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Putin’s regime: ‘a Titanic looking for an iceberg’

The growing awareness that Russia, growing ever more hostile, should be treated as a threat rather than a mere annoyance is pushing Western capitals toward a unified front in challenging Moscow over such serial transgressions as destabilizing its neighbors, assassinating its critics abroad, meddling in the elections of other countries, tolerating the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government and cyberskirmishing, the New York Times reports:

The confrontation is likely to only get worse, analysts say, for one main reason: Mr. Putin and his closest advisers are convinced they are justified in their policies and have persuaded important portions of the elite as well as the bulk of Russians that the country is thriving, rebuilding its global muscle rather than weakening itself.

“The party of war has won within the Russian elite,” said Yuliy A. Nisnevich, a political-science professor. “There are people in the elites who would like the confrontation to stop — these are the people who would like to spend or earn money abroad. But the party of war, the people who get their money inside the country and live here, is prevalent now.”

Putin’s regime is “a Titanic looking for its own iceberg,” according to a leading analyst.

The ruling elite wants to be inside the West for its own purposes, but also against the West, promoting militarization and patriotism in an efforts to consolidate its legitimacy, said Russian political analyst Lilia Shevtsova (right), addressing the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies (above). The elite is seeking a new incarnation, but with diminished resources, while militarization entails international isolation and marginalization. Ordinary Russians want change but the system can’t allow it, she added.

Western commentators “got Russia wrong”, especially in dismissing its international relevance,” said Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s Senior Director for Eurasia. But there is now a risk of overstating it strength, she said, recommending a speech by former National Security Adviser HR McMaster for recognizing that the US is in a new global completion needs to summon the will to advance democratic values.

Russia exhibits a range of contradictions, said Christopher Walker, NED’s Vice President for Studies and Analysis: weak economically, but dynamic, punching above its weight in foreign policy; politically stultifying but technically innovative; and insular but practicing malign internationalism.

The US lacks a clear strategy on Russia, Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times.

April 18, 2018

The Kremlin’s global challenge: paradoxes of Russian-Western relations

Russia appears today as an assertive power ready to weaken international norms and kick over the global chessboard, notes the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies.

Even as it confronts economic stagnation and popular demoralization at home, Putin’s regime has advanced efforts not only in undermining the liberal order but also in affecting domestic politics in the world’s leading democracies. By holding manipulated elections and mimicking other democratic institutions, the Kremlin works to discredit these traditions and, in doing so, the West itself. The Kremlin’s aggressive mobilization makes Russia the West’s key opponent, but this new antagonism lacks clear and mutually accepted rules of the game.

Political analyst Lilia Shevtsova (right) will examine the paradoxes of Russian-Western relations, the sustainability of the Russian system of governance, and the international implications of this system’s struggle for survival. The NED’s Christopher Walker will offer comments.

featuring

Lilia Shevtsova, Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow

with comments by

Christopher Walker, Vice-President for Studies and Analysis, National Endowment for Democracy

moderated by

Sally Blair, Senior Director, Reagan-Fascell Fellowship Program

Tuesday, April 17, 2018
3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m.
1025 F Street, N.W., Suite 800, Washington, D.C. 20004
Telephone: 202-378-9675

RSVP

Twitter: Follow @ThinkDemocracy and use #NEDEvents to join the conversation.

All cameras and media must register with NED public affairs.

Please email press@ned.org to register as a member of the press.

April 10, 2018

Is Russia part of a new ‘axis of evil’?

Newly-appointed National Security adviser John Bolton laid out his proposed strategy to respond to Russia’s “unacceptable” meddling in the 2016 presidential election and to Russian aggression around the world, speaking last month at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports:

The United States should respond in “cyberspace and elsewhere,” said Bolton [who is generally held to be hostile to democracy promotion], suggesting offensive action against the Russian operatives that perpetrated the interference. Only if the response is overwhelming will Russia and other countries be deterred.

“It’s really an attack on the United States Constitution….. I don’t think the response should be proportionate, I think it should be very disproportionate,” he said.

