If you ever wondered what "threat inflation" looks like, here's an example

One of the biggest problems of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has been threat inflation, blowing actual threats seriously out of proportion. The notion that a victory by Ho Chi Minh’s Communist guerrillas were a deadly threat to US national security, or that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” including vials full of anthrax that he could unleash on the United States at any moment, are two classics of the genre. The first was based on a highly ideological and poorly informed view of the world. The latter was mainly deliberate lies concocted to justify the war that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush were determined to wage.

                                 
                               Colin Powell and his famous vial of mass destruction

Lots of people, including Americans who died in wars that the US should never have fought, were damaged unnecessarily because of the fear that made exaggerated threat claims credible.
Richard Herzinger has provided us with a current example, a six-page essay in a respectable German foreign policy journal, Internationale Politik. It carries the title, “The Presence of Evil.” That sounds like a headline in a popular philosophy magazine, or maybe some ponderous essay by one of the West Coast Straussians. Herzinger has published articles in Die Zeit and in Cicero, a German magazine that packages New Right conservatism into a highbrow form.

But this one is really a surprisingly vapid rant about Vladimir Putin and Russia.

So, you ask, if it so vapid, why I’m I writing about it?

Well, since you asked, it’s because it’s a remarkably good as an undiluted expression of a polemical rant thinly disguised as a serious foreign policy article. An unsettling reminder of the kind of neo-Cold-War clichés that I’m grimly confident we’ll be hearing for the next few years, often from Very Serious People.

[T]he skeptics did not understand the practical uses such actions could have for the Russian leadership, who thereby risked considerable international complications. They did not understand that [for Putin's regime, it] was not about following a rationality familiar to us [in the West], but about demonstrating the omnipotence and omnipresence of criminality. In this way, Western societies should become accustomed to its "normality" and their moral resilience worn down. In the long run, the aim [of Russian leadership] is to destroy all values and norms that stand in the way of the limitless legitimization of criminal acts. [my emphasis]

He characterizes Putin’s government this way:

They fantasize not only about rebuilding the Russian empire of the 19th century, but also about redeeming the entire world from Western liberal "decadence" - a "mission" for which they consider the use of unlimited force, including the use of nuclear weapons, to be permitted, if not affirmatively required.

In the end, however, all these constructs are only pretexts to keep the regime's machinery of violence, which has been heightened into ever new excesses, going. It’s about destruction for destruction's sake, because this is the only reason for its rule - that is, something considered the hallmark of evil. [my emphasis]

It’s considered a bit tacky at the moment to inquire too closely into the evidence for the Russian leadership’s precise imperial ambitions, much less about their supposed mission of “redeeming the entire world.” (Wasn’t that supposed to be the USSR’s goal in the last Cold War?)

But if a policymaker takes this conception of the current Russian government as accurate, he or she could only conclude that the only current goal of the country with the most nuclear weapons (Russia) is to obliterate humanity: “destruction for the sake of destruction.“ And presumably to fulfill his goals, Putin will need to launch all his nukes before he dies.

It sounds like what we need is one of those famous American regime-change operations. And we need it desperately, quickly, no matter how risky the attempt! Settling for any lesser goal - like restoring Ukraine’s sovereignty over its full legal territory - would be a wimpy surrender that would guarantee Putin will destroy the world for destruction’s sake!

Unlike the fictional Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Herzinger does attempt to give some shred of intellectual respectability to what is essentially a rant about how Putin is evil - even Absolute Evil (he actually uses the phrase). He references a few philosophers (Hannah Arendt, Andre Glucksmann, Leszek Kolakowski), cites Christian ideas about evil, and provides familiar cultural references (Moby Dick, the Last Temptation of Christ movie, and the Rolling Stones [?!]). And it’s gonna take real men to git the job done! Not a bunch of squishes who sit around letting the Rooskies steal their Precious Bodily Fluids!

In “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), the demented, deteriorating and combative General Jack Ripper bloviated about “precious bodily fluids”: pic.twitter.com/pFiwguGjWh

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) November 18, 2020

Unlike the fictional Gen. Jack D. Ripper, Herzinger does attempt to give some shred of intellectual respectability to what is essentially a rant about how Putin is evil - even Absolute Evil (he actually uses the phrase). He references a few philosophers (Hannah Arendt, Andre Glucksmann, Leszek Kolakowski), cites Christian ideas about evil, and provides familiar cultural references (Moby Dick, the Last Temptation of Christ movie, and the Rolling Stones [?!]).

But a more appropriate image for Herzinger’s essay would be an animation of Porky Pig pounding the ground with a club and yelling, “Evil! Evil, evil, evil!!”

Do I even need to say that the piece features Hitler references? With, of course, Putin as the “Hitler” of the moment.

One can only speculate as to why IP thought this perspective was worth validating. But the only thing really surprising about it is such a superficial way of saying for six pages that Putin is evil, so evil, really really evil.

The truth is that in the foreign policy establishments of the US and NATO, Very Serious People are willing to accept such polemics as thoroughly respectable. Remember Tom Friedman’s classic “Suck.On.This” rant in favor of the Iraq War?

But basing policy on bombastic fantasies and careless historical analogies can have disastrous results.

Gen. Jack D. Ripper would surely have been sorry to see him cave at the end that way!