If the response of Western governments to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was stronger than Vladimir Putin might have expected — with serious financial and economic consequences now ensuing for the pariah state — the non-government response has been just as harsh.
International bodies like the Olympic movement and the soccer body FIFA — both of which are on par with Putin’s regime for corruption, if not body count — have booted Russia out. Major international companies like BP and Exxon have severed ties with Russia; major retailers have pulled out; big manufacturers are abandoning production and sales; big logistics companies have cut Russia off.
In the US, at least, there’s popular appetite for even more sanctions, and pressure on companies to go further in cutting Russia off. In the UK, perceptions of the US have lifted significantly, and perceptions that Russia is hostile, unsurprisingly, have surged. In Finland — in defiance of Putin — there’s growing support to join NATO.
The contrast with the tepid response to Putin’s previous invasions and atrocities is significant. Russia, it seems, chose its moment for invasion poorly, eliciting an extraordinary response from the international community and Western opinion. What changed?
1. American information strategy It might be an unpopular opinion, but the Biden administration has handled the invasion very well. It warned for months that Putin intended to invade. It explained how he would fabricate a pretext and launch the attack, citing intelligence sources. The American narrative — mocked by many on the left and the right, and by large numbers of commentators in the media — ended up being confirmed in nearly every particular. It was virtually the exact reversal of the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The persistent US warnings placed the issue of Ukraine and Putin’s hostile intentions firmly on the international agenda before any tanks began rolling across the border.
2. American diplomatic strategy Washington has worked overtime to stay in lockstep with the Europeans and to prepare a suite of sanctions that were rolled out within hours of the invasion. Germany’s turnaround has been remarkable. If Donald Trump’s spectacularly unsuccessful strategy was to rail at a lack of German military spending and threaten to withdraw from NATO, Biden’s lockstep strategy has elicited an historic commitment by Germany to increase its military spending significantly and turn its back on further Russian energy supplies.
3. Ethnocentrism and racism “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan … This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city.” “These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East or North Africa.” “These are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine … These are Christians, they’re white. They’re very similar.” Plenty of journalists and commentators have been rightly castigated for the implied and often not-so-implied racism of their analyses. But the reasoning, even if unpleasant, has to be reckoned with. People are not purely rational machines — they are tribal, they react more strongly to people they identify with if the latter are in trouble. There is literally no one (except philosophers like Peter Singer) who does not, in some way, prioritise their own “people” — family, community, country, race — over the more urgent needs of those they see as not their kind. Geographical proximity to Europe — Lviv is closer to Vienna than Brisbane is to Sydney — further reinforces the sense that this is a local conflict for Europe.
4. Sinophobia The elevation of China — first under Trump, and continuing under Biden — to the status of an existential threat to the United States, and China’s bullying of smaller states like Australia and Lithuania, have restored, to a degree, a Cold War mindset. Vows of friendship between Xi Jinping and Putin have helped establish a narrative of a civilisational clash of democracy versus tyranny (we’ve all moved on from the last civilisational threat, Islamist extremism, apparently). This narrative has been seized on by both the right (why can’t we be more autocratic and thuggish like these dictators) and the left (Western democracy is the real ogre; China and Russia hapless victims pluckily resisting capitalism), elevating it still further.
5. And, maybe, the sense that it’s not business as usual anymore. The neoliberal decades commencing in the 1980s have been brought to an end by the pandemic, along with any number of cozy assumptions about the benefits of globalisation, open borders and unfettered economic links between countries. After the past two years of closed borders and supply chain crises, the world is more ready to retreat into armed, self-sufficient camps (dressed up as “resilience”, “sovereign capability”, etc) than at any time since the end of the Cold War. A decade ago, a wall of economic blockades against Putin would have been anathema to the international economic order. Now — why not blockade?
There is an interesting article in CounterPunch …MARCH 6, 2022. The Kremlin goes Neocon. Eric Draitser
….Instead of retracing Putin’s steps, perhaps it’s better to consider the roadmap he’s chosen. It’s one we know very well, for it is the United States that charted the course.
In fact, a sober analysis of the situation reveals that Putin is, in fact, carrying out a mirror image of Bush and Cheney’s monstrous crime against humanity in Iraq. If anything, rather than being a demonic ghoul whose shadows creep along the Kremlin walls like Moscow’s Nosferatu, Putin was a careful student of modern imperial power who, like so many Russian leaders before him, merely copied the attitudes and tactics of the empires of the West.