Until fairly recently, after every election in Russia, the question being raised was who would prevail in the Kremlin: Western-style modernizers or anti-Western hard-liners? This question is no longer relevant, argues Ivan Krastev (right) the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies and the author, most recently, of “After Europe.”

The coming generational change in Russian reality tells us little about the future of the regime, because President Putin is its biggest asset but also the biggest vulnerability, argues Krastev, a regular contributor to the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy. He dominates the political scene to the extent that he promotes to the top only people with moderate ambitions who know how to work for the president effectively but could not be the president, he writes for the New York Times:

The irony is that Mr. Putin is placing these new technocrats in power as an alternative to his failed attempt to reinstall the current prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, as his successor. But in reality the Putin generation is just a collective Medvedev. And when it comes to what post-Putin Russia will look like, the president is back where he was when he put Mr. Medvedev in the Kremlin and then decided to return to his old office.

It is often said that Russia is a competitor to western democracy. But that is misleading. Its regime is a model only to other budding kleptocrats, the FT’s Edward Luce observes. Alas, the west’s chief ideological threat comes from within. Mr Putin’s wealth extraction machine reveals the west’s moral failings. His abettors could not do it without our connivance. This is especially true of the US and Britain, he contends:

In contrast to most western democracies, the US and UK permit anonymous ownership. Most democracies legally require the beneficial owner of an asset, such a company or property, to be made known. Not so in the largest English-speaking democracies. Roughly $300bn is laundered in the US every year, according to the US Treasury. Britain and its offshore financial centres take in about $125bn. Most of it goes undetected. The largest foreign share of it is Russian, according to Anders Aslund, a leading specialist on Russia’s economy. Estimates of Mr Putin’s personal wealth range from $50bn to $200bn. Even the lower figure would exceed the gross domestic product of most UN member states. Yet we have taken few steps to disrupt it.

Even authoritarian rulers like Putin face strong domestic elites they must appease to stay in power, notes Lionel Beehner, director of research of West Point’s Modern War Institute. Unlike their democratic counterparts, autocracies purposely keep their conventional forces weak to lower the threat of a coup, he writes for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage:

Why? One explanation is that today’s autocrats are less secure domestically than their predecessors. A recent survey in Russia found that only a third of Russians favored the Kremlin’s military support of President Bashar al-Assad. The popularity of the Russian intervention has waned as casualties have climbed. Despite his near-absolute power, Putin is not immune to this public pressure.

The West shouldn’t be fooled by Putin’s playbook, says Handelsblatt analyst Mathias Brüggmann.

“Coordinated action is needed to defend freedom and democracy,” he adds. “It is crucial to reject every each attempt by Mr. Putin to poison our community of values, whether by attacking his former people in the West, redrawing borders or disrupting western elections.”

March 28, 2018

West & Russia on brink of new Cold War?

There’s a fundamental flaw in the Russian propaganda narrative about the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the U.K. earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky writes: It assumes that Western nations want to gang up on Russia and punish it regardless of whether there’s any evidence linking it to the assassination attempt. In reality, the Western response to the incident shows how reluctant European nations are to escalate tensions with Russia.

The unified international response to the Skripal poisoning shows that the West will only suffer so much provocation, says analyst Mark Galleotti. This new determination from the West to take Putin to task is the product of a cumulative process, he writes for the Atlantic.

But German politicians from the left and right have criticised the government’s decision to expel four Russian diplomats over the nerve agent attack, saying there was still no conclusive proof that Russia was behind the poisoning, the FT adds:

Jürgen Trittin, the German Greens’ foreign policy expert, said it was “reckless to act against Russia in this way, and stumble into a new cold war without solid evidence and only on the basis of certain clues”.

“If this is continued, then we will very quickly find ourselves in a Cold War 2.0 situation, and I do not think this is wise,” he added. “For everything we want from Russia and where we want Russia to change its behavior — be it Syria or the stationing of medium-range missiles — a new Cold War is not helpful, but possibly even harmful.”

The West and Russia may be on the brink of a new Cold War, some analysts suggest.

“I don’t think many of us would question that we do face a new Cold War,” said Dimitri Simes, Center for the National Interest president and chief executive officer.

