The War of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

 

By David K. Shipler 

                To the extent that we think we know the fears and expectations of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, they seem fraught with contradictions.

On the one hand, Putin labeled Ukraine as an incipient NATO base with malicious designs on Russia itself. On the other, he supposedly thought his “special military operation” would be a cake walk, seizing Ukraine’s capital and toppling its government in a matter of days. How could both be correct?

On the one hand, Putin portrayed Europe and the United States as formidable threats to Russian security. On the other, he disparaged the West as fragmented, decaying, polarized, and weakened by internal disorder. Those two versions cannot coexist in the real world.

                So, which of Moscow’s prophecies have proven true, and what does that imply for Putin’s future posture toward Western democracies? And which of the West’s anxieties about Russia have been realized, and how will those determine policy going forward?

It’s not good news. In the perverse calculus of war, even one side’s frustration and defeat can reinforce the convictions that led it to attack in the first place. So it might be with Putin. His terrifying assault has provoked a flood of NATO weapons into Ukraine, justifying his assessment of the risk posed by the North Atlantic Alliance. And Russia’s war of choice has galvanized most democracies in a unified front of economic punishment, surely enhancing Putin’s dogma regarding Western hostility.

Of course the West cannot do less as Russia pulverizes Ukraine’s cities and slaughters civilians. The toughest measures are warranted short of direct NATO attacks on Russian forces, which could trigger a wider war, perhaps nuclear.

As in most military conflicts, though, the cycle of action-reaction accelerates a whirlpool of beliefs that is bound to keep spinning long after the last bomb is dropped and the last shot fired. No matter how justified, the West’s counters to Moscow’s brutality feed Russia’s historical narrative of victimhood, humiliation, and paranoia. They reinforce Putin’s stated resentment toward a Western world he sees as determined to denigrate and despise and damage his motherland.

These ominous visions are apparently shared by large numbers of Russian citizens who are deafened by the silencing of honest news reporting and accessible social media. There is a reason that Putin shut down his country’s last independent journalism. Bathed only in government propaganda, most Russians cannot know of their army’s reverses and atrocities, cannot see the wreckage of Ukrainian cities, cannot hear the anguished voices or watch the tear-streaked faces of Ukrainians on many millions of television and computer screens around the world.

The vacuum of truth leaves much room for fabrication—that Ukraine is governed by Nazis, that its labs prepare for biological warfare, that it seeks nuclear weapons. We in America have seen how easy it is to manipulate swaths of the public into believing absurdities—witness Donald Trump’s fantasy about winning the last election, QAnon’s farcical tales of Democrats as child sex traffickers. And we are a supposedly free society.

 Russia has a deeper context for this sort of thing, and the Kremlin is deftly touching the nerves of longstanding suspicions and grievances, inherited by those who grew up under Soviet rule. Many in those days looked out at the Western world with both antagonism and envy in a kind of superiority/inferiority complex.

Therefore, while Putin might be surprised by his military difficulties, he might claim vindication for his darkest assessments of a Russia besieged, a Russia endangered. Since he has written and spoken of Ukraine and Russia as an ancient, inherent whole, he can fit the West’s behavior neatly into his charge: that NATO’S extraordinary efforts in Ukraine are aimed at preventing that historical destiny, that NATO seeks to splinter Russia itself, cripple its capabilities, and overthrow its government.

That last element of Putin’s narrative—that regime change is on the American agenda—was fueled when President Biden let one of his true thoughts slip out: Putin “cannot remain in power.” Unlike Biden’s name-calling, (Putin as “killer,” “war criminal,” “butcher”) this impulsive ad-lib worried more tactful officials and prompted them to walk it back and nudge Biden to clarify: "I just was expressing my outrage,” Biden said later. “He shouldn't remain in power, just like, you know, bad people shouldn't continue to do bad things. But it doesn't mean we have a fundamental policy to do anything to take Putin down in any way."

There’s always a tendency to personify policy, especially where a dictator like Putin can wave his hand, launch wars, and make huge institutions fall in line. But conflating Russia with Putin is misleading. He might like the misconception, given his evident self-regard as Russia’s new Peter the Great. Yet there is a broader societal appeal to Putin’s expansionist aims, which clearly inspire Russians who mourn and crave their honorable past. It was erased by freedom: the freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s to denounce the Great October (Bolshevik) Revolution, to reject Communism, and ultimately to dismantle the Soviet Union in 1991. A country not anchored in a proud history can be emotionally adrift and dangerous.

