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January 28 - February 3, 2025
Within the space of merely a few weeks in the final months of 1989, every regime in the Warsaw Pact collapsed. Thereafter, Adams’s warning went into remission for the first time since 1914, as the Russian Empire did what it had periodically done throughout its history, but not since before the birth of modernity that came with the Industrial Revolution: it virtually disintegrated in much of its heartland.
No historian or analyst captured the failure of the American elite imagination regarding Russia at this moment better than the late New York University professor Stephen F. Cohen, who documented the utterly naïve Clinton Administration policy to remake Russia in America’s own image in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.
Cohen explains that the planeloads of heavily credentialed Americans referred to as “advisers”—economists, financiers, academics including political scientists, and so on—who descended on Russia with the Clinton Administration’s blessing, were in truth “political missionaries and evangelists.” These people embodied the “Washington Consensus” on Russia, which was unfailingly hopeful about the rule of Boris Yeltsin, who succeeded Gorbachev. “Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia,” declared Vice President Al Gore in 1998.
“the worst American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam…with consequences more long-term and perilous,” according to Cohen.[5]
as it would turn out, after all of the drama, 9/11 proved to be a head fake: a far-reaching distraction as Russian president Vladimir Putin methodically rebuilt the Russian state with the help of the military and intelligence services; and as China, especially under the leadership of Xi Jinping, eventually emerged as an aggressive military, economic, and technological power.
Ironically, the Biden Administration’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 may have encouraged Putin’s plan for invading Ukraine, out of the belief that America and the West were impotent. The Afghanistan failure may also have forced the Biden Administration to pull together bureaucratically for the sake of future crises. Without the messy Afghanistan withdrawal, that is, the administration may not have performed as well as it did in the early part of the Ukraine War. History is full of such ironies.
Russia was still (and more so than ever) the defining problem for Europe.
Ukraine War, though it has exposed Russian military limits (of which I will have more to say), nevertheless also demonstrated that there is and has been no world order or international community, no rules-based system in Europe or anywhere else, the more one reflects upon it.
The Gaza War has offered another punctuation of this. Different parts of the world were simply determined by their own balance of power systems that, because they usually held up well, were mistaken for a rules-based order that was in fact nowhere in evidence. As the Catholic University professor Jakub Grygiel put it: “An Earth-spanning security space governed by global rules…doesn’t exist.” Instead there are only “regional equilibria” with their own military dynamics “driven by local historical competitions.”[7]
It demonstrated not just how mass violence perpetrated by major states was once again possible in Europe, but how the previous decades in Europe, during the Cold War and afterward, constituted not peace but an armed truce. It also provided a warning that other parts of the globe were less stable than we thought.
This is certainly not a world governed by a rules-based order, as polite gatherings of the global elite like to define it, but rather a world of broad, overlapping areas of tension, raw intimidation, and military standoffs. Indeed, there is no night watchman to keep the peace in this brawling, tumultuous world defined by upheaval.
The United Nations, though it seeks to both preserve and make peace among nations, ironically can only prosper if such a peace is already to some extent in existence; so that a world of great powers on the edge of war leaves the U.N. diminished.
Globalization, which is based on trade, the large-scale movement of people by jet transportation, and rapid technological advances in the electronic and digital realms, fits neatly together with a world in permanent crisis. That is because the permanent crisis demands a dense webwork of interactions between crisis zones across the earth, which globalization produces. Ukraine, Gaza, and other major wars have their effects amplified, rather than assuaged, by globalization. A Weimar-type world, in the sense that I mean it, would be impossible without globalization.
Globalization can thus far be divided into two broad phases, which I will label Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0, with the coronavirus functioning as a very rough chapter break between them.
Again, there was an affliction of presentness, as if the present in all of its vividness, enhanced and constantly improved upon by technology, could go on forever and just keep getting better. The Cold War, with its deep and entrenched great-power divisions, seemed to have occurred decades ago rather than a few years ago.
Once again, the finite earth is gradually losing the race against technology and population growth, as John von Neumann indicated. Covid-19 spread as far and as rapidly as it did because of this phenomenon. Covid-19 might actually have been a minor factor in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, since it increased his isolation from other people, which left him more often alone with his own thoughts. Both the virus and the Ukraine War, by the way, each in its own fashion, disrupted supply chains, contributing to an element of deglobalization, however short-lived it was. It is just that because
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Humanity’s new sense of claustrophobia, wrought by the closing of distance, which was in turn wrought by technology, was in and of itself intensifying the magnitude of each crisis as it was perceived. The hot medium of digital-video communications drove us into emotional, philosophical, and ideological silos much more than did the cool, gray medium of print-and-typewriter journalism. Journalists shoved their opinions in our faces in a way that was harder to do with the old technology. They were participants, taking sides in a way they never used to do, which only served to further intensify
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It used to be in years and decades past that the most combative political arguments were about the Middle East, which quickly descended into an us-versus-them mentality: you were either for the Jews or for the Arabs. Now the whole world and much of public life has become as confrontational as the Middle East. That is the totemic reality of globalization.
