the fact is that man can and as we’re seeing here does generate actual geopolitical power by staging photo ops like an airbrushed van and that’s great

antoine-roquentin:

every couple of weeks, putin gives a speech and answers a couple of questions on live tv. the usual state propaganda stuff. this is how it’s advertised.

A fascinating thing about Vladimir Putin is how he’s managed to get both the American/European center-right and -left aligned against him at the same time he’s got the extremes of both wings rooting for him, for different reasons:

winning the marginalized right and alienating the center-left with his repressive Christian traditionalist posturing; winning the marginal left and alienating the center-right (and to a degree winning the off-right) by opposing the NATO imperium (plus some off-left bonus from reviving the 20th century “anti-fascist” imaginary).

He’s got both the channels and the rhetoric to speak out of both sides of his mouth to different crowds - able to justify any given geopolitical move in both registers at the same times - and I’d be shocked if this wasn’t the plan all along; one of the strengths of the KGB he came up through was its ability to fracture coalitions and inspire internal conflict in the western bloc

Wouldn’t say I in any way trust his commitment to any cause beyond “Russia strong”, but I certainly respect his relentless competence at power politics. (Admittedly, the Chuck Norris masculinity charms me a little too.)

War games are fun until somebody gets hurt

Pf. For my money, the correct moves for Putin in case of NATO-Russia conflict would be first, to to push the Syrian conflict into a regional war and fan the Arab Spring embers in the Maghreb, which would create a second(/third) theater for Europe that he didn’t have to supply himself and also create massive, destabilizing refugee flows - there’d be domestic pressure to keep naval assets that could go to the Black Sea at home in the Mediterranean for (take your pick) interdiction or humanitarian assistance, and it’d drive a wedge between the existing internationalist regimes and the continent’s right-nationalist challengers (any electoral victory by which would both weaken the NATO coalition and reinforce his domestic “let’s do WWII again” rhetoric of Russia as an anti-fascist counterweight).

And second, to try and strike way behind the American lines by stirring up a civil war - people tend to interpret his moves to ratchet up “Christian traditionalist vs. gay atheist” tensions as a purely domestic thing and that’s a mistake. Dude came up through the KGB.