THE GAMBLING MAN
A Putin victory does not always mean a win for Russia
Reading from a script, the Russian President was blunt. He said the West has been "ignoring us.”
“Russia still has the greatest nuclear potential in the world,” Vladimir Putin said in his annual address to parliament. “Nobody listened to us. Well listen to us now."
Then he boasted of new long range nuclear missile technology, illustrated with lavish video of a mocked-up attack on America. The threat was clear. Pay attention, or else.
Putin is in a new phase of his unprecedented rule as Russian president, then puppetmaster prime minister, then president again.
He takes mad gambles that would doom a lesser dictator, but he always seems to win. He annexed Crimea, tilted the battlefield in Syria, and gamed the American election. He taunts NATO and rouses Russian patriotism in the same breath.
Today, as he runs in a rigged election for possibly the last time, he has lately adopted the warmer airs of a grandfatherly patron, a father figure above politics, a saintly modern tsar who will ensure Russia’s future by reviving its imperial past.
But he still sometimes plays the firebrand, with the comically diabolical flair of a Bond villain.
Speaking to a joint session of both houses of parliament this week, in a grand former Soviet riding academy that recalled his own famous shirtless equestrianism, Putin calmly offered a vision of nuclear apocalypse.
“This low flying, difficult to spot cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead with a practically unlimited range and an unpredictable flight path which can bypass lines of interception is invincible in the face of all existing and likely future systems of both missile defence and air defence,” Putin said, in Russian.
He claimed no aggressive intent, but a video showed the missiles heading for Florida.
The U.S. State Department said it was “certainly unfortunate to have watched the video animation that depicted a nuclear attack on the United States.” This was not ”the behaviour of a responsible international player.”
Much was unclear, such as what the threat even meant exactly, or whether the weapons existed or were merely in development.
It was also not clear whether his message was mostly aimed at a domestic or foreign audience.
Domestically, he acknowledged shortcomings in public services and vowed to reduce the number of people who live in poverty. “Every person matters to us,” he said.
Foreign policy was the showstopper, however. It was clear he was talking to the world, but mostly the West, and of that mostly NATO, and of NATO, mostly the United States.
Mouthing off to the U.S. about a nuclear attack on the Sunshine State, home of the so-called Winter White House in Mar-a-Lago, seems the kind of thing that ought to get you killed in a preemptive decapitation strike. But as Kim Jong Un of North Korea has shown, it can be quite the opposite. It can be key to maintaining domestic admiration and a nervous, fragile peace with the rest of the world.
“We assume a high degree of rationality in the case of Putin and we assume a certain degree of irrationality on the part of Kim Jong Un,” said Aurel Braun, professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Toronto and author of a forthcoming book on Russia, the West and Arctic Security.
They may not be so different. Putin is playing the same game, just with many more bombs. It seems rash. But in the game of mutually-assured destruction, in which a leader would have to be crazy to launch even a single nuclear missile, seeming crazy can be a strategic advantage. It recalls Robin Williams’ famous standup bit about the atomic bomb, with his slurring imitation of a vodka-soaked Russian general: “We have many bombs. We don’t know where they all are ...”
Putin has always seemed crazy, but not like his predecessor Boris Yeltsin sometimes could, as for example when he stumbled around Washington in his underwear, trying to hail a cab to take him for pizza.
Putin seems crazy like a stone sober fox. When the dust settles, he always seems further ahead, even when he gets into outright war, as against Georgia over the former Soviet republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
He annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and as with Georgia, justified it as the reclamation of what is rightly Russian.
After that, he could have set his sights on Kazakhstan, but that would engage China on the far side, a fight he cannot pick. He can only go so far west until he runs into NATO, including Canadians in Latvia. Instead, he went into Syria.
In Bashar Assad, Putin backed a dictator who looked like he was about to lose a civil war — never an encouraging precedent in the dictator community. He called the bluff of former U.S. President Barack Obama about his supposed “red line” on intervention against chemical attacks, and suddenly Russia is once again an established military power in the Middle East.
He took a run at the American presidential election process and at least managed to co-opt Facebook and Twitter to spread propaganda and influence the election of the more Russophilic candidate, even if he might not actually have bought control of the presidency with kompromat.
“With each one of these gambles, the reality is that Russia doesn’t come out on top,” said Braun. Putin may be winning his own battles for prestige and self-regard, but Russians are “paying a very high price when he comes out on top.”
Somehow it never seems to matter, though. Things that would have got a less savvy strongman run up a flagpole by his neck — annexations, invasions, assassinations, oppression, corruption, mass incarcerations — have left Putin standing alone astride a ramshackle empire, holding all the levers.
Sometimes he uses them to petty ends, as when Russian military jets buzz Western aircraft or ships, including Canadians.
These provocations carry risks. Accidents amplify tensions. Arms races tend to spiral out of control. Nuclear war is catastrophic and unstoppable. All of this damages the image of Russia as a stable power, Braun said. But it burnishes Putin’s.
Once he was a pointyeared ex-spy who was mocked for plagiarizing his doctoral thesis.
Now he is something like a warrior philosopher king. He assigns his underlings to read pre-Soviet authors like Vladimir Solovyov, a mystic poet and philosopher who wrote about Russia’s divine destiny as a balance between the “blind, monolithic power of the East” that “destroys the freedom of the individual” and the “fragmented power of the West” that “leads to unchecked egoism and anarchy.”
“It’s grand theatre,” Braun said. “It’s a dual message. It is one of reassurance as well as deterrence.”
Even Joseph Stalin, the 30-year despot of the USSR, comes in for rehabilitation in Putin’s world view. Putin has always supported a “Stalin cult,” by “highlighting his transformation of a backward country into an industrialized, nuclear superpower that won World War II,” according to Taras Kuzio, a Russia expert at Johns Hopkins University. In a forthcoming paper, he quotes Putin saying “excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the means of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia.”
Putin’s most potent electoral opponent, anti-corruption campaigner and influential blogger Alexei Navalny, was banned from the election for a suspected embezzlement conviction.
Now, Putin is so confident in his re-election he did not even take part in a debate with other candidates. But he still covets a massive endorsement. Russian state news agency TASS reported polling that shows he is on track for 70 per cent of the vote on March 18.
“He will be re-elected by hook or by crook,” said Neil MacFarlane, a Russian foreign policy expert and Lester B. Pearson Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. “He is unstoppable domestically because he has stopped those who might stop him.”
The nuclear weapons boasting and “muscle flexing” against NATO “is about compensating for domestic underperformance, the economy but also delivery of public goods,” he said.
Putin likes his muscles. He has said he learned on the streets of Leningrad that if a fight is inevitable you must throw the first punch.
After he is re-elected, there is speculation that Putin will give some indication of a chosen successor, or possibly do as Xi Jinping is reportedly doing and try to rewrite the constitution to allow even more time in power.
He is reported to have said he will not stay on past the end of this term, when he will be 71. But there is much he can achieve in the meantime, especially given the unpredictable adversary he has in Donald Trump, who seems to look at Putin with something like envy, even as Russian espionage disrupts his presidency.
As retired Air Force General and CNN analyst Michael Hayden put it: “In his heart of hearts, (Trump) may look at what happened yesterday in the Russia Federation and have a certain sense — ‘Why can’t I give a speech like that? Why can’t I do those kinds of things?’ ”
HE WILL BE RE-ELECTED BY HOOK OR BY CROOK.