Bright lights, big pity

The Russians have been in the news of late more than Lindsay Lohan (one part of my heart smiles upon writing that). Whether it be planting titanium flags on the Arctic seabed, dropping bombs in Georgia (think grapes, not peaches), train bombings, or beheadings by neo-Nazi youths, the Russians are like the lone blockbuster in a quiet summer movie season. So popular have the Russians been with the news desks, Sovietologists—that group of out-of-work analysts who by themselves added 0.2% to the US unemployment figures over the last 15 years—are being exhumed from their geopolitical crypts and pressed into service to help explain to the rest of us what all of this activity might mean.

As the Global War on Terrorism becomes locked into a kind of long-term civilizational trench warfare, the Russian Question is beginning to replace it (in some quarters) as the preeminent challenge of American foreign policy. What do we do about the Russians? What should we do and what can be done?

Despite its status as a cultural and political black hole, Russia controls a substantial percentage of the world’s nuclear arsenal, a large and growing percentage of the world’s energy supplies, and a dominating geopolitical position on the world’s largest land mass. These things alone warrant attention, doubly so now that the Russians have effectively ended their on-again, off-again partnership with the West.

It should be noted that, whether or not it was the policy of the United States through three successive presidential administrations, the US has effectively encircled Russia, shrinking its sphere of influence dramatically since 1989. The Baltics, Central Europe, the Balkans, parts of Central Asia, and parts of the Caucasus are now free from Russian control and domination, politically if not economically, and many of the clumsy and transparent Russian provocations of late are blatant attempts to turn back the clock. Its attitude toward the Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians, Kosovar Albanians, and Moldovans, among others, smacks of the kind of petty intimidation favored by neighborhood bullies, the kind who set upon old ladies in stairwells. There have been attempted poisonings of politicians; there have been well-organized episodes of street violence in foreign capitals; there have been calculated cyber-attacks upon foreign digital infrastructure—these are not the acts of a sober, responsible nation-state.



In the typically Russian zero-sum formulation of geopolitics, such a loss of influence is more than a blow to national pride; it alters the very meaning of Russianness. Far from being a fixed and monolithic entity (after all, there is a reason Nicholas II was ‘Autocrat of All the Russias’), ‘Russia’ is often popularly conceived as those lands darkened by the shadow of a Russian heel. Wherever a Russian holds sway is Russia, and as a corollary to this, if one people gains something (land, rights, freedom), then necessarily ‘Russia’ loses.

Many analysts go to great measures to explain Russian tetchiness in terms of military necessity, i.e. Russian aggression on its western flank results from the vast, defenseless plain across which has washed sundry armies over the millennia. While this may have been true 100 years ago, who today believes the Poles or Germans are poised to launch a fresh attack on Moscow? Where Russia’s western borders are concerned, never has Catherine the Great’s famous quip (“I have no way to defend my borders except to extend them”) seemed more out of tune with geopolitical realities (Russia’s Far East is, of course, another question altogether).

The bottom line is that Russia today is a very large and very sad country, a hulking man-child reeking of drink and disoriented by the changes in his neighborhood. He refuses to submit to the analyst’s couch or the priest’s confessional and, instead, takes to menacing his innocent children with a belt or sack of coins or whatever is at hand. And most unfortunate, Mr. Putin might be the best of the lot. Après lui le déluge.