Under present and probable future conditions, Russia will not ally with the United States against China on any substantial issue in any sphere. The wording of that sentence is carefully chosen, since the U.S.A., under any president, would be glad to have Russia’s support in the great competition of the mid-twenty-first century. But we are living through a period confounding to Marxist and bulk-data historians alike––an irrefutable return to the great-man interpretation of history, in which the individual titan leads (or misleads) the masses. In our time, the “greatest” of contemporary strongmen and aspiring dictators is Vladimir Putin, a man who has played an inherently weak hand with forceful, if flawed, brilliance.
And Putin hates the United States so viscerally that he is willing to harm his own country to punish America.
Schooled in an irrational commitment to rational analysis, Western observers and commentators have cut themselves off from a fundamental grasp of the circumstances confronting them globally, be it Putin’s ethno-mythic emotional drivers or the religious passions fueling Islamist fundamentalism. Add in the fact that one individual can manifest both madness and genius that inspire vision and self-destructiveness (the latter pairing the bane of the last century), and those sages who would apply stern logic to human affairs fall short in all great crises.
Logically, Putin would recognize that China is, by far, the greatest threat to Russia, demographically, economically, militarily, and territorially. But Putin’s vision for the future is nostalgic, the longing for a return to Russian greatness in Soviet guise, to the shabby-but-reassuring Eden of his youth. It was the United States that, in Putin’s view, ravaged paradise and humiliated its most-devout inhabitants.
Each year, China grows stronger, Russia weaker, and Putin more obsessed with doing all possible harm to the United States. Given former U.S. president Donald Trump, who, to whatever end, declined ever to criticize Putin or counter his most-insidious initiatives, the situation has been all to Russian advantage, facilitating a domestic and international rampage. No Chinese action short of a large-scale invasion of Russian territory could move Putin toward a serious accommodation with the United States. Putin certainly recognizes that China may do great harm to Russia, but the United States already has done existential evil (in Putin’s cosmology), and for Putin’s psychology past sins are tangible and eternal, while future threats are abstract.
In an all-too-real sense, we are dealing not with a clash of civilizations between Washington and Moscow but with a collision between historical epochs: Our strategic cosmos is one of post-Enlightenment astronomy, while Putin’s is of high-medieval astrology. And don’t count on the scientific method to come through for us: We have entered an unstable new era of virulent superstition, a fraught time when signs and portents wallop the hell out of cold statistics: Increasingly, twenty-first-century man wants witches to burn, not learned explanations. Putin is, profoundly, a man of our times.
In the absence of strong, enduring and like-minded alliances united in the defense of our threatened strategic and national values, we will remain prey to Putin and to others.
Terrorists would like to kill us all in a blink; Putin would prefer our drawn-out suicide. To call him a sadist would be unfair to de Sade, who recognized the existence of morality even as he rejected it.
So…there will be no anti-Chinese pact until it is too late for Russia. Do not seek reason in the land of the czars.
