A Russian flag flies near bombed out buildings in Mariupol, Ukraine in April of 2022. Photo by Alexander Nemenov/AFP
Abstract
This article examines the distinct cultural and historical roots of Russia’s foreign policy, challenging the notion of universal values and rights. Drawing parallels between Russian actions in Syria and Ukraine and historic French and American philosophies, it argues that Russia’s behavior reflects its unique history, distinct from Western ideals of freedom and human rights. The text delves into the French Revolution’s universalism, contrasting it with the English tradition that influenced American independence to illustrate how cultural and historical contexts shape national values and policies. It asserts that Russia’s approach to strategic competition and conventional military conflict, as seen in Ukraine, is consistent with its historical ethos and not aligned with Western values. The article warns NATO of Russia’s potential ruthlessness in pursuing its security interests, driven by its cultural past and demographic challenges. This comprehensive analysis offers insight into the complexities of global geopolitics and the limitations of applying universal standards to diverse historical and cultural contexts.
Introduction
The Western public is frequently dismayed with the callousness of Russia. In 2015 and 2016, Russia’s General Surovikin (nicknamed General Armageddon in the media) ordered the direct targeting of civilian population centers in Syria to break resistance to al-Assad’s rule (Eckel, 2022). Surovikin calculated that refugees would not resist the Syrian National Army—they would just flow northward into regions controlled by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, ISIS, and ultimately, Europe.
More recently, Russian brutality was brought to bear against the people of Ukraine. Similar to Syria, civilian population centers, energy infrastructure, mass transit, and the people themselves were directly targeted. But Russia went further in Ukraine.
In many occupied Ukrainian localities Russian soldiers have perpetrated myriad war crimes. For example, in the town of Bucha, every military-age male was simply executed (Forrest, 2022). It is clear that officers allowed or even instructed Russian soldiers to rape and pillage as they pleased—all in service to breaking Ukraine’s will to resist.
The Russians have also conducted mass abductions of children from Ukraine, sending kids to live with Russian foster families (Coles, 2023). These children are taken without documentation of their families or origins deliberately to ensure that their parents can never track them down again. Moscow has adopted this policy to shore up Russia’s increasingly inverted demographics. Russians simply aren’t having enough children to support or replace their parents and grandparents in the workforce (Zeihan, 2023). Shipping a few thousand Ukrainian children to Russia, and then raising them as Russians, will help with the emerging demographic crisis.
How can the Russians do such things? How can they be so cruel? Why don’t they subscribe to western values or perhaps the values embodied in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
The answer is that “Rights” are not universal. Values and culture are not universal. They are anchored to a specific place–the product of a people’s journey through history.
French Universalism
In his famous “Social Contract”, Jean Jacques Rousseau postulated the existence of universal human rights, and these ideas were very much in vogue during the French Revolution. He famously declared that, “Man is born free, everywhere he is in chains,” (Rousseau, 1762). Rousseau believed that people were naturally free, and that society enslaved them to lives of drudgery, dependence, and immorality. In 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly, a self-declared quasi-legislative body contrived by radicals of the Third Estate and sympathetic noblemen, channeled Rousseau to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—a precursor to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Elysee, 2022).
Abstract
This article examines the distinct cultural and historical roots of Russia’s foreign policy, challenging the notion of universal values and rights. Drawing parallels between Russian actions in Syria and Ukraine and historic French and American philosophies, it argues that Russia’s behavior reflects its unique history, distinct from Western ideals of freedom and human rights. The text delves into the French Revolution’s universalism, contrasting it with the English tradition that influenced American independence to illustrate how cultural and historical contexts shape national values and policies. It asserts that Russia’s approach to strategic competition and conventional military conflict, as seen in Ukraine, is consistent with its historical ethos and not aligned with Western values. The article warns NATO of Russia’s potential ruthlessness in pursuing its security interests, driven by its cultural past and demographic challenges. This comprehensive analysis offers insight into the complexities of global geopolitics and the limitations of applying universal standards to diverse historical and cultural contexts.
Introduction
The Western public is frequently dismayed with the callousness of Russia. In 2015 and 2016, Russia’s General Surovikin (nicknamed General Armageddon in the media) ordered the direct targeting of civilian population centers in Syria to break resistance to al-Assad’s rule (Eckel, 2022). Surovikin calculated that refugees would not resist the Syrian National Army—they would just flow northward into regions controlled by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, ISIS, and ultimately, Europe.
More recently, Russian brutality was brought to bear against the people of Ukraine. Similar to Syria, civilian population centers, energy infrastructure, mass transit, and the people themselves were directly targeted. But Russia went further in Ukraine.
In many occupied Ukrainian localities Russian soldiers have perpetrated myriad war crimes. For example, in the town of Bucha, every military-age male was simply executed (Forrest, 2022). It is clear that officers allowed or even instructed Russian soldiers to rape and pillage as they pleased—all in service to breaking Ukraine’s will to resist.
The Russians have also conducted mass abductions of children from Ukraine, sending kids to live with Russian foster families (Coles, 2023). These children are taken without documentation of their families or origins deliberately to ensure that their parents can never track them down again. Moscow has adopted this policy to shore up Russia’s increasingly inverted demographics. Russians simply aren’t having enough children to support or replace their parents and grandparents in the workforce (Zeihan, 2023). Shipping a few thousand Ukrainian children to Russia, and then raising them as Russians, will help with the emerging demographic crisis.
How can the Russians do such things? How can they be so cruel? Why don’t they subscribe to western values or perhaps the values embodied in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
The answer is that “Rights” are not universal. Values and culture are not universal. They are anchored to a specific place–the product of a people’s journey through history.
