Kleptocratic Consolidation

Vladimir Putin considers himself a savior, a bastion of traditional right-minded elites governing in complete keeping with historical and conservative values. Strength. Valor. Country. God. People working hard, sacrificing for the Motherland, all marching towards a world order in which Russia assumes her hegemony, outright direct control, over her traditional Eurasian territories… Eastern Europe, all the CIS countries against an onslaught of weak-minded Western democratic priorities of human rights, free speech and liberal thought. Might makes right!

Vladimir Putin as a master of hunting and fishing, swimming a cold river, a hockey player, deploying his black belt martial arts skills, playing the West like the weaklings they truly are. He does what he wants. Takes what he wants. Some say he is the richest man on earth (how did get that wealth?). A man’s man! The old world reflection of physical strength that only a powerful uber-mensch could reflect. Very 19^th century. Succumbed to liberal thoughts and policies, Western Europe draws a condescending sneer from Mr. Putin. He believes liberal governance is no longer sustainable in modern conflict-ridden world. He is determined to prove himself correct.

For a moment, Putin believed that perhaps Donald Trump, with a little push from Putin’s social media and hacking operatives (just confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee – see below), could help decimate that liberal thought from at least the United States. “The Senate intelligence committee says it agrees with a 2017 assessment by intelligence agencies that Russia intervened in the presidential election earlier to hurt the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton and to help Donald Trump.

“Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman [Republican!] Richard Burr said in a statement Wednesday [5/16] that his staff has spent 14 months ‘reviewing the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work, and we see no reason to dispute the conclusions.’

“That’s in contrast to the House intelligence committee, which agreed with the majority of the report but said last month that the agencies ‘did not employ proper analytic tradecraft’ while assessing Russian president Vladimir Putin’s intentions.” Associated Press, May 16^th.

But then Putin watched his choice fumble, repeatedly. Trump’s instability, his inability even to organize and control his own appointees, seemed to reflect a lack of the most basic competence to get that job done, a bumbler with an aging and fading constituency mired in false hope and expired dreams. So Putin was just left with continuing to destabilize the American body politic with little developed to stop him. Trump couldn’t even get that right.

But there were/are plenty of other autocrats and autocrat-wannabees to support his building of a network of global Russian influence… lots of easy marks for takeover that the West was simply too weak to stop. Indeed, it was this self-same liberalism that actually allowed Putin to infect democracies with his Web-driven viruses of doubt and polarization – under the guise of free speech – to weaken them further, perhaps to the breaking point. Putin must smile every time Mr. Trump uses the words “fake news.” At least Putin has direct control of the news in his country and does not have to resort to name-calling to get the press to follow his wishes.

Stein Ringen (visiting professor of political economy at King’s College London) provides this overview of Putin’s underlying motivations in the May 16^th Los Angeles Times: “Russia’s behavior under Vladimir Putin seems baffling. Neighboring countries invaded: Georgia and the Ukraine. Crimea annexed. A covert war waged in eastern Ukraine. In Syria, chemical weapons and indiscriminate barrel bombing condoned. In Britain, one political assassination and another attempted. Throughout Europe, support of radical right-wing parties and organizations. In Britain again, propagandistic engagement during referendums on Scottish independence and ‘Brexit.’ In America and Europe, systematic disruption of elections by social media and other manipulations.

“Putin last week was inaugurated for a fourth six-year term as president in a hall where czars once were crowned. How to account for a superpower wreaking such havoc?... Under Putin, the Kremlin is now unmistakably a very assertive regime. Gone is the confusion of his first presidential period (2000–08) when, for a while, there was hope in the West that he might be cleaning up corruption and dragging Russia toward a semblance of rule of law.

“What instead happened was a kleptocratic consolidation. Some unfriendly oligarchs had their takings confiscated; some were imprisoned. Many escaped abroad. This didn’t eliminate corruption, but rather narrowed it to a single oligarchical clan under Putin’s control.

“Any hope of democratization was dashed. Russia is now an autocratic system that barely bothers disguising itself as democratic. In the recent presidential election, there were seven candidates in addition to Putin, none of them independent, all anointed by Putin. Putin’s administration is exposed to no outside controls, no effective legislature, no effective judiciary, no effective press…

“When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Western eyes saw a communist dictatorship collapse. But Russian eyes saw something else: a loss of empire. The Soviet Union had been monumentally successful in completing a Russian expansion that had been unfolding for centuries into an empire stretching from Central Asia to Central Europe. Overnight, that was all lost. What Putin called ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century’ was not the end of communism but of empire…

“His response has been to start rebuilding it. His agenda of ideas is meant to drive that purpose and secure his position in history as the czar who set the job in motion… The Putin ideology starts from a vision that goes by the name of ‘Eurasia.’ In that vision, ‘Russia’ is a spiritual empire of historical-religious origin, an empire of virtue. The geographic empire may have collapsed, but its spiritual legitimacy survives irrespective of transitory national borders. The Ukraine cannot be independent and European, for instance, because that is simply not what it is; it is Eurasian and inescapably a part of spiritual Russia… The second component of the ideology: Russia has enemies, including the European Union, America, liberalism and democracy…

“Still, Putin has a dilemma: He is big in ambition but small in power. The Russian state has behind it an unsophisticated economy and a population with a poor standard of education and public health. So it must fight with consistently dirty means. As historian Timothy Snyder writes in his just-published book, ‘The Road to Unfreedom,’ the ‘essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot be stronger, so it must make others weaker.’”

Russia replaced the Soviet Union in its veto-empowered position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, effectively neutralizing that agency against any policy Russia opposes (which is generally anything the United States embraces). Russian military aid to Syria and Iran assure state-of-the-art-shy-of-nuclear-weapons capacities. Russian experts at social media (masters of tailored viral disinformation) and detailed hacking of seemingly impenetrable systems – from military secrets, political parties to power grids and financial infrastructure – guarantee that Russian meddling and destabilization efforts will accelerate in the coming years. They are as surprised as anyone at their wildest success.

But make no mistake, Putin’s Russia is hell-bent on expanding and accelerating efforts at destabilizing the entire notion of Western democracy. Mr. Putin has to be grateful that the one-time leader of the Western world, the United States, is hemorrhaging from a self-inflicted wound named Donald Trump. What was once a road block to Putin’s ambitions is little more than a minor speed bump. However, you can barely hear Putin’s chortle. China’s Xi Jinping’s laughter is even louder!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is most frustrating to watch as bumbling and incoherent U.S. policy against rather clear, obvious and pernicious Russian intentions become one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest enablers.