What does Putin Want? Part 1

The Masters of Fear and Dread

The Sun shines bright with blue skies abounding over Moscow as I write this sentence. The beauty is rather strange to behold knowing of the horror unfolding across Ukraine. A short time ago there was only grey and no war. Now, bright light beams and war rages.

Reading the news, myriad articles, in English, in Russian, WhatsApp, Telegram, friends, family, actually drowning in it all, there is one overwhelmingly recurring question coming from the Western side — What does Putin want? Often not bracketed in some way or contextualised with in Ukraine but open ended and spilling off asymptotically. Often in close proximity to words like ‘Hitler’ or ‘Reich’ or phrases such ‘all democracies’ or ‘war on liberal democracy’.

It should be noted that there are some perspicacious analyses of Ukraine and why it matters so much for Russia out there, such as Anatol Lieven’s wonderful recent (15/11/21, rather recent but it seems long ago now) Ukraine: The World’s Most Dangerous Problem or his genuinely recent interview. Examinations demurring both blatant mendacity and binary moralising do exist. As do panels of experts proffering insights of varying degrees of soberness. However, these are mostly from commentators with a deep and especial knowledge of politics and the politics of the post-Soviet space in particular. They are not typical of what the mainstream is busy bombarding the public with.

Big Questions = Big Fear and Big Confusion

On the whole, western outlets from across the world pose their questions and frame their pieces in the broadest and most existential of ways, this having the effect of drawing the reader into a metaphysical domain of infinite possibilities and infinite dangers, something akin to theodicy, the study of evil and why it is permitted by God. Why does the benevolent divine allow bad things to happen? Why does God allow evil to exist? What even is evil? What does Putin want? It has a million answers and none at all at the same time. The trick is to put the question thusly and fill the answer with whatever you wish.

Here are some examples:

Time Magazine back in 2014 — What Putin Wants

The Atlantic 2018 — What Putin Really Wants

Foreign Affairs 2021 — What Putin Really Wants in Ukraine

The Guardian 2022 — The edge of war: what, exactly, does Putin want in Ukraine?

Sky News 2022 — Russian-Ukrainian crisis: What does Putin want?

BBC 2022 — Why is Russia invading Ukraine and what does Putin want?

The Spectator 2022 — How Putin is following Hitler’s playbook

Umair Haque Medium 2022 — Putin is acting like Hitler because he wants a Third Reich

The Boston Globe 2022 — Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine

The New York Times 2022 — Putin vs. Democracy

CNN 2022 — Fareed’s take: Putin’s war on liberal democracy

Some of the above are rather well-intentioned and genuinely illuminating (Time Magazine and Foreign Affairs). Most are not, and seek not one iota at all to delve into the real and deep issues at play, nor to offer suggestions as to any lasting solutions for both sides. Their game is not substance and hard fact but rather smoke and shadow, to obscure as much as to illuminate — show the right parts of the truth in the right way and the creature comes to life for all to see. Much like the shark in Jaws the beast is far more terrifying and demonic when it exists in the penumbra of the known and the unknown, wreaking havoc among its prey and alluded to with sinister imagery (in the film’s case with music), to occasionally rear its maw from the abyss to remind all that submerged somewhere below and beyond lives death.

The Masters of Fear and Dread

And this is how it should be in film. It is not just that the animatronics of the past were pretty poor and kinda funny — modern technology and computer- generated effects are amazing — it is that horror is most horrible and dread most all-encompassing when not simply subsumed within a single form that shows itself at the story’s crescendo, however skilfully wrought this may be, but rather when fear swims formless throughout the 90-odd-minute experience, enveloping the psyche, sucking in the senses and haunting every nook and cranny with its malevolent presence (The Blair Witch shows not a single thing and is quite terrifying). The manufacturing of fear hints at the truth, plays off the truth, twists the truth and shows part of the truth but the full truth revealed is coterminous with the dissolution of dread and fear as the scary part of the film subsides and some sort of ever-so understandable struggle takes place in the clear light of day.

Spielberg employed every trick of the trade to create his masterpiece and change Hollywood and film forever. His achievement tapped into something very deep and is drowning in symbolism. And this is because it shows how fear and hysteria work in society, how to produce fear and what fear produces, thus making it infinitely malleable and infinitely applicable.

