Russia’s President Putin: Political Realism with Lies

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.

1. Sasha Vakulina and Shona Murray, “’Putin Lied to Trump and Made Him Look Weak,’ Former US Envoy to Ukraine Says,” Euronews.com, 6 October 2025.
2. Ibid.

The Russian Conscience: Human Rights in Syria

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned on January 18, 2012, according to the New York Times, “that outside encouragement of antigovernment uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to ‘a very big war that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far beyond its boundaries.’” A very big war, it would seem, with very big stick, would be the result of “outsiders” stepping in to protect the Syrian protesters from their own government. In fact, the Times reports that “Lavrov said Russia would use its position on the United Nations Security Council to veto any United Nations authorization of military strikes against the government [of Syria].” It made no difference to Lavrov that the United Nations, including the Secretary General, had “repeatedly called for Syria [to] end a crackdown on opposition demonstrators, which Arab League monitors say resulted in hundreds of deaths over the past month.” In other words, the U.N. was officially impotent in being able to act on the basis of its “demand” because one of its members has a veto.

Lavrov’s position forces potential “outside” interventionists to justify their position. I would have thought that stepping in to stop people from being killed is a good thing. Lavrov was insisting it is bad. “If someone conceives the idea of using force at any cost—and I’ve already heard calls for sending some Arab troops to Syria—we are unlikely to be able to prevent this,” he said, “(b)ut this should be done on their own initiative and should remain on their conscience. They won’t get any authorization from the Security Council.” In other words, stopping people from being killed—from their own government no less—is a matter that would weigh on one’s conscience. One might ask Lavrov whether the Syrians killed because of his veto ought to weigh on his conscience. He was undoubtedly putting an absolutist view of national sovereignty before any right of “outsiders” to stop killing that at the very least, given a government’s formal monopoly of lethal force, unfair. Were he to relax his view of national sovereignty, would he still say that stopping the killing would remain on a conscience? There would not be much daylight between insisting even that and saying that interfering with Hitler’s concentration camps (or Stalin’s mass killing of the Polish elite) from abroad would have weighed on consciences. In other words, Lavrov can almost be read as being in favor of Assad’s killing spree, irrespective of national sovereignty needing to be respected for the world of nations to have order.

Of course, it could be objected that there was not much order in Syria at the time, and, moreover, that national sovereignty is not absolute on account of human nature, and that far from weighing on consciences, “outsiders” have a moral obligation to step in to stop killings when there is a reasonable expectation that they would otherwise happen. This obligation can be based on Kant’s imperative that there is a duty to treat rational nature, which humans have, as an end in itself and not merely as a means. This duty presumably includes stopping those people who would otherwise treat others only as means to their own designs. Alternatively, the obligation could be based on Hume’s moral theory, which holds that “immoral” simply is the sentiment of disapproval that humans naturally feel in watching something like a protester being dragged down the street and killed. In other words, what we naturally feel as a reaction to watching footage from Homs Syria is a valid basis for moral action.

Therefore, from both a rationalist and a psychological basis, moral theory can be used to justify the obligation of intervention by “outsiders.” This directly refutes Lavrov’s contention that there is an obligation not to intervene. Were one to talk with the family of a murdered Syrian, which position do you suppose the family members would say concurs with conscience? I’m thinking it’s not good ole Sergey’s. Fortunately, the rest of us can move on, past even our limp, even crippled U.N., to formulate and implement a mechanism with teeth for dealing with governments that engage in wholesale slaughter of their own citizens. Our consciences naturally demand nothing less.

Source:

Ellen Barry and Michael Schwirtz, “Russian Warns That Western Support for Arab Revolts Could Cause a ‘Big War’,” The New York Times, January 19, 2012. 

Unfairness and the Brain: Behind CNN's Biased Coverage of the Israel v. Gaza Conflict

Watching CNN on August 4, 2014, I tuned into CNN when Wolf Blitzer briefly mentioned the number of Palestinians killed that day only to quickly pivot to a focus on Israel's successful interception of two rockets. He went on to interview an Israeli official on the defense system to the extent of near obsession. The implication is that an Israeli life is worth more than a dozen Palestinian lives. At the very least, the editorial judgment is questionable, if not suspect. 

My question is not so much as to why CNN (and other news editors and reporters) is so biased; they are human after all. I find it more interesting that so many viewers have such a tolerance for unfairness that they continue to watch.[1] CNN would not have been giving the story such airtime were viewers fleeing like bats out of hell. As soon as I realized that Blitzer's attention would be on the intercepted rockets even as scores of Palestinians had died that day, I changed the channel. Did many other people watching have the same sentiment of disapprobation I instinctively felt and simply dismiss it when it came to deciding on whether to act? Or, do people have different instinctual tolerances for unfairness, whether as bias primped up as neutral journalism or the unfair fight being covered? Perhaps different life-experiences intervene, rendering the common instinct more or less sensitive to the external stimuli. Lastly, not everyone is going to make the same choice regarding how to respond.

Nevertheless, we can look inside the brain, at how it functions normally, to get at whether a certain tolerance for unfairness is species-wide even if individuals differ in how far the tolerance extends. The process of natural selection may have left its mark, and the matter of self-interest or self-preservation is never far when discussing human nature. Crucially, the extent to which a person’s own interests—including one’s self-identity—or those of one’s friends—are involved in a given case of unfairness impacts how reasoning, or cognition, and emotions, or the passions, affect the tolerance.

