NorthDoes America Still Need to
Worry So Much About Europe?
Europe will
always remain an important part of the world for U.S. foreign policy, but its
centrality to American national and economic security is drawing to a close.
How this rebalancing will happen during the 2020s will become the most critical
geopolitical challenge facing the U.S. national security establishment.
During his March 2021 visit to
Europe—the first major trans-Atlantic dialogue since the Biden
administration was inaugurated, Secretary of State Tony Blinken
re-emphasized (in his bilateral with European Commission President Ursula von
der Leyen) that Europe is America’s “partner of first resort.” After concluding his meeting with
the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell, he again stressed
that Europe and the United States “are the closest of partners, including on
issues beyond our borders.”
Blinken’s reaffirmation of the
priority of Europe in American national strategy and the pre-eminence of the
Euro-Atlantic community, even at a time when growing attention is being focused
on the challenge posed by China and the importance of the Indo-Pacific basin,
seems to replicate, in 2021, what academic Joseph Roucek, in a series of 1955
essays in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, defined
as the American understanding of geopolitics:
“American foreign policy since World War
II has viewed the Far East as a secondary theatre of action.
The Western European area is considered the main region for the concentration
of American efforts . . . This decision is due to the reasoning that the power
potential of Western Europe, at least now, is far greater than that of East
Asia and that the degree of stability and the community of interests in Western
Europe and the North Atlantic outweigh those of the Far East.”
But is this a fixed constant for
American national security?
For more than a century after
achieving its independence, the overriding U.S. geopolitical imperative was
separation from Europe and its conflicts (while retaining commercial
connections). Defined by George Washington himself as the avoidance of
entangling alliances, historian John Garraty encapsulated this process as
“America escapes from Europe,” especially as codified in the Monroe Doctrine of
1823. As Paul Glastris has noted:
“The Monroe Doctrine declared
that the United States would consider any attempt by a European state to
oppress or control any country in the Western Hemisphere a hostile act. It was
intended as a warning to the colonial powers not to restrict the potential
spread of democracy in Central and South America nor press any claims on North
American territory, thereby clearing the way for U.S. westward expansion. The doctrine
also stated that, in return, the United States would not involve itself
in the affairs of Europe—a vow meant to protect the ability of
American merchants to trade freely on an equal footing without being caught up
in Europe’s endless commercial intrigues.”
And as the United States
began to define for itself a more global role, at the end of the nineteenth
century, the initial areas of interest were the Caribbean and the Pacific
oceans, while maintaining the Atlantic as America’s line of defense from any
European spillover. Geostrategic thinkers like Alfred Mahan and Halford
Mackinder, however, raised a critical point: American homeland security and the
freedom of the seas that nourished America’s economic rise, could be endangered
if a hostile power or bloc was able to consolidate control over most of the
power centers of Eurasia. Mahan, in his book, The Interest of America in International Conditions,
warned of the dangers that a dominant European hegemon, combining the
industrial might and human capital of the continent with a sufficient
instrument of maritime power projection, would pose to the United States.
Mackinder, for his part, warned that a hegemonic power that dominated the
“world island” of the Old World, especially the industrial centers of Europe
and East Asia along with the vast material resource base of Central Eurasia and
the Middle East, would pose an existential threat to the outer crescent powers
such as the United States because of its ability to tap into economic and
military advantages that could end up overwhelming the British Empire and the
United States.
The outbreak of World War I
seemed to validate these concerns. As Roucek argued, “The United States could
not afford domination of Eurasia by Germany, or the elimination of Great
Britain as a great power standing between Europe and the United States in the
Atlantic Ocean.” America’s escape from Europe was over.
The lesson of
World War II and the start of the Cold War was
that the United States could not merely intervene in European affairs to defeat
a challenger and then return home; it would have to play a more active role in
shaping the political and economic balances of Europe favorable to U.S.
interests. For its own protection and to further its own geostrategic
interests, the United States decided to create the Euro-Atlantic community.
Faced with the possibility of Soviet dominance of Europe, the United States
moved from eschewing entangling alliances to, in Roucek’s formulation, becoming
the “most entangled” nation in the world. Within a few short years, after the
conclusion of World War II, “The United States shifted to a policy of
"containing" Soviet expansion and of countering Communist activities.
The Marshall Plan offered economic assistance to Europe, contingent on the
initiative and cooperation of the European States in drawing up a joint
recovery program. Then came the Brussels Pact, the Berlin blockade, the North
Atlantic Treaty, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Pact.” All of this lives on
in the twenty-first century in the formal institutions and informal
interconnections that define the trans-Atlantic relationship.
The collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, however, removed the overriding geopolitical impulse for close
American engagement with Europe. The “heartland” that so worried Mackinder and
his intellectual successor, Nicholas Spykman, is now divided among a group of
great and middle powers.
As the American effort to promote integration and cohesion in Europe is now largely
complete—with a Europe that is capable of holding the line if that’s
what it wants to do. Europe united under the banner of NATO now serves the role
Great Britain did in the nineteenth century—ensuring that no security
threat can break through that littoral barrier on Eurasia’s western
peninsula to threaten the eastern shore of the United States.
