Vladimir Putin is now trying, with all the grace of his wickedness and clumsiness, to seduce a part of public opinion in the West. If half a century ago, his Soviet predecessors tried to seduce the liberal part of the West, claiming that the radical left is their natural ally, here now, the former secret police agent is trying to appease the conservative part of public opinion by claiming that the reaction is their natural ally.
● A diplomatic achievement for Erdogan: grain exports from Ukraine will resume
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His invasion of Ukraine disgusted roughly half the planet. In the other half, there is a division between joy and Ida of America (to whom the Ukrainians move) and indifference. Since Putin and his minions assumed that the war would be the equivalent of the four-day march, they did not bother to prepare world public opinion. Enslavement of Ukraine was declared a natural right of Russia, and that should have been enough. The dictator trusted in Ukraine’s “female” weakness and his hypersonic missiles (five times and more than the speed of sound, beyond the interception capability of some kind of defense system).
Only when his mistake dawned on him, he was forced to begin to single out from his heart a Western, or international case, to justify the enslavement, destruction and killing. He began to paint the war as a cosmic struggle in favor of traditional values. That is to say, he is not only fighting against the ‘Kohli’ (the Russian derogatory term for Ukrainians), but he is fighting the war of Christian civilization against the degenerate way of life of the West: against the ‘cancellation culture’ and the woke, against secularism, against LGBT people, Against gender non-binary.
This effort has considerable potential for success. There are a great many people in the Western democracies who think that the liberals have gone too far in both their appetite and their aggressiveness.
Last week, Putin expanded the scope of the Holy War. In the ears of the annual conference of the ‘Valdai Club’, a Russian version of Davos, he launched a frontal attack on the West: on its democracy, on its political culture, on its international perception, on its “strange elites”.
In other words, the war he is fighting is not intended to achieve only political and military goals. It is a war, waged against everything that Western democracies value. It was intended to deprive the West of its many-year status as a role model and a source of inspiration. Today’s big police states live in the shadow of fear of Western inspiration, as China showed in Hong Kong, as Putin repeatedly shows in Russian cities, as the Ayatollahs of Iran show.
Not like India, not like Turkey
Is it possible to avoid choosing a side in Putin’s war on the West for a long time? Many countries try to evade, either because they do not have to choose or because they hope to keep all options open. India and Turkey are the two most important examples for our purposes, first of all because they have very important relationships with Israel, and secondly because their dilemma has sides of similarity with the Israeli dilemma. They have complicated strategic relations with Russia, they have complex strategic relations with the West; Turkey has a military front for everything with Russia in Syria; India needs Russia’s goodwill in its conflicts with China and Pakistan.
Their authoritarian leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have developed cordial personal relationships with Putin, just like Benjamin Netanyahu. They hope to influence him in a pleasant way, but sometimes find themselves forced to say things that are less pleasant. It is interesting to see them go out of their way to claim that Russia can be influenced. They do so even when it destroys the cities of Ukraine and its infrastructure, and completely ignores them.
Their silence is thunderous. But India and Turkey are not Western democracies, first of all because they are not Western, and also because the democratic content of their lives has diminished greatly in recent years. They have no feelings of solidarity with the West. On the contrary, they harbor a deep historical grudge against him. But the government of minus one and a half billion Indians and plus 80 million Turks has more freedom of action than the government of nine million Israelis.
“we will be alone”
Reserve Major General Amos Gilad estimated last week at the Globes conference that “if we are attacked by Iran, we will be alone.” But what does “alone” mean? Does the general intend to say that American and European soldiers will not fight on Israel’s side? Or does he intend to claim that the USA, Germany and Great Britain will not do for the benefit of Israel what they did for the benefit of Ukraine? That they will not subsidize its collapsing economy (in the event of a total war), and will not fill its weapons warehouses?
If this is his opinion, Israel only has the option of Masada, or Samson. But I’m satisfied if that’s what he meant. We are allowed to assume that Israel according to the abyss will benefit from the same aid that saved its life in 1973, when children stood on the rooftops in Tel Aviv to count the Hercules of the American aerial train. Even then, America paid a heavy price for siding with a defensive democracy. It is better to remember that the Arab oil embargo of the Yom Kippur War ended a quarter of a century of economic prosperity, and ushered America into a gloomy decade of stagflation (recession and inflation). But going to the aid of Israel was natural. She belonged to the western camp.
Where will Israel belong in its next existential war? Will she find herself moving away from the West, because tactical considerations led her to choose sides in Putin’s war against Western democracy? There are no easy answers, but the questions need to be asked. An election campaign devoid of real international content showed the extent to which Israel continues to evade discussion of its destiny.