Sergei Karaganov’s latest controversial article in ‘Russia in Global Affairs’
Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov’s latest article entitled “A Difficult but Necessary Decision” in the bilingual Russian-English publication Russia in Global Affairs touched off a wave of commentary and panic in the American foreign policy community.
See https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/a-difficult-but-necessary-decision/
As we say in the vernacular, “everyone and his uncle” has a word to say about Karaganov now, including people who never heard his name before and will likely forget it tomorrow. I received e-mails a couple of days ago from American colleagues who were at wits end, fearing on the basis of what Karaganov wrote that Russia is in the midst of ‘war fever’ and will unleash nuclear weapons in the days ahead. Then someone else sent me the latest blog by Seymour Hersh on substack.com which was clearly dictated by Hersh’s alarm over the Karaganov piece and sent him rambling into a discussion of Russia-related issues including why Putin is to blame “for his decision to tumble Europe into its most violent and destructive war since the Balkan wars of the 1980s” and Hersh’s speculation on Russian responsibility for the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, about which he knows no more and no better than Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, yesterday’s Financial Times featured an essay by Rose Gottemoeller, former deputy secretary general of NATO and former US chief negotiator on the New Start strategic weapons treaty. The title of her piece is “The West must act now to break Russia’s nuclear fever.” The prompt for this essay was again what Karaganov has just written, as we see from mention of him in the text.
What I propose to do now is to first briefly summarize what Karaganov says in the article in question and why that touched off alarm bells on the other side of the Atlantic. Then I will relate what I know about Karaganov and his place in the firmament of Russian elites from personal experience and not just from my reading him and his fans or detractors. This tells you why he is writing what he is writing now.
But before I get into all that, allow me to make one thing perfectly clear, at the risk of offending my pen pals: without reference to the merits or demerits of Dr. Karaganov, his political role as influencer of Russian government policy, like that of all academics and armchair analysts everywhere, myself included, is close to nil. He may have some value as a wind vane telling us which way the wind is blowing among the chattering classes, but not at the decision-making level of the Kremlin. He is one voice in a flock that preens itself before its peers.
*****
Allow me to open this brief examination of Karaganov’s latest essay with a bouquet. He is a peerless showman with a sense of drama and a good command of the pen. In his essay, Karaganov is as unflinching in taking his argument to its logical if horrible conclusion as, say, the American academic Herman Kahn was in the 1980s with his classic work Thinking About the Unthinkable.
Karaganov tells us that the war in Ukraine can truly end only if the West is forced to capitulate, to abandon its hegemonic ambitions in Europe. And that victory over the West can be achieved by putting aside all restraint in the use of nuclear weapons and to strike now in a decisive way
Allow me to quote from the middle of his essay where Karaganov applies his literary talents to the task at hand:
For many years I have studied the history of nuclear strategy and come to an unambiguous, albeit seemingly not quite scientific, conclusion. The creation of nuclear weapons was the result of divine intervention. Horrified to see that people, Europeans and the Japanese who had joined them, had unleashed two world wars within the life-span of one generation, sacrificing tens of millions of lives, God handed a weapon of Armageddon to humanity to remind those who had lost the fear of hell that it existed. It was this fear that ensured relative peace for the last three quarters of a century. That fear is gone now. What is happening now is unthinkable in accordance with previous ideas about nuclear deterrence: in a fit of desperate rage, the ruling circles of a group of countries have unleashed a full-scale war in the underbelly of a nuclear superpower.
That fear needs to be revived. Otherwise, humanity is doomed.
By breaking the West’s will to continue the aggression, we will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the five-century-long Western yoke, but we will also save humanity. By pushing the West towards a catharsis and thus its elites towards abandoning their striving for hegemony, we will force them to back down before a global catastrophe occurs, thus avoiding it. Humanity will get a new chance for development.
To cut to the quick, Karaganov is recommending that the threshold for using nuclear weapons be lowered, that Russia give clearer signals of its readiness to use nuclear arms preemptively. And what if the West nonetheless does not back down?
In this case we will have to hit a bunch of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their mind to reason.
This was the punch line that has set off alarm bells in the American foreign policy community.
En passant, Karaganov has not missed the opportunity to share with readers his utter contempt for Western elites which he sees as wallowing in moral degradation. And he gives us his vision of the new Russia that is emerging from three hundred years of intellectual servitude before Europe.
We will carefully preserve our European heritage, of course. But it is time to go home and to our true self, start using the accumulated experience, and chart our own course.
It is in this section of his paper that Karaganov shows himself to be a true son of the Russian intelligentsia, which is not what most readers in the West may imagine.
I, and many others, have written many times that without a big idea great states lose their greatness or simply disappear. History is strewn with the shadows and graves of the powers that lost it. It must be generated from above, without expecting it to come from below, as stupid or lazy people do. It must match the fundamental values and aspirations of the people and, most importantly, lead us all forward. But it is the responsibility of the elite and the country’s leadership to articulate it.
With these eloquent but incautious words, Karaganov puts the seal of death on his proposals. The pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia considered itself to be precisely the avant-garde of progressive humanity. In that regard it was by definition anti-democratic. And it is today the only stratum of Russian society that is anti-Putin. Anyone who believes that Karaganov, with his dramatic recommendations, is close to the Kremlin decision-makers knows nothing about Russian history or about Russia today.
