VIOLENCE, POWER, AND NUCLEAR PUTIN

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Violence, Power, and Nuclear
Putin
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Mariana Budjeryn
The practice of violence, like all action,
changes the world, but the most probable
change is to a more violent world.
—Hannah Arendt, On Violence
ladimir Putin wants to reclaim for Russia
the respect and status the Soviet Union
once commanded and has recently
undertaken to achieve this by force. His
landgrab in Ukraine has been swift and
remarkably successful, emboldening him to
continue his campaign against Ukraine.
Between his high popularity at home and the
meek reaction of the West, it might seem that
Putin is growing in power. Yet to maintain it,
he will have to increasingly rely on violence,
including world’s largest nuclear arsenal. The
West should understand that the cost of
deterring him now is dwarfted by the cost of
deterring him later.
So far, Russia and the West have engaged in a
war of words. Russia accuses the decaying
and hypocritical West of instigating last
winter’s Euromaidan protests in Ukraine,
deposing its corrupt regime, and installing an
illegal government in Kyiv. The US accuses
dishonest and belligerent Russia of invading
Ukraine, illegally annexing Crimea, and now
fermenting separatism in the country’s east
and south. Russia, while denying direct
involvement in Ukraine, claims that, like the
US, it has the right to project its power
wherever it deems necessary. The Russian
Parliament gave Putin the leave to do so by
force—only in Ukraine, for now.
Putin’s is an old-fashioned Machiavellian
understanding of power, whereby violence,
force, and coercion are various
manifestations of it and allude to the different
ways in which one man rules over another. As
that Clausewitzian maxim goes, war is simply
a continuation of politics by other means.
Force begets power, and power can use force
if and when it likes. In short, might
constitutes right.
Yet there is a profoundly different way to
conceive of the relationship between power
and violence. Political theorist Hannah
Arendt, while recognizing that power and
violence often come in tandem, drew sharp
distinctions between the two and juxtaposed
them as opposites. Power, she argued, is not
the ability to impose the will of one man over
another, but the ability to act in concert.
Power is the property of the collective, and a
single actor can be powerful only in as much
as he has the following of many. Power is
generated through persuasion and
demonstration. Because the support for power
is granted through free choice and can be just
as freely withdrawn, power comes with
responsibility to practice what it preaches.
Violence, on the other hand, is the property of
a single actor, individual or institutional.
According to Arendt, while power is the end
in itself, violence is always instrumental, a
means to an end. It also needs tools: physical
strength, soldiers, weapons. Violence distorts
equality between actors and obliterates
freedom to choose, which is so essential to
power and the responsibility it entails. Power
relies on support; violence commands
obedience. Power needs no justification, but
does need legitimacy; violence can be
justifiable, but never legitimate.
All forms of government, including
democracies, rely on a combination of power
and violence. All forms of government,
including tyrannies, rely on the general
support of society, too. To forge this support, a
tyranny sooner or later turns to coercion,
which necessarily diminishes its power and
makes it, as Montesquieu said, the most
violent and the least powerful form of
government. Thus, the resort to violence is
nothing else but a symptom of eroding power.
Vladimir Putin eschews and at the same time
envies US power, which he sees as freedom to
do as it wills in the world. What he does not
understand is that genuine US power is
manifested not in its military prowess, vast
intelligence network or economic might per se ,
but in the willingness of others to follow it
voluntarily. It is manifested in the fact that
US-led NATO did not fizzle away when the
instrumental reasons for its existence
disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. It is manifested in the free choice of
the polities formerly under the Soviet
domination, from the Baltics to Kyrgyzstan, to
align with the US-led Euro-Atlantic order
without any coercion. George Kennan best
described the essence of US power as leading
by example.
Ironically, Putin and his cronies unwittingly
grant recognition to Western power every
time they freely choose to send their children
to Western schools, park their fortunes in
Western banks, and establish their residencies
in posh Western cities and vacation spots.
While US power thus conceived has been
declining, in no small part due to its ill-
justified and unsupported invasion of Iraq, it
is still vastly more attractive than anything
Putin and his Russian world has to offer. With
its corrupt and oppressive oligarchy, its
primitive hydrocarbon economy one-eighth of
the size of America’s, and its stifled public
sphere, Putin’s Russia has found few eager
followers. Unable to generate power by
influencing, engaging, and inspiring the
world with a compelling ideology, a model of
development, or a concept of good life, Putin
resorted to violence.
