The Devil You Know: What Is Vladimir Putin?

Is Putin the madman they say? Or is he, to the contrary, somebody who coldly calculates his rational self-interest, in the manner of Thomas Hobbes’s legendary sovereign power or Niccolò Machiavelli’s eponymous prince?

In short, is it surrealism, rooted in deranged psychological fantasy, or Realism, grounded in hardcore political science, that we are up against?

Or could there be an alternative way of looking at it, one less familiar, more specific, grown-up, and intellectually challenging, if also less emotionally reassuring?

Let’s try putting in jeopardy our own “moral clarity” for a change. After all, while every war must perforce seem “needless” to beautiful souls, just as any person in charge of a modern state could be tagged a “killer” by children, nevertheless, military conflict, experience teaches, will not always be so readily averted.

If only for the sake of a diverting thought experiment, let’s examine in a bit more detail some possibilities—in hopes of dispelling a portion of the gloom that engulfs us in these dark times.

Is Putin Crazy?

While it must be comforting for ingenuous Western liberals to assume that anyone who opposes them—in their divinely ordained mission to bring History to an end by spreading individualism, consumerism, diversity, equity, and inclusion—is simply nuts by definition, we think it more likely that Russia’s president pursues another, not entirely unreasonable, course of action. His compass points in a different direction. His choices, however terrible, are not plainly irrational, with that end in view.

From this dangerous vantage, what appears as sufficient provocation is probably not so much NATO troops on his physical border, as some believe. But rather, our pensive Tsar would be spooked by the underlying, steadily advancing metaphysical encroachment of an otherwise unchecked tidal wave of liberal democracy, crashing down upon the Russian soul if not yet Russian soil.

As goes Ukraine, so goes Russia. Does one have to be insane to thus surmise? Would it be so crazy, then, from Putin’s perspective, to oppose such a seductive fate on moral grounds, by whatever means the gods have put at his disposal—including a rare window of opportunity, heralded by Washington’s recent genuflection in Kabul?

Is Putin Stupid?

We don’t see much evidence for this similar daydream either. After all, one is not necessarily the greater fool who notices that our gender-neutral utopia would, indeed, disrupt his treasured patriarchy at the grassroots.

Moreover, if, until recently, the topless huntsman had found relief in his bot farms’ sleepless manipulation of social media (sowing division in cyberspace, interfering in American elections at a distance), that era has now passed. With Biden-Harris in the White House, Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, and America’s adventure in Afghanistan ingloriously concluded, Putin is all out of virtual proxy fights.

The Kremlin’s own “Decider” thus reckons it’s now or never. Time to draw a bright line, indeed, between “the West and the rest,” inviting partisans of the former to check again who is on the “wrong side of History.”

If Putin is fighting for his life, Ukraine is where he takes his last stand. Otherwise, were Kyiv to fall to the West, then what had been a comfortably wide intermediary zone, shared with a kindred race, would definitively shrink to an unbearably thin membrane, osmosing decadence from the outside in. He feels it in his guts, according to his instincts, relying on that same animal cunning that has kept him afloat all these years. In Moscow, the Wordle puzzle of the day spells FINIS.

So he’s all in. And what’s at stake is the aura of Putin the Great, as it attaches to a myth of primordial Russian peoplehood—the destiny, in other words, of all those for whom spoke Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tarkovsky.

To men like this, it is forever Russia as torchbearer of an authentic Christianity—last line of defense against heathen upheavals at the periphery, heralding misrule in the heartland. No matter if it’s fierce Mongols, German captains of industry, or Palo Alto’s savage, nihilistic merchants of high-tech: Russian civilization has contained and destroyed foreign adversaries before, calling forth untold sacrifice from the sublime reaches of its vast interior. In sum, the wager is Russia’s “identity.”

Why not? Hasn’t everybody got one, demanding respect at home and recognition abroad? Perhaps Putin even feels that, in a profound way, the West misgenders him when it invites him to get bent.

Is Putin Hitler?

