By Joseph S. Laughon
Wednesday, March 02, 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine will
likely be one of the most important events of the relatively young 21st
century, upending decades of relative stability between European states. While
its effects on geopolitics, markets, and elections remain to be seen, the
invasion will also likely continue to widen the growing divide on the American
right. A small but increasingly visible and potentially influential faction of
American conservatives sees a friend and model in Vladimir Putin. They are
wrong to do so, however. Putin is not our friend. Nor is his Russia an example
for American conservatism. Conservatives should know the reality of Russia’s
social situation, how many of our national interests are incompatible, and how
Putin’s governance is not a fit for America.
If you make the mistake of perusing Twitter or reading
the comments on news pieces, it will not be hard to find voices loudly
wondering why on earth we would have tensions with Russia given that Putin is
an able conservative leader who has done much good. While it’s too easy to find
wild opinions online, it’s not too difficult to find influential conservative
figures aping these talking points. These views range from merely being
skeptical of the mainstream conservative consensus to actively praising Putin’s
talking points about the invasion. Possibly the most vocal in his admiration is
former Reagan administration official and paleoconservative par excellence, Pat
Buchanan. Buchanan has consistently Putin as a “stalwart defender of
traditional values,” and praised Russia as a place that “conservatives,
traditionalists and nationalists of all continents” can ally with.
They could not be more wrong. For one, it beggars belief
to imagine that a former KGB officer is in fact some sort of true believer.
Indeed, the realities of Putin’s Russia point to a less rosy and more cynical
view. For starters, for all the talk of traditional values, actual religiosity in Russia remains quite dismal.
With a 6 percent church-attendance rate, Russia remains barely ahead of highly
secular countries such as Norway and Sweden. Even more worrying is the abortion
rate. While this continues to decline after the Soviet era (as it does in the
United States, in large part due to the successes of the pro-life movement), it
still remains dramatically higher than in the United States.
Far from leading a traditional social revival, Putin’s Russia continues to
slide into demographic decline.
The reality is that Putin’s image of a conservative
restorer is a political narrative in the same way former Serbian president
Slobodan Milosevic reinvented himself from a communist apparatchik to a
firebrand Serbian nationalist. Travel writer Colin Thubron’s discussion with a
Russian citizen highlights the superficial nature of this brand of conservatism
in his travelogue The Amur River: Between Russia and China:
I murmur something about the
resilience of believers. She suddenly brightens, ‘Oh! We weren’t believers! My
father was a Communist and my mother was an atheist! We were all atheists!’ She
is laughing at my perplexity. ‘We used to buy sticks of dye to decorate Easter
eggs too, in secret. But nobody believed in the Resurrection!’ She adds, as if
informing me: ‘There is no God.’ She had walked into the church from habit, not
from piety. ‘I think it’s tradition that people live by, not belief . . . that
statue in Lenin Square…he’s part of who we are.’
More important, the United States and Russia have
national interests that remain in conflict with one another. Any “America
First” approach to foreign policy that seeks to anchor American policy to
concrete interests must prioritize our own interests over Russia’s. What are
those interests? There’s a wide consensus that a top core vital interest of
ours is to ensure the physical safety of the United States and to prevent
attacks on the homeland. One of the main ways we have sought to achieve this
has been to ensure a great power cannot threaten us. As strategist George
Friedman writes in his book The Next 100 Years, this has been the
north star of America since the Monroe Doctrine. American grand strategy
dictates that we not only deny our hemisphere to a great power but also ensure
no single power could dominate the Eurasian landmass.
Realistically, there are only a handful of states that
could pose this threat: namely, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, India,
and Germany. The latter two have been successfully brought into the American
orbit. Germany went from being the great power of the 19th and 20th centuries
to a non-nuclear power aligned with American interests by treaty. In Asia, the
United States has focused its attention away from the Middle East to the
Indo-Pacific region in order to counter China, a strategy wisely escalated by
the Trump administration.
That leaves Russia. The United States does in fact have
objectives that are compatible with Russian interests. Stability in Central
Asia and the Middle East as well as nuclear security are two major issues among
others where American lawmakers can find common ground with Russia. However, as
this invasion (and Putin’s awful speech justifying it) demonstrates, Putin’s
objectives in Europe are far broader than many doves had imagined. Rather than
simply seeking restraint from NATO, Putin has shown he believes that it is
Russia’s right to exercise an armed veto on our relations with the entire
continent, with the aim of rendering NATO totally obsolete. Geopolitically this
would return Europe back to the era in which wars on the continent were
commonplace. It is unrealistic to imagine that America, after being drawn into
two bloody European wars in the 20th century, would remain insulated from the
negative effects of chaotic Europe in the 21st. The American balance of power
in Europe has not only led to the end of Soviet communism and great-power wars,
but has also ushered in an era of historically unprecedented peace and
prosperity. It would not be restraint but recklessness to jettison a successful
strategy of nearly 80 years because those challenging it posture themselves to
be our ideological allies.
Moreover, American conservatism has functionally nothing
to learn from Putin’s ideology and governance. While some admirers could point
to Putin’s belief in Europe’s historic heritage, in reality, the similarities
are so vague as to be utterly nebulous. It would be nearly as useful to point
to the Islamic State’s belief in God and opposition to anarchism as a basis for
a shared ideological partnership. American conservatism is not rooted in some
quasi-Soviet nostalgia or a hope to restore Tsar Nicholas’s orthodoxy,
autocracy, and nationality. Instead, our conservatism seeks to preserve our
specific mix of influences, as so eloquently outlined by Russell Kirk in
his Roots of American Order. Kirk lists Jerusalem, Athens, Rome,
and London as sources of American identity and politics. Thanks to Russia’s
Orthodox heritage, there will always be some affinity between American and
Russian civilization. However, the early British and Protestant influences on
the American character, combined with the effects of settlement, Revolution,
and frontier expansion, all mean that an American conservatism is inevitably
different. While it would be a mistake to pretend historic American conservatism is
just libertarianism, the American emphasis on constitutional rights, localism,
and republican virtue would be alien to the Russian experience. It would not be
conservative but radical to wish to uproot every historic influence on one’s
country and replace it with another totally outside your country’s experience
and culture.
For now, it is not likely that Putinism will become a
mainstream position among conservatives. Polls of Republicans show a regard for Putin’s Russia generally
in line with America’s justifiably negative view, if not more pronounced.
However, as rising voices seek to launder Putinism, we should remember how
unhinged that truly is. Far from being a beacon of responsible statecraft, and
cooperation, Putin’s Russia is a hostile competitor seeking to undermine our
national interests while hiding its own decline behind a charade of
traditionalism. The last thing conservatives should be doing is needlessly
lionizing a foreign autocrat.
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