*****
I saw and heard Karaganov in the flesh and blood eight years ago when I was invited to participate in the 18th annual gathering of the Schlangenbad Gespräche [Dialogue], an event organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation think tank of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). The meetings brought together outstanding Russians from government and civil society as well as their German counterparts. For reasons of travel expense, the German participants were always two or three times more numerous than the Russians, meaning that each Russian underwent that much more scrutiny.
I have described what I saw in general in the chapter entitled “2015 Schlangenbad Dialogue: The East-West Confrontation in Microcosm” pp 341-349 in Does Russia Have a Future? (2015).
For reasons of Chatham House rules, I did not name the speakers then, but will disclose now that the most prominent speaker, second only to a Russian deputy foreign minister in attendance who spoke blah-blah, was precisely Sergei Karaganov, who was highly entertaining and was highly appreciated by the audience.
Let us remember that this event took place a year after the coup d’état in Kiev, after the “reunification” of Crimea with the Russian Federation and the start of a civil war in the Ukrainian regions of the Donbas. The concept of a common European home which had guided Russian-German relations for more than a decade was now discredited. The roof was leaking, the windows were blown out. Everyone was looking for a new concept of European security and Karaganov presented an intriguing answer, which was to recreate a new Holy Alliance such as came out of the 1815 Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic wars.
The hosts were leaning heavily towards demonstrating their dislike for the Russian government and its policies. When some sharp criticism was made by one speaker or another, there was typical rhythmic foot stamping of approval by the whole German contingent. I overheard a German host warmly confiding to one of the two openly anti-Putin politicians on the Russian side: “Ah, I was hoping by now you would already be President.”
This was the setting in which I had the opportunity to hear Karaganov in person. And it bears mention that most likely this was not Karaganov’s maiden visit to Schlangenbad: the vast majority of invitees had been coming year after year
I mention all of this because it shows that in the new period of patriotic upsurge in Russia today during the war in and about Ukraine, people like Karaganov who were “soft on the West” in the past find themselves compromised and are often positioning themselves not just as patriots, as Dmitry Trenin, (the “front man” giving respectability to the Carnegie Center Moscow for more than a decade) has done, but as super-patriots, like Dmitry Medvedev who was, let us be frank, a perfect patsy for the West during his presidency.
In short, nothing that Karaganov says now should be taken at face value. He is trying to improve his image at home.
*****
Those who speak of Karaganov as “known to be close to Putin” as Seymour Hersh does are disseminating disinformation. If we counted all the circus performers like the Eurasianist Dugin and now the oracle Karaganov who are said to be close to Putin, we would be counting in the hundreds. And when Hersh says that Karaganov has to be taken seriously because Serge Schmemann says so, and Schmemann is “a longtime Moscow correspondent for The New York Times,” then I wonder what added value Hersh brings to the public today, Pulitzer prize winner that he may be. I wrote several weeks ago about my classmate Schmemann, Harvard ’67, that he is anti-Russian down to his socks and always has been. And why does Hersh rail against The Washington Post for not publishing his exposé on the bombing of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and from the other side of his mouth cite another mainstream publisher’s thinking on who is who among influencers of Kremlin policy or on why Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam.
The moral of the story as regards Hersh is that no man is a universal genius, and only those who have been flattered by their admirers in the reading public and lost all self-control allow themselves to talk in public about subjects beyond their own expert knowledge.
This same rule applies to Rose Gottemoeller, who is, without question a highly intelligent and highly experienced person in matters of nuclear weapons and arms control. However, her article in The Financial Times, which today lists it among the most popular feature articles of the week, demonstrates willful ignorance and a remarkable inability to see two sides to an issue.
I say willful ignorance because she advances an utterly groundless interpretation of who is who and what messages to the world are coming out of Russia. I quote: “the notion that the Russian ruling class, including its top man, are unhinged about these devastating [nuclear] weapons is unnerving.” Had she taken the time to view Putin in his public appearances, most recently in the widely publicized two hour discussion with Russia’s war correspondents, she might understand that Putin is probably the most sane and reasonable statesman on the global scene. And when she goes on to praise Joe Biden and other western leaders for having been “wise to face these wild threats with messages of calm deterrence” then you have to ask when she lost the script and began living in some virtual reality.
I say inability to see two sides to an issue, because her calling out extravagant and threatening statements about razing London to the ground and the like, which indeed have been made by some Russian commentators and even by some legislators, ignores the wild and irresponsible statements made with respect to what awaits Russia that appear nightly on American television. The likes of Lindsey Graham and his call for Russians to be killed in the greatest numbers possible during his recent visit to Kiev or for Russia to be divided up: these hate speeches from American politicians are shown on Russian television and naturally prompt extreme statements in return. However, Lindsey Graham does not speak for the Biden Administration and Dmitry Medvedev does not speak for the Kremlin. The role of negotiator, which Gottemoeller once filled, requires an ability to understand your opponent which she patently lacks today, and maybe lacked in the past as well.
What are we to make of Gottemoeller’s suggestion that Russia and the USA should come back to the New Start treaty in the midst of the undeclared war of NATO on Russia following several years of determined cancellation of arms control treaties initiated by the USA? Gottemoeller would do well to enjoy her retirement and just shut up. Her experience from the past provides no new light on the present or on the future, only disinformation about the prospects for global security after Russia loses its war in Ukraine, as she hopes and expects.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023