Post-Soviet Russia remains one of
the world’s major players but, unlike the USSR in 1945, it is “hemmed
in” all around its borders. To the extent that the United States faces a
challenge--and, as Colin Dueck warns about the rise of China—“the U.S.
faces a near-peer competitor with the potential ability to dominate the
Eurasian Rimland through previously unexpected means,” the geographic locus has shifted from the
Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific basin.
At the same time, the
geo-economic picture has shifted. Fifty years ago, the Euro-Atlantic community
dominated the global economy and was the most robust trading space. Today, the
balances are shifting. Crunching the trade balance data, Parag Khanna concludes:
“Europe’s overall trade in goods with Asia--including China, ASEAN, Japan
and India—stands at $1.6 trillion annually, far larger than even Europe’s
trade with North America. This is one of the strongest indicators of the
irreversible shift in the global economic center of gravity eastward, from
trans-Atlantic to Eurasia.” North American trade with greater Asia also exceeds the value
of goods shipped across the Atlantic. To be sure, the Euro-Atlantic trading
area remains quite critical—but it is being balanced out by the
trans-Pacific and the trans-Eurasian economic linkages.
And as geoeconomics shift, so do
geopolitics. Twenty years ago, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay assumed that the
next stage of what they termed the “globalization” of U.S. foreign policy would
be the extension of the Euro-Atlantic community into other parts of the world.
That remains a strategic possibility, but as Europe’s economic ties with
the United States diminish, European strategic interests are also affected. In
responding to comments about the need for a “united” U.S.-European alignment
vis-a-vis a rising China, former French ambassador to the United States Gérard
Araud responded that Europe “doesn’t have to choose” and would need to
avoid either maintaining equidistance between the United States and China or
alignment with one against the other, noting that European interests are
“closer to the US but their interests while overlapping are not similar.” At
the same time, as Khanna notes, the implications of this shift are clear for U.S.
policy: to engage more with Asia.
Europe will always remain an
important part of the world for U.S. foreign policy, but its centrality to
American national and economic security is drawing to a close. How this
rebalancing will happen during the 2020s will become the most critical geopolitical
challenge facing the U.S. national security establishment.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev
is a contributing editor at the National Interest.
Temperatures are rising again in
eastern Ukraine with informed commentators suggesting that intensive military action might start
when the “mud season” passes. Quite understandably, Americans could suffer from
Ukraine fatigue after observing the often bizarre conspiracies that have arisen connecting Kiev and Washington political
machinations over the last five years.
Even as Presidents Joe Biden and
Vladimir Putin traded insults, the Russian president celebrated Russia’s control of the Crimean Peninsula.
Unfortunately for Europe, Ukraine remains as the simmering crisis that still
threatens to overturn the continent’s “long peace.” Indeed, even as
Ukraine-Russia tensions are at the root of almost all of the most acute
problems in European security, this tortured bilateral relationship also points
the way toward common-sense solutions too.
Some noteworthy American national
security commentators claim that the “New Cold War” has little in
common with the experience 1945–90, because the new centers of competition are
in the cyber and high-tech realms, rather than concerning military competition
and nuclear weapons. Yet, such assessments seem oblivious to the steady
ramp-up of exercises by large military formations across Eastern Europe
in the last five years. Escalating tensions along the front between
Russian and U.S. forces are visible along a huge geographic front from
the Arctic all the way to the Caucasus and even reaching deep into the Middle East.
U.S. bombers that have been
flying regularly along Russia’s flanks have now been permitted to “nest” for the first time in Norway, a neighbor of Russia in
the “High North.” Likewise, America’s most advanced submarines have visited the region recently in the wake of NATO’s
largest exercises since the end of the Cold War. U.S. forces,
including tanks and attack helicopters, have deployed into the
Baltic states with new regularity and are now a permanent fixture in Poland. Meanwhile, American drones now patrol
along Russia’s sensitive southern flank, including within Ukraine and all along
the perimeter of the Crimean Peninsula. Is it any wonder that Russia has at
least five major modernizations underway simultaneously for its nuclear
strike forces, including new ICBMs, bombers, submarines, drones, and tactical
nuclear weapons too?
Too many Washington defense
analysts prefer to talk about cyber weaponry while peddling projects for new
patches with upgraded cyber defenses. Yet, the broader public remains quite in
the dark regarding hundreds of billions going to feed the intensifying nuclear
arms race, not to mention the new forces now deploying to Europe—admittedly
a friendly locale for the troops. Yet, are these escalatory steps warranted?
Conventional coverage of the
Ukraine issue asserts that the country was invaded by Russia after an allegedly
corrupt pro-Russian leader was ejected from office by angry protests—the
so-called Euro-Maidan events of early 2014. After Crimea was seized by “little
green men,” Moscow was unsatisfied and decided to lop off a few more slices of
Ukraine in the Donbass region too. While the storyline is not completely false,
it fails to recognize some important nuances. For example, the leader of
Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, may indeed have been corrupt, but he was also
elected in a legitimate, democratic election. An angry mob is hardly the ideal
way to remove a democratically elected president, it must be admitted.
Moreover, the “invasion thesis” does not quite comport with facts on the
ground. For example, there occurred in early May 2014 a major flare-up of
pro-Russian sentiment in Odessa that included grave atrocities. Such
events fit better into the civil war explanation than the invasion narrative
that is so popular in Washington today.