Experiments have found that activity in the cognitive area of the brain, the cognitive dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), increases the amount of tolerance beyond that which the emotional area, the anterior insula cortex, will permit. Simply put, by thinking over whether to accept a condition that is unfair to you—that feels unfair (and is)—a person analyzes whether acceptance is in his or her own interest. If it is, then the person is more likely to override his or her anger at the unfairness and accept.

In one study, $100 is to be divided between two players—one of whom makes an offer, which the other person can accept or reject. The game is played only once, and anonymously. So the person tasked with accepting or rejecting the offer must decide whether a distribution unfair to him or her is worth accepting, given that rejecting it would mean he or she would not receive any money. Rationally, he or she would accept any offer, even one in which the other player gets $95 of the $100 because $5 is more than not getting anything. Emotionally, however, the responder may reject blatantly unfair offers. In the experiment, this second player rejected offers in which he or she would receive 30% or less of the $100. At that point, the emotive response outweighs cognitive calculation.

In another experiment, magnetic pulses were used to reduce the activity of the relevant emotional area of the brain (don’t try this at home!) while leaving the cognitive area untouched and thus fully functional. The result is that more unfair offers with less than 30% of the total $100 are accepted. The suppression of the sentiment of disapprobation that is triggered by instances of unfairness gives cognition the upper hand. The person can more easily conclude that tolerating the unfairness is worth the (diminished) emotional cost of resenting the other person for getting more than deserved. In business terms, the break-even point shifts in the direction of greater tolerance. Reason can speak internally with less suffocating clutter being spewed out by the passions: self-interest does not reside ultimately in relieving momentarily unpleasant feelings. Accordingly, the dominance of the cognitive area in the brain results in more tolerance for unfairness in cases in which the person’s self-interest is directly impacted by the unfairness.

The rational self-interest impacts the tolerance by reasoning that the person gets more in spite of the unfairness than without it. Less directly, the gravity of the self-interest can be expected to inexorably skew the person’s perception to an angle at which the unfairness is conveniently less transparent, and the tolerance more bearable. The person’s assumptions naturally comply. By means of their larger framework—a paradigm of assumptions unconsciously organizing experience with the world—they bend perception itself accordingly.

The CNN viewers who self-identified with Israel, for example, would not have perceived the bias fully, or even at all. Hence, the rational self-interest can triumph without so much emotional turmoil over the alleged unfairness to be tolerated. What about the viewers whose rational self-interest is not invested in either side the conflict, or with CNN? With perception freed up, though certainly not objective, the appearance of the bias cannot be assuaged or mollified. Nor is rational self-interest there to justify tolerating more unfairness.

Yet even so, self-interest generalized as self-preservation—that genetic instinct informed by the process of natural selection and elevated by reason—may still enable more tolerance. We humans can evince a chilling tolerance for unfairness that is borne by others rather than ourselves. The underlying culprit here may be our survival instinct, which is etched into the fabric of our very being through the myriad of accretions pronounced by natural selection on our species’ genome. We may have a greater confidence of our own survival by vicariously "living" through the dominance of an alpha male unfairly dominating a weaker constitution. Any sentiment of disapprobation proffering a harsh ethical verdict is also instinctual, but the primal urge of self-preservation more successfully marries instinct to reason and is thus habitually more powerful. According to Nietzsche, reason consists of contending instincts—the strongest urge being victorious as conscious thought. The instinct of self-preservation affords more tolerance of the unfair than the moral sentiment would allow. Society, including its organizations, may magnify this tendency.

Broadcasters may orient their news broadcasts to the cognitive dimension in highlighting facts, statistics, and news analysis. CNN suffers less of a financial disincentive from decreased viewership in exploiting an unfair fight and taking sides, even if tacitly in the choice of paradigm undergirding the news reports.  

Moreover, modern society itself, being oriented to scientific advancement (e.g., in medicine) and technological innovation (e.g., engineering) over the humanities (e.g., philosophy), may privilege the brain’s cognitive functioning over moral, sympathetic feelings. The news media may simply be reflecting this overall ethos. Ironically, the teachings of some major philosophers, Hume excepted, advocate for the hegemony of the rational dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Reason has what Kant termed “absolute value.” Furthermore, Plato’s theory of justice requires reason to subjugate emotions so as to provide order to the psyche and polis (city), which are then in musical/mathematical harmony with the harmony of the heavenly spheres (i.e., stars and planets). Within this “justice as order” prescription, greater tolerance for unfairness can be expected as the sentiment of disapprobation is subordinated.

In conclusion, the bias implicit in the CNN report relies on not only the rationalistic values esteemed in the technological age, but also a natural proclivity in how the human brain coordinates its internal parts. We may be inclined both as a society and as individuals to accommodate instances of unfairness that are repugnant to us emotionally—even those in which we decide to bear the unfairness ourselves. Just think how easy it must be for us to tolerate unfairness when someone else must bear the burden.

1. See http://thewordenreportinternationalrelations.blogspot.com/2014/07/hardly-fair-fight-israel-and-gaza.html