Cold Warrior?

It’s popular to deride Putin as a throwback, a Cold Warrior out of his time. Peter Pomerantsev thinks this underestimates Putin’s grasp of contemporary geopolitical realities.

A short story by one of Vladislav Surkov, an advisor to Putin, offers a clue to Putin’s strategy. Surkov’s story is about the fifth world war, a “non-linear war” that is not nation-v-nation, or coalition-v-coalition but a war of “all against all.”

Putin’s strategy depends on his conclusion that the old blocky alliances are no longer relevant: “As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally ‘Western’ companies, such as BP, Exxon, Mercedes, and BASF.”

What does matter in the globalized economy is capital and finance: “many Western countries welcome corrupt financial flows from the post-Soviet space; it is part of their economic models, and not one many want disturbed.”

Putin finds the dark side to Thomas Friedman’s sunny globalization: “Part of the rationale for fast-tracking Russia’s inclusion into the global economy was that interconnection would be a check on aggression. But the Kremlin has figured out that this can be flipped: Interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression.”