Memories in Washington do not
seem to go back any further than the disputed 2016 election or the Euromaidan
of 2014. The pervasive lack of historical knowledge in the American capital is,
unfortunately, feeding escalating tensions in Eastern Europe. Indeed, American
strategists should consider how it was that Americans were highly sympathetic to
Tsarist Russia during the Crimean War when Russia faced off against perceived
French and British imperialism. Likewise, they should reflect on the fact
that if Soviet forces had not paid so dear a price defending the
fortress at Sevastopol until mid-1942, they likely could not have prevailed at
Stalingrad subsequently. In other words, the Kremlin’s stubborn hold on
Crimea in the face of Nazi aggression proved exceedingly important to the
Allied victory in 1945. Finally, there is no understanding in the American
foreign policy establishment that Soviet internal borders were of little importance,
so their impact on post-Soviet politics is also limited. No wonder a giant
Russian naval base existed in Crimea after 1991 through 2014 to the present. In
other words, the Crimea situation and that of Ukraine generally is much grayer,
and less black and white than most Americans appreciate.
So, what is to be done
ultimately, besides dusting off some history books?
First, the United States should take overt and obvious steps to uproot the
militarized rivalries now in full bloom from the Arctic to the Caucasus to see
if such steps aimed at de-escalation might be reciprocated by the Kremlin.
Second, Washington should seek to re-energize the so-called “Normandy process”
that brings Russia and Ukraine into a negotiating format with the leaders of
Germany and France to stabilize the situation in eastern Ukraine.
Finally, American diplomats
should consider a “grand bargain” that accords full NATO membership to Ukraine
in exchange for complete diplomatic recognition of Russian sovereignty over
Crimea. While neutralization of Ukraine would be preferable for U.S. national
security, such a step is probably necessary in order to get Kiev (not to
mention Washington’s myriad hawks) to sign on to any larger compromise that
could lead to a relaxation of tensions. For Moscow, the extensive economic
benefits would almost certainly outweigh the security concerns. This agreement
to “meet halfway” may be the only way Europe can escape the ever-tightening
grip of the new Cold War.
Is America Ready for China’s
Belt and Road Challenge?
The Biden
administration is going to need a coordinated, multifaceted plan to counter the
changing shape of the Belt and Road Initiative ifit means to truly
engage in great-power competition with Beijing.
Since early 2020, there have been
rumors that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
prized economic strategy, was in trouble as a result of the coronavirus and
rising global opposition. This, however, is turning out to be mostly wishful
thinking. It would be more accurate to say that the BRI’s scope is shifting
from its traditional strategy of mainly infrastructure-driven development
toward sleeker, more modern efforts.
The coronavirus has been a key
driver of this transformation. While it’s true that the global pandemic has
significantly impacted China’s outreach (and its reputation), it has also
provided Beijing with the perfect opportunity to alter the parameters of the
BRI and reorient toward more relevant efforts.
Throughout 2020, a number of BRI
projects were either halted or scrapped, and many countries sought to defer
their loan repayments to Beijing. Even so, China used the opportunity to pivot
to public health and digital services.
Take China’s “Health Silk Road.”
The idea of a global public health effort spearheaded by China isn’t a new one;
it was first introduced in 2017 when Xi Jinping signed a pact with the World Health Organization (WHO)
committing to make health a major focus of the BRI. But the idea was catapulted
into prominence in 2020 when, under the aegis of the BRI, Chinese
companies publicly donatedpersonal
protective equipment around the world in an attempt to counter the prevailing global narrative of its negative
role in the spread of the coronavirus.
Facets of the Health Silk Road include providing countries with medical
supplies and consultations, as well as monetary aid to
the WHO so it can assist developing countries in building
stronger public health systems.
Then, there is technology: the
so-called “Digital Silk Road.” Although the pandemic caused some setbacks in
China’s efforts to become the world’s leading provider of 5G technology
(notably souring the UK on cooperation with Chinese telecom giant
Huawei), it has also afforded unexpected opportunities as well. Throughout
2020, Chinese tech firms introduced numerous 5G-driven medical services and helped to build
5G networks both at home and abroad to connect health care workers and patients
with medical experts. And much more is in store in this regard; in May of 2020,
the National People’s Congress approved a six-year spending plan with 5G as its
foundation. Huawei, China’s controversial telecom giant, has also laid a six-thousand-kilometer fiber-optic cable across
the Atlantic between Brazil and Cameroon, while the spread of digital payment
platforms like WeChat Pay and Alipay has helped to further internationalize
the yuan.
The so-called “Green Silk Road”
has received comparatively less attention, but it represents an effort that
almost certainly will grow in importance in the future. The pandemic has given
Beijing the opportunity to nix not only unviable projects but unpopular and
economically irrelevant ones (like dams and dirty coal plants) as well. Indeed,
reports have noted that the proportion of dirty to green projects underwritten
by the PRC has begun to decline. Late last year, for instance, China’s
Ministry of Ecology released a framework for classifying BRI projects depending
on their environmental impact. According to one analysis, “[t]he system will help curb
pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss caused by the mega
infrastructure projects associated with the BRI.” Not only that but in 2020, 57
percent of China’s investments in energy infrastructure focused on renewables.