After all, it worked at home. Putin’s
popularity is craftily manufactured through
various forms of coercion. As Sergei Guriev, a
Russian economist in exile, summed up : “For
less sophisticated people, he relies on
brainwashing… For more sophisticated but
less honest people, he needs to bribe them.
For honest, sophisticated people, he uses
repression.” Brainwashing is the most
dangerous of coercive methods because it
creates an illusion of power, intoxicating but
false. Nevertheless, it is a form of intellectual
violence: by snuffing out dissent and
establishing a monopoly on interpretation of
past and present, Putin’s regime has forced
millions of Russian minds into a rut, robbing
them of freedom to make a fair choice
between alternatives.
Thus, Putin’s regime stands and falls on
substituting violence for its nonexistent
power. To admit that people or states can
follow a leader without being coerced is to
subvert his own model of rule. Therefore, the
story must be told of the West blatantly
forcing others to align with it. It becomes
inevitable that the West should play its dirty
hand in Ukraine’s pro-European protests, as
in every other anti-Putin project inside or
outside Russia.
he repercussions of Putin’s conflation of
power with violence are ominous. He is
not the only leader to do this, but he is the
only leader presiding over a country whose
mediocre power is far outmatched by the
violence it is still capable to inflict upon the
world with its nuclear armaments. One might
argue that nuclear weapons were also a factor
in the US-Soviet stand off, and that deterrence
might still work well enough today. Yet the
current conflict bears a significant difference
from the Cold War: the Soviet Union was a
recognized superpower, and Putin’s Russia is
not.
The Soviet Union was one of the victors of
World War II, and participated in the
establishment of the postwar order on par
with the US and Britain. Its communist
ideology and critique of capitalism found
followers in Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
Behind its closed borders, the USSR relied on
gulags and the KGB for its survival. Yet to the
West, ever a riddle wrapped in a mystery
inside an enigma, the USSR was indisputably
a superpower. As such, it engaged on equal
terms with the US in both the arms race and
the disarmament race of the Bush-Gorbachev
years. The USSR’s special status conferred
upon it a responsibility for maintaining the
international order and preventing the
nuclear Armageddon.
By comparison, Putin’s Russia is open to
global flows of goods, capital, and data. In
any political, economic, or conventional
military regard, it is at best a regional actor,
as President Obama recently reminded Putin.
The international support Russia was able to
muster for its Ukrainian foray is pitiful:
eleven powerless states, including North
Korea, Syria, and Cuba, held together by their
hatred and fear of Western power rather than
by any positive idea, vision, or goal.
Furthermore, Ukraine may have cost Russia
the vestiges of greatness it enjoyed in military
and space cooperation with the US.
The only area in which Russia still brandishes
a global status is its nuclear arsenal. It is the
only conceivable reason why Russia still
enjoys a permanent seat on the UN Security
Council. In essence, Russia inherited the
Soviet Union’s super-force without a modicum
of super-power responsibility. In fact, Putin
looks to be set on dismantling the very postwar
order that helped prevent nuclear
conflagration during the Cold War.
Meanwhile, the West seems paralyzed by
Putin’s audacity and unsure what to make of
it. The temptation not to get mired in a
conflict over Ukraine is great. Economic
sanctions and visa restrictions against Putin’s
inner circle are meant to shake his oligarchic
power base at home. So far, these reactions
look like ineffectual finger wagging rather
than a credible deterrent, let alone a way to
reverse territorial changes already effected.
In any case, sanctions take time to produce
change, and, with Ukraine’s presidential
elections looming on May 25th, time is
working in Putin’s favor.
Arendt warned that nuclear weapons were
capable of distorting politics precisely due to
the kind of radical mismatch between power
and capacity for violence we see in Russia
today. The danger is not that, undeterred,
Putin’s regime will gain in power, but rather
that to compensate for its lack of power it will
have to rely on ever more crude coercion,
both domestically and in the neighborhood it
feels entitled to rule. In light of this threat, the
West should mount a prompt, united, and
decisive response to Putin proportionate to his
transgressions. It should do so not just for
Ukraine’s sake, but also for its own, if it wants
to avoid the rising costs of dealing with an
exponentially violent revisionist regime
armed with the most formidable weapons in
existence.