When Russian President Vladimir Putin deploys 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s border or China’s Xi Jinping orders dozens of Chinese fighter and bomber aircraft to swoop through Taiwan’s air defense zone, officials, analysts, and commentators scramble to devise a reason for their decisions.
Why, we ask, are Putin and Xi acting the way they are? What makes them tick? What considerations are driving their decision-making process?
In our haste to figure out what is happening, we seek to ascribe motives to the other side. The dispute near the Ukrainian border is instructive. Even before U.S. intelligence agencies projected a Russian military invasion of Ukraine early this year, observers searched for explanations behind Putin’s latest move. Many fell back on Putin’s personality or ideology as the main motivator of the troop buildup.
“A thriving, democratic Ukraine is a threat to Putin’s dictatorship model and thus to his personal power,” former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov commented on Twitter.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum had a similar take, writing that “the idea of a flourishing, democratic Ukraine right on Russia’s doorstep is, for Putin, personally intolerable.”
Pundits aren’t the only ones who cite ideology as a prime variable.
President Joe Biden tends to do the same thing. When talking about China, Biden often categorizes the competition with Asia’s largest power in terms of an ideological grudge match.
“This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” Biden remarked in his first press conference as president. Xi, Biden said a month later, believes “democracy cannot keep up with” China.
But are Putin and Xi really crafting their foreign policies on the urge to spread their respective autocratic beliefs?
The more likely explanation for why Russia and China are behaving the way they are, it seems to me, is because both believe their respective nations deserve more from the so-called international system they are currently getting. The motive isn’t so much an affinity for autocracy or a temptation to undermine and abolish democracies worldwide but rather a desire to enhance and further apply their hard power. In other words, the contest isn’t one of democracy vs. autocracy but rather state vs. state. It’s a concept those in the realist camp of international relations theory understand well.
As Hans Morgenthau, one of the most seminal realists in political science, puts it in his seminal work Politics among Nations, political leaders “think and act in terms of interest defined as power.”
Beyond the instinctual need for self-preservation, Russia and China are concerned first and foremost with ensuring the balance of power in their regions is advantageous, or at least not hostile, to their own interests. To the extent the system is out of whack, both states will try to alter the balance to increase their security and better position themselves relative to other powers. The reason Russia is stationing so many troops close to the border with Ukraine doesn’t have much to do with Putin being scared about a democratic neighbor emerging. Instead, it reflects the Kremlin’s ingrained belief that yet another neighbor is drifting too far into the West’s security orbit. The balance, in Russia’s assessment, is out of whack and needs to be corrected.
None of this is an excuse for the actions Russia and China have chosen. As committed democrats with ideals and values, we find a larger power threatening the security of a smaller one to be a grotesque byproduct of 19th- or 20th-century politics or something totally alien in an era of laws, treaties, and so-called “rules of the road.”
Boil down all the amazing improvements in technology, health, human innovation, and longevity, and what you get is a 21st-century world still dominated by self-interested states all on the same never-ending quest for power, wealth, and security.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