To fill the void, Russians still cherish the victory over Nazi Germany in what they call the Great Patriotic War, some even hold nostalgia for Stalin, and they reach back farther, to the empire’s sprawling heft under the czars. Putin taps into all those yearnings.

Could he be toppled anyway, and what then? The Kremlin does not have politics in a Western sense, perhaps not even as in the Soviet Union, where a 12 to 15-man Politburo exercised enough collective power in the post-Stalin era to temper most detours into radical adventurism. It ousted Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, after all, for various policies outside the acceptable mainstream. Today, though, Putin has no Politburo to answer to, only his tight circle of old friends and former KGB agents, a milieu of anti-Western authoritarianism. Those acolytes are terrified of telling him anything but pleasant lies, according to U.S. intelligence, a chronic problem of dictatorships.

But if a successor comes from those ranks, a regime change would not necessarily be a policy change.

It’s reasonable to speculate that an ouster would more likely come as a power-grab from within than a thrust for moderation. And moderation toward the West will be a hard road to travel given the dynamics of Russia’s severe isolation in retaliation for its war. Western companies are spooked, not only because of legal sanctions but also because of Putin’s threats to nationalize businesses and disrupt signed contracts for oil and gas payments by Europe. Even in Soviet times, representatives of such firms as Pepsico, Chase Bank, and the petroleum service company Brown and Root told me that they found the Russians hard bargainers but faithful to their word once contracts were signed. No longer.

That damage could take decades to repair. Yet in Putin’s rhetoric, the isolation becomes a blessing of forced self-reliance. Russia will build its own capacity. It will take its own reins of destiny. The argument feeds on itself, an echo of Soviet self-delusion. It relies on a suspicion of foreign enterprise that might resonate with a jingoistic segment of the population.

Without freedom of speech and pluralistic democracy, Russia can swim to the surface only with a new kind of leader—not just a new leader, a new kind of leader. But chosen how? In the early 1990s, when Russia was experimenting with a fledgling democracy, some intellectuals in Moscow dampened my optimism by cautioning that it would take an entire generation removed from the oppressive Soviet culture to implant democratic values.

Well, a generation that has lived thirty years open to the outside world has come of age, and what of it? Opponents cannot get on the ballot or even organize effectively without facing poisoning or prison. Many Russians are voting with their feet. An estimated 200,000 have already fled the country, the beginning of a brain drain that seems likely to continue unless Putin slams the borders closed, as his Soviet predecessors did. In that case, be ready to hear the clang of a new Iron Curtain.

All that adds up to the fulfillment of the most dire Western prophecies, especially those deep fears harbored in the parts of Eastern Europe once under the Russian boot, either as part of the Soviet Union or as separate countries that were satellites of Moscow. That’s why, after the Soviet collapse, they clamored to join NATO, whose expansion eastward toward Russia, in turn, helped provoke the national security fears cited by Putin in rationalizing his war against Ukraine.

Although Ukraine is not a NATO member, it has been a NATO partner in essence, benefiting from U.S. weapons and training since Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and effective invasion of Ukraine’s Donbass region. (Before the war, Ukraine was the fourth largest recipient of American military aid, after Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.) Eventual NATO membership, held out as a possibility at President George W. Bush’s insistence, gnawed at Putin and formed one of his stated rationales for invasion.

But the danger was a fantasy, and perhaps Putin knew it, using the argument only to excuse his messianic expansionism. In any case, he has contributed to the cycle. His brutal war has cast Russia into disgrace. That means hatred, probably long lasting. That means increased military spending and forward deployment by NATO in Europe. That means grassroots resistance, for Russia’s neighbors are seeing ugly images of what it means to have the Russian army arrive in town. Anyone young enough not to think much about what it’s like to live under Russian control has been given a wake-up call. Ukrainians have modeled how to translate the dread into the fight.

Even if the Ukraine war ends in some kind of diplomatic compromise, a generation of enmity toward Russia has been seeded in the West. That in turn will nourish Russia’s enmity toward the West. The whirlpool spins.