The Russian word ‘derzhavnost’ is usually translated as ‘great power status’, but the real meaning is closer to the gangland concept of ‘respect’. The word was beyond the reach of my feeble Russian vocabulary until I heard it about 20 times in 20 minutes while interviewing an ultranationalist ideologue called Aleksandr Dugin about 20 years ago.
He was then popularly known as ‘Putin’s brain’, although his role was always to provide philosophical justifications for what the Russian dictator wanted to do anyway, not to give him policy guidance. Vladimir Putin already had the attitudes of somebody who grew up poor and short on the mean streets of Leningrad, where ‘respect’ meant everything.
Dugin is still around, although he is probably no longer in close touch with Putin. But he’s still in play, and in an interview with CNN last March he claimed that Trump’s America has a lot more in common with Putin’s Russia than most people think: “The followers of Trump will understand much better what Russia is, who Putin is and the motivations of our politics.”
Well, yes, of course. As the Kremlin spokesman said of Trump’s new National Security Strategy, published two weeks ago, “The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision.” That vision is a deeply traditional version of nationalism which includes the conviction that the great powers have the right to command all the others.
Trump’s new national security doctrine states that the United States aims to “restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere,” and it has not a word of criticism about Russia’s wars in Europe, from Georgia in 2008 down to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Indeed, Trump effectively writes off Europe, which allegedly faces “civilisational erasure” by hordes of non-white migrants. (The ‘Great Replacement Theory’ as US government policy.) The American role in Europe is simply “to manage European relations with Russia…and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.”
In this vision, the world is to be divided up between the spheres of influence of the great powers: Russia, America and China, maybe with a share for India too if it can get rich enough fast enough. It’s as arbitrary and non-negotiable as the partition of Africa between the European great powers in the 1880s, only this time on a global scale.
Maybe all this time we have been looking in the wrong place for an answer to the question: why does Donald Trump always yield to Vladimir Putin? Maybe Putin has no incriminating information about Trump’s sexual or financial peccadillos, no kompromat of any sort.
Perhaps the answer is simply that the two men have identical 19th-century views about how the world should work, at a time when almost everybody else sees it differently.
The belief that all the states that belong to the United Nations are sovereign and inviolable has reigned (with only minor interruptions) since 1945. It has led to a stabilisation of borders and an absence of global wars for a full eight decades. But it has always required the great powers to refrain from using all their power, lest the world wars return.
Neither Putin nor Trump accepts that rule. Putin has already violated it by invading countries around its borders that used to be part of the Russian empire, and regularly threatens nuclear war even in the service of quite petty objectives. Trump is newer to this game, but has already attacked Middle Eastern targets and may be working up to a full-scale attack on Venezuela.
Most other countries still cling to the old rules (also known as ‘the international rule of law’) because that is their main protection against violation by one or more of the great powers. And, crucially, the two other major concentrations of wealth and military power in the world, the European Union and China, still support the law – at least in principle.
The fate of the Long Peace will be decided by the choices these two centres make. Europe knows that it should defend international law but is as divided internally as the Holy Roman Empire (27 sovereign states). China has mostly observed the rules in the past, but now has an alliance with Russia and a president-for-life whose future choices are imponderable.
We are where we are, and it’s not a particularly good place to be. However, the numbers are definitely on the side of those who do not want to return to the lawless past, and both Trump and Putin are mortal men. (Trump can even lose elections.) It will take at least several years yet to learn the outcome.
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