How is Russia a 'Threat'?

Or how we create our own nemesis from our own hubris

There are two models of ‘threat’ from Russia – one is absurd and propagandistic (which is the one I will dismiss but with an important caveat) but the other is on the verge of becoming real. And then there is the threat of a general war which emerges like 1914 out of the (appalling) logic of the situation. The absurd claim about threat is that Russia intends to expand outwards like the old Soviet Union. If it ever expands it will only be in reaction to events. Those events are Western actions. Until this point, anyone who believes the ‘threat of invasion’ beyond Ukraine to have been real does not understand recent Russian history or its actual capacity to mount a war against NATO. If there is one thing that Putin has been extremely careful to do (to date) it is not to create a twenty-first century Pearl Harbour by doing anything, despite massive provocation, to invoke Article 5. He is no Tojo.

The caveat, of course, is that events emanating from Western policy since the early 1990s and indeed long before, have led to a situation that may force Russia to become what the West claims it is but is not, engaging in war as a last resort in a game of existential survival. It is like the lone street kid constantly pushed around by a member of a gang who finally loses it, fears the gang may kill him one day and gets himself an automatic weapon - who is responsible for what follows? The gang or the kid? Hollywood and popular sentiment will tend to back the kid even if the law backs the gang. At the moment, the kid is just punching back with his fists.

The real (but still potential more than real despite current hysteria) as opposed to claimed propagandistic threat to the West is that, fearing NATO expansion, Russia adopts a forward ‘hybrid’ defence that involves attempts to destabilise the internal politics of the liberal democracies that it thinks are a threat not merely to its security but to its ‘values’. For Russia the issue has become existential so it may feel obliged to adopt methods that make the struggle equally existential, not necessarily for the peoples of Europe but for their masters. This distinction between masters and people becomes relevant as we shall see.

The first ‘absurd’ claim (of an imperial military onslaught against Europe driven by a madcap Putin) needs investigation. This claim certainly does not derive from the recent past conduct of Russia. Moscow constantly allowed itself to be pushed back, first in 2014 with Maidan when it then pushed back in turn with the seizure of Crimea before finally pushing back definitively in 2022. But this is a push-back by Russia localised to an immediate set of threats related to near neighbourhood national security. We need constantly to be reminded that Ukraine is ‘sui generis’, not part of NATO, not in the EU, the product of Soviet era boundary fixing, oppressive of its Russian-speaking and Russian Orthodox minorities, ruled by people who were beneficiaries of an anti-democratic foreign-inspired coup and sits very close to the heartland of Russia with the constant threat of bringing NATO assets closer to Moscow than hypersonics can defend.

The claim of a wider invasion threat is propagandistic. It derives ultimately from the desire to build a military-industrial complex within the West and to maintain a political commitment to NATO as well as representing the neo-nationalist political aspirations of certain politicians – in the Baltic States in particular. Atlanticism and Post-Soviet Neo-Nationalism combine in a malign narrative that explains much of what has happened in 2014 and since. The forward drive that wrecked Iraq, Libya and Syria was equally to be directed at Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia as it would eventually have been directed at North Korea, Myanmar and China. Behind the Atlanticism lies a separate ‘federalist’ centrist interest in creating a European state able to project hard power on the world stage because the post-imperial soft power of the continent was becoming negligible.

The ease with which the French West African Empire was dismantled by Russia and and China and the existence of a barely serious Commonwealth which is on its last legs are both signs that Europe’s global importance is on borrowed time if its economy is not turned around and if it fails to project military power more effectively beyond its own fragmented shores. The ‘threat’ from Russia has little to do with Russia per se. It has much more to do with equalising the Europeans’ relationship with the Anglosphere and giving Europe the tools to deal with multipolarity from strength, ideally in near-equal partnership with a liberal-minded internationalist Washington. Russia becomes the ‘necessary enemy’, as China is to counterparts in Washington - the point of strategic resistance to Western values and economic expansion. This alone makes the struggle existential for Moscow, the Russian people and Western liberal internationalists but not necessarily for Western populations.