Not everything has changed,
however. The BRI remains, at its core, an infrastructure-driven development
model. Xi’s plans for the future still rely on physical economic corridors throughout Asia and Europe,
and since its projects tend to use Chinese firms, they create important jobs for the
workforce. However, the BRI has always been ill-defined, which means that it
can adapt to new domains to remain relevant, which is something that is now
happening in the health, technology and green energy arenas.
The end result is notable. As the
foregoing makes clear, the BRI remains salient, and now has new coherence and
direction. The Biden administration is going to need a coordinated,
multifaceted plan to counter the changing shape of the BRI ifit
means to truly engage in great-power competition with Beijing.
Gracia Watson is a
researcher at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.
ANDREI KOLESNIKOV is a Senior Fellow and Chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
To mark the first day back at school on September 1, Russian schoolchildren received an online lesson from none other than President Vladimir Putin. He chose the subject of history, which has in recent years become close to his heart. His specific focus was a topic he has been talking about obsessively for almost a year now: the rewriting of Russian history, in particular that of World War II.
Putin is primarily concerned with two issues. One is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, which Western historians have long believed “paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War.” Putin holds that Stalin had no choice but to sign the pact with Germany. The other is the decisive role that the Soviet Union played in defeating the Nazis, which Putin believes other nations fail adequately to recognize.
If these were the views of a private individual, others could simply agree or disagree with them. But when a head of state presses them repeatedly, they become national ideological dogma. So far as the security services of an authoritarian state are concerned, they are nothing short of a call for action.
“People who cooperate with the enemy during a war are called and have always and everywhere been called collaborationists. Those who agree with the rewriters of history can easily be called the collaborationists of today,” Putin said during the public lesson on September 1. And sure enough, Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal body with far-reaching powers, took no time at all in establishing a new department to investigate crimes related to the rehabilitation of Nazism and the falsification of history. The hunt for historical “collaborationists” is on.
HISTORY’S AVENGERS
Under Russian law, the rehabilitation of Nazism is a crime. But what criteria investigative bodies will use to assess the “rewriting of history,” and how they will punish those found guilty of it, remains unclear. Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee and a friend of Putin’s from his St. Petersburg days, has defined such infractions as “attempts to put equal responsibility for the outbreak of war on Nazi criminals and on the Allied countries,” such as the Soviet Union.
By criminalizing certain interpretations of history, Putin is taking aim less at the West than at domestic figures, who, faced with the threat of prosecution, will hesitate to digress from the official narrative of the pre–World War II Soviet Union, for example. Similarly, when the committee opens criminal investigations into events abroad—as it did in the Czech Republic in April, when municipal authorities in Prague removed the city’s monument to the Soviet war hero Marshal Ivan Konev—the message to ordinary Russians is the real object. Look how little they like us in the West: they defile the memory of our victory and our heroes.
By creating a new department to avenge history in this manner, the Kremlin risks criminalizing the work of professional historians. There were already incidents shading in that direction: in 2018, the Ministry of Justice classified as extremist an article by the historian Kirill Alexandrov about the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, despite the fact that the article made no attempt to justify Bandera’s actions during World War II. Alexandrov was to receive a doctoral degree in 2017, but the Ministry of Education and Science withheld it on political grounds: he had written his dissertation about soldiers who joined a collaborationist unit during World War II.
Anything and everything to do with the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to World War II, is extremely sensitive for the Russian leadership. The memory of victory in that war is one of the few remaining bonds to hold the Russian nation together and legitimize the Putin regime as the heir to great triumphant ancestors. Putin has gone so far as to enshrine his fight against the falsification of history in the constitution by passing amendments to that effect this summer (alongside his better-known move to reset the clock on presidential terms, allowing himself to stay in power beyond 2024).
STALIN’S REVIVAL
The trouble with this new official historical discourse is that it implicitly vindicates Stalin and Stalinism. To criticize Putin’s version of history is to criticize the sacred memory of the war, and to criticize Stalin is to detract from public appreciation of Russia’s victory in that war. This paradigm is precisely the one on which the Soviet regime under Leonid Brezhnev built its official propaganda. Stirring up unpleasantness around repression under Stalin was the dirty business of dissidents: Stalin was above all to be remembered as the leader who won the war.
The revival of this narrative has already begun to expunge important chapters of Russian history from public discussion. Scholars, writers, and the public no longer explore the Winter War that Stalin unleashed against Finland in 1939. They don’t consider Stalin’s shameless cooperation with Hitler, which included holding joint parades and handing over German antifascists to the Nazis. They can’t talk about details of the occupation of the Baltic states or the invasion of Poland in accordance with the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and under the pretext of liberating Ukrainian and Belarusian “brothers” there.
There will likely be little further scholarship on the Soviet secret police’s shooting of more than 20,000 Polish officers in Katyn in 1940. Earlier propaganda had suggested that it was the Germans who executed the Poles in Katyn. Putin himself once debunked that notion. But now the idea has resurfaced in an article that the official state agency, RIA Novosti, published in March. Moreover, this spring, the prosecutor’s office in Tver ordered the removal of memorial plaques from a building in whose basement Stalin’s death squads had executed more than 6,000 Poles.
