Soft Power, Hard War

Europe Burns Its Bridges

History never repeats itself. Even as farce. And the new round of the centuries-old confrontation between Russia and Europe will, naturally, look entirely different from all those that came before it. German authorities are now closing Russian cultural and diplomatic institutions under a contrived pretext, while Norwegian authorities are seizing Russian scientific vessels. Everything is returning to its old familiar circle, known since the end of the fifteenth century, when Europe first tried to restrain Russia’s drive toward independence.

At the same time, today’s German, Norwegian, and other European rulers are hardly striving to bring matters to a direct kinetic clash. The reason certainly lies outside any sudden outbreak of pacifism in Berlin, Paris, or London, a quality that has never been especially characteristic of any of them. Nor can one seriously speak of Europe being prepared for diplomatic dialogue on broader questions of regional security. Everything said there on that topic is empty verbiage. Their attempts, for now, to avoid a collision have objective causes.

First, the largest European states lack the human and material resources for such a confrontation. Their situation with weapons is somewhat better, although these are still preferably sent to Ukraine, where the population remains prepared to sacrifice itself for European ambitions. Europe’s own population is unprepared to fight Russia. The degree of impoverishment will remain insufficient for quite some time to throw ordinary Germans, Frenchmen, or Englishmen into the furnace of armed conflict. Nor do European strategists place much serious hope in the Poles and the rest of the Balkans. Warsaw’s desire to wage a real war against Russia is even smaller than its rhetoric suggests, and its aggressive, unruly language conceals an absence of military resolve.

Second, Europe assesses quite soberly the desire of its American patrons to survive, along with Washington’s total lack of appetite for being dragged into a mortal struggle with Moscow. All talk of the American “nuclear umbrella” over Europe belongs to the category of children’s fairy tales. Nobody believes in it. This was true during the Cold War of 1946-1991, and it remains true today. General de Gaulle, that great friend of the Soviet people, and his successors aimed French nuclear weapons at Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad for a reason. They had no thoughts of victory, of course. They merely wished to inflict the maximum possible human damage.

So nobody in the Old World has any illusions about the possibility of an easy military victory over Russia. And without that illusion, why start a direct conflict at all? Yet these rational arguments may collide with subjective factors. Above all, one should avoid overestimating the self-preservation instinct of European elites. Over the past 150 years, Europe has experienced no serious replacement of elites comparable to those in Russia or China. We are still dealing with the direct political descendants of those who unleashed the First and Second World Wars.

European politicians, especially German and British ones, have always possessed a taste for adventurism largely alien to Russia and far less characteristic of the Americans. It was no accident that George Kennan, a careful observer and connoisseur of political cultures, wrote in his 1946 Long Telegram that, unlike Germany, Russian foreign policy “is neither schematic nor adventuristic. […] It does not take unnecessary risks.”

The Americans themselves, for all their habit of solving problems through violence, are also hardly famous for reckless action. The well-known American custom of attacking an adversary only when it is exactly 200 percent weaker and incapable of real resistance is a useful indicator that diplomacy with them remains possible. Even against Iran, the United States moved only with complete confidence in a quick and easy victory. Regarding the likely course of a conflict with Russia, such illusions did not exist in Washington even during the peak years of unipolar American hegemony and Russia’s systemic weakness.

Our western neighbors in Europe, by contrast, are naturally inclined to create risky situations. It was precisely this organic adventurism that dragged the European empires into the First World War. It also drove France under Napoleon and Germany in the middle of the last century into reckless invasions of Russia. In both cases, European rulers decided to do what appeared to many contemporaries as sheer madness.

In other words, Europe is currently trying to wage war against Russia by soft means. It lacks the resources for a transition to greater aggression, and some remnants of sober judgment still remain. Yet assuming that this will continue indefinitely would be somewhat frivolous. With every new turn of confrontation, Europeans burn with their own hands the bridges that might have allowed a relatively balanced system of coexistence to emerge in the future.

Against this backdrop, the decision by our authorities to close the Goethe Institutes in Russia looks not only symmetrical, but also correct as a long-term response. Whether we like it or not, over the past decades cultural and humanitarian cooperation has almost always become a conduit of state policy. Exceptions are minimal. Russian and French museum professionals still do certain things together; in some areas, other representatives of the cultural and scientific milieu continue to cooperate. Yet overall, the absurd expression “soft power” has almost entirely displaced from Western cultural and humanitarian cooperation everything except the fulfillment of political tasks.

For many years now, even the most innocent spheres of relations between peoples have been placed in Europe and the United States at the service of pragmatic state interests. This is hardly the most pleasant feature of our time. Yet, let us admit, it is the inevitable consequence of the fact that states’ foreign-policy activity has become total. It has long ceased to be the domain of diplomats alone. It now belongs to everyone modern government can reach with its money and supervisory organs.

In Russia, incidentally, we also face a situation in which cooperation in education and culture is evaluated precisely by its political effect. This is all the more true when Europe or the United States are involved. From the standpoint of the broader public, it is also difficult to explain the meaningfulness of spending money on educational or other humanitarian projects when it is impossible to trace how they strengthen the state’s position in a given country or region.

There is little doubt that when Western countries are involved, the demands placed on conditional “Goethe Institutes” in terms of producing influence over minds are even higher than in Russia. The control exercised by officials of the relevant German federal agency to ensure that this function is carried out is also stricter and more efficient. In the end, whatever usefulness such institutions might have is contaminated by the political burden placed upon them.

The erosion of this sphere of interaction appears inevitable. Perhaps it is even necessary if, in the future, relations beyond official diplomacy are to become less dependent on the political moods of European capitals. For now, European politicians are simultaneously afraid of confrontation with Russia and pulling themselves deeper into the vortex of conflict. This is precisely the kind of situation that requires particular vigilance and practical resolve from the Russians.

We will soon see the results.