浪花直播

BY MAXIM TRUDOLYUBOV

Russia鈥檚 war against Ukraine can be seen as a culmination of decades of Russian society poisoning itself with stories of foreign encirclement and mistreatment by the West. For more than two decades now, politicians and the state-run media have peddled external-threat scares, the West鈥檚 containment of Russia, and national grievances related to alienated territories and economic failures.

Russia鈥檚 ultraconservatives and communists started to dust off the old concepts of 鈥渉eartland,鈥� 鈥渓imitrophe states,鈥� and 鈥済eopolitical destiny鈥� as early as the mid-1990s. Since the late 2000s a toxic mix of early twentieth-century geopolitics and historical ressentiment has effectively been Russia鈥檚 ideology; it is now coming into full bloom with Vladimir Putin鈥檚 about Ukraine published last summer and in his angry casus belli  that was followed by the full-scale invasion of a neighboring country.

Geopolitics cannot but attract those political leaders who cultivate various historical injustices as the basis for their revanchism. This is a political program not only of the Russian president but also of politicians with similar attitudes, including, to various degrees, the leaders of Cuba, China, Hungary, Iran, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. All of them constantly complain about past humiliations, the lack of international recognition, the hostility of certain external forces, and wrongly drawn borders.

Post-Factum Geopolitics

What is less clear is why versions of geopolitics still retain currency in many international academic arenas. Those who try to understand or even justify Russia鈥檚 war against Ukraine often speak the language of 鈥済reat power politics.鈥� Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, a favorite of the Russian authorities, never tires of that 鈥渢he United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.鈥�

In Mearsheimer鈥檚 , NATO expansion is the heart of the West鈥檚 strategy, but it includes EU expansion as well, and it 鈥渋ncludes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.鈥�

One response to this sort of reasoning is that Russia鈥檚 behavior is proactive rather than reactive. 鈥淲ay before NATO existed, in the 19th century Russia looked like this. It had an autocrat, it had repression, it had militarism,鈥� the historian Stephen Kotkin. 鈥淚t is not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the 1990s, it is not a response to actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.鈥�

Geopolitical language used by foreign policy theorists, scholars, and analysts as explanatory mechanism may not thus grasp the full picture. It also allows Russian great power ideologues to cloak their ideas in an aura of respectability. But of course, scholars are entitled to a free debate. They also do not normally start wars, they just explain them, post factum.

Dehumanizing the World

The main problem with this sort of discourse is not its explanatory weakness. As many in the United States will admit, 鈥渢urning a country into a pro-American liberal democracy鈥� is easier said than done. This thinking deprives 鈥渙rdinary鈥� countries of agency, treats countries as monolithic entities, and leaves out all the contradictory processes going on inside鈥攖hat is, the desires and pursuits of actual people with their beliefs, disagreements, individual dramas; with their diverse, not at all monolithic economic and cultural activities. This thinking permeates political language as well. In political commentary, countries 鈥渄ecide,鈥� 鈥渨ant,鈥� 鈥渟uffer,鈥� or 鈥渞esent.鈥� But states can do nothing of the kind, only living beings can. Moreover, each country鈥檚 鈥渄ecision鈥� has many opponents within the country itself.

Most of those who think in terms of 鈥渨orld order鈥� and 鈥済reat power politics鈥� only impoverish themselves, because they talk only about dead entities or study them. The real catastrophe happens when this discipline becomes the basis for policies, when the language of geopolitics becomes the only language of power. Then the war begins.

The dehumanization of the world at this point occurs not in the imagination but in real life. Applied geopolitics sweeps living people with their thoughts and attitudes from the face of the earth, destroys their homes, leaves no values beyond the values of survival, makes power extraordinary and regimes and state borders sacred. This policy makes people die for the lines on a map. Applied geopolitics replaces productive economics with the mobilization of whatever resources can be used for war, regardless of people鈥檚 right to life, liberty, and property.

Official Russia effectively ignores casualties on both sides of the front. Russia鈥檚 overall death toll has been kept secret; countless bodies have been on the battlefield, and the soldiers鈥� parents have been about the fate of their children. This is not the fog of war but a combination of paranoid secrecy and disregard for human life. When impersonal entities, powers, clash in a fight for an abstraction, the world order, 鈥渙rdinary鈥� people are dispensable. After all, the actors and victims here are countries. This is how the dehumanization of the world works.

Putin Is Late by a Century

Putin鈥檚 geopolitics is flawed on another level too. He is notorious for his in showing up for meetings. This time he is late by about a century. Many observers have said that Putin is fixated on the idea of subordinating Ukraine because, as Zbigniew Brzezinski famously , 鈥渨ithout Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.鈥�

In the twenty-first century, this is magical thinking. Putin鈥檚 idea of owning a large land mass that is all-important in itself and somehow mysteriously awards its owner world鈥攐r at least regional鈥攄omination is deeply out of date. Putin is attempting to reproduce twentieth-century geopolitics in twenty-first-century modernity, in which economics, finance, and technology are more important than geography and land mass. In Russia, we see failures in running its civilian economy, its finance system, and failure to create its own technology.

Putin and the members of his inner circle are now trying to reenact the war on Nazism in order to look like the winners of the last war. This is what hobbyists鈥攎ostly men鈥攚ho are involved in historical reenactments do when they sew themselves costumes, make replica guns, and gather on the fields of the battles of old to take part in spectacular shows and enjoy themselves.

The trouble is, the Russian reenactors, having made themselves the wrong costumes, turned up with real weapons and started killing innocents. We see a war that has spilled into Ukraine and into the world of the twenty-first century right from nineteenth- and twentieth-century textbooks, including those written decades ago by the gurus of geopolitics. The global struggle for domination in today鈥檚 world is prosecuted by economic, technological, and financial means鈥攖he kinds of things that do not require physical men in tanks to cross international borders. By moving tanks into Ukraine, Putin has challenged not only Ukraine, but all of our modernity. He has not been doing well in the modern world, so he wants the clock to stop.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the authors and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.