With apologies to Gary Kasparov, we decline this tempting reductio ad Hitlerum. After all, were one indulging in hyperbole, might it not as well be the Grandmaster’s nemesis who, according to his own lights and those of many Russians, confronts the ghost of a genocidal aggressor—once more in the shape of European and American bullying?

That’s surely how the Russian leader sees NATO, the EU, the whole ensemble of complacent engineers of a better tomorrow on his border—not as an inevitable coalition of value-neutral peacekeepers, anointed by History, but as a potent force whose contingent purposes include, at the horizon, disrupting and dismantling Russia. At the very least, we should pay attention to this disturbing reflection in another mirror, as we strive to comprehend the struggle we are locked in with this uncanny counterforce to our best intentions, seemingly out of nowhere.

What Is Putin, Then?

Putin is a realist (small r), in the plain colloquial sense of the word. He is no more a deranged lunatic than the deracinated, disembodied mind of rational choice theory’s fantasy. He aims to shore up his power at the margins.

We might not like him. He seems unkind, vicious, inured to the pain he inflicts on others. He’s homophobic, transphobic, and, yes, maybe even worse, a mass-murderer to boot. But is this not of the essence of his service to the Russian narod (nation, people)? He did not invent these contending attitudes, competing beliefs, collective self-understandings, strategies, and tactics. In short, he faces reality.

Moreover, in this cold light of day, is Justin Trudeau, for example, so clearly a finer specimen of multicultural Canadian masculinity than Putin is an exemplar of Russian Orthodox manhood? Is Kamala Harris a more formidable paragon of American statesmanship? Not all peoples, places, cultures are one, after all—as a sentimental pluralism purports to remind us daily.

Surely it is us, we Western liberals, so hell-bent on tolerating the hell out of everyone, proliferating myriads of mandatory “identities” to the ends of the earth, who should be the first to affirm this humble plea for recognition from afar? Can postmodernism’s shipwrecked mind really fail to acknowledge so palpable an instance of the Other, and its inherent right to hold to whatever value system it wants, rooted in a different history? We thought that that was what it was all about.

Is Putin Intolerable?

In sum, we believe Putin is precisely what the representative public intellectual of the age, Slavoj Žižek, would surely diagnose as an eruption of the Lacanian “Real” into Western liberalism’s “Symbolic” order—a return of the repressed, disappointing sunnier expectations. In other words, something that insistently defies our cherished common sense at its most common.

Putin is, in fact, everything a self-assured, triumphant liberal technocracy rejects, expels, refuses—what it will not visualize under any circumstances—unless forced to. And maybe not even then.

Thus, already several weeks into a devastating military conflagration (one so uncanny, Real Putin won’t even term it a war!), which no one seems to have dared to seriously contemplate in advance (let alone prepare for adequately!), our own modest goal has less to do with plumbing the depths of anyone’s individual character than characterizing the product of so many consequential, self-deceived misunderstandings.

Too late to have prevented it, a decent first step toward resolving this extinction-level event would be to acknowledge the altogether different rationale that dominates the other side of the equation. The liberal pluralists were more right than they knew!

And while it may be nauseating to contemplate something bound to reek of an illicit desire for “appeasement,” this overdetermined reaction-formation (in a subject made sick by what it wants) nevertheless reveals (by virtue of its dumb, visceral insistence) that very impulse which the politically correct mind of Western liberalism would disown: in this case, the repressed lust for a taboo coexistence in the world as it exists.

Could it be, then, that fantasizing about regime change in Moscow is, as of yet, still another symptom of the same woke-adjacent malaise, and that “mere” Ukrainian independence should be the unconditional aim at this time?

As Freud said his business was nothing more than “transforming neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness,” we likewise aspire not to purify the current discourse around Putin and Ukraine of all excesses but merely to loosen the grip of certain obsessions. As there can be no surrender of the sovereign Ukrainian nation, neither can Russia be expected to capitulate to the globalist consensus. Finally, it is this perduring antagonism itself that now has to be respected. There’s no such thing, per se, as peace in our time.