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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Weakness of the Despot (The New Yorker)
Link to tweet
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin
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https://archive.ph/swnIt
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Kotkin has a distinguished reputation in academic circles. He is a professor of history at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. He has myriad sources in various realms of contemporary Russia: government, business, culture. Both principled and pragmatic, he is also more plugged in than any reporter or analyst I know. Ever since we met in Moscow, many years agoKotkin was doing research on the Stalinist industrial city of MagnitogorskIve found his guidance on everything from the structure of the Putin regime to its roots in Russian history to be invaluable.
Earlier this week, I spoke with Kotkin about Putin, the invasion of Ukraine, the American and European response, and what comes next, including the possibility of a palace coup in Moscow. Our conversation, which appears in the video above, has been edited for length and clarity.
Weve been hearing voices both past and present saying that the reason for what has happened is, as George Kennan put it, the strategic blunder of the eastward expansion of nato. The great-power realist-school historian John Mearsheimer insists that a great deal of the blame for what were witnessing must go to the United States. I thought wed begin with your analysis of that argument.
I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar. But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldnt be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. Its not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before nato existedin the nineteenth centuryRussia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and its not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. Its not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.
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Me.
(35,454 posts)for every ill in the world.
Nevilledog
(50,682 posts)Me.
(35,454 posts)added...especially when it's nowhere the truth as the article goes on to say.
Beastly Boy
(9,060 posts)Half of Europe would be facing the fate of Ukraine. Millions of people facing Putin's despotism. It is ridiculous to suggest that NATO could have affected, one way or another, Russia's historically megalomaniac view of its destiny to dominate Europe.This view, along with absolute despotism, are the only two constants in Russia's entire history since at least Ivan the Terrible. No appeasement would have been sufficient to disinvest Russia's ruling elites, whoever they may have been, from this maniacal, and eventually futile, pursuit of this grandiose delusion.
NATO's expansion, as we can clearly see now, may have saved millions of lives, along with Western democracy and the rule of law.
PortTack
(32,606 posts)Skittles
(152,964 posts)dalton99a
(81,068 posts)How do you define the West?
The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. Western means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But thats what the West is. And that West, which we expanded in the nineties, in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.
If you assumed that the West was just going to fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; if you assumed that the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; if you assumed that Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraineif you assumed all of that, then maybe you thought you could take Kyiv in two days or four days. But those assumptions were wrong.