A reality check for the realists

The Victory Parade in Moscow in 2019. Photo: website of the President of Russia (CC) http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60490

“Of the various weird things Governor Romney has said, his position on Russia is truly out of date,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright observed. “We’re living in the 21st century, and to think that Russia is our biggest geostrategic threat makes absolutely no sense.”

This was before Russia’s invasion of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine, its brutal bombing campaign to prop up the Assad dictatorship in Syria or its efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election. It is now an article of faith among Democrats that Russia is a major threat. During a House Intelligence Committee hearing last year, Albright humbly embraced this new consensus: “I personally owe an apology to now-Senator Romney, because I think that we underestimated what was going on in Russia.”

Perpetual competition

Albright was not the only one who had to rethink the threat posed by Russia. After the invasion and annexation of Crimea, then Secretary of State John Kerry was incredulous: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in a 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.” The Obama administration was caught off guard by an act of aggression so brazen that seemed like it belonged in a bygone era.

Beyond the predictable attacks from Obama’s Republican critics, there was a more substantive critique of the administration from academics like Harvard’s Stephen Walt, who described Kerry’s complaint about Putin’s 19th-century behaviour as representative of a deeper attitude about the geopolitical reality in the post-Cold War era: “The comment captured the familiar idea that the world has supposedly moved beyond the ‘cynical calculus of pure power politics,’ as Bill Clinton once put it. The problem, at least in Kerry’s view, is that leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin haven’t gotten the memo about proper 21st century behaviour – either Putin hasn’t bothered to read it or doesn’t agree with its message.”

Like many of his fellow realists, Walt argues that great power competition will be a fact of life as long as great powers exist. While there are several different forms of realism, the theory broadly refers to the idea that states are in perpetual competition with one another due to the lack of a centralized supranational authority that can exert meaningful influence over them. States act in their own self-interest in accordance with how much power they are capable of wielding in an anarchic international system.

This is why realists argue that Russia’s aggressive behaviour in Eastern Europe is perfectly intelligible. After years of eastward NATO expansion, the argument goes, Russia feels encircled and threatened, which has led it to defend its interests in the region by attempting to keep states like Ukraine in its orbit.

But is this really all we need to know to understand why Putin invaded Ukraine and has been waging a proxy war on its eastern flank for more than six years? If NATO hadn’t expanded into Eastern Europe, would Putin be quietly minding his own business? As the United States continues to spend billions of dollars on military aid to Ukraine and the conflict with Russia grinds on, is it time for Washington to start listening to the realists?

Breaking the status quo

When the EuroMaidan protests erupted in 2013, it was clear that the Ukrainian people were tired of being shackled to Russia. The first protest was held in November 2013 when the Ukrainian government suspended the Association Agreement with the European Union which would have established closer political and economic relations between Ukraine and Europe. Despite the passage of an anti-protest bill in December, the demonstrations intensified and confrontations with police and paramilitary forces turned violent (more than 100 protesters were killed and many more were injured in fighting on Kyiv’s Maidan Square). After a political settlement was reached in February 2014, the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country and the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from office. Putin invaded Crimea a month later.

At the time, prominent realists like the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer insisted that Russia couldn’t really be blamed for invading and annexing its neighbour. Instead, Mearsheimer argued that the “United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.”

The first problem with this analysis is that it treats NATO and Russia as the only relevant actors, all but ignoring the Ukrainians. As the protests demonstrated, the Ukrainian people desired stronger economic and political ties to Europe. According to Pew’s 2019 Global Attitudes Survey, 79 per cent of Ukrainians have a favourable view of the EU while just 11 per cent have an unfavourable view – much stronger support than any country in Western Europe, Eastern Europe (besides Poland and Lithuania), the United States or Canada. Meanwhile, just 11 per cent of Ukrainians have confidence that Putin will “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” while 78 per cent say they have no confidence in him. This is the lowest level of support for Putin among any of the 33 countries in the Pew survey.

