find taking religion seriously to be naïve or sinister, a sign of nefarious plots to restrict personal freedom by evoking religious authority. Hence the “evangelical fundamentalist” bogey that for nearly half a century progressives have brandished in order to delegitimize conservatives and their “bitter clinging” to patriotism and religion.
Nationalism and Orthodox Christianity, in contrast, long ago melded in Russian history, and was strong enough to survive the seven decades of atheist communism. Thus ignoring the role of history and religion in Russian foreign policy compromises our understanding of events. Take Putin’s annexation of Crimea a few years ago. In the standard Western narrative, Putin subverted a democratically elected government in Ukraine to protect its puppet oligarchy useful to the Russian plutocrats and their selfish interests. But from Russia’s point of view, it was the West that interfered in Ukraine’s politics and subverted democracy in order to advance a larger design: Basing NATO forces deeper into Russia’s sphere of influence, including Crimea, the historical home of an important Russian naval base.
These two views are not mutually exclusive. As Christopher Caldwell writes, “Both of these accounts are perfectly correct. It is just that one word [democracy] can mean something different to Americans than it does to Russians.” This is not to endorse postmodern radical relativism, the view that, as Hamlet says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” The point is we are handicapping ourselves if we don’t understand that other point of view and take it into account in our calculations. If we had done so in the 1990s, we might not have been so hasty in enlarging NATO to include countries in Russia’s historical sphere of interest, both humiliating Russian national pride, and committing ourselves to protecting those countries against their only possible aggressor, Russia.