The second emergent ‘threat’ (that of hybrid warfare directed back at Western liberal democracies) is a more real potential threat although it should not be exaggerated. Even the GCHQ cyber terror chief on Radio 4 this morning somewhat belied the ‘Russian threat’ headlines in the mainstream media by making clear that the national level of threat from state actors was more anticipated than actual (which is a very reasonable position) and that most actors in the game were criminals concerned with profit rather than state actors. It just happens to be that many criminal actors are lodged in Russia and allied states and that their relationship with the state is obscure (as if the capacity was treated as a potential national asset rather than that it was actually being used by Russia for political purposes).

This toleration of villainy should be a matter of law enforcement dialogue rather than confrontation but we are not dealing with rational actors at the political level. This threat, real more in potential than actual current warfare, is one created by perception of belief in the first threat (of Russian malign intent to conquer Europe with Putin like a latter-day Hitler or Napoleon) and a counter belief within Russia of a threat from the West (which is demonstrable at least in the form of quasi-State NGO funding of regime change operations in Belarus, Russia and Georgia). In other words, this villainy would not be such a threat if the West did not behave as if it was itself an existential threat to Russian national security beyond the usual spying games and gangsterdoms of over-funded spooks on both sides.

But the cybersecurity aspect of hybrid warfare is not the only aspect of the case. We also have perfectly legitimate (on both sides) diplomatic competition and the interference of both parties in the internal political affairs of the other. And let us be clear here - if Russia is interfering (and the evidence is both that it probably is but the effect is marginal), both sides are at it. Two decades and more of regime change games are evidence enough of the West going beyond mere diplomatic persuasion. Some regime change attempts have been backed up with the supply of weaponry and special operations assistance. As we write, Syria is being destroyed in a civil war that has lasted since 2011 and in which the West is a significant and malignant player.

Historically, Russia legitimately sees itself as periodically actually threatened from the West quite separately from the political manipulation that was attempted in the last days of the Tsar or under Yeltsin. After all, it has seen off not only Napoleon and Hitler but the British and French in the Civil War as well as British & French troops in Crimea in the 1850s. It has seen the steady eastwards expansion of NATO regardless of promises accepted in good faith by Gorbachev. Yes, Russian troops were in Paris in 1815 but not for long and Russian (or rather Soviet) occupation of Eastern Europe followed and did not precede invasion. Tsarist occupation of Poland in 1815 was unconscionable but so was British occupation of India. The Russians are no angels and neither are we. The point is whether (as the English were in 1066) a nation is at threat or not and why it is at threat.

Russia’s natural response to any potential for the militarisation of Europe against it is to counter-militarise and to build the necessary cultural infrastructure to maintain that militarisation. Since it has no interest in actual war with NATO (the military arm of Western Europe), if only because of the sheer destructive nature of such a war even if it might expect to survive as it has done before, it has to resort to hybrid warfare because it has no other option. This, in turn, includes developing influence inside the West and deterring influence inside Russia. It is a response to a forward strategy directed at Russia along precisely the same lessons in the past. Ideally neither side would dabble in the affairs of the other and both would guarantee the security of the other. Both sides are now caught in a cycle not so much of violence as manipulation.

Naturally this becomes an increasingly vicious cycle. The counter-counter-position of Western liberals is to weaken their own free values by treating the ‘enemy within’ (often just people with a different narrative to the prevailing one) as a ‘threat’ and attempting to control access to information, communications and to the freedom to speak or organise. We see this more obviously in the case of opposition to Israeli conduct in the Middle East. When faced with challenges to their hegemony, Western liberal centrists are not afraid of using draconian methods in dealing with direct action, employing lawfare and control of the judiciary and offering threats to freedom of expression. There is even talk of banning political parties (as constantly threatened against the German AfD). Journalists are undoubtedly being arrested and intimidated. Western values are abandoned to save the values. The village is burned to save it, so to speak. A President pardons his own son despite his repeated promises. The West starts to look corrupted. Resentment grows and a significant minority detaches itself from allegiance to the prevailing order and its narrative. This is not the Russians doing anything. This is what we are doing to ourselves.

