Putin knows history hasn't ended

Neither the American policy makers nor the European ones who stumbled into this bear trap are stupid, but this episode is confirmation that the problem that has haunted Western statesmanship since 1989 is still with us. Both President Obama and the many-headed collection of committees that constitutes the decision-making apparatus of the EU believe that the end of the Cold War meant an end to geopolitics.

This helps explain why American diplomacy these days is about order and norms. The objectives are global: an environmental climate treaty, the abolition of nuclear weapons, the creation of new global governance mechanisms like the G-20, the further expansion of free trade agreements, and so on. When the U.S. voices its objections—to Bashar Assad’s slaughter in Syria, say, or to the Ukrainian crackdown this week—they are stated in terms of global norms. And so U.S. diplomacy with Russia has focused on order-building questions like nonproliferation, while gravely underestimating the degree to which Russia’s geopolitical interests conflict with those of the U.S.

This is not so much an intellectual error as a political miscalculation. For American and European policy makers, the 1989 geopolitical settlement of the Cold War seemed both desirable and irreversible. Powers like Russia, China and Iran, who might be dissatisfied with either the boundaries or the legal and moral norms that characterized the post-Cold War world, lacked the power to do anything about it. This outlook is Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” on steroids: Humanity had not only discovered the forms of government and economic organization under which it would proceed from here on out, it had found the national boundaries and the hierarchy of states that would last indefinitely.

There are many things that Vladimir Putin doesn’t understand, but geopolitics isn’t one of them. His ability to identify and exploit the difference between the West’s rhetoric and its capabilities and intentions has allowed him to stop NATO expansion, split Georgia, subject Washington to serial humiliations in Syria and, now, to bring chaos to Ukraine.