Clash of Civilizations

In my last post, Quagmire for Whom, I discussed the Western strategy in Ukraine to create a quagmire for Putin, with the aim of forcing regime change.  I predict that this will not work since Putin's Russia can trade with its neighbor, the enormously powerful country of China.  Meanwhile, western culture is being undermined by a cancerous system, bloated with trillions of dollars which are doled out to propagandists, weapons manufacturers, politicians, think tanks, media conglomerates, and anyone else willing to do the bidding of the military industrial complex.  By contrast, Putin, in my view, is something of a philosopher king -- an intelligent man able to run his country coherently.  This post expands on the cultural themes underlying this worldview.

My understanding of Putin's worldview has been shaped by the following:

• Russia's Nationalist Turn, by Anatoly Karlin, 9/28/2021
• Regathering of the Russian Lands, by Anatoly Karlin, 2/16/2022
• President Putin’s February 21, 2022 speech to the nation – full text
• Transcript: Vladimir Putin’s Televised Address on Ukraine, 2/24/2022

I've titled this post Clash of Civilizations, taken from a reference by Karlin to Samuel Huntington's 1996 book:

The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world...  Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post–Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post–Cold War world... Huntington posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest category of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict.

China's leadership is emphasizing the need to focus on its distinctive culture:

Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.” ... 

Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over...  Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.

And Putin is taking Russia in a similar direction:

Putinism has developed into ethno-aware nationalism..  For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people... So broad and all-encompassing is the shift that, just as academics came to classify what happened between Putin’s rejection of Western moral supremacism in the Munich speech of 2007 to the gay propaganda law in 2013 as a “Conservative Turn” (Nicolai Petro), so I believe future historians will classify the 2018-21 period as a “Nationalist Turn.” Thus, just as the First Age of Putinism in the 2000s was marked by unideological technocracy, and its Second Age during the 2010s was defined by conservative retrenchment, so I believe that the Third Age, the 2020s, will be defined by the political ascent of ethno-aware (as distinct from ethno-nationalist) Russian nationalism.

So a backlash to Fukuyama's The End of History is on the ascent, with multiple superpowers standing up to the West along with stalwarts such as Iran and Venezuela.  Huntington appears to have the more prescient world view, and Putin is on board.  

Meanwhile, the West is facing a crisis as described by Martin Gurri in The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.  From Trump to Brexit to the Yellow Vests in France, the west is increasingly divided against itself, with a strong reaction against globalist liberal democracy.  It is certainly conceivable that Putin and Xi are evolutionarily ahead of the West in using ethno-nationalism to restrain global capitalism.   

Coca Cola, McDonald's, Ford, Tesla, Facebook, Google, and Amazon may be on the wane globally, with sanctions accelerating this trend.  Ethnonationalism may serve an important purpose for the foreseeable future as a check against cultural decay.  Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity may no longer be symbols of backwardness, but rather signs of cultural strength as they were in previous eras.  The Hegelian dialect, in which cultural tradition competes with technological advance, lives on and the woke West may be forced to come to terms with this new modernity.   

Liberal values, as manifested in woke, cancel culture politics, have been coopted by the cancer of the military industrial complex.  Anti-Putin liberalism is an extension of corrupt liberal intolerance.  Incoherently, liberals militarily and morally support the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists that have invaded Ukraine in recent years.  Putin has called their bluff.

Liberal, enlightenment, values must balance majority rule with minority rights.  The corrupt West vilifies majority rule when it suits their purposes, as during Trump's presidency, and vilifies minority rights when it suits their purposes, as in Ukraine.  We must reclaim balance in both foreign and domestic affairs, which means that we must resist cooptation by the "intelligence agencies".

Quagmire for Whom?

Executive Summary

The current situation in Ukraine is analogous to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.  The U.S. media is full of accounts of our side winning, whatever that means.  Eventually we realize we are not winning but rather stuck in a quagmire.  In Ukraine, winning for Russia means self-determination for Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, and this is slowly but surely being accomplished.  Also, Russia now has the ability to attack Ukraine military forces at will, and it seems this will continue for the indefinite future.  So Russian victory can be attained without any surrender by Ukraine and western allies. 

