The Kremlin’s Machiavelli has led Russia to disaster

Just a couple of months ago, it was fashionable to laud Russian President Vladimir Putin for his strategic genius. American right-wingers contrasted his sure-footedness with their own President’s alleged weakness.

In a column entitled “Obama vs Putin, The Mismatch”, Mr Charles Krauthammer argued: “Under this President, Russia has run rings around America.” Mr Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York, praised Mr Putin’s decisiveness and cooed: “That’s what you call a leader.” Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence party, said Mr Putin was the world leader he most admired.

How misplaced all this adulation looks after the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.

POLITICAL ISOLATION LOOMS

Russia’s apparent policy of supplying anti-aircraft missiles to the Ukrainian rebels was not simply immoral. It also gives the lie to the idea that Mr Putin is some kind of strategic genius. Instead he is revealed as a reckless gambler whose paranoid and cynical policies are leading his country into economic and political isolation.

The Kremlin’s mini-Machiavelli believed he could destabilise eastern Ukraine while maintaining plausible deniability about Russia’s links to the separatist rebels.

However, the puppet master failed to keep hold of the strings. After the deaths of nearly 300 innocent civilians, a harsh light is shining on Moscow’s involvement in the tragedy. Outside Russia, only a hard core of Mr Putin’s apologists is likely to accept denials of involvement.

The Russian authorities now face a very difficult choice. If they cooperate with an international investigation into the MH17 atrocity, the results are likely to be extremely embarrassing. However, if they block the investigation, shelter behind conspiracy theories or even send troops into eastern Ukraine, they will encourage an even fiercer international backlash. Last week, even before the airliner tragedy, the United States had announced intensified sanctions. The European Union is also now likely to toughen its stance. Some big Russian companies are losing access to Western capital markets.

Political isolation also looms. Russia has already been chucked out of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations. Australia, which lost several citizens on the flight, are baulking at welcoming Mr Putin to a Group of Twenty summit in Brisbane in November. Russia’s hosting of the World Cup in 2018 will come into question before long.

FOUR BLUNDERS BY PUTIN

Mr Putin’s mistakes extend beyond the irresponsibility of enabling the separatists to shoot at passing aircraft. This blunder has its roots in at least four other failed policies.

First, there was the wildly excessive reaction to the idea that Ukraine might sign a trade deal with the EU. The idea that Brussels was desperately trying to grab Ukraine was paranoid. In reality, the EU has, for decades, been embarrassingly reluctant to admit Ukraine. Membership into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — which Moscow saw as the great threat to Russia — was a similarly remote prospect: At its summit in 2008, NATO declined to put Ukraine on the path to membership, and this has been the basic position since.

Russia’s second blunder was to stir up unrest in Ukraine while denying responsibility. This must have seemed smart in a cynical sort of way — and it certainly caught the world off guard when it came to the annexation of Crimea. But in eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s manipulation has been less effective and harder to disguise. This has culminated in the MH17 tragedy. The result is that Russia has the worst of both worlds. It is not completely in control of events but is still blamed for them — and rightly so because, even if the order to shoot did not come from Moscow, Russia had enabled the disaster to happen.

The third trap that Mr Putin has created for himself involves the manipulation of public opinion in Russia through increasingly crude, nationalistic propaganda. This has had the desired effect of boosting the President’s approval ratings, but it also makes it much harder for him to back down. Anything less than total support for the separatists will open him to the charge that he has failed to protect Russian speakers from the “fascists” whom his media has claimed control Ukraine.

Mr Putin’s fourth blunder has been consistently to underestimate the reaction in the West. Perhaps he was convinced by the sycophants around him — and their echo chamber overseas — that he is a master strategist and that the West is feeble. The West’s response has sometimes been slow, but real sanctions have been passed and more are on their way. Russia’s business leaders are aghast at the situation but, for now, they are powerless.

By allowing himself to be sucked into an unnecessary and destructive confrontation with the West, Mr Putin is also engaging with the wrong problem. For all Moscow’s paranoia about NATO, the real strategic challenge to Russia is the rise of China. However, locked into a confrontation with the West, Mr Putin has become a supplicant of Beijing, as is evident in the lopsided energy deal recently signed with China.

It is the job of the tame Russian media to gloss over this record of failure and misjudgment and present Mr Putin as a hero standing up to a hostile world instead. Opinion polls have suggested that this campaign is working well for the moment.

The danger is that the only way for Mr Putin to disguise his repeated failures is to further ratchet up the atmosphere of crisis, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which Moscow is indeed faced by an increasingly hostile West. This policy is dangerous for the world — and, most of all, for Russia. THE FINANCIAL TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gideon Rachman is the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs columnist.