One of the marks of irrationality is failure to profit from experience. One of the marks of immaturity is a knee-jerk desire to get one’s own back even at the expense of harming oneself. One of the marks of braggadocio is posing in front of a phalanx of press photographers without a shirt on, brandishing a gun or something equally ithyphallic, such as a very large fishing rod. Join up all these dots and you get a picture of Russia’s posturing, pouting, pectoral-flashing Mr Putin.
Mark one: Russia, despite violently denying self-determination to Chechnya, has encouraged and rewarded it in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the break-away regions of Georgia, and has taken the Crimea from Ukraine and actively attempted to detach East Ukraine from the rest of that country. Not long ago, to the amusement and delight of observers, it appeared that little Tatarstan, the oil-rich region in the very heart of Russia, wished to become independent after the model of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And no doubt other regions – including Chechnya again, when it has recovered from the pulverising Russia has given it – will begin to ask for the same courtesy that Mr Putin has extended to the former regions of Georgia.
Put this another way: Russia’s efforts to weaken its neighbours and incrementally recover the empire lost upon the demise of the Soviet Union is proving to be its own undoing, because the more it nibbles at those neighbours by such means as it has used over Crimea and East Ukraine, the more it will encourage just such break-away movements from within and around itself.
So there is a lesson here: what you do can backfire. Now let us apply that lesson to Russia’s aid to Iran to build a light-water reactor in Bushehr, capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, and to train Iranian nuclear scientists in Moscow. This strengthening of ties was seen at the time by commentators as a Russian reaction (getting its own back; mark two) to US and Western support for Georgia. But (mark one again) ‘what you do can backfire’: Russia is helping Iran become a nuclear-weapons nation; Russia is helping a mullah-dominated state (perhaps forgetting its own Muslim populations – for example in Chechnya – who might wish to secede, and who might invoke the aid of co-religionist neighbours in doing so) to acquire nuclear weapons. Any chance that this might backfire too, literally as well as figuratively?
And now (mark three) as to braggadocio. Some, including Mr Putin, think it admirable that he ordered the invasion of Georgia while reclining at ease in his VIP seat in Beijing’s Olympic stadium. He can ignore most of the international community’s objections because he has his fingers on the taps of the pipes that send gas to Europe: if Europe gets too uppity he can turn his hand, and Europe will squeal. This though (back to mark one yet again) can backfire: his pipeline westwards transmits gas, but the invisible pipeline running in the opposite direction transmits money. If he turns off the gas, he thereby turns off the money; and like the Middle Eastern countries waxing fat and pursy on the money that the West lavishes on oil and gas, he is as drunk and dependent on the cash as Europe is on the energy.
Anyway, the point of mentioning all this is that in Putin’s Russia we see the ballooning strength of yet another delinquent power. With China, Russia, religious fundamentalism, and the prospect of the Republicans’ desired version of the US blundering around the crockery shop, most of the possibilities for our fragile world seem to be shattering ones.
But one forgets! – one is not allowed to criticise Russia in this way, because of the crimes and follies of the US and the West in invading countries and encouraging break-away states and doing what it can to annoy its enemies. That is, I forgot the principles of blogic (i.e. the logic of the blogosphere): that if the West does anything wrong, then no one who lives in the West can criticise anyone else.
Except – note this: Westerners can and do disagree with what their own governments do, and their investigative journalists can investigate and criticise without the risk of getting murdered as a result – unlike journalists in Mr Putin’s Russia. In this little fact lies a big difference, relevant to deciding which side one would take if forced to take sides.