The War between Hard Power and Soft Power

Meanwhile, back in Eastern Europe….

Writing in the New York Times, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has declared that Putin cannot be allowed to win. And retired Admiral William McRaven, former commander of the Navy SEALs, told the CNN audience yesterday that Putin will definitely lose.

So much for encouragement. Others have pointed out that if Putin seems to be suffering a major humiliation, he will become more, not less dangerous. Remember Tiananmen Square….

Anyway, for the point-counterpoint of sophisticated thinking on the Ukraine crisis, I bring you some articles from the weekend edition of the Financial Times. They are, dare I say, cogent and to the point. They present different points of view, which is what we are seeking. As you know, it is impossible to link FT articles.

First up is Francis Fukuyama, noted public intellectual who proclaimed that history had ended with the fall of Communism. Now, if one were of a cynical disposition, one would suggest that Fukuyama has been spending considerable time and energy trying to keep his one big idea alive. That idea is-- the triumph of liberalism, that is, the triumph of democratic governance, human rights, freedom of discussion, and free enterprise. To that he adds the triumph of modern science, though, dare we mention, scientific fact is not and has never been determined by taking a vote. Not even by taking a vote of scientists. If all the world's people and all the world's scientists believe that the earth is flat that does not make it any less round.

Fukuyama is a Hegelian, and therefore, there is no such thing as an event that can prove him wrong. Liberalism triumphed, he declared, but revanchist actors have been fighting against it.

But then, somehow or other, Europe in the twentieth century, to take an obvious example, found that liberalism had spawned some of the most horrific butchery the world has ever seen. I understand that it is all too simple minded for Fukuyama’s mind, but his good friend Hegel's ideas gave rise to Marxism and to Communism.

As for the Hegelian prophecy of the end of history, the story comes to us from the Bible, and, through its secular idealistic version, managed to animate totalitarian dictatorships throughout the world. Fukuyama has proclaimed that history ended when everyone came to believe that liberal democracy was the best and the greatest. And yet, he was talking about a uniformity of belief, as were Hegel’s Communist descendants.

Anyway, Fukuyama has glommed on Ukrainian president Zelensky, his great hero, for standing up to tyranny. A few words will give the gist. You would think that God had sent Zelensky to save Fukuyama’s great idea.

The heroism of Ukrainians rallying around their country and fighting desperately against a much larger enemy has inspired people around the world. President Zelensky has come to be seen as a model leader, courageous under not metaphorical but real fire, and a source of unity for a previously fractured nation. Ukraine’s solitary stand has in turn provoked a remarkable upwelling of international support. Cities around the world have decked themselves in blue-and-gold Ukrainian flags, and have promised material support….

As for the facts on the ground, they are none too encouraging:

Although it is hard to see how Putin achieves his larger objectives of a greater Russia, we are still facing a long and dispiriting road ahead. Putin has yet to bring to bear all of the military force Russia has at its disposal.

 Ukraine’s defenders are exhausted and running out of food and ammunition. There will be a race between Russia resupplying its own forces, and Nato seeking to bolster Ukrainian resistance. As Russia doubles down, Ukrainian cities are suffering indiscriminate shelling, and tragically are coming to resemble places, such as Grozny in Chechnya, that suffered similar Russian bombardment in the 1990s. There is also a danger of escalation of the fighting to direct clashes between Nato and Russia as calls mount for a “no-fly” zone. But it is the Ukrainians who will bear the cost of Putin’s aggression, and they who will be fighting on behalf of all of us.

The travails of liberalism will not end even if Putin loses. China will be waiting in the wings, as well as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and the populists in western countries. But the world will have learnt what the value of a liberal world order is, and that it will not survive unless people struggle for it and show each other mutual support. The Ukrainians, more than any other people, have shown what true bravery is, and that the spirit of 1989 remains alive in their corner of the world. For the rest of us, it has been slumbering and is being reawakened.

In truth, Fukuyama does not care about the outcome. He cares mostly about the resurrection of his own big idea.

Continuing with yesterday’s FT, Simon Schama argues persuasively that, in Ukraine and the West, soft power is defeating hard power. We and many others have remarked sagely that the West is fighting for Ukraine using the weapons of finance and information, that is, propaganda. Russia is using tanks and fighter jets, and is trying to occupy territory.

States are built with hardware, but nations run on software. Which is the more indispensable to the life or death of a nation state, we are, through Ukraine’s bloody ordeal, just discovering. The hardware of state power consists of armies, bureaucracies, security police, imposing buildings, abysmal prisons. National software is something less tangible but no less powerful: the obstinacy of allegiance under extreme stress; the kinship of calamity; the surge of patriotic emotion; the fortitude of families; the swell of civic pride even as neighbourhoods are besieged or destroyed; the inconvenient resistance of truth; and, not least, the transfiguring experience of creating, amid torment, an unforgettable national epic.

The 60km Russian convoy, stalled in the mud, hobbled by blown tyres, fuel and food shortages, is the ultimate embodiment of dumb hardware: a lumbering dinosaur, inexorably destructive, fire-breathing its oxygen-sucking terror, yet also brainlessly impotent, incapable, for all its death-dealing, of achieving any politically strategic end. Which is not to say, of course, that monstrous atrocities such as depriving cities such as Mariupol of the most basic human needs — water and sanitation — will not have been committed en route to the dead end of Putinite imperialism.

