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.

President Obama's Justification for Limited Military Intervention in Libya: Driving a Wedge between the Bushes

In the early evening of March 28, 2011, President Barak Obama addressed the American people and the world to explain his administration’s involvement in the international coalition that had been implementing a no fly zone over Libya while protecting Libyan civilians from their own ruler. He sounded much more like the first President Bush than the second in terms of foreign policy.  Similar to how the elder Bush had restrained himself from going all the way to Baghdad after he had joined an international coalition in removing the Iraqis from Kuwait, Obama said that directing American troops to forcibly remove Colonel Qaddafi from power would be a step too far, and would “splinter” the international coalition that had imposed the no fly zone and protected civilians in rebel areas of Libya. Interestingly, in taking the elder Bush’s route, Obama came out strongly against that of Bush II. Referring to the alternative of extending the U.S. mission to include regime change, Obama stated, “To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq . . . regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.”[1] In effect, Obama was exposing a fundamental difference between George H.W. Bush and his son by saying essentially the same thing as the elder Bush had done while excoriating the foreign invasion of his son. Yet Obama did not stop there. He added a theoretical framework that the elder Bush could well have used.

The New York Times put the theory quite well. “The president said he was willing to act unilaterally to defend the nation and its core interests. But in other cases, he said, when the safety of Americans is not directly threatened but where action can be justified — in the case of genocide, humanitarian relief, regional security or economic interests — the United States should not act alone. His statements amounted both to a rationale for multilateralism and another critique of what he has all along characterized as the excessively unilateral tendencies of the George W. Bush administration.”[2] In other words, even in providing a basic framework, Obama was able to distance Bush the father from Bush the son.  Interestingly, Obama had awarded the senior Bush with the Metal of Freedom over a month earlier. I would be very surprised if Obama would award Bush the Son such a prize. In terms of foreign policy, the philosophical line in the sand clearly distinguishes the second Bush from both his own father and Barak Obama.

Of course, the President’s speech left his audience hanging in other respects. For instance, averting a large-scale massacre in Libya is in the U.S. strategic or national interest because of our humanitarian values as well as the proximity of Libya to the nascent upheavals in Tunisia in Egypt. So would not protecting a mass protest in Yemen, which is next to Saudi Arabia, or in Syria, which has particular strategic interest to the U.S. on account of Syria’s connection with Lebanon (and thus relevant for Israel) and Iran, also be in the American national interest?  The President could argue that neither Yemen (or Bahrain) nor Syria had come to the point where the civilians in a major city were at risk—but it could still be asked, what if?  Must there be a baleful hint of genocide in a city commensurate to the Libyan city of Benghazi for protesters to warrant invoking principled leadership with or without allies when a ruler has effectively lost his right to rule by having turned on his own people?

I contend that the President treated the U.S. strategic interest quite broadly by including the protection of large numbers of civilians against their own ruler, particularly when even the portent of carnage could destabilize emergent republics next door. Such interest is broader than questions such as, how the civilians would view the U.S. were they to gain power? and what effect would a new government have on Iran and Israel? Such questions pertain to a narrower conception of national interest—one that is much less of value to a country. Viewing the good will of protesters as an opportunity—essentially taking on the wider, humanitarian-inclusive, notion of national interest—Syria, Bahrain and Yemen become like Libya as soon as their respective protests and prospect of government brutality reach a certain threshold that Libya had surpassed. What that threshold is—meaning in terms of scale as well as brutality—is something the American Congress and President needed to decide. For had that been set, attention could have turned to the mechanism involved in forming an international coalition should a country cross the line.

Differing from Obama, I submit that the establishment of a threshold can be relied up such that principled leadership could be invoked by the U.S. even in the absence of partners at the outset. Such unilateralism would differ appreciably from that of Bush the Younger, whose invasion of Iraq was based on a criterion used for that one case alone (WMD).  In other words, unilateralism need not mean capriciousness or impulsiveness. A humanitarian threshold undergirded by a strategic interest in there being a world wherein rulers serve rather than violently turn on their own people can justify not only international coalitions, but also instances of principled leadership.

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[1] Helene Cooper, “Obama Cites Limits of U.S. Role in Libya,” The New York Times, March 28, 2011.

[2] Ibid.