“Now a new Cold War might be different in many respects than the old one,” he added. “First of all, a very different balance of forces. Second, the absence of an attractive international ideology on the Russian side. Third, obviously, Russia is much more exposed to the West than during the original Cold War, but also, fewer rules and, I think, perhaps more emotions on both sides and increasingly hostile emotions on both sides.”

There have also been comparisons made between the poisoning of a former Russian spy and Soviet behavior during the Cold War, the BBC adds.

“The Soviet Union clearly did try and kill people abroad who they didn’t like,” says Michael Cox, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. “So it isn’t that Russia is doing anything novel in that regard.”

The volatile state of Russia’s relations with the outside world today, exacerbated by a nerve agent attack on a former spy living in Britain, however, makes the diplomatic climate of the Cold War look reassuring, said Ivan I. Kurilla, an expert on Russian-American relations, and recalls a period of paralyzing mistrust that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

“If you look for similarities with what is happening, it is not the Cold War that can explain events but Russia’s first revolutionary regime,” which regularly assassinated opponents abroad, said Mr. Kurilla, a historian at the European University at St. Petersburg.

He told the New York Times that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had no interest in spreading a new ideology and fomenting world revolution, unlike the early Bolsheviks, but that Russia under Mr. Putin had “become a revolutionary regime in terms of international relations.”

The Kremlin has a dual agenda: to mobilize anti-western sentiment in Russian society, while at the same time engaging with the west and persuading the liberal democracies to co-operate with it, analyst Lilia Shevtsova (left), a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, writes for the Financial Times:

Great power status and the desire for external domination have long been central components of the Russian system of personalised power. But building a galaxy of satellite states, as the Soviet Union did, is no longer the only way Russia seeks such status. With diminishing resources, the Kremlin has increasingly resorted to intimidating the world’s liberal democracies into accepting Russia’s grand ambitions.

Tensions between the West and Russia are likely to escalate, at least in the short term, in what could look like a “Cold War on steroids,” Nina Khrushcheva, who is the granddaughter of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and who now teaches at the New School, in New York, told the New Yorker’s Robin Wright.

“Putin is judo-esque to the core of his being. For him, this is all a game: ‘Who’s he going to screw next?’ He wants the upper hand. He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t stand back. He sees an opening and strikes. He punches ten times what he receives. He’s a brilliant tactician but a petty man. We’ve seen that for all his eighteen years in power.”

Britain, but also other countries, have built up a dependence on Russia, be it oligarchs parking their money in London or Germany increasing its energy dependence on Russia by building another Nord Stream gas pipeline, notes Carnegie analyst Judy Dempsey. Both make a mockery of solidarity. Both run counter to resilience.

“Moscow will now try to divide the EU into two camps – the radical pro-British camp and those who they would think followed the EU because of the demands for solidarity rather than out of conviction,” said Konstantin Eggert, a Russian analyst and journalist.

In his opinion, the UK will also gradually escalate its measures against Russia.

“It is quite conceivable to me that quite soon there will be a British version of the Magnitsky Law and it seems that the desire to clamp down on Russian wealth in the UK is the most serious of all others over the last 15-17 years,” he told Al Jazeera.

 

These are aspects of how the Cold War created the world we live in now, notes Harvard’s Odd Arne Westad. But today’s international affairs have moved beyond the Cold War, he writes for Foreign Affairs:

  • Bipolarity is gone. If there is any direction in international politics today, it is toward multipolarity. The United States is getting less powerful in international affairs. China is getting more powerful. Europe is stagnant. Russia is a dissatisfied scavenger on the fringes of the current order. But other big countries such as India and Brazil are growing increasingly influential within their regions.
  • Ideology is no longer the main determinant. China, Europe, India, Russia, and the United States disagree on many things, but not on the value of capitalism and markets. China and Russia are both authoritarian states that pretend to have representative governments. But neither is out to peddle their system to faraway places, as they did during the Cold War. Even the United States, the master promoter of political values, seems less likely to do so under Trump’s “America first” agenda.
  • Nationalism is also on the rise. Having had a hard time reasserting itself after the ravages of two nationalist-fueled world wars and a Cold War that emphasized non-national ideologies, all great powers are now stressing identity and national interest as main features of international affairs. Cold War internationalists claimed that the national category would matter less and less. The post–Cold War era has proven them wrong. Nationalists have thrived on the wreckage of ideology-infused grand schemes for the betterment of humankind.

