As a former KGB agent, Russia’s
President Putin could probably write a book and teach a course on the art of
lying, or fabrication, as means of doing foreign policy, which manipulation
being the not so subtle subtext. The tactic can be reckoned as being expedient,
with the loss of value in reputational capital being assessed to be a cost
worth incurring. That Putin lied to U.S. President Trump in Alaska in 2025 on
the Russian’s intention to “put an end to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”
should have caught the American off guard, if the claim made by Kurt Volker, an
American envoy to Ukraine that Putin had indeed lied to Trump about being
willing to meet and negotiate with the Ukrainian president is true.[1]
The American president was, in short, naïve even in being willing to meet with
his Russian counterpart, especially without the president of the E.U. present
too, at least to serve as a reality-test regarding Putin’s real game, for Europe
had more to lose—more on the line—than did America from incursions from the
east. Political realism is the theory that best fits the Russian president.
In realism, states act in
their own interests, even in multilateral negotiations, rather than forsaking
any such immediate interests for the good of the global order, if indeed such
an order exists institutionally. Power is the name of the game, and, as Nietzsche
observed, the strong have incentive to give up their position of strength to
the weak (so the weak can only hope to beguile the strong into feeling ashamed
ethically of using their strength). In other words, Putin still had a winning
hand when it came to extending his invasion farther west in Ukraine, so why
would he unilaterally offer to sit down at a negotiating table unless any such territory
were to be offered to him? Equality in terms of power is the only context in
which justice is possible, Nietzsche wrote, and Hume as well as Nietzsche hold
that equality does not really exist; more counter-power is needed for an
invaded power to arrest the insurgency of a greater power. With Putin stating
that the force of arms would decide the political matter of Ukraine, the world
should have realized that political realism best fit and that any common good,
or world order, would be nugatory in comparison to the interests of strong,
powerful states. The impotence and fecklessness of the United Nations had
created the vacuum in which both Russia’s Putin and Israel’s Netanyahu could
blatantly pursue their respective military interests even at the expense of the
civilian populations of their respective enemies. In other words, impunity,
even in being able to arrest peaceful protesters in international waters, and
throw them in prison, invites political realism to fill the void and come to
characterize international relations. The world itself has been culpable in
this by refusing to reform the UN or establish an alternative international
body sans vetoes and with an enforcement mechanism of its own
that could stand up to aggressors internationally, as Mo Di, the founder of
Mohism, had done in China during the Warring States period of the Zhou Dynasty.
Political realism is
dangerous, not only because states nakedly pursue their own interests without
regard to the common good—that of the world—but also because the personal,
emotional reactions of presidents can easily come into play. As Volker said of the
effect of Putin’s lie on Trump: “He made Trump look weak and Trump doesn’t like
looking weak, so this is now a personal issue for him.”[2]
So Trump was considering sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, whether
doing so was in the strategic interest of the U.S. or not. Without a world
order as a viable constraint as political realist states pursue their own
interests in relation to other states, political realism can easily lapse into
personal vengeance and retaliation even at the expense of state interests.
In short, political realism can lapse in to something much worse—and much more
dangerous. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a case in point, as nuclear weapons were
in the mix.
So political realism is in
need of a major constraint beyond what Koehane and Nye suggest in their theory
of neo-realism; especially in the nuclear age when “force of arms” is still being
relied on by some state actors to settle political questions and such actors
are all too willing to lie, our species should engage in a stepwise political development
resulting in a world federation of the willing—countries that are willing to subscribe
without a veto and even be willing to transfer some military hardware and
troops so the common good has a means of clamping down on state actors who seek
to invade weaker states with impunity. It is interesting that even as our
species has advanced technology so much, political development has been stalled
for centuries. Perhaps a new millennium can mean something, politically, such
that deciding questions by the primitive means of force of arms can finally be treated
as antiquated.
2. Ibid.
