Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: The brutal truth is that despite outrage in the West, the appetite for doing what it takes to put pressure on Putin is not yet in evidence.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine poses unprecedented risks for the global system. It brings back the spectre of a major war to Europe. If the Ukrainians manage to resist, the war will be long drawn; if they don’t, the precedent of an important country of the size of Ukraine being reabsorbed will haunt Europe. Russian actions create more uncertainty in Great Power politics. The trustworthiness of vital agreements will be up for grabs. China may be tempted to exploit the opportunities provided by a Western entanglement with Russia. When wars start, the risk of one or another country’s hand being forced by events rises substantially. This crisis will certainly lead to significant economic realignment. Every country in the world will now start reassessing the gains and risks of economic interdependence. But if the crisis continues, everything from energy to fertilisers might be potentially affected.
No one quite knows how the situation will unfold. One should be cautious about psychologising. But Putin’s chilling speeches, staged public choreography indicate a leader convinced by delusions of grandeur, unwilling to let any consideration of means restrain him, and willing to see in diplomacy a sign of his opponent’s weakness. If anyone thinks deeply authoritarian leaders can never succumb to this syndrome, they have not read recent history. If you take Putin at his word, his fantasy of cementing Russian nationalism by creating the glories of a pre-Bolshevik Russia, then the whole international system and the hard-won and fragile stability of the nation-state system is up for grabs.
Ukraine is already paying a heavy price. The most optimistic scenario of all bad scenarios now might be that Putin makes his point by destroying Ukraine’s military capability, securing the two separatist enclaves, unsettling Ukrainian politics, and signalling to the neighbours that he is quite willing to do to them what pleases him, and leaves. Putin declares this to be a victory of sorts for him, he avoids the cost of occupying Ukraine, but does enough to control it, and in his own way, humiliates NATO.
But the chances of Putin leaving quickly are unlikely. Once the war has started, the dynamics are not necessarily under Putin’s control. The Ukrainians may put up better resistance than he anticipated; the pro-Russia groups he supported precipitate action to keep him in; his suspicion of covert operations by the West makes him wary of simply being satisfied by teaching Ukraine a destructive lesson. If, as is being speculated, the main reason for Putin’s action is not rooted in strategic logic but to shore up his credentials as a nationalist leader, he will have to continue to play up the spectre of Western threat. The intangible thing in this is Russian public opinion, whether it has any chance of turning against Putin. But authoritarian leaders see any public opinion turning against them as itself a sign of a foreign conspiracy, an invitation to double down on repression. So Russia could end up paying a bigger price for this. The ramifications of this crisis on American domestic politics are not clear either.
But this is not a moment for feeling superior by harping on the hypocrisy of the West or revelling in schadenfreude. This would be nothing but an excuse to let Putin off the hook, a temptation both the Right that admires Putin, and a Left that is so singularly focussed on American evil that it won’t see anything else, are tempted to succumb to. One can believe that American foreign policy was misguided: Its invasion of Iraq and its possible mishandling of the politics of NATO expansion dented its credibility. But these criticisms detract from the most important fact at hand — that Putin has decided to destroy a large independent country with sovereign rights.
In this instance, it is not even clear that the West’s missteps on NATO have significant explanatory power. That issue has been around for more than a decade, and would have been kicked around for another. Putin wants not only to undo the legality of the post Cold War order, he even criticised the Bolshevik concession to Ukrainian identity within the Soviet Union. In part what makes this dangerous at this moment is that there are many more leaders who are tempted by the plausibility of this vision, who want to dismantle the constraints of the nation-state and recreate themselves as civilisational states. China may formally talk about sovereign states, but the imaginary is shaped by repositioning at the apex of a civilisation; Turkey, which was sympathetic to Putin till Putin’s fantasy came back to haunt them; Trump, Bannon and the right-wing in the US seems to be implicated in it as well. Even the Indian Right loves this fantasy. What is shocking about this episode is how Ukraine seems not to really matter to anyone. The dominant framing is Russia versus NATO and/or Europe, as if Ukrainians or half a dozen other smaller states are irrelevant to the whole global moral calculus.
The brutal truth is that despite outrage in the West, the appetite for doing what it takes to put pressure on Putin is not yet in evidence. The first round of sanctions that the US and the EU have announced seem astonishingly tepid; it does not even attack Russian offshore finance fully. Exempting Russian energy and food from any sanctions seems designed to inflict minimal pressure on Russia and almost no cost on the West. But will this only embolden Putin? Or can one do an optimistic reading that they still signal the willingness to give Putin a way out. But if Putin’s occupation of Ukraine continues for long, then sanctions will have to be ramped up or the West loses face totally.
China has reiterated the principle of respecting sovereignty. But in the end, it will be tempted to use this occasion to diminish American power. The spin that India is playing realpolitik and securing its interest may be accurate. But it is also a reflection of India’s weakness. Instead of being the “swing state”, it has been reduced to a constantly swinging state — too dependent on Russia, so scared of China that it needs to court Russia, standing for a rules-based open world order but not being able to say in simple words that the Russian invasion is the clearest, most egregious and risk inducing violation of international norms at hand. So the net result of this crisis may be to deepen the world’s cynicism to the point where no meaningful international cooperation is possible on any subject that matters. All great powers are, in the end, too self-absorbed. Putin is counting on that truism.