 

RTWT

March 28, 2018

Russia’s sham election shows many faces of Putin

Autocrats have a talent for producing impressive election results. It isn’t difficult to win when your opponents are not on the ballot, Russian democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza writes for the Washington Post:

In the last elections they ever ran in, Indonesian dictator Suharto achieved 75 percent of the vote; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had 89 percent; Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu mastered an impressive 98 percent. My friend Boris Vishnevsky, a leading opposition legislator in St. Petersburg, likes to point out that Ceausescu still had a 99 percent approval rating in December 1989, just one week before his trial (and subsequent execution). As all these victors found out in the end, the results of manipulated “elections” in authoritarian systems are a poor indicator of the actual state of public opinion.

U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated Putin on his victory, prompting a curt response from Republican U.S. Senator John McCain.

“An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” McCain said in a statement.

Putin seems, at present, invulnerable, argues John Lloyd, senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism:

At a gathering of mainly young Russian liberals which I attended last weekend, Lev Gudkov, the veteran pollster and head of the independent Levada Centre, showed the graphs which underpin the success: a loss of popularity for Putin after his 2012 election and then, with the taking of Crimea and the Russian-sponsored hostilities in Ukraine, a huge spike upwards to some 80 percent of support, a doubling of the figures. In spite of declining incomes, rising prices and the viral videos showing the luxury in which senior officials live, Putin has stayed at or near these heights, unthinkable for a democratic politician. There has been, and remains, no alternative to Russia’s strongman.

In a series of probing analyses, New Eastern Europe charts the prospects for Vladimir Putin, who was re-elected for a fourth term as president on 18 March and has now been in power longer than Leonid Brezhnev, Eurozine adds:

No way out? Mark Galeotti detects a sense of weariness – and not just among ordinary Russians: ‘The talk in Moscow is that Putin is bored with ruling Russia. This is reinforced by his lacklustre demeanour in public appearances as well as the minimalist nature of his election campaign.’

New vision required: Konstantin Eggert turns a light on a major dilemma of Russia’s beleaguered opposition: Putin’s successful monopolization of foreign policy. Opponents can highlight corruption all they like, but ‘as soon as the critics of the Kremlin refuse to discuss Russia’s relations with the outside world, they immediately become ordinary soldiers of Putin’. However, Eggert predicts that ‘Putin’s fourth term will be a time of simmering political crisis that will eventually burst into the open’. The key to a successful outcome will be someone piercing today’s stagnation with ‘an attractive and realistic picture of the future’.

The defining feature of Russia’s 2018 presidential vote was that it was an election without choice, Kara-Murza adds:

Two major opposition figures who had planned to run against Putin were absent from the ballot on Sunday. Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister and leader of the People’s Freedom Party, was shot and killed in February 2015 on a bridge in front of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, a prominent anti-corruption campaigner, was barred from running, thanks to a trumped-up Russian court sentence that was assessed by the European Court of Human Rights as “arbitrary.”

Most Russians only remember Nemtsov as an opposition leader who organized popular demonstrators against Putin’s autocratic regime, says Stanford University’s Michael McFaul (a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy). But I knew him for nearly two decades in a different role, when he was a popular, successful, democratically elected governor in Nizhny Novgorod, he writes for the Washington Post.

“Nemtsov boldly pursued radical economic reforms in that role, yet managed to maintain popular support and protect his reputation.  I also remember First Deputy Prime Minister Nemtsov, who challenged the oligarchs and made tackling corruption one of his highest priorities. He had the skills and charisma to have become a successful president – a successful democratic president,” McFaul adds, in an excerpt from his forthcoming book, “From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia” (May 2018):

RTWT

March 21, 2018

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