Debunking Putin’s New World Order – OpEd
During the tense months of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, the National Security Council’s Middle East expert Gary Sick was inundated daily with hundreds of pages of classified documents describing the rapidly evolving situation in Tehran. Yet the sources that Sick found most valuable in making sense of the crisis were neither the reports nor memos that the NSC staff helpfully supplied, but the direct speeches of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “You could tell what these people were thinking […] [F]or intentions, you can’t do better than get a politician and let ‘em rant on for two hours.”
Fortunately for analysts who take a cue from Sick to interpret the intentions of the Kremlin, the Russian president can “rant on” for two hours—or four. Indeed, that’s how long Putin’s commentary ran during the November 7 meeting at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi.
An annual meeting of international scholars, world leaders, think tank experts, and journalists funded by pro-Kremlin NGOs, the Valdai forum is primarily aimed at shaping international perceptions of Russia. According to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s DisinfoWatch, Valdai’s purpose is to platform Russia’s geopolitical agenda while casting a scholarly glaze on pro-Kremlin talking points. This year, Putin spoke for one hour and took questions for three hours in an effort to contour the narrative about Russian intentions and activities on the world stage. Tellingly, the Russian president kicked off the event with praise for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution which, like the French and English revolutions before it, had “determined the course of history.” He then remarked that today’s citizens are “destined” to see “revolutionary changes” in their lifetimes as “a completely new world order, nothing like we had in the past” is ushered in.
The stakes, in other words, couldn’t be higher as Putin laid out his vision for the world to come. Yet it wasn’t a vision so much as instructions directed at both domestic and international audiences about how to understand Russia’s ideological struggle against Western nations.
The independent news outlet Meduza reported that pro-Kremlin media organizations received guidelines from the Putin administration about how to cover the Valdai forum. The guidelines emphasized that the Russian president is a “great world leader” and that his speech introduced the “doctrine of a new world order.” Given their marching orders, Russian media outlets immediately got to work. The popular Lenta.ru ran the following headline: “‘The moment of truth is at hand.’ Putin spoke out about the formation of a new world order” while the more than century-old Izvestia chimed in with “At the Valdai Club meeting, Putin declared the formation of a new world order.” As though a new geopolitical arrangement is something that can simply be announced into being—by Putin, no less.
Although much of what was said at Valdai was familiar—grievances about NATO expansion, American duplicity, and Western hegemony—there was an unusual emphasis placed on a pseudo-philosophical framing of Russia’s relations with the West. Reminiscent of how he had treated the world to his lengthy amateur historicizing during the Tucker Carlson interview earlier this year, Putin is now legitimizing Russian aggression by means of lengthy amateur philosophizing. Characterizing his remarks as “philosophical digressions,” the would-be philosopher-king dove headfirst into the “dialectics of history.”
As Putin related to his audience, the unforgiving “course of history” is currently characterized by an “irreconcilable struggle” informed not by a scramble for strategic predominance, but by ideology. The ideological combatants are, on one side, a hegemonic “modern Western liberalism” that’s both “racist” and “globalist,” imposing “totalitarian ideologies” in a “crude colonial approach.” The belligerent hegemons bent on an “ideological, military, and political monopoly” of the world include the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany (the “collective West” for short). On the other side of the ideological divide, Putin identifies a somewhat vague but diverse “global majority” that simply wants to be left alone to live in peace. Predictably, and without a trace of irony, Putin contends that Russia, China, and North Korea represent the world’s peace-loving nations.
The Russian leader reminds his audience that, dialectically speaking, ideological contradictions are resolved via “synthesis, transitioning to a new quality” which, practically speaking, means that the U.S.-led rules-based order will be invariably replaced with a regional and egalitarian arrangement in which “all voices are heard.” Putin warns that the global domination by Western states, which are themselves engulfed in “chaos, a systemic crisis,” is “irreversibly passing away” because “the course of history cannot be stopped.” This is not dialectical reasoning à la Hegel, for whom opposing forces are always reconcilable. Instead, it is evident that Marxist-Leninism is alive and well in the halls of the Kremlin, with the Russian leader praising, as his Soviet predecessors had done, the justice of a great ideological battle waged against imperialist powers on behalf of oppressed nations everywhere.
In this Marxist-Leninist formulation, the West is perpetually on the brink of annihilation and its opponents need only strike while the iron is hot. Indeed, it was on the basis of Marxist theory that Lenin promised nearly a century ago that “the epoch of capitalist imperialism is one of ripe and rotten-ripe capitalism, which is about to collapse.” Today, the bogeyman is no longer capitalism as such, but rather what Putin described at Valdai as the “greed of those Western elites,” with “elite” being today’s hip, populist term for “bourgeois.” Indeed, it’s no coincidence that the military and economic cooperation among Russia, China, and North Korea mirrors that of the mid-twentieth century, when the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China worked together to bolster North Korea’s war against the U.S.-supported South—the first proxy conflict of the Cold War.
Despite two world wars and the Great Depression, Western states didn’t collapse in the first half of the twentieth century and, considering America’s humming economy, aren’t poised to collapse any time soon. Putin’s intellectual sleight of hand relies on Valdai’s audience of “experts” unquestioningly accepting his idiosyncratic version of history. On the one hand, the Russian leader coolly explains historical laws that cannot be altered, only observed. In this Hegelian conceptualization, Russia won’t need to aggressively confront the United States to establish multipolarity—the liberal world order will disintegrate on its own since “any monopoly, as history teaches us, eventually comes to an end.” Remarking that the coming transformation “is not even a fight for power or geopolitical influence,” Putin contends that the struggle against the West is entirely in the realm of ideas.
On the other hand, however, Putin threatens kinetic action arising from the latter of two alternatives: either the West capitulates or there will be “global catastrophe.” These are the sole possible outcomes because, as Putin said multiple times at Valdai, the collective West aims at the alleged “strategic defeat of Russia” as evidenced by NATO expansion and economic sanctions against Russia. He then warned that the West’s crazed drive at nothing less than the total annihilation of the Russian nation risks “mutual destruction” resulting from the use of nuclear forces and unspecified, technologically advanced weapons. Deploying his familiar tactic of studied ambiguity, evident in Russia’s revised nuclear doctrine and intended to sow public panic in the United States and its allies, Putin cautioned that “nobody can guarantee that these weapons will not be used.” This is likely a reference to the hypersonic “Oreshnik” missile that hit Dnipro exactly two weeks later.
Here, the Russian president’s “dialectical” logic reaches an impasse and betrays the Kremlin’s intentions: the global liberal order will collapse either because historical laws demand it or because Russian nuclear forces will blow it to smithereens. Put differently, history will be made one way or the other—and it will be made by the Kremlin. Of course, it was Lenin who had rejected Marx’s insistence on letting historical laws take their natural course, demonstrating that the movement of history can be hurried along with violence. The rival outcomes—Western collapse or Russia’s destruction—are phantoms of the Kremlin’s own making. But, despite Putin’s intellectual posturing, this is neither dialectic nor philosophy. It’s simply paranoia mixed with a strong dose of propaganda.
- This article was published by FPIF