Empire

Every few weeks a fresh wave of optimism washes over the commentary class. Sanctions are about to bite. The oil price is about to crack. The defence budget is about to run dry. Soon, we are told, the Kremlin simply will not be able to keep fighting, and the war will grind to a halt of its own accord, like a machine that has run out of fuel. I understand the appeal of this hope. I do not share it. The whole prediction rests on a hidden assumption: that the war is draining some finite resource which must, sooner or later, be exhausted. But the resource that actually sustains this war is not finite, and the men who run Russia have, by now, far stronger reasons to continue the slaughter than to end it. The uncomfortable truth is that peace has become more dangerous to the regime than war. Until we grasp that, we will keep mistaking our own wishes for forecasts. ...

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

There is a recurring question that comes up whenever people try to take the measure of the men who currently dominate the headlines: can a figure like Putin, or like Trump, actually change the course of history the way a Lenin or a Genghis Khan once did? The instinct is to answer by ranking personalities — to argue that these two are smaller men than the world-shakers of the past, or that the historical conditions simply aren’t ripe. I think that instinct, while not entirely wrong, misses the decisive point. The scale of a personality matters, yes. But what truly separates the man who reshapes the world from the man who merely disrupts it is not raw force of character. It is whether he carries an idea in his head — a developed picture of a future he intends to build. And it is precisely here that both Putin and Trump are empty. ...