Popular discontent among Ukrainians is what led to the push for greater European integration and the removal of Viktor Yanukovych. According to Mearsheimer’s view, the EU and Ukraine should have abandoned any hope of a productive relationship to placate Russia, which raises the question: Will the international system really be more stable if countries can forever be held hostage by their neighbours, even when the citizens of those countries desperately want to change course? The protesters in Ukraine were willing to stand up to sniper fire and riot police to protest the suspension of the Association Agreement, while the Ukrainian parliament voted unanimously to impeach the country’s pro-Russia president. It is clear that the status quo was not sustainable. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Eastern European countries think NATO is keeping them safe. How many of these members does Mearsheimer think NATO should abandon before the proper balance of power with Russia is restored?

If Putin’s goal was to limit NATO’s influence in Eastern Europe, his plan backfired – Ukraine has now moved closer than ever to the West to counter Russian aggression. Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine led to what NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg described as the “biggest reinforcement of NATO forces since the end of the Cold War”. This included the build-up of NATO forces in the Baltics (including increased defence spending among those states). Instead of deterring NATO, the annexation of Crimea and other forms of Russian aggression in Ukraine have mobilised it.

Zero-sum thinking

Mearsheimer’s argument is based on the assumption that any state in Russia’s position would behave similarly. As he put it in an article that warned against the United States providing arms to Ukraine: “Great powers react harshly when distant rivals project military power into their neighbourhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally … Russia is no exception.” But this generic view of great powers ignores everything we know about the unique historical circumstances that have led Russia to where it is today, as well as the characteristics that make Putin such an intransigent and dangerous actor in the international system.

In an address on March 18th 2014, Putin argued that Russia was entitled to absorb Crimea on the grounds that the original transfer to Ukraine was done “within the boundaries of a single state … Unfortunately, what seemed impossible became a reality. The USSR fell apart.” Putin regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century and he longs to restore some semblance of transnational political and economic authority over former Soviet states. After the Cold War, he explained, “Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” The corollary to Mearsheimer’s claim that Putin’s aggression in Eastern Europe is a response to NATO expansion is the idea that he would have kept to himself in the absence of that expansion. But how do we know NATO’s absence would not have emboldened Putin to make even stronger claims on his neighbours’ territory?

Putin defended the invasion and annexation of Crimea in explicitly revanchist terms, condemning the “outrageous historical injustice” that was inflicted on Russia at the end of the Cold War: “Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.” Putin’s behaviour is not just an inevitable consequence of the fact that Russia is a great power – it is a combination of post-Cold War historical grievances and a zero-sum conception of the world that positions Russia in permanent opposition to the West.

After the invasion of Crimea, Kerry argued that Russia’s relationship with the West “does not have to be a zero-sum game. It is not Russia versus the United States, Russia versus Europe.” Realists deride this view as hopelessly quixotic – of course it will be Russia versus the US and Europe until the end of time; that is just how great powers always have and always will behave. This view assumes that the characteristics of state behaviour are as immovable as physical laws, and it regards the idea of human progress (in this case, the creation of international norms and institutions that reign in great power competition) as a utopian fantasy. It is no surprise that realists hold this attitude – they believe states are part of an inherently anarchic international system in which power is always the dominant variable.

But after three-quarters of a century in which we have seen greater international integration than any other period in human history, shouldn’t the realists be a little more modest about the permanent features and constraints of the international system? Who could have imagined in 1942 that Germany would eventually be the anchor of a vast political and economic union that spanned the entire continent, as well as a member of a transatlantic defensive alliance founded by its enemies during the Second World War? Of course, the situation with Germany after the war is not analogous to the situation with Russia today ‒ Germany was devastated and occupied. But the point is that great power competition was a permanent feature of Western Europe, until it no longer was.

Who’s the victim?

The realists are right that NATO expansion has antagonised Russia. As Putin explained: “For all the internal processes within the organisation, NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historic territory.” However, Russia doesn’t just act belligerently because it is conforming to some ironclad law of state behaviour ‒ it acts belligerently because it’s run by a kleptocratic authoritarian ruler who is afraid of being removed from power. After seeing what happened to Yanukovych in Ukraine, Putin immediately took drastic measures to prevent the same thing from happening to him.