The atmosphere in today’s Russia encourages the vindication of Stalinism and its atrocities. By simplifying and mythologizing history, the Russian president is encouraging the deterioration of public knowledge of historical events. Historical discourse that was once marginal is becoming mainstream, with the state’s endorsement. Those who commemorate the victims of repression face official persecution. The historian Yury Dmitriev, for example, discovered a mass grave of victims of political repression in Karelia, in northern Russia. This summer he was sentenced to three and a half years’ imprisonment for pedophilia—a charge widely believed to be a vengeful fabrication. The prosecutor’s office appealed the sentence as too lenient, and the Karelian Supreme Court added another nine and a half years. The Ministry of Justice has labeled Memorial, a nongovernmental organization that for several decades has heroically and painstakingly pieced together Stalin-era crimes, as a “foreign agent,” and one court after another has ravaged it with fines. Such is the context in which the Investigative Committee intends to punish people for “knowingly spreading false information about the deeds of the U.S.S.R.”
While Russia’s Investigative Committee was thinking up new ways to combat historical dissidence, parliamentarians in Spain began debate over a new draft law on “democratic memory.” The Spanish law, which has come under fierce criticism, includes “a plan to recover the remains of victims of the civil war and setting up a special prosecutor to investigate human-rights abuses from 1936 to 1978.”
If and when Russia transitions from Putin’s authoritarianism to democracy, it should look to Spain’s example. Russia needs to restore, rather than erase, the memory of the millions of victims of totalitarianism and cease putting it in competition with the memory of those who fell in battle in World War II. Promoting that false opposition is a deliberate tactic to deepen the national divide.
TIMOTHY FRYE is Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and the author of Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia(Princeton University Press, 2021), from which this essay is adapted.
For 21 years, Vladimir Putin has reigned supreme over Russian politics. A skillful manipulator of public opinion, he wields the blunt force of repression against opponents at home and the sharp power of cyber-operations and espionage campaigns against enemies abroad. Increasingly, Western analysts and officials portray him as all-powerful, a ruthless former KGB man who imposes his will on Russia from behind dark sunglasses. This narrative, which the Kremlin goes out of its way to reinforce, is tempting to believe. Putin has jailed the closest thing he has to a political rival—the opposition leader Alexei Navalny—and crushed a wave of protests by Navalny’s supporters. Putin’s intelligence agencies brazenly hacked the U.S. government, and his troops are gradually eroding U.S. influence everywhere from Libya to Syria to Ukraine.
But if Putin is unrivaled at home, he is not omnipotent. Like all autocrats, he faces the dual threats of a coup from elites around him and a popular revolt from below. And because of the compromises he has had to make to consolidate his personal control over the state, Putin’s tools for balancing the competing goals of rewarding elites who might otherwise conspire against him and appeasing the public are becoming less and less effective. He has weakened institutions such as courts, bureaucracies, elections, parties, and legislatures so that they cannot constrain him, meaning that he cannot rely on them to generate economic growth, resolve social conflicts, or even facilitate his peaceful exit from office. This leaves Putin dependent on the fleeting commodity of personal popularity and the hazardous methods of repression and propaganda.
Those who acknowledge these vulnerabilities frequently note that Putin is “playing a weak hand well.” But Putin has dealt his own hand, and it is weak primarily because of the tradeoffs inherent to regimes like the one he has built. Eventually, he will have to decide whether to continue the same balancing act, skillfully playing his weak hand even as it gradually diminishes his power, or try to strengthen his hand by introducing economic reforms that will threaten his core constituencies in the security services, the bureaucracy, and the private sector.
Putin was buoyed by an oil-fueled economic boom that sharply raised living standards in his first decade in office and a wave of nationalist sentiment following the annexation of Crimea in his second. As the sheen on these achievements has begun to wear off, however, Putin in his third decade in office has increasingly come to rely on repression to neutralize opponents both big and small. This trend will likely intensify as Russia’s problems mount, accelerating a cycle of political violence and economic malaise that could stymie Putin’s great-power ambitions and test his political skill.
THE PERILS OF PUTINOLOGY
The narrative of Putin as all-powerful is sustained in part by analysts who believe that to understand autocracy, one must understand the autocrat. Putinologists scour the Russian leader’s background, his career path, and even his reading choices for clues to his policies. Their analysis makes for a compelling story of Putin’s Russia, but it does not explain all that much. After all, Putin was just as much an ex-KGB man in the early years of this century, when he favored liberal economic policies and better relations with the West, as he is today, with his strident anti-Western stance. More important, Russian politics follow patterns common to a subset of authoritarian regimes that political scientists call “personalist autocracies.” Studying this type of system, rather than studying the man himself, is the best way to understand Putin’s Russia.
Personalist autocracies are, as the name suggests, run by lone individuals. They frequently have political parties, legislatures, and influential militaries, but power over important personnel or policy decisions always resides with one person at the top. Contemporary examples of this kind of regime include Viktor Orban’s in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte’s in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s in Turkey, and Nicolás Maduro’s in Venezuela. The former Soviet space has proved especially hospitable to personalist autocrats: such leaders currently rule Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Globally, personalist autocracies are now the most common type of autocracy, outnumbering both one-party regimes, such as those in Singapore and Vietnam, and military regimes, such as Myanmar’s.
