Putin’s global crusade against domestic political threats
Or: How hawks like Walter Russell Mead misunderstand Putin’s motivational structure
Walter Russell Mead, the very hawkish foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal, last week urged the Biden administration to “see the world through Mr. Putin’s eyes.”
Welcome to my project, Walter! I’m writing a book about seeing the world through other people’s eyes—about exercising “cognitive empathy.” I’m using this newsletter as a place to do research for the book, and today I’d like to put your column on Putin under the microscope.
My quasi-scientific analysis of Mead’s column is below. If it were being published in some quasi-scientific journal, the abstract would read something like this:
Mead’s column illustrates a very subtle kind of impediment to cognitive empathy, one that can afflict even good faith efforts to see the world through the eyes of others. This impediment can have the effect of making adversaries seem more threatening than they actually are. Mead’s column is a reminder that exercising cognitive empathy can be very challenging. However simple “putting yourself in their shoes” may sound, it’s far from easy.
Mead, it turns out, disagrees with that last sentence. He thinks cognitive empathy is easy, at least in the case of Putin. “The Russian president isn’t that hard to read,” he writes. “Like a movie supervillain who can’t resist sharing the details of his plans for world conquest with the captured hero, Mr. Putin makes no secret of his agenda. At Friday’s ceremony marking Russia’s illegal and invalid ‘annexation’ of four Ukrainian regions, he laid out his worldview and ambitions in a chilling and extraordinary speech that every American policy maker should read.”
The first thing that struck me about this passage is how different Mead’s framework for interpreting Putin’s speech is from the framework typically applied to speeches by American politicians.
With American politicians, the guiding assumption is that a speech is a product of political calculation—an attempt to build and sustain support from people and interest groups that constitute the politician’s base, to undermine support for the politician’s rivals, and perhaps to send signals to target audiences around the world. Sure, some of this will coincide with the politician’s heartfelt beliefs, and presumably none of it will clash violently with their heartfelt beliefs (if only, in some cases, because there aren’t many heartfelt beliefs). But most of us would dismiss as hopelessly naive a pundit who, as a rule, assumed that a politician’s speech is simply an honest disclosure of the politician’s actual worldview.
And yet… Mead treats Putin’s speech as an act of uninhibited self-revelation: Putin is like a movie villain who “can’t resist” disclosing his dark motivating world view.
As it happens, a couple of days after reading Mead’s column, I found myself talking to an actual Russian—Nikita Petrov, an artist and writer who used to work with me at NZN and now puts out his own Substack newsletter. I asked him about the Putin speech Mead wrote about. Nikita said that, though some of Putin’s speeches do seem like fairly straightforward presentations of his actual world view, this particular speech had seemed like “a complete calculated, crafted thing with certain parts targeted at certain demographics within and outside of Russia.”
I’d love to stop here, chastise Mead for his naivete, and move on to my next victim—I mean, my next subject for careful scientific examination. But Mead’s column is in a sense more subtle than I’ve made it sound. And, correspondingly, the failure of cognitive empathy that I think it evinces is more subtle than I’ve made that sound.
In fact, I think I may have discovered, in Mead’s column, a new species of cognitive empathy impediment! I’m not sure if it’s distinctive enough to warrant a new name—like “the Walter Russell Mead Cognitive Empathy Impediment.” I’ll let you be the judge.
Here is how Mead summarizes Putin’s world view as presented in the speech: