As a college undergrad I was a proud member of a Greek letter fraternity and continue to wear those letters with pride a quarter of a century later. While I was interested in joining the fraternity and encouraged to do so by its incumbent members, the decision to let me in was a prerogative of those who formed the existing membership of the chapter.
This is fairly commonsensical. Who gets into an organization or a club is generally the prerogative of the existing members of the said organization or club who impose certain criteria and requirements on prospective members. This is as true of social lives as it is in the realm of international relations. Or is it?
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin certainly disagrees with such logic, and forcefully so. He and his deputies have made clear that they reserve the right to veto the admission of Ukraine -- a sovereign country -- into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), notwithstanding the fact Russia has never been a member of Nato and Ukraine, as of now, has not applied to become one. The chutzpah of the former KGB spymaster would be comic were he some tinpot dictator of a sub-Saharan African country rather than that of the ambitious successor state of the mighty former Soviet Union.
Therein, in the nostalgia for the supposed lost glory of the USSR, lies the seed of such a weird mixture of chutzpah, arrogance, and nationalistic ego. In his repeated comments about how tragic the collapse of the Soviet system was, Putin has laid bare a truth that so many naïve Marxist individuals simply cannot handle: For all its sweet sounding rhetoric of equality, anti-imperialism, and mutual respect, the USSR was little more than a continuation of the Tsarist Empire which was a brutal vehicle of the Russian elite for colonizing large swathes of land and people from the Baltics to the Balkans to the Central Asian steppes. The Romanov autocrats were replaced by the Marxist ones, and the subjugation of the non-Russian countries went on unabated.
In attempting to forbid Ukraine from joining an international organization, Vladimir Putin is simply trying to revive the ghost of the centuries of Russian colonization of the lands that his cronies condescendingly refer to as the “Near Abroad.” While Putin’s nostalgia is dangerous and his desires not hidden, he has also been given a helping hand by those who should have known better.
In stark contrast to neighbouring France, Germany’s scepticism of nuclear power, combined with the desire for carbon neutrality, has left Nato’s strongest European economy woefully vulnerable to energy imports from Russia to maintain its standard of life. This state of dependency has left successive German governments with little more than rhetoric to counter increasing Russian belligerence to its east.
More strategically, the decades-long American domestic consensus on containing Russian expansionism suffered a severe blow under former president Donald Trump. The former president’s chumminess with his erstwhile counterpart Vladmir Putin is but merely a symptom of a significant opening on the American “right” towards the Russian political culture that has traditionally been steeped in authoritarianism, narrowly-defined nationalism, and illiberalism.
While some Republican senators and congressman remain Russophobic, the cultural avant garde of the latter day conservative movement in the United States -- the opinion makers on Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax for example -- has been quite adulating of Putin’s strongman tactics against dissidents, minorities, and the free press.
Ukraine is a rather small country in the shadow of a giant that nobody else wants to annoy right now. Too many Marxist intellectuals around the globe are still too enamoured by Moscow to feel much sympathy for a victim of potential Russian aggression.
With a hundred thousand Russian troops massing on its borders to take away what is left of independent Ukrainian territory after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Europe should be worried. So should the United States and the rest of the free world. Whetting the appetite of the Russian bear is bound to encourage the revanchism of the Muscovite nostalgia that was only recently arrested a mere 30 years ago.
It’s said that free people either hang together or surely they end up hanging by the noose separately. The analogy, applied to Nato, is relevant with respect to Russia as well. Without domestic consensus on policy with respect to Russia in the United States, and without Germany playing its due role as a European leader of the Western alliance, it’s hard to see Vladimir Putin being deterred effectively from his desire to reclaim the empire of the Tsars.
In that quest of nostalgia, Ukraine will likely be the first of many victims.
Esam Sohail is a college administrator and writes from Kansas, USA. He can be reached at [email protected].