Personalist autocracies exhibit a host of pathologies that are familiar to Russia watchers. They have higher levels of corruption than one-party or military autocracies and slower economic growth, greater repression, and less stable policies. Rulers in personalist autocracies also have a common toolkit: they stoke anti-Western sentiment to rally their base, distort the economy to benefit cronies, target political opponents using the legal system, and expand executive power at the expense of other institutions. Often, they rely on an informal inner circle of decision-makers that narrows over time and appoint loyalists or family members to critical positions in government. They create new security organizations that report directly to them and appeal to popular support rather than free and fair elections to legitimate their authority.
These tendencies are readily explicable when one considers what personalist autocrats stand to lose if they leave office. The leaders of military dictatorships can retreat to the barracks, and the heads of one-party dictatorships can retire to plumb posts in the party, but personalist dictators enjoy their wealth and influence only as long as they stay in power. And once they relinquish it, they are at the mercy of their successors, who rarely want once formidable rivals waiting in the wings. Over the last 70 years, personalist autocrats who lost power have tended to end up in exile, in jail, or dead.
Although he may not show it, Putin is surely aware of this danger. As Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to the Russian leader and now a critic, put it in a 2012 interview:
In the Kremlin establishment . . . there has been an absolute conviction that as soon as the power center shifts, or if there is mass pressure, or the appearance of a popular leader, then everybody will be annihilated. It’s a feeling of great vulnerability. As soon as someone is given the chance—not necessarily the people, maybe the governors, maybe some other faction—they will physically destroy the establishment, or we’ll have to fight to destroy them instead.
The similarities between Putin and other personalist dictators do not end with his worries about removal. Like his Filipino, Hungarian, Turkish, Venezuelan, and Central Asian counterparts, he has gradually eroded the powers of the legislature, subdued independent media, subverted elections, and usurped authority from previously powerful regional officials. Last year, Putin pushed through changes to Russia’s constitution that will allow him to run for office in 2024 and 2030. Given the potential downsides of leaving office as a personalist autocrat, this effort to prolong his rule came as little surprise. Faced with similar term limits, every personalist autocrat in the former Soviet Union has made the same choice.
But by undercutting the kinds of political institutions that constrain executive power, Putin has reduced certainty about policy and increased the vulnerability of elites. As a result, investors prefer to park their capital in safe havens outside Russia, and many young Russians have taken their significant human capital abroad. Even superrich Russians feel vulnerable: they hold far more of their wealth in cash and have more volatile incomes than do their peers in other countries, and they have resisted the Kremlin’s calls to bring their capital home.
Without strong formal institutions to legitimate his rule, Putin relies on great personal popularity to deter challenges from elites and keep protesters off the street. Over the last 20 years, Putin’s approval ratings have averaged a remarkable 74 percent, and there is little reason to believe that Russians are lying to pollsters in large numbers. But these high approval ratings were largely driven by the economic boom that doubled the size of Russia’s economy between 1998 and 2008 and the unique foreign policy success of annexing Crimea in 2014. Since 2018, Putin’s popularity has wavered. His approval ratings remain in the mid-60s, but Russians express far less trust in him than they have in the past. In a November 2017 poll, when asked to name five politicians they trusted, 59 percent of respondents named Putin; in February 2021, just 32 percent did so. During the same interval, support for a fifth Putin term fell from 70 percent to 48 percent, with 41 percent of Russians surveyed now saying that they would prefer he step down.
THE IMPOTENCE OF OMNIPOTENCE
Putin is constrained not just by his need for high approval ratings but also by the challenges of governing a modern society with an unwieldy bureaucracy. In Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, the political scientist William Taubman recounts how Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and controlled a Communist Party and a bureaucratic apparatus with far greater influence over society than Putin has, complained to the Cuban leader Fidel Castro about the limits of his power:
You’d think I could change anything in this country. Like hell I can. No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia is like a tub full of dough, you put your hand down in it, down to the bottom, and think you’re master of the situation. When you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That’s what Russia is like.
Russia’s enormous size and bureaucratic complexity mean that Putin inevitably must delegate some decision-making authority to lower-level officials, all of whom have their own interests. And because Russia’s state institutions are weak, Putin must also work with powerful businesspeople who are more keen to make money than to serve the state. As Putin’s authority is channeled down through this chain of bureaucrats, businesspeople, and spies who may or may not share his preferences, slippage inevitably occurs, and policies do not always get implemented the way he would have preferred.
The problem gets worse when the Kremlin seeks to maintain plausible deniability. To covertly supply rebels in eastern Ukraine, for instance, Putin partnered with Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch who allegedly funded a band of private mercenaries that maintained indirect ties to the Russian military. In July 2014, however, these rebels appear to have inadvertently shot down a Malaysian commercial airliner, killing almost 300 passengers and crew members. In order to camouflage its cyberattacks, the Kremlin similarly relies on hackers who work for private-sector front companies but who answer to the Russian security services. In 2016, it was the sloppiness of these hackers that allowed the United States to identify Russia as the source of the Democratic National Committee hack. The Russia analyst Mark Galeotti has dubbed the Kremlin’s outsourcing of dirty work to groups with murky ties to the state “adhocracy.” This method of statecraft hides Moscow’s hand, but it also loosens its grip on policy.