It is not that a real shark is harmless and poses no threat. On the contrary, given the right or wrong set of circumstances, some species are extremely dangerous. However, there are facts, statistics, basic precautions, known knowns, science and logic which all serve to chip away at the megalith of fear to render the animal bounded and contained, knowable and predictable.

Vladimir Putin is a shark. We have made him into Jaws.

He is an alien lifeform that wishes to enslave all humanity and pass it into tyranny as Joe Biden suggests in his first State of the Union address. He is a universal bogeyman that seeks to steal liberal democracy. He is Hitler reincarnated and remade for the 21st century. He is the Grinch who lusts to steal Christmas from a civilised world. He is the Devil. He is Jaws swimming behind the borders of Europe’s happily bathing countries waiting for the right time to swallow one of them down whole.

‘What do you want?!!’, screams the world. ‘Everything that you hold dear, my dear,’ is the response.

Spielberg, Hitchcock, Hooper, Nakata, Carpenter — masters of fear and dread.

The political sphere has its own masters of fear and dread. And they have always existed. The Spanish Inquisition, the Reign of Terror, Stalin’s Great Purge, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, genocide after genocide — all times when certain groups sowed deep fear and terrible dread to degrade, dehumanise and massacre thousands and millions of people. McCarthyism, the Red Scare, the Lavender scare, persecution after persecution — all times when certain groups summoned up the spectre of fear to destroy their quarry socially, spiritually and morally.

The fall of the Soviet Union set in motion the emergence of a new form of fearmongering and othering which gripped the globe. It is singular in its dictates and unrivalled in its power. It may be called liberal hegemony, hegemonic liberalism or transdemocracy. If you are on the right side of it, the chances are you’re pretty happy with the arrangement. If not, you will need to be on your toes lest death come your way.

This state of affairs came into being with the collapse of the Soviet Union as this is the point at which history died, bipolarity became unipolarity with the US as the last man standing, and liberal democracy became not merely a domestic way of organising a society in the best way I know of but a universal stick to smash the whole world over the head with.

Bipolarity to Unipolarity

Liberal democracy is great, amazing, one of the best things ever created or stumbled upon. Of course, how it is upheld and implemented is a different matter entirely. However, it is a DOMESTIC DOCTRINE. A domestic idea. Liberalism gives the rights part — human, civil, political. Democracy gives the elections and competitive political environment part. And the two together give greater freedom and protection for the individual, make government more accountable and transparent and society better in a myriad of ways. For this to work a million different rules, rights, restrictions, and regulations must be in place, held firm and largely unbreakable, and a general rule of law must be deeply entrenched. This requires a strong and legitimate state, as well as a certain type of culture for the system to be self-realising and self-sustaining. But most essentially a strong state, that will enforce the rules and itself follow the rules, with the seal of approval from the people whom it governs. And even with this, liberal democracy, as is evidenced by every country where it exists to one degree or another, is a fragile thing.

There is NO WORLD STATE.

There is no world state to make such a system work. There are agreements, treaties, charters, international law, international bodies, supranational bodies, prevailing customs and modes of behaviour, but there is nothing that a powerful state cannot break should it so choose.

To illustrate the incontrovertible nature of this axiom, the US has been at war for 225 out of 243 years since 1776. WW2 was existentially and fundamentally necessary (Hiroshima and Nagasaki are however extremely debatable) and some other conflicts may be justifiable or understandable, perhaps. That being duly accounted for, if we look at the more recent past, at Vietnam, Iraq (up to 207,156 Iraqi civilians have been killed in America and its allies’ wars in the country in case we have somehow forgotten about the notion of scale), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia, we can see rather quickly that powerful states do as they wish when they see fit. Power provides its own justification. Rules can be broken and exceptions to them established. Truth is the purview of the powerful and the most powerful give the world its ultimate truth.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, two powerful states were locked in a battle for truth and dominance. This bipolar state of affairs had the effect of balancing out some of the more egregious tendencies of superpower politics. The dissolution of the Soviet system meant that bipolarity became unipolarity. The new unipole had an opportunity to attempt to usher in a new era for the world and transform the international system. It also had the chance to consolidate its position, push its agenda, expand its ideology and continue on its erstwhile course untrammelled. It chose the latter, and with this hegemonic liberalism became the order of the day.

