by Gideon Rachman*
Just a couple of months ago it was fashionable to laud Vladimir Putin for his strategic genius. American rightwingers contrasted his sure-footedness with their own president’s alleged weakness. In a column entitled "Obama vs Putin, The Mismatch”, Charles Krauthammer argued: "Under this president, Russia has run rings around America.” Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, praised Mr Putin’s decisiveness and cooed: "That’s what you call a leader.” Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence party, said Mr Putin was the world leader he most admired.
How misplaced all this adulation looks after the shooting down ofMalaysian Airlines flight MH17. Russia’s apparent policy of supplying anti-aircraft missiles to the Ukrainian rebels was not simply immoral. It also gives the lie to the idea thatMr Putinis some kind of strategic genius. Instead he is revealed as a reckless gambler, whose paranoid and cynical policies are leading Russia into economic and political isolation.
The Kremlin’s mini Machiavelli believed he could destabilise eastern Ukraine
while maintaining plausible deniability about Russia’s links to the separatist
rebels.
However, the puppet master failed to keep hold of the
strings. After the deaths of nearly 300 innocent civilians, a harsh light is
shining on Russia’s involvement in the tragedy. Outside Russia, only a hard
core of Putin apologists is likely to accept denials of involvement.
The Russian authorities now face a very difficult choice. If they co-operate with an international investigation into the MH17 atrocity, the results are likely to be extremely embarrassing. But if they block the investigation, shelter behind conspiracy theories or even send troops into eastern Ukraine, they will encourage an even fiercer international backlash. Last week, even before the airliner tragedy, the US had announced intensified sanctions. The EU is also now likely to toughen its stance. Some big Russian companies are losing access to western capital markets.
Political isolation also looms. Russia has already been chucked out of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations. The Australians, who lost several citizens on the flight, are balking at welcoming Mr Putin to a G20 summit in Brisbane in November. Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup will come into question before long.
Mr Putin’s mistakes extend beyond the irresponsibility of enabling the separatists to shoot at passing aircraft. That blunder has its roots in at least four other failed policies. First, there was the wildly excessive reaction to the idea that Ukraine might sign a trade deal with the EU. The idea that Brussels was desperately trying to grab Ukraine was paranoid. In reality, the EU has, for decades, been embarrassingly reluctant to admit Ukraine. Nato membership – which Moscow evoked as the great threat to Russia – was a similarly remote prospect. At its 2008 summit Nato declined to put Ukraine on the path to membership, and that has been the basic position ever since.
Russia’s second blunder was to stir up unrest in
Ukraine while denying responsibility. This must have seemed smart in a cynical
sort of way – and it certainly caught the world off guard when it came to the
annexation of Crimea. But in eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s manipulation has been
less effective and harder to disguise. This has culminated in the MH17 tragedy.
The result is that Russia has the worst of both worlds. It is not completely in
control of events but is still blamed for them. And rightly so because, even if
the order to shoot did not come from Moscow, the Russians enabled the disaster
to happen.
The third trap that Mr Putin has created for himself
involves the manipulation of Russian public opinion through increasingly crude,
nationalistic propaganda. This has had the desired effect of boosting the
president’s approval ratings. But it also makes it much harder for him to back
down. Anything less than total support for the separatists will open Mr Putin
to the charge that he has failed to protect Russian speakers from the
"fascists” his media claim control Ukraine.
His fourth blunder has been consistently to
underestimate the reaction in the west. Perhaps he was convinced by the
sycophants around him – and their echo chamber overseas – that he is a master
strategist and that the west is feeble. The west’s response has sometimes been
slow but real sanctions have been passed, and more are on their way. Russia’s
business leaders are aghast at the situation. But, for now, they are powerless.
By allowing himself to be sucked into an unnecessary
and destructive confrontation with the west, Mr Putin is also engaging with the
wrong problem. For all Moscow’s paranoia about Nato, the real strategic
challenge to Russia is the rise of China. But, locked into a confrontation with
the west, Mr Putin has become a supplicant of Beijing, as is evident in the
lopsidedenergy dealrecently signed with China.
It is the tame Russian media’s job to gloss over this
record of failure and misjudgment and instead to present Mr Putin as a hero
standing up to a hostile world. Opinion polls suggest this campaign is working
well for the moment.
The danger is that the only way for Mr Putin to disguise his repeated failures is to further ratchet up the atmosphere of crisis, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is indeed faced by an increasingly hostile west. That policy is dangerous for the world – and, most of all, for Russia itself.
* Columnist of the "Financial Times"
("Financial Times",July 21, 2014)
