The Ethics of Putin: Hanania Replies

A while back, I criticized Richard Hanania’s anti-anti-Putin position as not only mistaken, but inconsistent with Hanania’s plausible general principle for assessing such things. Now Hanania replies. Enjoy!

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I appreciate Bryan remaining my friend despite some shadowy figures apparently whispering in his ear. Responding to his piece puts me in a bit of a tough position, since I’m basically having to more explicitly defend Putin using specifics rather than make a more general argument, but taking unpopular positions is something neither of us tends to shy away from, so I'm up to the challenge.

Using the framework I put forth in my original piece as the starting point, I will present a few mitigating arguments in Putin’s favor. Not that any of this makes him a good man, only that it makes him a “moral approximate” to American leaders, and possibly even slightly better. I’m stepping back a bit from my claim that he’s clearly better than most American leaders upon further consideration, making an exception for George W. Bush, who was an outlier in how much destruction he caused abroad and how negligent he was in doing so. Just as a reminder, the framework I presented, and that Bryan agrees with, says that you judge leaders by two factors. These aren’t the only two possible criteria, but they form the basis of how I think about foreign affairs.

1)      How limited or unlimited their ambitions are abroad, that is how much influence and control they seek over others outside their borders (China’s campaign against the Uighurs is domestically focused, so that doesn’t count against them when judging Chinese influence in the world geopolitically, and things like democracy don’t matter here either)

2)      The foreseeable consequences of their actions, more than deontological rules like “don’t violate sovereignty,” which everyone violates when they want to anyway.

Let’s start with 1. Bryan is right that Putin cares about more than the safety and well-being of the people who live within the borders of modern Russia. He cares about the fate of Russian minorities in neighboring countries, along with having a desire that Russia be culturally influential and play a large and powerful role in world affairs. I don’t think he would be content for Russia to be economically wealthy and passive in foreign affairs in the way Japan has been. It’s a credit to Japan’s leaders that they took this path. True enough, Putin is way more ambitious than Japan, though he pales in comparison to just about anyone in Washington on this front.

As for 2, one has to remember that on the brink of war, most analysts didn’t think that the Ukrainians would put up much of a fight. There was even at least one quote from a Ukrainian official that I remember about how there was no way they could survive a conventional war for very long, though I wasn’t able to track it down. In February, it was conventional wisdom that Ukraine would lose, and if it was to have any hope of thwarting Russian plans it should prepare for guerilla war (see here, here, and here). General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that Kiev could fall within 72 hours. People are misremembering how taken for granted it was that conquering Ukraine would be a cakewalk for the Russians. The US was only hoping for a long and bloody war in the insurgency phrase, which they actually might not have gotten if the Ukrainian army fell apart (see the lack of serious insurgency in areas where Russia has control, which I predicted, though like everyone else I erred in not foreseeing a strong conventional military resistance).

In retrospect, we know that Putin started a bloody war that may go on for a very long time and is having tragic consequences for the world. But that wasn’t obvious at the beginning. This argument implies that Putin would be ethically more defensible if he had planned the war better, and it’s strange to judge someone’s moral worth by how good they are at war. But I’m willing to bite that bullet in the interest of sticking to this consequentialist framework given that there aren’t very good alternatives. War is unpredictable, which is why “don’t invade other countries” is such a good rule to stick to –despite what I say in 2 above about not having any deontological rules – based on utilitarian grounds if nothing else. But this is a rule that the US violates much more often than Putin.

Bryan makes the distinction between the US, which only invades those who are “weak and virtually friendless,” and Putin, who started an armed conflict that involves the US and all of NATO. Again, there’s a bit of hindsight bias here, in that nobody knew if Ukraine would even last long enough to get any aid. I agree that he really upped the risk of a major conflict though, since these things are inherently unpredictable. But remember, this all started with the US going to Russia’s borders and helping overthrow a Russian ally. The US by meddling in Ukraine has been playing with fire since Bush invited them to join NATO in 2008 (see this Adam Tooze piece on a lot of the under the radar developments in the last few years). Launching the invasion is just the latest in a string of steps taken by both the US and Russia that could lead to WWIII. It’s a big one, but the fact that it is the US that is in Russia’s neighborhood looking for military alliances rather than the other way around factors a lot in my judgement. And up until the invasion, it really was the US that was taking the most aggressive steps to change the status quo. Again, moral approximates.

The US you can see as taking a series of relatively small incremental steps that in the aggregate all helped create a greater risk of WWIII as Mearsheimer and other realists warned they would, and Russia responded with a larger and more dramatic act pushing us in the same direction. It’s a classic security dilemma, a concept that doesn’t always work in international affairs but fits in this case.

As for whether Russia faced an objective threat from Ukraine and NATO, consider that Ukraine has never given up on its ambitions of regaining the pre-February 24 territory Russia took over either directly or through its proxies. Bryan says Russia has nuclear weapons so Ukraine wouldn’t invade, but there have actually been a few cases of nuclear powers being attacked by non-nuclear states. Nobody was marching to Moscow, but Ukraine trying to take Donetsk and Luhansk back at some point in the future with Western help was a real possibility. Now you might say that those territories “belong” to Ukraine anyway, and others might say that the people in Donbas and Crimea have the right to self-determination and after 2014 there was a new status quo that needed to be respected. And of course, as Bryan says, Russia was responsible for creating that new status quo in the first place. But it all started with the American-backed coup in Kiev, and I think the entire point we’re arguing here is how bad Putin is relative to the US (out of curiosity, I wonder if Bryan agrees with me that China is easily one of the most innocent great powers in history, given the gap between its capabilities and how little it meddles abroad!). Even if Putin could have prevented Ukraine from taking back Crimea and other territories without an invasion, he clearly wanted to prevent there being a Ukraine that had a free hand in forcibly assimilating its Russian-speaking population and otherwise orienting the country westward with American help. Again, I grant that cross-border Russian nationalism is something Putin cares about, probably to his detriment. I just think it’s something that’s less crazy than Americans caring about whether Saudi Arabia has the upper hand over Iran, whether some Latin American country is tough enough in fighting the war on drugs, or most of the other things Washington cares about but shouldn’t.