No man is an island, the poet John Donne said. If he is well briefed for his summit in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, US President George W. Bush should discount Donne's wisdom. For within Russia, President Vladimir Putin does appear to be an isolated island, at least among the Russian elite who have singularly failed to embrace his decision to anchor Russia firmly to the West.
The elite's gripes about Putin's foreign policy are many, but they center mostly on the notion that the US is running roughshod over Russian interests. US troops, they complain, are on the ground in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kyrgizstan, Tadjikistan, and Uzbekistan. The next wave of NATO expansion promises to lap onto Russia's border and indeed surpass the old Soviet borders by taking in the Baltic states. Foreign investment has scarcely increased.
Putin, they allege, has surrendered Russia' traditional notions of security and received nothing from the West in return. The crimes they attribute to Putin sound like the indictment for a treason trial. After making his bold moves towards the West after Sept. 11, Putin undoubtedly expected to receive praise and favors in return. Of course, the West's ingratitude has been marked: the US withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty and has now rammed a vague disarmament agreement -- to be signed during the summit and which will allow the US not to destroy surplus missiles and warheads but rather to put them in cold storage -- down Putin's throat.
Even Putin's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB colleague and a man often considered to be Putin's closest adviser within his government, does not fully agree with him on the terms of collaboration with the US. If the Russian-Western alliance fails to bring tangible benefits to Russia soon, there is a growing fear that the loss of confidence in Putin may weaken him fatally.
There is an eerie sense of deja vu in all this. Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin all saw their hold on power undermined when they sought to please or placate the West only to receive nothing in return. Weakened by the perception of allowing the West to mistreat Russia, their influence among Russia's ruling elite disintegrated.
But there is a critical difference between the Russia of today and even Yeltsin's early postcommunist Russia. Under Khrushchev and Gorbachev (and also Yeltsin), Russia was an autocratic society in which control of the elite was the key to power. Civil society didn't exist. Only the power bureaucracy mattered. The faceless mass was just that: faceless and powerless. Public opinion didn't matter; it didn't even exist.
That elite, the old politburo nomenclature, was united by homogenized opinions. You kept power by sticking together in thought and word and deed. Change was anathema, risk to be avoided at all costs. Better to stick to a tried and failed policy than to upset the apple cart, even if the apples were rotten.
Today's Russia is no longer a two-tier society. It is a society with a diversity of opinions, options, opportunities and interest groups.Democracy, every Westerner will tell you, is not founded on what the elite think; it's what the people think that matters -- or at least what a contending rabble of rival interests think.
But the most important thing is that people are free to think, which Russia's people undoubtedly are now free to do. What they think is that Vladimir Putin is looking after Russian interests, which now include being an unconditional part of the West.
Public opinion matters, and Russia's elite knows it. Yes, Putin cares that the elite are keeping their distance from his foreign policy. But he knows something that they don't seem to recognize: Russia's people endorse his policies and do not want them overturned. Of course, the elite works behind the scenes to retard Putin's efforts, which is one reason why his ideas for military reform have gone almost nowhere under Sergei Ivanov's direction.
But obstructing is far from overthrowing. Putin may well be as isolated as my grandfather Nikita Khrushchev was in 1964, when Leonid Brezhnev organized his palace coup against him. Yet he is nowhere near as vulnerable, thanks to his widespread grassroots support among ordinary Russians.
Indeed, in the old days, Russia relied on its strength, mostly military, to determine its self-image. Russia's elite still embraces this vision. But after the disasters of the last two decades, including the military debacle in Afghanistan and the ruinous barbarity of the Chechen war which has blown back its violence into Russia's cities, ordinary Russians are less enamored of military might.
They still revere their country, of course, and want the world to respect it. But it is respect for Russia's culture that matters most to them, and such does not come at the barrel of a gun. The obsession with power and prestige that galvanizes Russia's elite hardly matters at all.
Russian society today is diversified and democratic, and its support for Putin is stronger than the grudges Russia's elite hold against him. So perhaps John Donne was partly right: if Putin is an island, he is one in a sea of millions of islands. The bell of a coup will not toll for him.
Nina Khrushcheva is a professor of International Relations at the New School University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
US President Donald Trump last week told reporters that he had signed about 12 letters to US trading partners, which were set to be sent out yesterday, levying unilateral tariff rates of up to 70 percent from Aug. 1. However, Trump did not say which countries the letters would be sent to, nor did he discuss the specific tariff rates, reports said. The news of the tariff letters came as Washington and Hanoi reached a trade deal earlier last week to cut tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the US to 20 percent from 46 percent, making it the first Asian country
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) delivered a welcome speech at the ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum, addressing more than 50 international law experts from more than 20 countries. With an aim to refute the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim to be the successor to the 1945 Chinese government and its assertion that China acquired sovereignty over Taiwan, Lin articulated three key legal positions in his speech: First, the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were not legally binding instruments and thus had no legal effect for territorial disposition. All determinations must be based on the San Francisco Peace
As things heated up in the Middle East in early June, some in the Pentagon resisted American involvement in the Israel-Iran war because it would divert American attention and resources from the real challenge: China. This was exactly wrong. Rather, bombing Iran was the best thing that could have happened for America’s Asia policy. When it came to dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, “all options are on the table” had become an American mantra over the past two decades. But the more often US administration officials insisted that military force was in the cards, the less anyone believed it. After
During an impromptu Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) rally on Tuesday last week to protest what the party called the unfairness of the judicial system, a young TPP supporter said that if Taiwan goes to war, he would “surrender to the [Chinese] People’s Liberation Army [PLA] with unyielding determination.” The rally was held after former Taipei deputy mayor Pong Cheng-sheng’s (彭振聲) wife took her life prior to Pong’s appearance in court to testify in the Core Pacific corruption case involving former Taipei mayor and TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). The TPP supporter said President William Lai (賴清德) was leading them to die on
RSS