The Rise of Liberal Hegemony

Henceforth, countries would be divided by the nature of their internal systems. Are you a liberal democracy or not? Are you liberal or are you illiberal? The norms of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference in domestic affairs would remain intact for liberal societies and those illiberal societies strong enough to protect them. The right to a natural sphere of influence in the accepted tradition of political realism would perdure for one nation only and this sphere would encompass the whole world. By virtue of this, the USA had and still claim to have universal ownership over the right to interfere in any matter it so chooses.

Are you liberal or not? Are you democratic or not? Answer the question correctly and show some proof or shut up and go along with everything we say and we’ll agree to leave you alone, for now (as Gadhafi learned only too well). The central tenet of modern international politics recalls a story my brother once told about when himself and some mates were interrailing in Germany. They were on the train speaking English to one another when some fairly decent-sized Germans approached, asking,

‘Are you English?’

‘No, we’re Irish.’

‘Show us your passports then,’ was the response.

They scrutinised the passports. ‘Ok, you’re fine. If you were English, we would have had a problem.’

You’re either on the right side or the wrong. You’re either liberal or not. It is an infinitely sad irony that liberal democracy — an idea that is all about freedom, fairness, equality and peace — has become a fundamental basis for the moral and legitimate application of war as a mechanism for shaping and reshaping illiberal societies across the world, at gargantuan costs of life, great misery and little chance of any lasting success. The United States is not a world state with any remotely legitimate claim to a rightful monopoly on the use of violence to govern the world and dictate how states are organised and structured.

Yet, this is what the proponents of liberal hegemony claim. Some of these genuinely believe in what they lay claim to and some make use of the the doctrine for surreptitiously instrumentalist motives. It can be a little confusing as the adherents style themselves in differing ways and espouse divergent views and values on a great number of issues.

Some are internationalists, focusing on rights, elections, institutions and the free market. The Clintons, Obama, Madeleine Albright, and Joe Biden at the present time, all belong to this first group. Albright states in 1998, ‘we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us’. These are the guardians and custodians of history and righteousness, with high Hegelian destiny and necessity, and no small amount of hubris, on their side.

Bush and Blair are neocons (although, admittedly, Blair drastically departed from this sort of strain of politics in his domestic policies) who imbue liberal hegemony with a distinctly messianic zeal, with such utterances as ‘God will be my judge on Iraq’, invectives involving Satan and casting countries opposing American will as Axes of Evil (immediately redolent of the present language being used to describe Putin and Russia).

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and possibly Paul Wolfowitz, more than likely fit into the instrumentalist category. Their goal was and is to protect America’s position in the world, and their own coffers of course, at all costs and by any means possible, including by virtue of the doctrine of liberal hegemony.

Good Wars and Bad Wars

Everything liberal is good, great, rational, civilised, well-meaning, justified and justifiable, done with benevolence and good intentions, blessed by providence and the Good Lord, implemented in the name of progress and brought forth all for the benefit of humankind. Everything illiberal is atavistic, uncivilised, brutal, primitive, dumb, dangerous, deranged, unevolved, unenlightened, of a bygone era, putrescent and poisonous, from the primordial soup. The Liberal West is the Star Trek Federation moving boldly towards the future — the Illiberal East is the Klingon Empire trapped in the past; Richard Sakwa in his wonderful and essential Russia against the Rest makes this germane analogy.

And so, for the US-led West, war waged against an illiberal state becomes a moral duty — the removal of a vestigial tale, the correction of a wayward pupil, a dirty business that must be taken care of. War for the US is always a necessary evil to drag the world forward and rid humanity of some cancerous growth. No illiberal society can make such a claim using as defence for its crimes this doctrine of first moral discovery. War for it can only be self-serving or part of some grand scheme to rebuild a fallen empire or a destructive throwback to a past barbarism or simply evil incarnate.

This is the root of the bile, venom, anger and deep revulsion rippling across the world and boiling everything Russian alive. It is not that the human race has suddenly decided to weep for the victims of wars everywhere and fight for the rights of all to live in peace and prosperity. It is that Putin’s illiberal Russia is something with hooves and horns, malformed, hideous, slithering out from the black lagoon of its own backwardness to bring back war without a liberal moral justification to our age, to wage a war inspired by Thomas Hobbes and not John Locke. It is the not wrong kind of war waged by the wrong kind of person.

