In praise of Putin

For too long the west has rested on an assumption of superiority. The Russian president should be praised for exposing this old fallacy.

by Edward Pearce - Oct 31, 2007

There is a plague afflicting casual commentary on foreign affairs today, and it is the survivor of cold war assumptions. We talk a great deal too much about "the west," and by implication we mean the good, civilised west facing its enemies. Stalin has been dead for 54 years but across that time "the west" has acquired any number of new enemies. Such thinking or dumb assumption-making has glazed over every act of meddling or aggression by the United States. The rest of us on the western list may hint at doubt and make reservations, but official commentary, the government and increasingly the new, tamed BBC, think systemically of a common western interest.

Accordingly we never understood and do not now understand Russia. At the most crass level there is Donald Rumsfeld, snarling at the French and Germans, calling them "the old Europe." Rumsfeld's "new Europe" comes in the form of Baltic states serving western interests - supplying troops in American wars. Some part of the hatred for the EU with which the Murdoch press salts the earth derives from this "new Europe's" potential insufficient loyalty to the United States. American-led, American-commanded westernism is the true sacrament, one which Tony Blair and Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar took on their knees, giving full support to the Iraq invasion in the Azores in 2003.

We may yet come to see the America's rise over last 20 years as a kind of convulsion, with triumph leading to calamity, and hubris meeting its nemesis. It may be, and let's candidly hope that it is, the Spanish Empire moment of United States history. But the glory comes first. The fall of the Soviet Union had to signal American triumphalism, and it did, with neoconservative paranoia turning into neoconservatism on a drunken glass-breaking high. Robert Kagan caught the mood with a little pamphlet rationalising an American duty to intervene wherever it chose in order to reshape the world in a better American way. Such is the amazing want of historical memory that there actually was talk about "a new world order".

Like the last one, it doesn't seem to be working. Banking movements and investment diversifications now suggest an insufficient loyalty more important than any words, any argument. But in 1989 and across the 1990s, with the US embassy in Moscow effectively controlling a western leadership of Russia, the US presidency had its Philip II decade.

Was there ever a more despicable figure than Boris Yeltsin? Drunk and incapable in charge of a nation, he waved through the plunder of national assets by a pack of corrupt skimmers. He approved an abolition of food subsidies instituting an overnight destitution of ordinary people. His function in terms of Russian pride and self-respect was to play collaborator, quisling, self-enriched and wrapped in the consolations of drink and a church gaudily and expensively restored. People ate out of dustbins, but Boris Yeltsin was a westerner, a splendid thing, evidence of western triumph. Somehow American and British governments have never felt the same way about Vladimir Putin. But then neither have the Russians.

Putin is enormously popular. The device by which he is continuing his leadership, behind a competent but happily subordinate technician, is accepted there as good news. I suggest that we should agree with the Russian people. They are getting what they want and they want it because Putin has governed Russia for Russia and Russians, has put back self-respect in a country whose nadir reflected an American zenith.

There has been luck involved. The rising price of oil has made non-compliance and international truculence pleasantly practicable. Russia behaves badly (from a western point of view)

Consider the implications of the coming bombardment of Iran: reinforced terrorist impetus, diminished security of pro-American governments in the Middle East; consider the people who will die, the open and rolling road of imminent contingency, and Vladimir Putin's words seem pretty temperate.

He is making a stand which Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy should be making and which long, hungover assumptions about western-hood make psychologically impossible. The leader of Russia, with his people behind him, speaks for his country and speaks clear, obvious sense. It is a sense which our western complex denies us.