The wars in Iraq and Ukraine show the dearth of wise and cautious leadership not just in the United States after the end of the Cold War, but in Russia as well, as Soviet leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev were on the whole far wiser and more cautious than Putin.
That is why China’s leader Xi Jinping’s obsession with absorbing or even conquering Taiwan might indicate that not only the United States and Russia, but China, too, face over the long term what I call Shakespearean decline. I refer to the inner demons that drive all powerful leaders to a certain degree of madness, best exemplified in some of the plays of Shakespeare. It is uncanny, as if all three great powers have produced leaders with a death wish, each driven by private torments. And the more concentrated and unchallenged their individual power, the greater their proclivity to do real
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Q
The soldiers and Marines from blue-collar families who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan—who I can attest as an embedded war reporter were originally enthusiastic about the prospects of victory—in significant measure turned to Trump following the abject failure of both wars, something which became undeniably apparent around the beginning of the century’s second decade. Yet the failure of the Iraq War was never truly central to Trump’s election: not nearly as central as was the outsourcing of well-paying manufacturing jobs to China and other developing countries, the further job-killing effects of
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Iraq mattered in another, more subtle way. It was the most clear-cut example of the general deterioration in the quality of American leadership since the end of the Cold War. Even considering the Biden Administration’s middling-competent handling of the Ukraine War thus far, the record of presidential leadership in foreign policy from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush (and including Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan) was of a much higher caliber than from Bill Clinton to the current occupant of the White House (and including George W. Bush and Donald Trump).
Q KP
Such a palpable decline from one group to another, despite individual variations, was related to a decay in the culture of public life, especially the media, in which the forces acting upon all of these men had become more divisive, intolerant, and even hysterical at times. And as the media has become less serious, so have our leaders.
The media, with its right- and left-wing extremes, each seeking to proclaim its virtue in its own way, has often encouraged our post–Cold War presidents to be moralistic rather than moral. Passion, often the enemy of analysis, is precisely what is encouraged by social media, which has had such an insidious effect on our politics. To some extent, nations, especially in democracies, get the leaders they deserve. America was a great and well-functioning mass democracy in the print-and-typewriter age. It is unclear whether it can continue as such in a digital-video age aggravated by social media,
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suffice it to say that America’s weakness and its capacity to decline is rather subtle; that is, unrelated to fundamental structural forces: geography, for instance. It may be in decline, but it remains a powerful behemoth. After all, America is bordered on two sides by great oceans and a thin band of middle-class civilization in Canada to its north. Its only problematic border is with Mexico to its south.
America is not only geographically blessed, but technologically superior to China even, because of its free society and consequent tradition of inquiry and risk-taking.
It is America’s political, social, and cultural divisions that have taken their toll on the country’s political leadership, and that’s even if Donald Trump passes from the scene.
While all this was going on—while Putin entrapped Germany as well as other countries in Europe with Russian natural gas—he also divided them by encouraging European populist leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and France’s Marine Le Pen, leaders who, like Putin himself, believed in the reality of the ethnic nation above that of the individual. Given all this, Putin believed that a quick and successful invasion of Ukraine would forge a permanent alliance with a weakened and insecure Germany, practically dislodging it from the West, which would have the indirect effect of further undermining
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Suddenly, for the first time in the record of Putin’s military adventures, combined arms, that is, coordination between air, land, and sea forces, as well as a realistic strategy befitting a World War II–size campaign, were all required. And that, in turn, meant logistics, logistics, logistics: coordinating the supply of fuel, food, spare parts, maintenance units, ammunition, and what have you for a large, advancing army separated into a half dozen principal paths of advance. As it turned out, none of those elements was in evidence in the initial Russian aggression against Ukraine.
a first-world army is built around its NCO corps: the various types of sergeants, corporals, and other noncommissioned officers who impose pride and discipline on the thousands of troops. Officers devise policy and plans, NCOs carry them out. Military culture depends far more on NCOs than on officers. The Russian military that Putin sent into Ukraine barely had an NCO corps. With
A first-world army, the product of Western democracy, decentralizes decision-making down through the ranks; a third-world army, especially if it is a product of a Communist Soviet legacy, does not. Russia’s did not.
The Russians were less an army than a mob on the move. This had always been the case. For example, Nancy Mitford, in her biography of Frederick the Great, writes that whereas it was reckoned that in one campaign in 1759, the Prussian military burnt some 1,000 civilian houses, the Russians burnt about 15,000.[9]
Such malice and brutality against innocents rendered the individual utterly meaningless in what for the Soviets was the essentialist struggle between nations and ethnic groups: something that has defined Russian actions through much of history and is a tradition that Putin is heir to. Likewise, wanton destruction and abject cruelty, the bedfellows of indiscipline, combined with bad morale and an historical legacy of seeing flesh-and-blood individuals as mere abstractions that could be wiped off a blackboard, were distinct features of the Russian military in Ukraine, where, as in Stalin’s day,
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large-scale warfare, with its emphasis, as we know, on materiel, logistics, and social organization, can provide an audit of an entire culture and civilization.[11]
To be sure, Vladimir Putin’s tyranny demonstrated that the problems of Communism persist in Russia well into the third decade of the 21st century.
