The Well-Armed Troll

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 20, 2022

 

Someone ought to remind Vladimir Putin that his side lost the last cold war — and in­form him that he is likely to lose this one, too.

 

Putin is a ridiculous caudillo running a third-rate gangster state with a GDP per capita that is half of Lithuania’s and barely ahead of Kazakhstan’s. His is a country that is in both economic and demographic decline — on its way toward being a “great power” with the demographics of the United Kingdom, the economy of Mexico, and the geopolitical standing of North Korea. But just as criminals are often weak men who are able to temporarily dominate others through ordinary viciousness, criminal regimes may momentarily raise their standing in the world — and maybe even engage in a little profitable blackmail — through simple lawlessness.

 

Vladimir Putin does not want for confidence. He has published a couple of “draft treaties” for ending the crisis in Ukraine — a crisis entirely of his own creation — that are so delusional and arrogant that Russia specialists at the Brookings Institution and elsewhere have concluded that they were designed to be rejected. But there is very little reason to conclude that the demands in the draft treaties are not exactly what Putin wants — and maybe even what he expects to get from a war-weary United States led by a senescent placeholder presi­dent. Joe Biden’s headlong retreat from Afghanistan, with hardly any consultation or coordination with our allies, left NATO members shocked and dismayed, and what discomfited Berlin and Brussels may have emboldened Moscow — which hardly needed the encouragement.

 

Against the background of that reckless U.S. retreat, Russian troops were dispatched to the Ukrainian border, and Russian demands were dispatched to Washington. The demands in the draft treaties amount to giving Moscow veto power over all NATO decisions of any consequence: Putin demands that NATO rescind its offer to bring Ukraine and Georgia (both of which already are partially occupied by Russian troops) into the alliance and put an end to the process of doing so; Putin demands that no NATO forces or weapons be de­ployed in the NATO countries that joined after 1997, which together compose almost half of the member states. In exchange for NATO’s meeting these demands, Moscow promises almost nothing — not even the mandatory redeployment of troops away from the Ukrainian border.

 

In addition, the treaty would prohibit both the United States and Russia from placing intermediate-range missiles outside their own territory — or deploying them within their own territory if doing so would put those missiles within striking distance of the other party. Such an arrangement would have been redundant under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which mandated eliminating such weapons entirely, an agreement that Moscow chose not to withdraw from but simply ignored, deploying new intermediate-range missiles in 2014. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a burglar trying to sell you back what he stole from your house.

 

What is almost amusing is that these are the kinds of heavy-handed dictates normally handed down by the victor to the losing side in a war. Putin’s Russia is something closer to the opposite of that: the remaining rump of what Ronald Reagan called an “evil empire,” but an empire nonetheless. Putin’s dream treaty would in effect take NATO back to the late 1990s and fix it there — while Putin would be free to move. It is almost nostalgic: a tacit admission that Russia has been left behind.

 

That freedom to move may be the key to understanding what is at work inside the Putin regime. As Nicolas Tenzer of the Paris-based Centre d’Étude et de Réflexion pour l’Action Politique argues in a very interesting essay reprinted in Claire Berlinski’s “Cosmopolitan Globalist” Substack newsletter, Putin’s ideology — to the extent that it is an ideology — is a cult of movement, of action for its own sake, the politics of action that fascinated the proto-fascists of Italian Futurism and that Hannah Arendt, among others, identified as a key element of totalitarianism. Putinism, Tenzer argues, consists of a “double movement: internally, with increasingly brutal, radical, total repression and the ever-greater militarization of society, from the earliest age; externally, with incessant aggression and destabilizing action, on new fronts.” Which is to say: rigor and suppression at home — “home” being not only Russia but anywhere under Russian influence — and chaos everywhere else, at least as far as Putin’s arm can reach. At the moment, Putin’s regime has shown itself able to project power into poorly defended territory: Ukraine, which his forces have partly occupied; Kazakhstan, where Russian troops and mercenaries recently were deployed to crush protests against the government of autocrat Kassym-Jomart Tokayev; Mali, where Russian troops have installed themselves in bases lately abandoned by the French. And the Putin regime has flexed its muscles on poorly defended virtual territory as well, using Facebook and other social media in an attempt to destabilize the United States by undermining faith in the legitimacy of its elections. For a middling and sinking power, any opportunity to shake things up is an opportunity to reverse the de­cline.

 

Putin is, in that sense, a very well-armed troll — opportunistic, attention-seeking, happy to upset the cart and see if any apples roll his way. But the Russian regime necessarily looms larger in the Western mind than do those of Putin peers such as Kim Jong Un for three reasons: (1) The Cold War trained Western policy intellectuals to think of Russia as a great power, and the habit remains even though Putin has nothing like the real geopolitical power enjoyed by Joseph Stalin or Leonid Brezhnev; (2) Putin’s forces are in close proximity to our European allies, including NATO members; (3) although the old Soviet nuclear arsenal has declined, Putin has something on the order of 1,600 strategic warheads ready to go — on missiles, bombers, and submarines — and a thousand strategic warheads in storage, according to the estimate of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The first of those three considerations is a matter of intellectual inertia, but the other two are live concerns.

 

American political leaders in both parties have focused a great deal of attention on the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline connecting Russian producers with German consumers — opposition to which just happens to accord with the business interests of U.S. energy producers — but if Washington is looking to lean on Moscow, then the American eye should travel southwest from Berlin to Brussels, the corporate home of SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications), the financial-messaging system that makes a great deal of modern banking possible. While states such as Russia and Cuba have shown themselves willing and able to endure conventional financial sanctions, cutting a nation out of the SWIFT system is a different thing altogether. Without access to SWIFT, a country’s businesses cannot pay for imports — or get paid for exports — in the conventional way. Iran weathered other U.S. sanctions, but when its access to SWIFT was interrupted, its oil exports collapsed and Tehran came to the negotiating table. (The Obama administration did not make much of the opportunity, unfor­tunately.) A sanctions bill being proposed by Senator Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) would impose SWIFT sanctions on Moscow if Russia invades Ukraine. It is the financial version of nuclear retaliation: The habitually crass Senator Menendez calls it “the mother of all sanctions.”

 

But while Washington was carrying the big stick in 2012, by SWIFT’s own account it was complying with European regulations enforcing EU sanctions — the firm describes itself as “neutral,” but adds: “SWIFT is incorporated under Belgian law and had to comply with this regulation as confirmed by its home country government.” There is no such regulation regarding Russia, and the EU “blocking statute” forbids SWIFT and other financial firms to comply with sanctions imposed from outside the European Union. There are two exceptions to that EU regulation: U.S. sanctions on Cuba and the U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran in 1996 and 2012. Without EU support, using SWIFT as a cudgel against Moscow will be difficult or impossible, and it is unlikely that such support would be forthcoming — the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported in January that using SWIFT against Moscow already had been quietly rejected out of fear of destabilizing fi­nancial markets or encouraging the development of non-European alternatives to SWIFT.

 

It may be that Moscow understands the alienation of our European allies better than Washington does.

 

Ukraine is weak, and it has long been undermined by corruption — it is not Russian opposition alone that has kept Ukraine’s NATO accession in limbo. But the country has made important advances against the most fundamental kind of corruption — the looting of the treasury by elected officials, something that has no doubt been noticed in Moscow, which cannot abide much transparency. It would be unrealistic to demand that Kyiv build a stronger and more democratic state and then stand by, feigning helplessness, as Vladimir Putin unbuilds that state.

 

Putin is acting as though Russia had already won the contest this time around. Washington’s alienation of traditional allies, and its own seeming inability to act, does nothing but encourage that confidence.