The new de facto situation will be an expanded Russian sphere of influence, and an increasing independent Russian economy more closely tied to China, India, and other third world nations.  Victory for Ukraine could only come about via WW III and western destruction of Russia, but this would be lose lose and west/NATO should not seek this outcome.  There can be no Ukrainian victory.  Time is on Russia's side as in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, and, ultimately, Afghanistan.  The U.S. empire is facing another quagmire.  Eventually, Putin will die and future generations of leaders will be able to do the sensible thing and come to detente, where Ukraine will emerge as a healthy country similar to Finland, but not a staging ground for the U.S. in a Cold War.

Flawed Western Position

As Niall Ferguson points out, the U.S. and its western allies want to keep the war going, in the mistaken belief that time is on the west's side:

I conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going... “The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime." ... I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire.

The optimism, however, is the assumption that allowing the war to keep going will necessarily undermine Putin’s position; and that his humiliation in turn will serve as a deterrent to China. I fear these assumptions may be badly wrong and reflect a misunderstanding of the relevant history.

Begin with the military situation, which Western analysts consistently present in too favorable a light for the Ukrainians. As I write, it is true that the Russians seem to have put on hold their planned encirclement of Kyiv, though fighting continues on the outskirts of the city. But the theaters of war to watch are in the east and the south...

Also on Friday, the Russians claim, they used a hypersonic weapon in combat for the first time: a Kinzhal air-launched missile which was used to take out an underground munitions depot at Deliatyn in western Ukraine. They could have achieved the same result with a conventional cruise missile. The point was presumably to remind Ukraine’s backers of the vastly superior firepower Russia has at its disposal. Thus far, around 1,100 missiles have struck Ukraine. There are plenty more where they came from.

And, of course, Putin has the power — unlike Saddam or Qaddafi — to threaten to use nuclear weapons, though I don’t believe he needs to do more than make threats, given that the conventional war is likely to turn in his favor...

In any case, Putin has other less inflammatory options if he chooses to escalate. Cyberwarfare thus far has been Sherlock Holmes’s dog that didn’t bark. On Monday the Biden administration officially warned the private sector: “Beware of the dog.” Direct physical attacks on infrastructure (e.g., the undersea cables that carry the bulk of global digital traffic) are also conceivable.

In contrast to reports in the western media, Russia has been holding back quite a bit in recognition that this war in their backyard could go on for years or even decades.  They have avoided hitting most civilian infrastructure, instead targeting their attacks on military targets and fuel supplies which could be used to support Ukrainian military operations.  They are avoiding the cities, with the exception of the neo-Nazi stronghold of Mariupol which is being taken over by the Russians.  Russia can not walk away from this conflict, even if they want to.  Crimea is now part of Russia, and Donbass is similarly situated.  The U.S. is a concerned observer, providing weapons and moral support from afar.

Eurocentrism

Daniel Berman recently provided his take on the war after four weeks.  He finds Russia losing badly, but sees no end to the conflict.  He provides some historical references, from 19th century and 20th European history, and compares German psychology in that era with that of Russia and Putin today.  Berman neglects to mention China, a major economy and ally of Russia.  We need to grapple with the reality that the west no longer monopolizes global technology and resources.  Just as in the previous Cold War the Communist bloc presented a credible challenge to the west and prevailed in Vietnam, the current alliance of Russia and China presents a credible challenge to the U.S. centric global empire.

Austria-Hungary and Germany were surrounded and did not have sufficient resourced to prevail against western Europe and the U.S.  Russia is not surrounded by enemies and is rich in strategic resources.  

Psychology

Berman, like Biden and the western political establishment, spends much time considering Putin's psychological state, but this leads him nowhere:

Putin needs respect...  One of the errors Chamberlain made at Munich was misunderstanding what Hitler wanted... 

Historical analogies are awkward, and the “Putler” ones are cringe. But if Putin’s problem is that the small states around Russia do not respect Russia as much as they do the United States, ending the conflict with an agreement in which Washington takes pity on Russia and generously grants concessions reinforces rather than challenges that impression.

So Berman concludes that that Putin wants respect and that he cannot get respect by making concessions to stop the war.  This is where his analysis stops, as does that of the western political establishment.  They see regime change in Russia as the only viable path.