Rape by Fatty Arbuckle

Slavoj Zizek calls what is happening in Ukraine a rape. This rape would not have taken place had Ukraine simply consented, which, of course, it would not. All the while, the US stands pointing, moralising, condemning, but refusing to stop the situation in the only way that really counts for Ukraine, making everything worse in many ways. I would argue that the rape analogy works far better if we tweak it a little: it is the rape of Virginia Rappe by Fatty Arbuckle in 1921 from the perspective of the Liberal West.

America was shocked by the rape and death of Virginia Rappe, seemingly at the hands of Roscoe Arbuckle, then Hollywood’s biggest star. He was acquitted in three separate trials, but the fact that Rappe’s bladder had ruptured, the implication being that the bloated body of the obese Arbuckle had squashed the poor woman to death, and that wild drink-fuelled libidinousness were involved, made the crime infinitely more shocking for the public. Arbuckle was spat at on the street, there were calls for him to be put to death, he became the most hated man in America and he passed away, his reputation in tatters, ostracised by Hollywood, at the age of 46.

It was not just the alleged rape. It was the fatness, the boozing, the lecherousness, the seeming corruption of a chaste girl midst the high moral sanctimony of prohibition, the mental image of the dripping-with-sweat obese man having his way with the girl and then popping her with his weight.

It didn’t matter that he was acquitted three times. It didn’t matter that the situation was anything but black and white. It didn’t matter that Bambina Maude Delmont, Arbuckle’s accuser, had convictions for extortion and blackmail. The masters of fear and dread in the media wanted a beast and a crime and the public lapped it up.

It doesn’t matter that Putin and Russia have been saying that they cannot tolerate ballistic missiles on ships and in countries around Europe for more than twenty years. It doesn’t matter that numerous ex-Soviet states and buffer zones have been swallowed up by NATO, 3 states in 1999, 7 more in 2002, and yet more in 2009, 2017 and 2020. It doesn’t matter that the 2014 Maidan Revolution was at least, in part, a US-sponsored coup, which both Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky agree on. It doesn’t matter that there are many unsavoury extremist nationalist groups that exert a presence throughout the country (these even being endorsed by the likes of Facebook). It doesn’t matter that the US has killed 100s upon 100s of thousands of people and displaced up to 38 million people in its own wars, far far far in excess of anything that Russia has done.

What does Putin want? What does Russia want?

It doesn’t matter. Putin is Jaws and Russia is a bloated beast trying to rape a poor aspiring nation. The truth is black and white. Good and evil. Right and wrong.

But the truth is grey. And a million bad decisions and a concerted effort to ignore, vilify and discredit a nation and all of its vital interests and reasonable concerns have led us to this point.

Vladimir Putin is a shark leading a bad regime. He has embarked on a terrible bloody path and made a an extremely costly miscalculation. Notwithstanding this, to think that states with illiberal regimes and the countries they govern have not only no legitimate interests but no right to have such interests, no right to have a say in what happens on and near their borders, no right to worry or be afraid or expect to be consulted about what goes on in their neck of the woods, is a fundamental non sequitur and an extremely dangerous position to take. And this danger is many times more acute in the case of powerful states.

Russia and Putin do have a fairly firm leg to stand on. Russia does have a right to protect its interests and feel safe as all countries do. As does Ukraine. And when the interests of countries clash and collide, compromise should be sought. And such compromises are already enshrined in the Minsk II Agreement signed by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany and Belarus.

Putin and his circle are masters of fear and dread and have many tricks at their disposal to make Russians see what they want them to see. Indeed, this is taking place at the present time. However, their work is being boycotted by much of the world and they have been cast in someone else’s film, with their real and existing maleficence monstrified far beyond what it is, all nuance deracinated and Russia’s real and rightful interests resigned to the book the film is based on.

The grand masters of fear and dread and the false and dangerous doctrine of liberal hegemony want you to see evil and evil you shall see. They have given the public of the western world their own narrative and distorted reality and the public has been stupefied into thinking that what the television and internet says about this country they know so little about is the gospel truth. Russia and its leader have been groomed to play the villain ever since Putin denounced liberal hegemony in his famous 2007 speech in Munich, and they play their part all too well. The truth, however, is both far more complex and far simpler.

And there are people who understood this truth, knew what would happen and know what a state is and how it will act, particularly a powerful state, when the international sphere is boiled down to its bare bones. These are the speakers of the simple truths of realism and to them we turn in Part 2.