A dreadful cycle emerges whether between powers or between domestic interests. The more one side seeks to act, the more the other has to counter-act until everything rapidly starts to move out of control. In international affairs, eventually, both sides at the highest level will have to go to war or agree to disagree with some sort of de facto non-aggression pact between powers who are separate but equals. Each will then have achieved sufficient their more minimal ends after ridiculous amounts of diverted expenditure and countless lives. Perhaps Europe will have become a viable and independent hard power. Perhaps Russia has preserved its hedgehog-like ability to secure its own security and regime. Perhaps the liberal democracies will have re-constitutionalised themselves to resist populist regime change internally.

However, the room for accident along the way is considerable. This vulnerability to the accidental is where we are now under conditions where the risks include tactical nuclear conflagration, economic destruction and mass migrations. We get a double confrontation at this point – between Russia and Europe in an increasingly manufactured fear of each other and between European elites and significant parts of European populations who both have opposing and near-hysterical narratives about what is to be feared from the other. The question remains - are we fearing the right thing when we fear and do we need to fear at all? Are we perhaps in the position of early modern Europeans fearing that our children and cattle are dying of witchcraft instead of bad sanitation and invisible diseases?

Naturally, since they are under existential threat as they see it, the Russians will reach out to discontented components of European populations but they did not create that discontent. Western populations are not passive. They are agents in their own right. Their discontent has emerged from entirely different fears – cultural and economic, migration and household financial security, loss of freedoms or whatever. This internal set of confrontations was ultimately built into both the European and neoliberal projects for complex historical reasons that have had nothing to do with Russia, just as the witch trials of the seventeenth century had nothing to do with the devil and everything to do with massive disruptions caused by major technological and economic changes in the preceding century.

The Russians, Chinese and Iranians (even the term ‘axis of evil’ is indicative of irrationality here) are becoming the demonic force that very stupid people require in order to evade and avoid the real causes of their various predicaments. To be fair here, the ‘other side’ has a similar tendency to impute evil to Israel and America when the issues are vastly more complex than this implies.

In this context, current confrontations were built in to our historical situation as it deverloped during the last century. Post-1945 and then post-1991 Europe were Atlanticist Projects that depended on the nuclear guarantee and on a Washington-led model of continued values and neo-liberal expansion shared by liberal elites in both constituent nations and Brussels. However, ‘values expansion’ imperialism is breaking down because of its own massive internal contradictions. Europe in particular (the US is a different case) is left in an impossible situation, caught between its own existential drives and its desperate attempt to maintain a moral standing that it no longer has.

Europe either has to continue to go forward along unnecessary confrontational and non-realist lines as a liberal imperium in the making in order to create the conditions for its own existence or it has to reverse itself and allow such anomalies as a Russo-German entente in order to re-industrialise Germany or permit multiple different alliance structures which might reproduce the conditions of the 1920s with consequent local conflict risks. It has become a desperate lose-lose instead of the win-win that might have been put in place as late as the spring of 2023.

Yet if Europe goes forward (if it can achieve full federal unification along military-industrial lines) it risks a superpower confrontation before it is ready militarily: it has to remain dependent on an unstable American imperium in the meantime. And it is the Washington connection that tends to soil the ambition of Europeans to be both independent and ‘moral’. Indeed, the two are incompatible … in the drive to hasten independence because Trump is throwing them out into the cold, morality is being abandoned in favour of the dark side of liberalism which has always had an historical tendency to resort to war.

The role of war in state formation may be relevant here. The point here is that most state formation requires a devastating war internally or externally to build itself as credible and united and to purge fundamental strategic dissent within itself. The US is the US because of a Revolutionary War and a Civil War. The UK is the UK because of its Civil Wars and two World Wars. Europe is what is is because of the Second World War but it has reached an impasse as the US did in 1860. Unfortunately for radical federalists (but fortunately perhaps for the potential victims), Europe has no single issue like slavery that can set future history (the ‘North’) against past history (‘the South’) and sacrifice a generation of young people on the altar of modernising state formation.

Internally there are not the political conditions for creative confrontation. Europe is stuck as 27 states reach the end of their period of boundary extension (once the Balkans are tidied up). Increasingly assertive individual member nations seek to bend a half-baked and surprisingly non-democratic structure to their will. Populism might be the democratic challenge that re-envisions the structure but it is a rebellion from below and has not captured sufficient centres of power to trigger a decisive confrontation. Could war in the East do it for the ‘power federalists’?

