What's behind Russia's backlash against the West

Whether it's Hillary or Trump in the White House come January 20, Russia promises to be the top geopolitical challenge for America in 2017. Its quest for security in the post-post-Cold War world is fundamentally at odds with the American vision for how the world should be and how its people should live.

On the central front of this new East-West confrontation, Moscow is beefing up its military presence around Ukraine to bolster and maintain its strategic "escalation dominance" over its smaller but vital neighbor in the two-and-a-half-year crisis that has effectively established Kiev as the linchpin of US and NATO efforts (however halfhearted) to contain Russian expansionism.

The redeployment of one particular unit near the Ukrainian frontier is telling:

In the Rostov region, which is already packed with Russian military bases, contract servicemen of the 33rd Motor Rifle Brigade have returned from Maikop in the Caucasus. Russia is speedily throwing down modular housing for a third planned division in this region, situated on Ukraine’s southeastern border, and likely incorporating the 33rd Brigade. The unit will materialize in late 2017 and resume the legacy of the 150th Idritsk-Berlin Division from World War II. That bit of historical trivia is not inconsequential, because it was the 150th that raised the flag over the Reichstag in 1945. The symbolism of establishing such a unit with such a prominent legacy of defeating fascism on Ukraine’s flank is doubtfully a coincidence.

Indeed, outside the former Soviet Union, places like Rostov and Maikop are typically known only in relation to the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) against Nazi Germany, appeals and allusions to which are likely to only intensify in the coming months and years. While Putin isn't betting the barn that nationalism is truly back in vogue, he's taking precautions that would be expected of any responsible Russian leader with regards to such an intimately linked neighbor as Ukraine, and the ghosts and shadows of the epic conflict of over seven decades ago are unavoidable - so best make good use of them.

This latest "Great Game" - to use Rudyard Kipling's original term for the strategic competition over the vast Eurasian landmass - which pits the land superpower Russia against an Anglophone naval superpower and its proxies, is at the same time both identical and different compared to its antecedents: the Russo-British rivalry over Central, South, and Northeast Asia in the last quarter of the 19th century, and then the global US-Soviet Cold War which consumed most of the second half of the 20th.

Unlike in the last century under communism, Russia is now a semi-market economy beholden to the Anglo-American global financial architecture; in fact, for all its recent oil-fueled struggles - which have seen per capita GDP plunge with the ruble to as little as under US $6,000 in the past year - Putinist Russia is more deeply integrated into this worldwide financial and commercial system than either the USSR or the Czarist empire ever were. And largely as a consequence, contemporary Russia is politically freer, even with a dominant Putin at its head, than it ever was under the bureaucratic-despotic regimes of the imperial or communist eras. Diversity of thought and opinion remain vibrant even among the majority of its population that appears generally pliant towards if not supportive of the existing order.

But Russia will not relinquish its Russianness - it's the vigorous defense of the parameters and boundaries of this "Russianness" that are driving its present slide into repression. Liberal and progressive viewpoints are being squelched, not as an end in itself, but in the interests of sociopolitical cohesion in the Russian historical tradition. Probably the single most representative issue in this regard is the policy towards LGBTQ citizens: they're being shoved back into the closet, where they can engage in whatever mutually consenting activity they please, so long as they don't promote it in the open as the desired norm for the younger and next generation. For a conservative society trying to reinstate a traditionalist, collective monotheistic identity after a costly experience of totalitarian atheism followed by a rocky failure to Westernize, such repression is entirely expected and legitimate. Rather, the whole Western liberal clamor over "equal rights" for "alternative lifestyles" can't be considered purely humanitarian and apolitical, because its unabashed purpose is to make any and every value system equally valid and moral, thereby rendering none of them suitable as a unifying social principle. In this sense, the very notion of "independent civil society" is indeed little more than a proxy for wholesale Westernization and in fact Americanization. And at this juncture in her history, Russia is unequivocally rejecting such cultural colonization; she may change her mind about it someday, but that's up to her own state and her own people in harmonious and symbiotic action with each other, not one segment of the people in opposition to the state.

This is at the root of Russia's multidirectional play for Eurasian security, with Ukraine at its epicenter. Until the West and specifically the US understands and empathizes with Russia's self-perception as a civilization-state, it won't resolve its contradictions with Moscow and in fact is likely to worsen the present confrontation that's already increasingly dubbed a new Cold War.

The mainstream liberal media in the West, but especially here in America, will continue to focus primarily on the unscrupulous methods and outright deceptions employed by the Kremlin and its surrogates to fight a "hybrid war" against Western interests - to now include direct meddling in our own elections, as it's already done so for years in Western Europe. Unfortunately, much like the Western obsession with Islamic terrorism, the cumulative effect of this will be to paint an irredeemably dark picture of a dark society that hates freedom and is therefore an existential threat to Western civilization itself; where in reality Russia, again much like Islamic radicals, is simply employing asymmetric strategies and tactics against a vastly more powerful global American empire.

That empire has been in apparent retreat not because of any particular Russian strength or resurgence, but because of Washington's own blunders and miscalculations - all of which are ultimately rooted in a false moralizing that essentially prevents it from even acknowledging that it's trying to run an empire at all. While this has lately made a good field day for Kremlin propaganda like this editorial, for sure, nobody should be fooled: America's problems with Russia today are a product of its own excess and carelessness, of a mismatch between perceived vital interests and actual vital interests. In other words, Russia's backlash against the West today is as much and possibly more the product of our own ideological inflexibility and political dysfunction as they are of its own defects - principally political but ultimately cultural. As always, it takes two to tango.