The Ethics of Putin

It’s hard to believe that I only discovered the work of Richard Hanania about a year ago. I’ve been promoting him ever since. Since the Ukraine War began, however, some of my friends have been urging me to rethink my enthusiasm. They especially object to “Why a Multipolar World Will Be More Humane,” an essay Hanania released four days after Putin’s invasion began. While the rest of the world was denouncing Putin, Hanania refused to join in:

When I oppose American intervention in Ukraine, I’m not going to preface it by saying how bad Putin is, at least until those in favor of being involved have to answer for Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the other disasters that have characterized American foreign policy over the last several decades. I can at least understand why Putin does not like missiles, troop deployments, and bases on his borders, or why he would not want a neighbor to engage in cultural genocide against his fellow Russians.

But I’m definitely not going to rethink my enthusiasm for Hanania at this time. “Why a Multipolar World Will Be More Humane” is a thought-provoking essay. And while I think key parts are wrong, the arguments are worth pondering. The heart of his argument:

Regarding the question of whether the US is morally superior to its enemies abroad, we can think about it by way of analogy. Imagine you are trying to judge the moral worth of two men. A has a dispute with his neighbor, so he goes and burns down his house. That seems like a pretty bad thing to do, and we should judge him for that.

B, in contrast, faces no threat from those closest to him, but decides for no conceivable reason to go two blocks over, arm the weaker party in an ongoing dispute, and watch the two sides start killing each other in large numbers. All the while he brings women’s studies majors into the neighborhood to lecture the children about “toxic masculinity.” If the people of the neighborhood reject B, he places them under an economic blockade and destroys their livelihoods, starving some of the children to death. B does this while patting himself on the back for being the defender of the “rules-based neighborhood order.”

Which man is worse? If the two men were political opponents, which one do you think would do more damage if he gained power?

Obviously, A represent Putin, or Xi Jinping, or most of the world leaders we classify as “bad guys.” B is the United States. A person who commits crimes for rational self-interested reasons is always less dangerous, and in some ways more moral, than one who does so for ideological reasons or because he enjoys watching the world burn down (the analogy isn’t perfect because American foreign policy is in the interests of a certain class, but not the country as a whole, so it is “rational” in a different sense).

If this is overly abstract, here’s how Hanania applies his story to Syria:

From the early days of the Syrian Civil War, anyone who knew anything about the region could understand that the only meaningful opposition to the government had always been Islamist. Whenever I would read about an atrocity being committed by the Assad regime, I could always at least understand that the men of that government were fighting for their wives and daughters not to be raped, which often happened to Alawites, Christians, and others who fell into the hands of US-backed rebels. Who could say what they would do when facing the same circumstances? One can understand why if you’re Assad you’ll take the bad press and indictment at The Hague as the price of survival.

Contrast these decisions that have to be made by men on the ground with the actions of those who sat in air-conditioned offices in Washington, doing things like sharing PowerPoints about “gender mainstreaming in IR” and talking about how as students of color they don’t have to visit the countries they are “experts” in, while deciding to prolong and exacerbate a conflict in Syria less than a decade after they’d already destroyed its neighbor. As I’ve shown, they made things worse, giving the US government moral responsibility not only for the atrocities committed by the rebels, but the regime’s reaction to them when faced with a threat to its survival.

The claim that “A person who commits crimes for rational self-interested reasons is always less dangerous, and in some ways more moral, than one who does so for ideological reasons or because he enjoys watching the world burn down” is overstated, but seems pretty solid. The application to Syria seems compelling to me. The U.S. and it allies really did try to overthrow Assad despite the high risks of victory for radical Islam and/or a horrific war of attrition. And none of their failures in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan seems to quench their self-righteous Action Bias. “Something must be done; this is something; therefore this must be done” is only a slight caricature of the reasoning of the Western foreign policy establishment.

