October 27, 2002
Putin's long-term strategy

In a comment posted below and reiterated at his own blog, Ron Campbell asks what the Russians hope to get out of it. Damned if I know. That of course won't stop me from speculating. This is a blog, after all.

Putin's early career in the Soviet Union was as an officer in the KGB, working in the foreign intelligence arm. For several years he was stationed in East Germany, and he speaks German well. This has allowed him to cultivate his relationship with Germany under Schröder. Putin's style in Russia is hard and uncompromising. The second Chechen war was started after a series bomb explosions in Moscow which ripped apart several apartment buildings, leading to hundreds of dead. This wave of terrorism was blamed on the Chechen, and used as a pretext for launching the second Chechen war. However, no evidence of this was ever produced of this supposed link, and there have been persistent allegations that it was the Russian secret service that was responsible, as documented on this Danish site. Sound monstrous? The KGB was monstrous. The Soviet Union was monstrous. And Putin spent most of his career in the Soviet Union in the KGB, whose business it was to keep the communist dictatorship in power. In the grand scheme of things, the Soviet-era mentality is perfectly capable of blowing up a few hundred of its own people in order to pursue a larger goal. The larger goal is to re-establish Russia as a first-rate power. The shock of not being taken seriously on the world stage after losing its empire is a deep psychological wound in the Russian psyche.

I read once an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (can't find it online) that Putin has a copy of Atlas Shrugged on his bookshelf. If he has read the book, its message has not taken hold. The transformation necessary from KGB apparatchik to someone who would truly understand and promote liberal democracy is enormous, and I don't think Putin is capable of it. He will remain, at heart, someone for whom the state is an end in itself, not something that exists to protect its' citizens rights.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there is an opportunity to entice Russia back into the mainstream of Western civilization. The obvious road to that goal is to establish a capitalist economy in Russia. But taking this tack is mistaking Russia's ultimate goal: having a prosperous economy is just a step on the way of re-establishing Russian national greatness and imperialism. That is the way Putin is likely to see it at the moment. The hope is that once Russians do get the benefits of increased prosperity, the wounds of losing the empire will start to heal. But that will take a long time. For several generations the Russian people have been bombarded with propaganda demonizing the West, and especially the US. Even in eastern Germany, which has benefited enormously from capitalism and America's role in Europe, the generations-long brainwashing has left a strong undercurrent of anti-American feeling.

So I think Putin's current strategy has to be seen in the light of the long-term goal of putting Russia back on the map of Great Powers. He certainly realizes that he can make common cause with the US in the war against the Islamofascist enemy. How freely he will give his cooperation to the US in this depends on how great he thinks the danger to Russia is. Bush has rightly determined that eradicating the Islamofascists and the regimes that support them (like Iraq) is necessary. Putin has to ask himself whether Russia will be an ongoing target in the war, or whether it will be secondary. If he thinks the danger to Russia is containable by the use of force in Chechnya and that Iraq is peripheral to this, he will try to play the US for his support.

This is something I have never understood about shady opportunistic regimes, such as those in Russia, China and France. Why do they think that there is no danger to them from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? They're happy to deal with and protect rogue states all over the world. But North Korean and Iraqi missiles (if further developed) could strike just as easily in China, Russia and France. It is a peculiar myopia that these regimes display. For all their criticism of the US for fighting an "oil war," it these regimes who have the dollar signs in their eyes, and are willing to sell their souls to any third-world tyrant who throws them some baubles.

So what does Putin think he can get out of this? The most optimistic scenario is that he will see this as the opening bid in a long term rapprochement between Russia and the US. Fighting a war on the same side is always a good start. Then again, we also fought with the Soviets against the Nazis, so it's not necessarily the start of a beautiful friendship. If we can show Putin that Russia and he himself will benefit by cooperating with the US, he will probably do so. On the other hand, the resentment of America's victory in the Cold War and Russian dreams of a new empire might lead Russia to try to play it too cute: withhold full support in the war and trying to maneuver for position on the world stage as a result, for instance by playing Saddam's protector at the UN. This would be extremely short sighted and it's a losing strategy, but it could cause a whole lot of problems in the short term.

In the end, the Russian economy depends on oil. A $1 move in the price of oil leads to a billion dollar swing Russia's state finances. From that perspective, it is in Russia's interest to keep oil prices as high as possible by not having a resolution of threat of war in the Middle East. Again, a short-sighted strategy that will not achieve anything in the long term, while losing credibility and good will in the US. But Russia is a huge country rich in mineral resources other than oil, and should be able to build a more balanced economy. The short-term pain of lower oil prices after the liberation of Iraq is bearable for the Russian economy, but it will make Putin's life more complicated. Russia's economy needs to be weaned off its petrodollar dripfeed; it's a theme I have been returning to again and again. A sound economy is vital.

Putin's long-term goal is resuscitating the Russian empire. But our and his short-term goals coincide sufficiently to start building a real partnership that can be used to defuse the imperial revanchism in the longer term, leading to a situation in which Russia becomes a confident modern state that no longer feels the pain of its amputated phantom limbs.

UPDATE: Another thing I wanted to mention (answering Ron's question, which is how I started off on this) is that in concrete terms what Putin may be looking for from the US is a free hand in dealing with Russia's "near abroad" in the Caucasus. Allowing Russia to reassert its imperialist aspirations in the region (such as their troop deployments in Georgia) would be a mistake, because it's going to leave us with a much bigger mess to clean up later. Morally it would also be a deeply flawed move, even on the chessboard of realpolitik. We owe it to the recently liberated peoples of the region to prevent a new Russian dominion.

Posted by qsi at October 27, 2002 07:16 PM | TrackBack (0)
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Comments

in case you didn't know, Ba'athism is a totally secular ideology, it is impossible for true Ba'athists to support Islamists. Connection between Saddam and Al-Qiada is merely false propoganda of the US government

Posted by: معاويه عسكري on October 15, 2003 08:58 PM
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