Geopolitics

There are moments in history when evil stops being an abstraction and acquires a face, a pulse, a fixed address. Most of the time the malice that drives a war is genuinely distributed — across institutions, ideologies, bureaucracies, the cold inertia of millions of people doing their small assigned part. You cannot point at it. You cannot, in any literal sense, end it. But occasionally the architecture of a regime tightens around one man so completely that the distinction between the man and the machine collapses. When that happens, a question arises that polite society prefers not to ask aloud: if the war flows from a single living person, is killing that person a legitimate way to stop the war? I want to take that question seriously, because I think the honest answer is yes — and because the reasons we treat one such man as a candidate and another as untouchable have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with fear. ...

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 story that has become almost an article of faith among people who watch this war closely. It goes by a code name now, a colonel’s pseudonym, and it holds that the President of the United States is a recruited asset of Russian intelligence, that somewhere in a Moscow archive sits a folder with his operational alias, and that this folder explains everything he does. The appeal of the theory is obvious. It is tidy. It converts a maddening, inexplicable man into a known quantity. If he is an agent, then his every move against Ukraine, every gutted alliance, every gift handed to the Kremlin, snaps into a single line of cause and effect. I understand the temptation completely. And I want to argue, carefully, that we should resist it — not because the truth about this man is reassuring, but because the recruitment theory is the weakest available explanation for behavior that a much simpler idea explains in full. ...

There is a story the Kremlin tells about its own defeat, and the remarkable thing is how many people outside the Kremlin have come to believe it. The story goes like this: cut off from a hostile and decadent West, Russia has executed a grand strategic turn to the East, finding in China a co-equal partner, a civilizational ally, a second pole around which a new and fairer world will organize itself. The sanctions, in this telling, were a gift. They freed Russia from dependence on a dying Europe and delivered it into the embrace of the rising power of the century. The pivot to China is presented not as a retreat but as a triumph — the proof that the war was worth fighting, that the multipolar world Putin promised has in fact been born. ...

We have a habit, and it is a comfortable one, of keeping the world’s wars in separate folders. Ukraine goes in one. The Middle East goes in another. North Korea’s perpetual menace gets a folder of its own, filed somewhere at the back where we hope it will stay quiet. Each folder has its own experts, its own history, its own list of grievances and borders and broken treaties. And because each looks so distinct on the surface, we treat them as distinct in their nature: this war is about territory, that one is about religion, that other one is about a paranoid dynasty and its missiles. We reach for a local explanation every time, and the local explanation is always available, because every war does have a local cause. ...