VH said:
Putin is a proud man and to be bested by a person he despises, Obama, may force him into irrational actions...
While it is largely accurate to describe the escalation of this conflict in personal terms on Putin's part - his siloviki clique espouses "vertical power" "ideals" all the way back to Ivan the Terrible, after all - the democratic, liberal, human rights believing counterweight in the rest of us constitutes very much an empirical, evolved and multidimensional value based system rather than personality driven one. Therefore I would be disinclined to describe the developments mainly in terms of leaders personifying their respective "sides".
That being said, all of this does bring Obama a full circle of sorts towards the end of his presidency. It came out before Obama was first elected that one of his favorite philosophers is Reinhold Niebuhr ("
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." - Niebuhr). Obama should well remember
what he told of his ideas about Niebuhr in an interview with (conservative NYT columnist) David Brooks in 2007: "
... there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism." In other words, he does essentially believe in progress, growth, dreams and happiness beyond and within an individual. "Hope", as we would come to recall the succinct slogan, its opaqueness inviting ridicule which nonetheless did manage to belie the irreducibility of value based thinking into blunt propaganda form. Whereas blunt, unintellectual tools do conform to propaganda very well, which brings me to ...
Contrast(ing) this (value based thinking) with Putin whose World view is that everything is a zero sum game, all "interests" being mutually exclusive and him essentially being the state. Therefore his type of pragmatism is, once liberated of the largely superficial but nonetheless restrictive constraints of communist iconography, that everything is power and unrestrained power - be it dressed in politics, religious, financial, military or whatever guise - is ultimately just for the wielding. A cause in itself - thus everything is a conflict, a war on various levels of boil. He's also getting on in years and the timing of his actions has as much to do with his (and his siloviki friends') "biological clock" as anything - have fun with it now or never. This "doctrine" - if it can be called that - was
described by General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation not too long ago in these terms (edited for brevity, see link for full text): "
In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template. ... The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures — applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. ... All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special-operations forces. The open use of forces — often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation — is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict."
This is Putin, Gerasimov et al. essentially justifying their power grabs on previous, more or less flawlessly altruistic international interventions (by whatever means i.e. UN, medical, financial, or even plain military) even in places that could only benefit from those, declaring fundamental human value(s) and equal opportunity merely a ruse. Making a deadly caricature of the intentions, means and motives of those who consider values very real (despite being human and thus imperfect), pointing to our failures of our standards and corruption to rationalize theirs. Make no mistake, they don't point to and celebrate the failings of others to correct anyone but to perpetuate them. No, this is not cold war. Oil is fungible and entangles us with Putin so we've also got to think and act beyond that while dealing with the sort of practicalities that Assad, ISIS an Iran as Putin's proxies/allies might entail locally. I would posit that the outcome (be it considered in ultimate or continuous form) does not hang solely on what we can do about this state of affairs or to Putin and his ilk - rather our success depends on our ability to act and improve
despite him.
