Every autumn since 2004 Mr. Putin has gathered a
large group of international political scientists and commentators for a couple
of days of discussions. The gathering, called the Valdai Discussion Club, has
shifted shapes over the years, changing locations, personalities and topics. It
used to be held in Valdai, a national park about halfway between Moscow and St.
Petersburg, but this year it was held in Sochi, where facilities left over from
the Winter Olympics had fallen into disuse. It used to focus largely on Russian
politics and the economy, but in the last few years has turned increasingly to
Russia’s role in the world. It used to draw virtually all the Western Russia
specialists who could get an invitation, offering, as it does, an opportunity
to interact with a president who is usually inaccessible.
But in recent years a number of Western scholars
have dropped out or been disinvited. Attendance peaked at over 200 in 2013, and
dropped to roughly half that number the following year. Still, the basic nature
of the event remains constant: It is a junket, an affair lavishly catered at
the Kremlin’s expense, at which Mr. Putin puts forward his vision of himself
and his country.
This year’s gathering was titled “Societies
Between War and Peace: Overcoming the Logic of Conflict in Tomorrow’s World,”
but in his keynote address Mr. Putin dispensed with the “between.” The world is
at war, he explained. And it is all the fault of the United States.
Back in the 1970s the underground Soviet singer-songwriter
Alexander Galich sang of his country, “We stand for peace and we are preparing
for war.” The Kremlin punished him for this and similar songs by kicking him
out of the country, but this particular phrase was actually an accurate
rendition of Soviet rhetoric. Much like the American gun lobby today, the
Soviet rulers claimed that the only way to stay safe was to be armed to the
teeth. Mr. Putin has now taken this logic a step further by claiming that the
only way to maintain peace is to actually wage war.
“Peace, a life at peace, has always been and
continues to be an ideal for humanity,” said Mr. Putin. “But peace as a state
of world politics has never been stable.” In other words, peace is an anomaly,
a fragile state of equilibrium that, Mr. Putin explained, is exceedingly
difficult to sustain. The advent of nuclear arms helped, he said, by
introducing the specter of mutually assured destruction, and for a while — from
the 1950s through the 1980s — “world leaders acted responsibly, weighing all circumstances
and possible consequences.” He thus cast the Cold War as the golden era of
world peace.
Since the Cold War ended, the world has
descended into disarray. “In the last quarter-century, the threshold for
applying force has clearly been lowered,” said Mr. Putin. “Immunity against
war, acquired as a result of two world wars literally on a psychological,
subconscious level, has been weakened.” The United States is the primary
culprit because it has thrown the world out of equilibrium by asserting its
dominance. Mr. Putin, who has cited different examples of this American
behavior in the past, this time focused on the missile defense system and its
recent tests in Europe.
Mr. Putin’s speech then took a short detour as
he ranted about the United States not playing well with others, including
France and Japan. Then he got on the topic of Syria. He repeated what he has
said before: Russian military intervention there is legitimate because Russia
is protecting Syria’s sole legal government, that of Bashar al-Assad, and the
United States can choose to accept this and negotiate with Russia, or find
itself fighting a war against it.
It is important to listen to what Mr. Putin is
saying. His narrative of resisting U.S. world domination is familiar, but the
key point he made at his meeting concerns his views on war — and peace. The
strategic purpose of his wars is war itself. This is true in Ukraine, where
territory was a mere pretext, and this is true of Syria, where protecting Mr.
Assad and fighting ISIS are pretexts too. Both conflicts are wars with no end
in sight because, in Mr. Putin’s view, only at war can Russia feel at peace.
A totalitarian society seeks to be mobilized,
and in this sense Mr. Putin’s statement is verifiably true: The more Russia
reverts to its totalitarian habits, the more comfort it will derive from a
constant state of war. It is useless, in the face of such single-minded
determination, to caution against the return of the Cold War, as though
Americans could stave it off simply by not wanting to be involved. The war is
on, and Mr. Putin has been sparing no effort trying to get that message across.
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