But Putin is not Russia ‒ his personal interests are not interchangeable with his country’s. During his speech on the annexation of Crimea, Putin asked, “Are we ready to consistently defend our national interests, or will we forever give in, retreat to who knows where?” What does Putin imagine “giving in” will look like? Greater political and economic integration with Europe, the elimination of sanctions, and less need for NATO to build up its forces on Russia’s western flank? Greater co-operation on nuclear proliferation and joint military exercises with NATO? Or what frightens him the most: democratic reforms in Russia?

Putin ominously warns of a “fifth column” working to “provoke public discontent” and he observes that “western politicians are already threatening us with not just sanctions but also the prospect of increasingly serious problems on the domestic front.” We should never forget that the “us” in that sentence is Putin and his allies, not the Russian people.

Putin argues that Russia is the victim of an implacably hostile West: “We have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, continues today. They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position.” In recent years, Russia’s “independent position” has entailed blowing up hospitals in Idlib, invading its neighbours, murdering and imprisoning journalists and dissidents, and attempting to subvert democracy from Ukraine to the United States. These are the reasons the West is hostile to Russia, but Putin has a powerful interest in presenting the illusion that NATO would be aggressive towards Russia no matter what.

According to Mearsheimer, Putin’s actions in Ukraine have been “defensive, not offensive.” Defensive in what sense? Anne Applebaum argues that Putin and his allies do not “seriously fear western military attacks, but they do fear popular discontent, public questioning of their personal wealth, open criticism of the basic tenets of Putinism and, of course, political demonstrations of the sort that created the Orange Revolution in Ukraine” (she made this argument in 2013, before the EuroMaidan, the invasion of Crimea, etc.). According to Applebaum, this is why Putin’s ire has been “reserved for those countries which have most successfully navigated the path from communism to democracy, and which maintain the most open and pro-western political systems.”

Managed system

This is also why Putin venerates the Soviet Union and laments its collapse ‒ Applebaum summarises the version of history that he presents to the Russian people: “The hardships and deprivations which Russians experienced during the 1990s were not the result of decades of communist neglect and widespread theft but of western-style capitalism and democracy.” Applebaum defines “Putinism” as a system characterised by “managed democracy” (which presents the illusion of electoral choice, civil society, etc. while ensuring everything remains under strict control); enough repression to silence critics of the government and prevent genuine political resistance from mobilizing; and a “rent-seeking oil economy … which resembles Saudi Arabia far more than that of the United States or Western Europe.” In other words, Putinism bears no resemblance to real liberal democracies with functioning market economies ‒ systems that provide their citizens with far greater freedom and economic opportunity.

It’s no wonder Putin is so eager to keep as many countries as possible in Russia’s orbit ‒ the last thing he wants is a group of western-style liberal democracies next door because he knows it would put pressure on him domestically. The need to silence any talk of alternatives to the Putinist system is all the more important considering Mearsheimer’s observation that “Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time.” Russia’s GDP is 1.6 trillion US dollars while the combined GDP of the United States and the EU is almost 40 trillion. Compounding the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for Russia was an oil war with Saudi Arabia that has dropped oil prices to their lowest point in years. This increases the possibility of unrest within Russia even more.

Realists do not think personalities count for much in the global system, which is why Mearsheimer and those like him generically refer to Russia as a “great power” and argue that it behaves in predictable ways. Yet there is a reason Applebaum describes the decrepit Russian system as “Putinism” ‒ one man has dominated Russian politics and society for two decades, and he cares more about what is good for himself than what is good for his country. If Washington wants to understand Moscow’s position, that is a good place to start.

Matt Johnson is a freelance journalist and writer. He has written for Haaretz, The Bulwark, Quillette, and among other outlets. He has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas.

geopolitics, Russia, Ukraine, US