#krastev

[dostoyevsky-official]

Europe should hijack Trump’s revolutionary plans for the world

The Trumpian revolution has already changed the nature of European politics. Less than two months into the new White House administration’s term, the European political scene has been transformed into a clash between Trump-allied revolutionaries and Trump-resisting “do not bully us” liberal nationalists. Now it is for the far right to justify Trump’s anticipated tariffs on Europe, threatened this week at 25 per cent, and to ask Europeans to follow Washington’s leadership in foreign policy. By contrast, mainstream parties are acting as defenders of national sovereignty who hope to mobilise support by appealing to national interest and national dignity. The Munich conference also put an end to the heated debate about whether Trump should be taken seriously (meaning, not literally) or literally (meaning, not seriously). Now we know that he should be taken both seriously and literally. As Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has aptly observed, Trump “does not simply say what he thinks, but he says what he wants”. His comments about taking control of Greenland or the Panama Canal represent not signalling, but intention. The US president is convinced that America’s strategic interest lies in making Canada the 51st US state. He strongly believes that he can split Russia from China, and he blames America’s “deep state” for preventing him from achieving this in his first term. In this context, Europeans are wasting precious time pondering what will be Trump’s plan for Ukraine and complaining about not being at the negotiating table. Getting Trump right necessitates first and foremost recognising that it is a revolutionary government in power in Washington, albeit one organised as an imperial court. Revolutions never have detailed plans. They run by timetables: meet the moment; don’t project steps ahead. It is unclear what exactly Trump wants to achieve in his negotiations with Putin, but he wants to achieve something very big, and he wants to achieve it fast, very fast. What Trump offers Putin is not simply the prospect of ending the war in Ukraine on terms broadly favourable to Moscow, but a grand bargain to reorder the world. This includes America’s presence in Europe, and also in the Middle East and the Arctic. Trump promises Putin that Russia will be rapidly reintegrated into the global economy and that Moscow will regain the status of a great power that it lost in the humiliating 1990s. Trump hopes that this will convince Russia to sunder its alliance with China. The US refusal in a UN vote to condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shocked even some of the president’s most devoted admirers. But it was meant to persuade the Kremlin that the American leader is ready to do the unthinkable — and reconfigure the world as shaped by Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in the late 1980s. [...] George Orwell once observed that “all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure”. What kind of failure the Trumpian revolution will be, we do not know. But what history teaches us is that the best strategy is not to resist the revolutionaries but to hijack their revolution. In doing this, Europe’s success will mostly depend not on its ability to resist but on displaying a talent to surprise. Could Europe find a way to benefit from not being at the US-Russian negotiating table? Should Trump be left to own his great peace plan for Ukraine and its implementation? In a moment of existential crisis like the present one, there is one valuable resource for the weaker party that stands out: political imagination.

[ketavinsky]

WEIRD KIDS - I CANT MAKE YOU CALL OR MAKE YOU STAY OR TAKE YOU OFF THE PEDESTAL.

read a short thing about them four years post-canon here.

[dostoyevsky-official]

It would be a historic mistake to assume that autocracy is destiny in Moscow Ivan Krastev

It was only a matter of hours after Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine that Marina Davidova, the esteemed Russian theatre critic, wrote an open letter against the war. The Russian Duma responded with alacrity, fast-tracking legislation that included prison sentences of up to 15 years for criticising the invasion.

Davidova soon became subject to vicious harassment, receiving hate mail and finding the notorious white “Z” borne by Russian military vehicles in Ukraine painted on her door the next day. Fearful for her life, she fled Russia. Once she got out, however, Davidova was surprised to discover a twisted new reality.

When in Moscow, she had been treated by the secret service as a traitor. But in western Europe, she was now perceived as a Russian occupier, possibly an agent — a person complicit with Putin. Her Russian bank cards no longer worked and her Austrian bank account was blocked. It was her passport, not her story, that mattered. Sotto voce, her friends told her that the idea of a “good Russian” was now a thing of the past.

Europeans who criticise ordinary Russians for not denouncing the war en masse have a point, but they miss an important nuance: Russia today is a brutal police state and in Putin’s worldview to be a traitor (and for the president any citizen who opposes the war is a traitor) is far worse than to be an enemy. Putin once put it with terrifying clarity: “Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed.”

[...] Some outside Russia are seduced by the possibility of a palace coup in Moscow, but the prospects for such an outcome are slim. History teaches us that in a crisis like this the majority of the people, as well as political elites, initially stand with their leader rather than turn against him. It is only with the passing of time that they change their mind.

While in the short term the west’s priority should be to provide support to Ukraine, in the medium and long term it needs a strategy on Russia that goes beyond military containment.

We have shifted easily (and lazily) from complacency to moral outrage. We are shocked that Russians have allowed themselves to be taken in by Putin’s propaganda, forgetting that they are not the only ones capable of living a lie. A poll conducted in 2015, more than a decade after the American invasion of Iraq, found that 52 per cent of Fox News viewers believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. Let us also recall that enthusiasm for Putin as a defender of “European values” was stronger in some western quarters than in Russia itself.

[...] After the end of the cold war, the west assumed Russia would follow the road taken by postwar Germany. But Russia’s behaviour over the past decade resembles Germany during the period after the first world war, not the second.

Three decades ago many in the west naively believed that a democratic future was the only possible path for post-Soviet Russia. Now we are making a comparable mistake in assuming that a post-Putin Russia could not be anything but his Russia with another strongman ruler.