Sofia, Bulgaria — “VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH, is war coming?”
The
question is asked in the first frame of “Myroporyadok” (“World Order”),
a manifesto-style documentary aired in the last days of December on
Russian state television. And in the following two-plus hours, President
Vladimir V. Putin, aided by diplomats, policy analysts, conspiracy theorists and retired foreign statesmen, attempts to provide an answer.
Though
the Russian leader resists sounding the alarm, the audience is
nonetheless convinced that if nothing changes in the coming months, the
Big War could be imminent. And the Kremlin isn’t doing much to dissuade
them: Days after the film’s airing, its new national security strategy,
which declares NATO and the United States as fundamental threats to
Russia’s future, was unveiled.
“Myroporyadok”
is a powerful expression of the Kremlin’s present state of mind. It
views the world as a place on the edge of collapse, chaotic and
dangerous, where international institutions are ineffective, held
hostage to the West’s ambitions and delusions. Nuclear weapons represent
the sole guarantee of a country’s sovereignty, and sovereignty is
demonstrated by a willingness and capacity to resist Washington’s
hegemonic agenda.
The
film’s story line focuses repeatedly on NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia,
George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, the West’s misuse of a United Nations
no-fly zone in Libya and the West’s insistent meddling in the domestic
politics of post-Soviet states. This is all done to prove the film’s
central point: that the West may carry on about values and principles,
but all of that masks a realpolitik aimed at world domination.
Some
of the accusations have merit: The United States certainly bears
considerable responsibility for the catastrophe in the Middle East. Some
are patently false: Not every popular revolt in the world is a covert
C.I.A. operation. But all of them carry more than a whiff of
exaggeration. America, after all, is neither as powerful nor as
malevolent as the Kremlin supposes.
The
central contradiction in Moscow’s view of American foreign policy is
its failure to reconcile its insistence that America is a declining
power with the tendency to explain everything that happens in the world
as resulting from American foreign policy actions. Is Washington failing
in its effort to bring stability to the Middle East? Or is keeping the
region unstable the real objective of White House strategy? Improbably,
Moscow believes in both.
More
important, the film is a challenge to the widely accepted view of Mr.
Putin as a coldblooded realist, a cynic who believes in nothing but
power and spends his days poring over maps and checking his bank
statements. In “Myroporyadok,” we find Mr. Putin the angry moralist who,
similar to European populists and third-world radicals, experiences the
world through the lens of humiliation and exclusion. As Mr. Putin’s
close adviser, Vladislav Surkov, once wrote: “We still look like those
guys from the working part of town suddenly finding ourselves in the
business district. And they’ll swindle us for sure if we keep stumbling
backward and dropping our jaws.”
Such
exclusion fuels distrust and the tendency to view the world as a family
drama structured around love, hate and betrayal. It is this
sensitivity, rather than 19th-century realpolitik, that explains most of
Moscow’s policies in recent years.
Russian-Turkish
relations are a case in point. Rather than adhering to any
foreign-policy realism, the Kremlin seems to have adopted a policy of
Great Power sentimentality. Until two months ago, Ankara was Russia’s
strategic ally in its struggle for a multipolar world. Turkey had been a
brother-in-resentment, the only NATO member that refused to join in
sanctions against Moscow after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Ankara
occupied a central place in Moscow’s energy diplomacy.
But
it was enough for a Turkish missile to hit a Russian plane on the
Syrian border, and suddenly the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
was not a friend anymore, but a traitor who was “aiding terrorists,”
Mr. Putin said, sounding personally offended.
At
the heart of Russian foreign policy sentimentalism is a tendency to
view relationships between states as relations between leaders. It is
this highly personalized view of the world that helps explain why Mr.
Putin, the man who seeks to defeat America, is such an enthusiastic
supporter of Donald J. Trump, the “brilliant and talented leader” who promises to make America great again.
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Mr.
Putin’s predilection for Mr. Trump has nothing to do with the Kremlin’s
traditional preference for Republicans. It also can’t be explained by
the fact that had Mr. Putin — a physically sound, aging, gun-loving and
anti-gay conservative — been an American citizen, he would have fit the
profile of a Trump supporter. Nor is it a function of tactical
considerations: that the nutty billionaire would divide America and make
it look ridiculous.
Rather,
Mr. Putin’s puzzling enthusiasm for Mr. Trump is rooted in the fact
that they both live in a soap-opera world run by emotions rather than
interests. Perhaps Mr. Putin trusts Mr. Trump because the American
businessman reminds him of the only true friend the Russian president
has had among world leaders, the former Italian prime minister Silvio
Berlusconi.
In
“Myroporyadok,” there is a lot of discussion about new rules and
institutions, about Yalta and about the United Nations. But its message
is clear: In a world where hypocrisy holds sway, only angry outsiders
can be trusted.
Ivan Krastev is the chairman
of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a
permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
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