Vlad the Throwback

Vladimir Putin is a throwback. For Putin, it's as though the 20th Century never happened. Which stands to reason, because for Russia generally the 20th Century was something that happened someplace else.

The 20th Century was very largely a continuation of the later 19th Century 'til sometime around the end of the First World War in 1918, and Russia was knocked out of the war in '17 by the Bolshevik Revolution and descended first into chaos and before long into that Hadean nightmare called communism, 'til the 20th Century was near enough to over. And because communism can't survive the exposure of its people to the alternative, the Soviet Union had of necessity to be a hermetically-sealed hermit-state which would shoot and kill its citizens summarily rather than let them walk across its borders and out of its system. So Russia skipped from the Edwardian world of 1917 to the 1990s, and passed the intervening decades in a bad dream.

The idea that annexing territories is the worst kind of gauche in international relations is novel, coming as it does in the 20th Century among the earlier phases of Western Civilization's project of dismantling itself and reducing the towering, gleaming skyscraper to a useless, miserable little heap of broken and twisted bits. Putin is a quite conventional nationalist and imperialist like is found from the dawn of time 'til sometime in the 20th Century, as alien to the West in 2014 as it is commonplace to every civilization 'til living memory. As though Putin had skipped the 20th Century.

Plus which, it has to be said, Russia is nothing if not self-consciously un-Western, and repudiating the vogues of our Western bien-pensants is a point of pride over there.

So Vladimir Putin is unbound by our decadent 21st Century Western notions of "international law" or even "morality", which in practice amounts to voluntarily binding one or both arms behind our backs in war against barbarians who want us all dead and burning in Hell. Putin's only constraints in the end are practical ones. Putin may be expected to push, in other words, 'til someone pushes back and draws the line that constitutes the geopolitical limits of his Russia. Putin may prefer to reconquer the old Soviet or Czarist empires by maneuver, but then, even Hitler won his early conquests of the Rhineland and Austria and Czechoslovakia and Klaipeda without a shot fired, and it can only be assumed that if push comes to shove, Putin will shove.

Barack Obama's Russia policy from the very outset has been capitulation to Russian demands and psychoses, as gestures of comity to bring about some mythical global harmony or anyway as an uncomprehending rote-Left reaction against George W. Bush. Obama's defense and foreign policies generally are to retreat and contract, which only invites trouble and raises the price of answering it, because threats and half-measures won't suffice without something bigger and badder behind them. If one may be permitted to mix metaphors, a serious president with a demonstrable capacity for pulling triggers and upsetting applecarts may need only rattle a sabre to get the attention of trouble-makers or would-be trouble-makers, but an Obama can wag his finger day and night without effect, because those trouble-makers have the measure of him and understand him to have not the constitution or even the interest to give force to his finger-wagging.

And the West in 2014 isn't much in the mood for anything costly or causing of discomfort, any more than we were in the mood in the 1930s to confront Hitler on his assorted acquisitions, least of all to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine or Georgia or whatever other old Soviet satellites and Czarist colonies Putin has in mind to reconquer.

So Vladimir Putin is liable to have things his way, and the Lord only knows how far he'll go along that way, unless and until someone pushes back and wins the shoving-match and a very different president of the United States sits in the Oval Office.