The trouble is that the war is a proxy one that divides rather than unites. The struggle between populism and liberalism ‘triangulates’ not into progress in creating a new viable power but in weakening it. Each move towards war unravels the European economy that little bit more which increases the populist vote that is in opposition to federalist ambition. Yet a move away from war weakens the impulse towards creating the sort of security regime that is essential to the formation of a modern state. And there is an equal problem that war is counted as good if the usual suspects retain their positions of power and can use it to build the neo-liberal imperium of their federalist dreams but it is bad if it triggers internal revolt or results in the destruction of a fragile economy or risks a tactical nuclear immolation. As things stand, the ‘bad’ consequences have become more obvious especially as there is no significant ‘liberal’ leadership that is loved by its people - at least not in France, Germany and the UK.

This is a problem of Europe’s own making. If it had understood both the Russian need for security and the emerging cultural discontents of its own population then it would have understood its own natural limitations. Within those limitations, it would have had the political capital to build by stealth (the historic mode of federalist operation) a stronger federal political and security state (displacing NATO) and could militarise to gain respect and ensure greater independence from both the US and Russia. It would also have bought time to strategically put in place a green transition that would have reduced dependence on Russian energy over time and integrated the Balkans safely into the European project.

Imperial unification within agreed boundaries and with a strong military capacity would have enabled negotiation to secure both Europe and Russia, perhaps integrated the economies of both with each other. Allowing the US to suck Europe into Ukraine in defence of some manufactured global liberal international order directed at control of resources has thus weakened Europe immeasurably. The right deal with Russia before Maidan (and to hell with Washington) and Russia would not be sitting on four additional oblasts today. Ukraine would not be, in effect, a basket case.

Russian strategy in this light thus became logical. From being not a threat because it had no imperial ambitions (which is also logical because of the costs of empire to Russians in the Soviet era), the attempt to bring Atlanticism to its own borders for no sensible strategic reason has set in motion a chain of events that mean that Russia has evidence of the West as military threat. This means that Europe has countervailing evidence of Russia as potential hybrid threat (which is more important because of the nature of democratic politics) which it was not at the beginning of the century. Quite the contrary, the hybrid balance of war had, until that time, been directed at Russia.

Poor Ukraine is just a pawn in a game which Russia had lost on a local Western-engineered coup in 2014 (similar to the one currently being attempted in Georgia). This makes the current conflict increasingly insoluble unless Russia can be guaranteed national security in return for not interfering in Western politics although most pro-Russian forces are now entirely ideologically independent of Russia: they will proceed as populist operations regardless and without direct Russian support. A Ukraine Peace depends on understanding this dynamic: that Russian defensive security is paramount to peace. Sort that out and everything else follows.

The threat of a general war (as opposed to the military ‘threat from Russia’) has now become very real. The point I am making as a ‘realist’ is that the threats are in this order and not in the order that we are supposed to accept – a) of a devastating accidental regional European war because somebody makes a mistake (it does not matter who), b) of internal destabilisation of national democracies and of Europe as a result of unnecessary confrontation to protect a counter-productive liberal expansionist values agenda, and c) of Russia being driven to general war by a Western-directed defeat in Ukraine.

Counter-intuitively we can say that it is not in Europe’s interest for Russia to be defeated. It is in its interest for Russia not to be driven to a level of escalation that would tear Europe apart while the US remains insulated nor for this situation to continue to help fuel populist revolts that would require illiberal and counter-productive operations to manage if, in fact, they could be managed. The initiation of a direct attack by Russia on the West always was unlikely. It remains so unless the West persists in intensifying its ‘protect Kiev at all costs’ strategy. Russia’s interest is very parochial and defensive. Short of the existing oblasts in Russian hands, Ukraine can be given the space to survive, prosper and reconstruct within the Western sphere of economic influence. The paradox here is of hysterical maniacs in the West who think that they are defending Western security by creating a situation in which that security is placed at risk. In that context, toning down the rhetoric and talking about peace might be the wise option. In yet another paradox, Trump may prove, quite accidentally, Europe’s last hope. For Europe, this is the wrong war at the wrong time if it wants to unify and become a global power.