The Kremlin struggles with more mundane tasks, as well. In 2012, Putin issued a detailed set of targets to increase economic growth, improve bureaucratic efficiency, and support social programs. That these decrees were poorly formulated was one indication of the bureaucracy’s weakness (among other flaws, they optimistically assumed an annual growth rate of seven percent). But even more telling was the lack of follow-through. On the five-year anniversary of these decrees, Sergei Mironov, then the head of the Kremlin-friendly party A Just Russia, reported that the bureaucracy had implemented just 35 of the 179 decrees monitored by his committee in parliament. Autocrats have long struggled to elicit honest information from their subordinates and make sure their policies have taken hold, and Putin is no exception.
DUAL THREATS
Imperiled and constrained by the very compromises that enable them to amass power, personalist autocrats struggle to balance defending against the two main threats to their rule: coups by the political elite and protests by the public. Those in the leader’s inner circle typically have a stake in the regime’s survival. This is true of Putin’s cronies, who have become rich beyond their dreams. But these elites also pose a potential threat. Cronies can capture personalist autocrats who lean too heavily on them for support. Moreover, rare is the political insider who thinks he could not do a better job than his boss if given the chance. According to the political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, between 1945 and 2012, leaders of nondemocracies were more than twice as likely to be replaced by an elite coup as by a popular revolt.
Autocrats also face threats from below in the form of protests. The “color revolutions” toppled rulers in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Few worries animate the Kremlin more than the possibility of a popular uprising, and many analysts argue that it was the large protests against corruption and electoral fraud in 2011 and 2012 that prompted the Kremlin to sharply increase the penalties for attending and organizing protests.
These dual threats put Putin in a bind, because steps that might reduce the risk of a coup by elites can increase the risk of a popular revolt, and vice versa. Investment in the security services that buys the loyalty of elites may necessitate cuts to social services that stoke popular anger and risk igniting protests. Conversely, generous social programs that placate the public and forestall a revolt may require cuts to state spending that anger regime insiders and make a palace coup more likely. In general, Putin must walk a narrow line between allowing his cronies to engage in enough corruption and self-dealing to keep them loyal and promoting sufficiently broad-based economic growth to keep the public from protesting.
In his first decade in office, high energy prices and sound macroeconomic policy obscured this tradeoff, allowing Putin to reward both elites and the masses with spectacular increases in income. But the days of $100-a-barrel oil and surging living standards are behind him, and Putin must now choose between rewarding his cronies and reforming the economy. Infighting among elites, although always hard to measure, appears to be on the rise as the regime’s economic largess falls. The last four years have seen a sitting minister of economics jailed for bribery, a senator arrested on the floor of the Federal Assembly for murder, and a prominent American businessman detained for almost two years. Arrests for economic crimes, which are often a rough proxy for violent corporate raids, increased by a third in 2019. And spats among Russia’s security services surged in 2018 and 2019, until the coronavirus pandemic hit.
The public, too, is restless. Real household income fell every year between 2013 and 2019. Pension reforms shaved 15 percentage points off of Putin’s approval rating over the course of 2018, and Russians routinely cite economic difficulties as their most pressing problem. The protests in January in support of Navalny, which occurred in more than 100 cities, were rooted as much in economic dissatisfaction as in opposition to Putin.
Putin faces a similar dilemma in foreign policy. The policies needed to generate economic dynamism—opening the economy to foreign trade, reducing corruption, strengthening the rule of law, increasing competition, and attracting foreign investment—are difficult to square with his assertive foreign policy, which has benefited hard-liners in the security agencies and firms in import-competing sectors. The Kremlin’s more confrontational foreign policy toward the West has brought Moscow back as a global force and secured Putin’s place in Russian history, but it has also impeded much-needed economic reforms that would strengthen the country’s position abroad over the longer term and satisfy Russian citizens, most of whom, according to opinion polls, care more about their own living standards than their country’s great-power status.
Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine led to U.S. and European sanctions that have further slowed the economy. These measures have scared off foreign investors and reduced Russian access to foreign technology and financing. That Kremlin elites frequently call for these sanctions to be removed is evidence of the considerable, if intermittent, pain they have caused some oligarchs in particular.
Putin likely knows that he could boost economic growth by charting a less assertive foreign policy. His longtime adviser Alexei Kudrin, who served as Russia’s finance minister from 2000 to 2011 and is now the government’s chief auditor, told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2018 that the success of Russia’s economic policy depends on reducing tensions with the West—a comment that brought a swift rebuke from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Putin continues to challenge the West, and the United States in particular, to boost his popularity among nationalist voters. But as with all of Putin’s strategies for managing threats to his rule, stoking patriotic sentiments comes at a cost—in this case, broad-based economic growth.
RISKS OF REPRESSION
Like all personalist autocrats, Putin has relatively blunt tools for managing the tradeoffs inherent to his position. He has succeeded in exerting control over the media, but he is no master manipulator. If he were, public opinion would more closely mirror the Kremlin’s line on foreign policy. Putin’s annexation of Crimea was wildly popular, but support for using Russian troops in eastern Ukraine and Syria has always been quite modest. Despite the Kremlin’s harsh anti-Kyiv rhetoric, most Russians have a positive view of Ukraine, and just 15 percent support unification with the country. The Kremlin has also conducted a noisy anti-American campaign in recent years, but Russians are about as likely to hold a positive view of the United States as they are to hold a negative view. According to a January 2020 opinion poll, two-thirds of Russians believe their government should view the West as a partner rather than a rival or an enemy. Attempts by the Kremlin to shift blame for Russia’s economic malaise to foreign countries have largely fallen flat, and few Russians believe that their government is capable of improving their economic situation. In what Russians call “the battle between the television and the refrigerator,” the latter is winning.