However, I think that Hanania is wrong to put Putin in group A. He totally belongs in group B. Putin’s actions in Ukraine are plainly not in Russia’s rational self-interest. Ideology and/or sheer self-indulgent power-hunger are the only plausible motivations behind his actions.

What makes me so sure? All the following:

1. Russia’s armed forces have always had massive conventional superiority over Ukraine’s.

2. Russia’s conventional superiority is stable, because Russia has a far larger population and GDP per capita.

3. Before Russia seized Ukrainian territory in 2014, even the most pro-Western governments in Ukraine were eager to maintain friendly - or at least civil - relations with Russia, for obvious economic, cultural, and military reasons.

4. The “Nazi Ukraine” story is transparently silly. It makes 100x more sense to call Russia a Stalinist country. Not only is Putin a former KGB colonel, but the Communist Party continues to be Russia’s second-largest party.

5. Even if Russia’s army vanished overnight, they still have the ultimate deterrent of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. This all but guarantees that Russia can do anything internally without provoking invasion. Seriously, Russia could start a second Great Terror in full view of Western media and no other country would even dare to bomb the train lines to the death camps.

6. The only serious military threat to Russia, then, is that they’ll provoke nuclear war by terrifying other countries. Which is precisely the path Putin is taking.

7. Nuclear weapons aside, Russia’s invasion is now very likely to push Finland and Sweden into NATO. Even if the Russians fully conquer Ukraine, the combined GDP of Sweden and Finland is more than five times the GDP of Ukraine. They could easily turn that economic might into mass destruction - and they’re awfully close to St. Petersburg.

8. Hanania rightly points out that sanctions are unlikely to deter Putin. But according to Hanania’s own survey of the research, sanctions are likely to severely impoverish the Russian people. Furthermore, once sanctions come on, they almost never come off. If Putin really cared about Russian national self-interest, he would have factored these costs into his calculations - and stayed his hand.

9. You could say, “Putin is fighting for his own survival, not the survival of Russia.” If he just annexed Donetsk and Luhansk with loud demagoguery, you might have a point. But actually invading Ukraine has greatly multiplied the chance of Putin’s own demise. Betting markets have been giving Putin a rough 20% chance of losing power in 2022.

10. What then explains Putin’s actions? Russian nationalist ideology is probably part of the story, but to me this mostly looks like sheer power-hunger. Putin wants Ukraine’s leaders to be his junior partners; they assert some independence; he gets angry - and tries to bring them to their knees.

At best, then, Putin is in the same deplorable category as the negligent warmongers of the West. But on reflection, he’s much worse. When the United States decides to “take out” the Taliban, Saddam, Gadhaffi, or Assad, they don’t fret much about what they’ll do if they win.

But to its credit, the U.S. elite does ask one vital question before invading a country. Namely: Is this a pitifully weak and virtually friendless regime? If the answer is no, the U.S. proceeds with extreme caution. (Even Syria is a poor counterexample; though a Russian ally, their bond is flimsy compared to something like NATO).

Back in 2014, Ukraine was arguably still in this “pitifully weak and virtually friendless” category. During the last eight years, however, this clearly changed. Perhaps the strongest sign of this was when the European Union granted Ukrainians visa-free travel. The upshot is that Putin invaded a country with powerful and committed allies, several of them with nuclear weapons. The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria were bad for those countries, but they did not plausibly endanger the peace of the world. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine does. We’ll probably avoid nuclear war over Ukraine, but it’s hard to believe that the risk hasn’t multiplied tenfold this year.

Could all of this been avoided with Western appeasement? Though I’m a vocal fan of appeasement, I fear the answer this time was, “Probably not.” It’s hard to appease someone who keeps denying his plans to invade you - and refuses to even deliver a public ultimatum clearly stating his demands. While I’d still recommend trying appeasement under these circumstances, I would do so with modest hope, at best.

Bottom line: Hanania makes some great points. His framework is sound. But using this very framework, we can see that Putin really is the moral monster his detractors claim. Almost all politicians are evil, but Putin is one of the worst on Earth.