If we are to understand the enemy, we must look further into Putin's options.  Everyone agrees that victory on the western front via defeat of NATO and total defeat of Ukraine is not possible.  Russia itself has publicly recognized this:

Russia Signals It Will Limit Scope To "Complete Liberation Of Donbas"...   In what's looking like a hugely significant first sign that Russia could be pulling back on the scope of its Ukraine operations, Bloomberg reports Friday that the Kremlin may be limiting its key military objectives to taking full control over the Donbas region. This despite multiple parts of the county, including outside the capital of Kiev, still witnessing intense fighting and shelling.

The hugely important Friday Bloomberg report says that "After a month of fighting that’s yielded limited territorial gains, the Russian military said it’s focusing efforts on taking full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, potentially a sign it’s backing away from hopes of taking larger swathes of the country."

This doesn't sound like Hitler.  Rather, this sounds like somebody who recognizes better options than fighting a losing war.  Putin/Russia can scale back their territorial ambitions, although it is far from clear that they ever intended to conquer all of Ukraine.  How can Russia do this without losing respect?  

1. They will have achieved significant territorial claims.
2. They will have demonstrated an ability and willingness to fight the west.

The latter is the sticking point with regard to ending the war.  It is not only the Russians who demand respect as a condition for ending the war.  It is also the west who demand the Russians surrender their ability and willingness to fight the west on their borders.  Russia can take the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, then unilaterally pull back, yet continue to fight Ukraine militarily should Ukraine attack Russian held lands.

Thus, Putin is likely to remain standing with respect.  Russia will take an economic hit, but will not be isolated into submission, because of China.  The west will also take an economic hit.  As time goes by, western psychology, already unhinged in my view, will come under greater scrutiny.

What are we to make of the U.S. point person on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, for example: 

From 1993 to 1996, during Bill Clinton's presidency, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War.

Or the DNC:

Former DNC contractor and opposition researcher Alexandra “Ali” Chalupa not only worked closely with the Ukrainian Embassy and Clinton campaign, trading dirt on Manafort and Trump, but also Congress and the Obama White House, State Department and even the FBI. 

Or Biden's National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan:

Last month Washington was rocked by the indictment of Michael Sussman, former counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee...   In testimony to Congress, Sullivan also insisted that he did not know the Alfa Bank scandal was the work of a Clinton lawyer and people associated with the campaign...  Sullivan will have to argue that, despite being one of the top campaign advisers, he was unaware of the campaign’s prior work on developing the allegation.  

and:

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)... isn’t alone in promoting these past CIA-backed insurgencies as a model for “covert” US aid to Ukraine. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose State Department helped to create the “moderate rebel” insurgency in Syria and oversaw the US and NATO-backed destruction of Libya, appeared on MSNBC on February 28th to say essentially the same. In her interview, Clinton cited the CIA-backed insurgency in Afghanistan as “the model that people [in the US government] are now looking toward” with respect to the situation in Ukraine. She also references the insurgency in Syria in similar fashion in the same interview. It is worth noting that Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff when she was Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, is now Biden’s National Security Adviser. 

Essentially the same people who have bungled U.S. foreign policy from the days of Boris Yeltsin, through the 2003 Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and 20 year long failure in Afghanistan, are directing the western policy regarding the Ukraine War.  These people falsely vilified Russia as having compromised the U.S. electoral process, and impeached a U.S. president for hesitating regarding the sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine.  

What do we say about the psychology of this foreign policy blob?  I think of it as a cancer, bloated with trillions of dollars which are doled out to propagandists, weapons manufacturers, politicians, think tanks, media conglomerates, and anyone else willing to do the bidding of the military industrial complex.  Much like the projected Putin mind set, this amorphous power structure has acted so brazenly at such a massive scale that it cannot afford to admit mistakes with regard to Russiagate and Ukraine.   In Berman's terminology with regard to Putin, the west needs an off-ramp with regard to Ukraine and Russia.  It hopes that Putin will die.  Failing that, we are faced with more failures -- death and destruction in pursuit of elusive world domination.  The alternative is regime change in the west.