Although RDI’s activities apparently focus on democratic governance issues, it’s pretty clear that it is, uh, at least receptive to neocon foreign policy prescriptions. As Wikipedia also notes:
In November of 2023, RDI hosted its first annual Frontlines of Freedom Conference to address transnational repression. The event was hosted in partnership with Freedom House, Johns Hopkins University, the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, PEN America, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, among others.Kasparov recently posted on Substack Notes a comment that should make all good neocons happy:
Why would Russia see that as anything but a sign that NATO countries would take a direct attack on a NATO member state as anything but a serious threat to their security that would trigger the mutual-defense clause? “Credibility” may be the most overrated concept in Western foreign policy discussions. But it seems very credible at the moment that at least the NATO members (except Trump’s US) are very serious about pushing back against any Russian territorial aggression against their own countries and those of their NATO partners.
In other words, the fact that NATO countries haven’t gone directly to war with Russia over Ukraine does not mean that Russia can assume they are unwilling to stand by their very-long-time NATO commitments. I would agree that NATO decisionmakers were more than a bit arrogant and even reckless in treating NATO expansion as a kind of “freebie” that would not likely result in heightened tensions with Russia. But there seems to be no good reason that Russian decisionmakers would conclude that European NATO members, even without the full support of the US, are not deadly serious about their NATO defense commitments.
There are plenty of valid questions and criticisms around the policy NATO followed since the Russian buildup in preparation for an invasion of Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2002.
I do think that there has a been a serious amount of threat inflation around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s perfectly possible to see various and even contradictory elements in evaluating Russia’s current situation: Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in 2022 after having illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and having promoted partisan warfare against Ukraine in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces).
NATO declared officially in 2008, against very public protests from Moscow, that both Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of NATO. Russia regarded that prospect, especially with Ukraine, as an existential security threat. Russian leaders in taking that position were likely indulging in their own version of threat inflation. Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders have signaled indirectly that they might someday want to make all of Ukraine part of Russia. Russia’s government is a corrupt dictatorship dominated by Putin, a talented political operator who is willing to resort to imprisonment and assassination against opponents he finds annoying. The Russian army has committed serious war crimes in Ukraine, including mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children and sending them to Russia.
But neocons typically look at a messy combination of facts like those and retreat into their baseline position of: It’s always 1938! And Neville Chamberlain is always on the verge of giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler! And when he does it will start a new world war!!
The European view of Russia, which has historically largely been shared by the US, has been that it’s a grim autocracy which is a constant threat to its neighbors. And that was partly a reality-based view. In addition, after the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 established a new international arrangement in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, Russia’s Czar actually became a guarantor of the old (i.e., non-democratic) regimes in Central and Western Europe.
And that was a lasting impression across the political spectrum. A majority of the German Social Democrats in 1914 voted to support war credits out of fear that a Russian victory in the war would suppress democratic governance and reinforce autocracy in Germany and much of Europe. The Russian bogeyman has been a powerful image in Europe for the last two centuries.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 which produced a Communist government in Russia flipped the bogeyman image from a rightwing to a leftwing one. And the Soviet government and Communist Party did proclaim themselves to be the vanguard of the world socialist revolution which would overthrow capitalist system in Europe and America. Once it became clear around 1923 that there was not likely to be a Communist revolution in Germany anytime soon, the USSR showed itself willing and able to make hardheaded pragmatic deals in foreign policy that did not place top priority on generating revolutions in other countries. (For that matter, Lenin’s acceptance of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918 was a bluntly pragmatic decision.)
Ideology does matter, because it shapes the way the public and decisionmakers process information and set goals, But the current international system is one of sovereign states. And, as the “realist” foreign-policy theorists constantly stress, that international system imposes certain kinds of considerations on its participants. That doesn’t mean that countries have no options from which to choose. It means that they don’t have complete control over the system that defines the practical options at any given time.
And a perpetual problem is that foreign policy in all countries is made by human beings. If the TechBro dystopian visions of a world run by AI systems like Skynet in the Terminator movies actually come true, maybe they will make more competent decisions that flesh-and-blood actors. Maybe.
Ideology is a factor in foreign policy, as we see in the Authoritarian International that somehow manages to put American fascists, European antisemites and authoritarians, along with Israel and Russia into some kind of anti-democracy trend. But, unlike the elaborate doctrinal pronouncements with which Soviet leaders concerned themselves, the current capitalist (and, yes, imperialist) Russian regime does not have anything like the old Soviet Communist approach of ideological aspirations. The modern-day Kremlinologists have to sort through a variety of conservative Christian religious positions and amorphous romantic nationalist views to get a picture of what the current ruling ideology may be at any given time. Some figures like Alexander Dugin are at least known in the West as influential Russian ideological thinkers. But they don’t provide some clear master plan for a coherent “Putinist” ideological outlook.
There was a cynical saying associated with the Nixon Administration back in the day – another regime with definite authoritarian tendencies but also a cold pragmatic streak when it came to foreign policy – “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
Obviously, diplomatic signaling often takes the form of “what we say.” So policymakers can’t ignore that. But everyone needs to be cautious about neocons trotting out scary-sounding snippets of Russian statements to justify their own it’s-always-1938” perspective.
Notes:
(1) Renew Democracy Initiative. Wikipedia 03/11/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Renew_Democracy_Initiative&oldid=127987273> (Accessed: 20205-22-08).
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