Countless small acts of defiance, a daily astonishment — doubtless to the Kremlin as to the rest of the admiring world — are all over the internet: villagers draped in Ukrainian flags, impeding tanks and armoured cars, leaving the soldiers who man them bewildered about what to do next with the crowd whose grateful acclaim they had been told to expect. Hatred rains down on their head rather than nosegays. Troops who have no difficulty firing missiles on faraway, unseen targets pull up short before gunning down grandmothers and teenagers. Notwithstanding the grotesque disparity in military resources between the invaders and the invaded, there have been pitched battles where the ostensibly larger force has come off worse.

Even if Putin wins on the ground, his will, Schama writes, be a pyrrhic victory:

Yet this too will prove a pyrrhic victory, since the Ukrainian diaspora will instil the characterisation of the Putin regime as genocidal murderers. Generations will neither forgive nor forget.

Dare I note, that Schama is a far better writer than most of the journalists around. One find his arguments convincing, up to a point. The problem is that victory forgives a lot of sins and predicting outcomes is a notoriously dodgy business. Keep in mind that Putin has a lot of non-military weapons at his disposal. He has energy and grain and minerals… the absence of any or all of which can certain wreak havoc around the world. And besides, Putin does have allies around the world. From a Western perspective, Putin has lost. That does not tell us about the attitude in China, in India and throughout the Middle East. China's leaders are playing it cool, but the media in the Middle Kingdom seems clearly to be cheering Putin on.

And then, as you read through your weekend edition of the FT, you run across a column by one Janan Ganesh, a roving columnist, who has been doing much of his roving in the United States of late. Ganesh is one of the brighter young columnists around, so, he is well worth a read.

As opposed to Schama, Ganesh sees the lesson of Ukraine in quite different terms. He sees the Russian invasion as a decisive repudiation of the soft power that Western Europe has been indulging all these many decades. You see, Europe has been promoting soft power, since it effectively has no military hardware to defend itself. The current leader of Europe, one Ursula von de Leyen, was previously the minister of defense in Germany-- at a time when the German armed forces did not have tanks to run tank exercises-- so they were running them with VW buses. Evidently, she is the face of European weakness.

Ganesh explains the change in Europe:

Last week, at the instigation of German chancellor Olaf Scholz, a charade ended. It had been going on for a human lifetime. Having evolved beyond the use of force, Europe has acted on occasion as though the outside world has done the same, or will catch up any day now. What began as a “culture of restraint” in postwar West Germany became a wider continental faith in aid and diplomacy as not just necessary in world affairs but almost sufficient. To judge by Berlin’s plan for a permanently larger military, and its €100bn downpayment to that end, a certain idea of Europe is over.

No doubt, the trope of the continent as a passive “Venus” can be taken too far. The militaries of Britain, France, Poland and Norway all inspired respect in Washington during my more than three years there. So did what is known, in the dry idiom of that town, as their “strategic culture”. Germany itself has overcome psychic burdens that scarcely need spelling out to intervene in the Balkans and beyond.

It is just that there is no getting around the numbers. Australia, with less than half the population, and every geographic reason to shirk, has about the same defence budget as Italy. There is no forgetting Europe’s cringing reliance on American wares and logistics either, which was as conspicuous in Kabul in 2021 as it was in Kosovo in 1999. An end to this kind of dereliction has been promised before, of course. But never with the clarity of the past week. And never with neutral Sweden making its own gestures in the same vein.

Obviously, the trope of the passive European Venus suggests that the continent has been amassing great stores of girl power, led by strong, empowered women. Led by Germany, and especially by the hapless former Chancellor Angela Merkel, that nation did not merely have no military power at all. It shut down its coal based and nuclear energy supplies, the better to embrace renewables-- at the suggestion of a Swedish schoolgirl.

Germans love nature and their primary goal in life is not to pollute the environment.

By trotting out Venus, Ganesh is obviously referring to the notion, the subject of a long forgotten best seller, that men are from Mars and that women are from Venus. 

This is a political moment, but no less revealing as a cultural one. It is a reminder that the lifestyle for which I bang the drum in this column — and which finds its highest expression in Europe, where you can visit another country for lunch — relies on its opposite. It relies on uniformed men and women and the backstop of coercive force. Passing off a large part of that burden to the US doesn’t make it less true. The EU’s soft power is as awesome as claimed (see the long-shot membership bids of Ukraine and Georgia) but it rests on a steel base.

Amazingly enough, and most Americans have known this already, the very generous European welfare state can grant out largesse with abandon because it does not need to pay for its defense.

The quality of European living depends on more than direct physical security. There is an implicit subsidy at work, too. The paid leave, the clean cities, the high social minimum: Europe funds these things, in part, with the money it saves on defence. It is entirely possible to have guns and butter, of course. France pairs a serious military with a serious welfare state. But it does so by having a serious tax burden. If the continent is going to tool up and remain a “lifestyle superpower”, it will face trade-offs that it has fudged since the end of the cold war.

Nicely argued. Credit to the FT for running a series of interesting and intelligent analyses of the situation in Ukraine.