Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, Russia has not played by western rules, morals, or concepts, but Washington has been slow to catch on to this reality. That is the reason the Obama/Clinton “reset” has been a total failure, and why, in this second iteration of the Cold War, Moscow appears to be gaining the upper hand.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, most policy-setters in the U.S. adopted the belief that large scale, superpower vs. superpower warfare was a thing of the past, and that countries across the globe would mostly be guided by economic interests. They did not acknowledge that Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB agent who publicly mourned the breakup of the USSR, didn’t concur, and ignored obvious warning signs.
While the U.S. and its allies scaled down their military spending, the Kremlin ramped up its arms budget. While the Obama Administration kept key allies such as the United Kingdom and Israel at arms-length, Putin re-engaged with the USSR’s Cold War contacts, and formulated a new axis consisting of Russia, China, and Iran.
The Obama Administration’s confusion and naiveté became almost humorously apparent following Moscow’s invasion of the Ukraine. As the Putin government ginned up national pride by highlighting the success of its armed forces, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry could only sputter, “This is not 21st century behavior.”
The contrast between the Kremlin’s idea of 21st century behavior and that of western nations is stark. While the population of NATO nations have sought to keep Cold War memories of feared nuclear exchanges in the past, Russia, the BBC reports will be celebrating its 1961 explosion of the world’s most powerful hydrogen bomb in a special exhibition in Moscow.
While the Obama Administration moves to surrender control of the internet to a United Nations controlled organization, Russia has cleverly moved to build a unique organization of “trolls” who, pretending to be everyday people, actually use clever techniques to sway online postings and conversations in Moscow’s favor, reports The Guardian.
Putin’s government—essentially, just Putin himself and his cronies- is an odd arrangement of a third-world style kleptocracy grafted onto the world’s largest single-nation landmass possessing the planet’s most formidable nuclear arsenal.
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“How did twenty-first-century Russia end up, yet again, in personal rule? An advanced industrial country of 142 million people, it has no enduring political parties that organize and respond to voter preferences. The military is sprawling yet tame; the immense secret police are effectively in one man’s pocket. The hydrocarbon sector is a personal bank, and indeed much of the economy is increasingly treated as an individual fiefdom. Mass media move more or less in lockstep with the commands of the presidential administration. Competing interest groups abound, but there is no rival center of power. …
“… Putin has been in power for 15 years, and there is no end in sight. Stalin ruled for some three decades; Brezhnev for almost two. Putin, still relatively young and healthy, looks set to top the latter and might even outdo the former…Bit by bit, however, using stealth and dirty tricks, Putin reasserted central control over the levers of power within the country—the TV stations, the gas industry, the oil industry, the regions…
“Putin’s machismo posturing, additionally, is undergirded by a view of Russia as a country of real men opposing a pampered, gutless, and decadent West. Resentment toward U.S. power resonates far beyond Russia, and with his ramped-up social conservatism, Putin has expanded a perennial sense of Russian exceptionalism to include an alternative social model as well.”
Putin’s position appears secure. The Jamestown Foundation reports:
“This growing irrelevance of domestic politics is aggravated by the Russian government’s aggressive and poisonous propaganda, which has become a political force in its own right. … One figure stands in splendid isolation at the head of this course—President Vladimir Putin, whose approval ratings have reached the level typical for mature authoritarian leaders. After 15 years at the summit of power, and at just 62 years of age, he has established such dominance over other
“Russian elites that all speculations about a possible successor…have now entirely ceased …Putin’s mood swings and idiosyncrasies…overrule every bureaucratic preference for stability and quiet self-enrichment. … Alexei Kudrin, the only person who was able to insist on common economic sense, has been expelled from the Kremlin; German Gref, the designer of the first set of reforms at the dawn of the Putin “era,” has been reduced to an eccentric contrarian; and court aides like Sergei Glazyev have learned to deliver only the advice that the boss likes to hear…”