The reemergence of a Leninist level of cynicism in the form of Putin’s rule, following the chaos of the 1990s, was actually foreseen, albeit indirectly, by the late policy intellectual and former ambassador to the United Nations Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, in her historic and seminal essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” published in the November 1979 issue of Commentary. It is worth spending some time with Kirkpatrick’s essay in order to comprehend what we are still up against.
“Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations.” But, she continues, “precisely the opposite is true of revolutionary Communist regimes. They create refugees by the million because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of society and
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Q
As we now know, the Nicaraguan Marxists who followed Somoza and the Iranian ayatollahs who followed the Shah did exactly that, and so led their societies into far worse tyrannies, proving Kirkpatrick right. Kirkpatrick was an original thinker because her philosophy was both realist and neoconservative, which are usually opposed to each other.
She was a realist in the sense that she knew that throughout most of history autocracy has been the default option while democracy is problematic. To wit, in Great Britain, the journey from the Magna Carta to the great reform bills took seven centuries to traverse. The United States cannot generally be the “midwife” to democracy far away, she believed. She was a neoconservative during the Cold War because she felt, like President Ronald Reagan did, that the United States had to defeat Communism, not simply coexist with it.
the enduring legacy of Communism (with all of its cynicism) in our world today must be added to the deadly mix encompassing the dystopian uses of technology, the finite size of the earth, the ravages of climate change, the ends of both monarchy and empire, the fast-forward development of precision-guided weaponry as well as of artificial intelligence, and so forth. And this deadly mix also involves the pathologies of urbanization that I will describe in the third part of this book—all in all accounting for the permanent crisis, which, as we will see later on, approximates the inner logic of T.
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Q
Once again, American decline was in relative terms subtle and qualitative, with both major political parties at times gravitating toward the extremes, with racial tensions periodically on the boil, with cultural standards in disarray, with the liberal arts that educate new generations of Americans threatened by ideology, and so forth.
The initial failure of the army was obviously reflective of the whole Russian state in this regard, starting at the top where no one dared to tell Putin the truth. Which was the ultimate reason he had such a difficult time at the beginning achieving victory in Ukraine. That is the chief problem with authoritarian leaders. The very intimidating nature of their rule makes it difficult for subordinates to risk a confrontation with the boss, and thus the very anxious foresight based on unpleasant facts—precisely the facts required for difficult decisions—is harder than usual to come by.
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Like empires, autocrats often arise out of chaos but also leave chaos in their wake. Communism, which as a morally debased political culture continued in spirit unabated under Putin, has left no sustainable institutions to work within.
Because Jeane Kirkpatrick’s analysis of the difference between right- and left-wing dictatorships was correct, and has admirably stood the test of time, we must be patient regarding Russia. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminded us, the central conservative truth is the preeminence of culture, not politics, in determining the success of a society.
Q
given what is relevant for our own time—a time of instability, destructive populism, intemperate dictatorships, and anarchy in places—in light of the struggles of silent billions across the planet who worry about putting enough food on the table and providing safety for their families more than they worry about the right to vote, Deng’s accomplishment is the greater. Deng is what is missing in today’s global environment. The absence of his likeness contributes to the permanent crisis. It may be too much to expect that great powers like China and Russia be both stable and democratic. It would
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He was in his own way a Burkean conservative, seeking the preservation of existing systems and values while concomitantly forcing them to evolve. He opted for gradual economic change and chose party reform, with term limits, over the introduction of democracy. Thus did China become a role model for the developing world.
Deng, at eighty-four, remained the final decision-maker in the government crackdown against student-led demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, when hundreds if not thousands were killed. The students had wanted more sudden, democratic change. Yet, as Vogel notes, “in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid—even spectacular—economic growth.”[16]
The world has become what it is to a significant extent because we have autocrats like Xi and Putin holding sway rather than Deng and Gorbachev. The last decades of the 20th century were eras of hope in American-Chinese relations because they coincided with the era of Deng and his like-minded successors. As for the decline in U.S. presidential leadership, it has been real, but minor, compared to the decline in Chinese and Russian leadership, where pragmatism has given way to Leninist ideology in Beijing and to Great Russian imperialism in Moscow.
Xi Jinping is nothing if not a Leninist ideologue, who has made “struggle” the guiding principle of the Chinese Communist party. In speeches to top party leaders that were kept secret for months before being released in Chinese, Xi denounced the fall of the Soviet Union, and said that “to dismiss Lenin and Stalin…is to engage in historic nihilism: it confuses our thoughts and undermines the Party’s organization on all levels.” Xi has lamented the failure of the 1991 attempt by Soviet hardliners to topple Mikhail Gorbachev: “Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” Xi goes on, “Facts have
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