Take, for instance, Putin’s justifications for his criminal aggression. Here’s the Russian president describing the “existential threat” (sound familiar?) posed by Ukraine:
In reading the transcript of Putin’s speech, one wonders if David Frum has grounds to sue for plagiarism as it repeats, almost verbatim, the noxious talking points used by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other neocon criminals about an imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction from a country that has neither a nuclear weapons program, nor the requisite uranium enrichment program necessary to make a weapon.
Hayward, c’mon mate, who on earth would use that silly idea of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as an excuse to invade any country? Why, if they didn’t find them wouldn’t they risk being accused of war crimes?
Most of this sounds reasonable, apart from this line about democracy versus tyranny:
This narrative has been seized on by both the right (why can’t we be more autocratic and thuggish like these dictators) and the left (Western democracy is the real ogre; China and Russia hapless victims pluckily resisting capitalism), elevating it still further.
“ and the left (Western democracy is the real ogre; China and Russia hapless victims pluckily resisting capitalism), elevating it still further.”
Constructing a bit of a straw man here, Bernard? This is a complete non sequitur!
But “the right (why can’t we be more autocratic and thuggish like these dictators)” is fine, right?
Excellent first draft of historical explanation, thank you Bernard. Good companion to Guy’s piece today, easier reading but still plenty deep. The next step for the historian, cue undergraduate essay topics, what weight to accord each of your factors and explore how they interact? Your point three will be most triggering if understood as yes, racism is playing a part. It certainly would be for some but I would nuance the point, as you do, around the varying capacity for empathy.
For Europeans especially, Ukrainians are not seen as “other” they are seen as “us”. Hence solidarity comes unthinkingly. There is an excellent article by Tim Judah in the New York Review of Books underlining this. In it he explores how the Ukrainians were becoming more European even in the last seven years. They have free travel in the Schengen zone for example, so like other Europeans they could sit in a coffee shop, watch Netflix, work in an office nearby and contemplate a cheap trip to Barcelona for the weekend. Twenty years ago, or maybe even ten, Europeans may not have regarded Ukrainians as “us” but it seems pretty evident that a great many do now. Servant of the people, in which Zelenskyy starred was a Netflix series after all (cue conspiracy theorists).
Crucially Russians also don’t see Ukrainians as “other”. For many Russians this invasion will look and feel like civil war, completely sickening. This makes Putin’s demonisation task, to create the will among Russians to fight and kill, difficult. It was a different story for Chechnya. However, others and hatred of others can be manufactured, see the break-up of Yugoslavia. I would not be surprised if at some point a bomb attributed to “Ukrainian terrorists” goes off in Moscow or Rostov as part of the construction of an enemy other. And of course, watch both sides for stories about deliberately murdered babies.
Also, Putin has used up his KGB dirty tricks book and people are too aware to fall for them anymore
I know, he is evil isn’t he. Or mad. Mad and evil even. And ruthless. Amongst the main qualities of Vladmir Putin are: 1. madness; 2. evil; 3. ruthlessness……
The corollary, however, is that Russia is ‘other’ ie NOT European, white, overwhelmingly Christian. This is an unexplained anomaly. If Ukraine was being attacked by, say, Turkey, how different would be the response?
A thoughtful response – thank you.
Are you aware of the historical divide in Russia between Slavophiles and Westerners? If I recall Richard Pipes writes about it in Russia Under the Old Regime. I read it for Soviet politics at UWA in the 1980s. Russia typically displays a great suspicion, one might say paranoia without using it in the sense of a mental illness, toward the West and western ambition. The creep of NATO toward Russian borders – one wonders why NATO felt the need to do this and what effect it has had on Russian thinking. Any thoughts?
“The creep of NATO toward Russian borders” or the creep away from Russia by Russia’s neighbours?
Ethnocentrism is one I would rate very highly.
Conflicts happen all the time. In sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, South America, the Far East – one could be forgiven for thinking that conflicts are eternal. But those people are Others.
But this is on our back door. I mean, have you seen Ukrainian people – blond hair blue eyes. Well, perhaps not exclusively, but they do look like us. They share a religion, an ethnicity, an approximation to us in ways that people from other parts of the planet do not.
And Russia is one of those countries that we love to hate.
And so, we have the simplistic narrative that Putin is evil, or is insane, and whatever ‘interests; he has are thus, by definition, evil or insane. This avoids complicated thinking such as ‘how did we get to this point’? And ‘what role did the west (USA, NATO, Ukraine) play in getting to this point’?
Thanks for the article.