Mr. Clinton may have been more right than he knew. The transactional attitude he identified turned out to be the key to understanding the Russian president. Mr Putin had inherited a very special vision of what the West actually was. For him, according to Gleb Pavlovsky, a former close associate, it was synonymous with the liberal capitalist order, which he understood in terms of Soviet caricature: it meant tolerating oligarchs, privatizing state industries, paying and accepting bribes, eroding state capacity and having the appearance of power-sharing. Mr Putin thought his predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had failed because they did not understand this.
Mr Putin behaved in many ways as a shrewd candidate for the West. He bravely joined the “global war on terror,” which later allowed the United States to use its bases for the war in Afghanistan, and extinguished a “terrorist” insurgency at home. Since coming to power, Mr Putin has also made Moscow a paragon of fiscal rectitude, and according to the former aide, he explored the idea of installing a US two-party system in Russia.
But when the economy in which Mr Putin was in charge threatened to collapse into a state-dismantling bonanza, he tried to support the state sector and turned to increasingly authoritarian measures at home. When the former Warsaw Pact countries welcomed NATO enlargement, he shifted to a more civilized understanding of Russia’s place in the world, one based on “Eastern” values: the Orthodox Church, patriarchal chauvinism, edicts against homosexuality, as well as an idea of greater ethnic Russian identity whose ancient source is uncomfortably Kiev, Ukraine. Protesters like Pussy Riot and others who directly attacked this neo-civilized image came in for swift retaliation.
Mr Putin’s turn reflected a wider phenomenon of authoritarian-led liberalizing economies trying to fill an empty ideological space that seemed ready to be filled by Western idolatry. Also in China, in the late 2000s, there was a reversal to an understanding of civilization in Beijing, where dutiful readers of Mr. Huntington have disseminated notions of Chinese civilization in the form of global Confucius Institutes or a “Cultural Self-Esteem” program. . ”, and which President Xi Jinping expresses today in his elliptical “thought”.
Turkey, too, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has promoted a vision of a neo-Ottoman atmosphere stretching from North Africa to Central Asia, which is a direct rejection of Ataturk’s more limited view of Turkish nationalism. More recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has revived ideas of Hindu supremacy by glorifying his country’s ancient past – Hindustan is its Kyivan Rus – and using it as a cudgel against his opponents. The turn to civilizational imagination provides a useful lever for ruling elites seeking to suppress other forms of solidarity, whether class, regional or ecologically based, and to limit the appeal of cosmopolitanism to their economic elites.
Despite all the talk of how Ukraine – despite its battlefield losses – is winning the PR war, there is a sense that Mr Putin has already won on another level of conflict formulation. The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order resemble the provincial principles of a particular people, in a particular place.
Of the 10 most populous countries in the world, only one – the United States – supports major economic sanctions against Russia. Indonesia, Nigeria, India and Brazil have all condemned the Russian invasion, but they seem unwilling to follow the West in its favored countermeasures. Also, non-Western states seem to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result, as Senator Rob Portman said. formulated it, “put a noose on Putin’s economy.” North Africa and the Middle East rely on Russia for basic necessities, from fertilizers to wheat; Central Asian populations depend on its remittances. It seems unlikely that major disruptions to these economic networks will alleviate Ukraine’s suffering.