The misery of “political realism”
A fantastic textbook example of the misery of Western “political realism” as voiced by Dr. Ricardo Duchesne^1
The liberal West is incapable of grasping the necessity of realism in geopolitics. Putin will never back down because, as John Mearsheimer argues, Ukraine represents an “existential issue” for Russia due to its critical geopolitical importance to Russian national security and strategic interests.
Losing influence over Ukraine to NATO or allowing the West to integrate this nation within its liberal sphere threatens Russia's security and identity as a great power. Capitulating would signal weakness and invite further encirclement by NATO.
Why do I call it misery? Because this approach has nothing to do with realism, a term literally meaning is “the state of being actual or real”.
To see how much “realism” is in that “theory of realism”, let's just take apart these wisely sounding statements and check how much in common they have with the physical reality:
Ukraine represents an “existential issue” for Russia due to its critical geopolitical importance to Russian national security and strategic interests
Apart from a chain of vague claims, what does it really mean? Are they really claiming that 2m km2 #Russia with 138m population is going to collapse without controlling 0.6m km2 #Ukraine with 30m population? Or what they mean?
Then, what exactly are Russia's “strategic interests”? How exactly Ukraine threatens them? How does it exactly threaten Russia's “national security”? What does exactly this “geopolitical importance” mean? And here emerges the primary problem – apparent wisdom of these “realist” statements relies exclusively on their vagueness.
In the physical reality, Russia does anything from Ukraine. Russia has significantly more territory, population and resources and was able to grow its economy without Ukraine for decades (1991-2014) without any problems. Moreover, Russia obsessively diminished and continues to diminish the role of Ukraine, calling it “country 404” (non-existent), “red necks” (селюки) and other rather infantile insults, only to suddenly exclaim – as if in some kind of bipolar disorder – that Ukraine is the crown jewel without which Russia will what... collapse?
In the physical reality, sovereign Ukraine does not impact Russia's economy, security, politics – Russia can afford not to care about Ukraine at all in any of these aspects. That's the physical reality.
There's however another reality where Ukraine indeed is the crown jewel. It's the imaginary world of “tsar Putin, collector of the Russian lands”, invented by the likes of Dugin and Medinsky as part of the flattery mandatory on their career path, which at some point resonated with the wannabe tsar and his entourage, and made it into the new political theory of Russia.
And that's the only world, where Ukraine is really the crown jewel – Putin failed to deliver any of his past promises in the sphere of social and economic progress^2, so the current hope is that he can deliver the goal of at least capturing Ukraine, even as burnt out wasteland. If everything else failed, that would be at least something. And that's the only part where Ukraine is really “existential issue” – not for Russia as a nation or the state, but for Putin personally and the model of governance he chose for Russia – the kleptocracy. Ukraine's relative success outside of the Russia's zone of influence serves as a stunning demonstration that Putin is the brake, not the leader.
What Western political scientists calling themselves “realists” are doing is therefore the very opposite of realism – they simply uncritically internalise unfounded axioms invented by Russian political class, assume they are true because they sound nice, and build whole own theories on top of them. The funny part is that they have already done exactly the same thing 100 years ago, when they just as uncritically internalised Marxism-Leninism and took all of its nonsensical “laws of dialectics” for granted, simply because Soviet philosophers said a lot of wise-sounding words.^3
Footnotes:
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Paweł Krawczyk https://krvtz.net/
Fediverse @kravietz@agora.echelon.pl