mtracey | If there is any “threat” that “Western” elites have been most exercised about for the past several years, it’s this supposed international surge of populist illiberalism and/or right-wing radicalism, and Putin was appointed as the main global exporter and string-puller. Which made it all the more untenable over the course of the latest Ukraine standoff for a Democratic Administration, especially one that campaigned on “confronting” Russia, to offer any significant concession to the world’s Number 1 progenitor of white supremacist extremism. You know, the same extremism that we are told nearly toppled the US Government on January 6.
It was consequently ruled out as unthinkable “appeasement” to give Putin a concession on Ukraine’s NATO membership that wouldn’t have actually conceded anything, but might have averted war. Yes, there did already exist a baseline attachment to the sacrosanct principle of NATO expansion, but that’s mostly confined to cloistered NatSec elites. The principle is now endorsed with such fevered gusto on account of Putin emerging as an all-purpose global villain — the man behind the curtain of horrendous White Nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and even “anti-vaxxers.”
You can see the contours of this new ideological conflict all over the place. Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, tied the trucker “siege” earlier this month to the broader phenomenon of “liberal democracies being confronted with serious and repeated threats” by nefarious right-wing agitators — whose Grand Poobah we’ve long been told is none other than, you guessed it, Putin. So there was very little compunction about imposing some of the most extreme due process-shredding Emergency measures in Canada’s history to squash these “insurrectionists.” Doing so even swelled everyone with a sense of tingling patriotic pride, as the “siege” was said to be just another front in a seismic global struggle. “Canada and our allies will defend democracy,” declared Justin Trudeau as he froze bank accounts without judicial review and empowered police to seize private property. “We are taking these actions today to stand against authoritarianism.”
Of course, it’s important to note that — as per usual — this grandiose ideological vision of Russia’s designs mostly exists in the addled imaginations of think tankers. While it’s apparent that Russia has grown more authoritarian in recent years, the US “intelligence community” actually just studied the question of whether Putin was really backing all these horribly de-stabilizing right-wing insurrectionists all across the world. The strongest conclusion that their subsequent Report could muster is that the Russian Government “probably tolerates” support by “private Russian entities” for some dangerously motivated international extremists — but as the authors sorrowfully concede, “we lack indications of Russian Government direct support.” (With “support” defined as “financing, material support, training, or guidance.”) Really, the CIA and FBI couldn’t even come up with any evidence that the Russian Government has provided “guidance” to these sinister factions? What a bummer. This less-than-fervent finding might explain why it took approximately seven months for the Report — written in July 2021 by the Director of National Intelligence — to see the light of day when it was published on February 10 by Yahoo News, and even then it appears to have hardly made a ripple.
Naturally, this largely-buried Report had zero effect on changing the general perception of Putin as the standard-bearer of global right-wing extremism, or that he subverted the 2016 election on behalf of these evil ideological aims, or that he’s fueling insurrectionist turmoil all over the world — including perhaps in Canada, or at the Capitol on January 6. Yes, it’s true that a marginal contingent of the Right has expressed some half-baked affinity with whatever gestures Putin does make about ethnic nationalism, but this contingent is almost entirely irrelevant for practical purposes. I’d also note that for all the depictions of Putin as the savior of ethnic nationalism, at his annual end-of-the-year press conference in December 2021, he hailed Russia as having “a very solid foundation as an ethnically diverse state.”
There are a huge array of factors that led to this invasion. Some are necessarily a matter of speculation, like what’s going on inside Putin’s brain. Others are tangible and available for all to see, such as that certain demands were made by Russia, and any accommodation to those demands was rejected out-of-hand by the US — thus negating any real diplomatic process. To understand why this happened, you have to survey the ideological battlefield that was already being fought on for years. And if you think examining any of this “defends Putin,” there are plenty of other media outlets right now that will be happy to spoon-feed your preferred infantile pablum.