Part of the Kremlin’s problem is that manipulating information sometimes backfires. If people believe that the information they receive is being spun, they will lose confidence in the source. As Russian television became more politicized over the last decade, Russian viewers became more skeptical. According to public opinion polls, viewers’ trust in what they saw on television fell from 79 percent in 2009 to just 48 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, the share of Russians who cited television as their chief source of news dropped from 94 percent to 69 percent between 2009 and 2020.
Putin retains the trump card of force, a card he has played with increasing frequency as the economy has stagnated and the warm glow of the annexation of Crimea has faded. Since 2018, the Kremlin has dealt with political opposition far more harshly than in the past, making it harder for independent candidates to run for even local office and using force against protesters as a rule rather than an exception. In late 2020 and early 2021, the Kremlin further restricted protest activity, sharply increased penalties for unsanctioned protests, expanded the definition of “foreign agents,” and made slander on the Internet punishable by up to two years in jail. The arrest of Navalny, his sentencing to almost three years in prison, and the brutal treatment of those protesting on his behalf are the logical extension of this repressive trend.
Putin’s increased reliance on repression is a sign that his other tools are failing. The danger for the Kremlin is that repression takes on a self-reinforcing momentum. As the political scientist Christian Davenport has argued, authoritarian regimes that resort to repression typically come to rely on it more and more because of its tendency to perpetuate the problems that generate opposition in the first place. Crackdowns on protests rooted in declining living standards only heighten popular grievances among the economically disadvantaged and further entrench those who benefit from the status quo. Repression also increases a ruler’s dependence on the security services and crowds out other means of dealing with the opposition.
Skillful repression has helped keep Putin in office and pushed the political opposition to the margins, but it has done little to resolve the underlying problems that threaten his power. It has not promoted economic growth, strengthened property rights, or reduced corruption. On the contrary, it has made the problems worse by empowering the security services and the corrupt government officials who benefit most from them, and it has encouraged the flight of human and economic capital, which are essential to economic growth and good governance. Emblematic of this issue is the fact that in 2018, Russia spent more on prisons and less on prisoners than any other country in Europe.
A future spike in energy prices that increased rent streams to the elite and delivered prosperity to the broader public would offer Putin some respite. If energy prices stay where they are, however, his future looks rocky. Given the diminishing returns of media manipulation, further repression and additional limits on political rights seem like a good bet. Having already tilted the electoral playing field against the opposition and drastically increased the punishment for protesting, the Kremlin has begun to move against the social media platforms that Putin’s opponents have used to gain traction. In March, the Kremlin announced charges against Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and the homegrown outlets VK and Odnoklassniki on the pretext that they failed to remove material harmful to children. Such actions will do little to endear Putin to young Russians, who are already the most likely to oppose his rule.
The parliamentary elections slated for September are likely to be fraught. Approval ratings for the ruling United Russia party are lower than ever, and so the Kremlin will need to clamp down on the opposition while also keeping the regime-friendly Communist Party and Liberal Democratic Party in the fold. And relying on excessive voter fraud would be risky. After a stolen election last year, neighboring Belarus saw months of protests, a fate the Kremlin would like to avoid.
Looking further down the road, the expectation that Putin will stay on as president past 2024 will only reinforce Russia’s economic stagnation and heighten popular frustration over the Kremlin’s inability to raise living standards or improve governance. The result will most likely be a steady increase in pressure on the regime and in repression against its opponents.
GREAT BUT DIMINISHED
Russia remains a great power, albeit a diminished one. Although Leonid Brezhnev, who led the Soviet Union at the height of its global power, would be appalled by the country’s current military capabilities and geopolitical status, Boris Yeltsin, who inherited a country in collapse, would view them with envy. Russia’s nuclear might, geography, and seat on the UN Security Council ensure that it ranks among the great powers—as do its educational, scientific, and energy prowess. The country has more college graduates as a proportion of its population than almost any member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It produced an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year, and it will provide Europe with low-cost energy for years to come and remain a major player in global energy markets. Those who dismiss Russia as a regional power are mistaken.
Putin faces no immediate threat to his rule. He is a deft tactician with considerable financial resources facing a disorganized opposition. Yet no amount of shrewdness can overcome the agonizing trade-offs of running Russia the way he does. Cheat enough in elections so that you don’t risk losing, but not so much that it signals weakness. Rile up the base with anti-Western moves, but not to the extent that it provokes an actual conflict with the West. Reward cronies through corruption, but not so much that the economy collapses. Manipulate the news, but not to the point where people distrust the media. Repress political opponents, but not enough to spark a popular backlash. Strengthen the security services, but not so much that they can turn on you. How the Kremlin balances these tradeoffs will determine Russia’s immediate future. But the trend toward greater repression over the last four years, and its likely continuation, does not bode well for Russia or its leader.