French Universalism
In his famous “Social Contract”, Jean Jacques Rousseau postulated the existence of universal human rights, and these ideas were very much in vogue during the French Revolution. He famously declared that, “Man is born free, everywhere he is in chains,” (Rousseau, 1762). Rousseau believed that people were naturally free, and that society enslaved them to lives of drudgery, dependence, and immorality. In 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly, a self-declared quasi-legislative body contrived by radicals of the Third Estate and sympathetic noblemen, channeled Rousseau to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—a precursor to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Elysee, 2022).
But human rights was not the only field that French philosophers attempted to universalize. The French revolutionaries embraced the opportunity to remake the world as it should be—based on rationality. It was decreed that all roads must lead to Paris. All systems of standardization were transitioned to be base-10: months in the calendar, units of measurement, even the number of provinces in France. The metric system was invented as a rational new means of measurement based on the density of water. The old dogmas of Roman Catholicism were dismissed in favor of a new enlightened rationalism.
Yet, somehow the universal values expressed in this Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen did not apply to the decisions made by the Committee for Public Safety. Its chairman, Maximillian Robespierre, relentlessly pursued the “enemy within”, attempting to preserve the gains of the French Revolution by executing all skeptics, critics, and political resistance by La Madame Guillotine. What became known as the Great Terror was an attempt by French rationalists to usher in a new age by purging the nation of aristocracy, privilege, and mysticism—and opposition. The Catholic clergy, who were deemed not only oppressors, but old mystics—anathema to a modern and progressive state—were simply liquidated (History.com Editors, 2023).
American Rhetoric Embodying French Universalism
The American experience of revolution lacked the chaos and cruelty of the French. This was no accident. The Americans were fundamentally English, and they inherited the English Parliamentary tradition, English Common Law, English religion (Anglicanism), English understandings of government under law, and all of the traditions enjoyed by the English people (Starkey, 2023). One widespread outcry for justice amongst merchant American colonists regarded being taxed without representation in Parliament. America’s Founding Fathers were indignant at not being treated with the full rights and privileges of English citizens.
Thomas Jefferson in particular couched a great deal of political rhetoric in universal ideals of the French enlightenment, as did most of America’s founding fathers. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” (Jefferson, 1776). These words in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence were plagiarized from John Locke and clearly claim universalism. Indeed, the entire Declaration of Independence is an explanation to King George III as to how he has broken the “Social Contract” with the Englishmen in the American colonies—Jefferson was channeling Rousseau.
But Jefferson’s high mindedness, his grounding in universalist French philosophy, was rhetoric—window dressing. Words written on parchment do not define a people (Starkey, 2023). The American people were a product of their English heritage. In Novanglus No. VII (1763), John Adams argues that England was fundamentally a Republic:
The British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition be just, the British constitution is nothing more nor less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government’s being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend. An empire is a despotism, and an emperor a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy.
—Novanglus No. VII (1763) (Adams, 1763)
The Magna Carta
The Magna Carta was signed in 1215. It was England’s first attempt to establish a government under law (it is often glorified as England’s first enlightenment moment). First drafted by the ArchBishop of Canterbury, Magna Carta was a charter signed by King John to make peace with England’s rebel barons (Starkey, 2023).
Lampooned in the old Robin Hood stories, King John did not have the managerial capacities of his brother Richard the Lionheart, and after losing most of his inherited overseas holdings to King Phillip II of France he was forced to levy extremely heavy taxes in England to cover the losses of his failed wars. England’s overtaxed barons rebelled (Starkey, 2023).
The Magna Carta was the basis of peace, extracted by the barons in exchange for their support of John’s monarchy. It provided John’s guarantee of protection for the Church, protection from illegal imprisonment, swift justice in timely public trials, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown adjudicated by a council of 25 barons (Magna Carta, 1215). In law, the Magna Carta only survived for three months, and most of the original provisions in the Magna Carta died with John in 1216 (Starkey, 2023).
The 1215 Magna Carta was too revolutionary and the barons too unwieldy for the document to achieve a permanent political consensus. However, John’s Regent, William Marshal, used the old English tradition of “familiar councils” to establish a degree of consensus in his governance while the young King Henry III came of age (Starkey, 2023).
De Republica Anglorum
King Henry III soon came of age, and in 1225 he reaffirmed and placed the Royal Seal on an updated (less revolutionary, more centrist) version of Magna Carta in exchange for the barons’ tax support. As England’s leading council, Parliament proved its usefulness to the Crown as a means of explaining to the barons the geopolitical pressures on England and eliciting their support (Starkey, 2023).
Parliament gradually grew both in its membership and in its authorities (especially after the Glorious Revolution in 1689), setting in motion an inexorable trend towards the establishment of a limited executive, the supremacy of English Common Law, fair trials for the accused, independence for the Church of England, and suffrage (Starkey, 2023).
The King of England’s Oath of Office declares that he will, “Promise and Sweare to Governe the People of this Kingdome of England and the Dominions thereto belonging according to the Statutes in Parlyament Agreed on and the Laws and Customs of the same,” (The Coronation of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II, 1953). This is government under law. It was not achieved through some universalist declaration of rights. The English Parliamentary system that emerged from implementation of the 1225 Magna Carta survived through history because it fundamentally worked.
And it was unique in all of Europe. Most countries, France included, had some kind of Parliament, but they were institutions that the King essentially ignored. After all, a room of 100+ pig-ignorant grandstanding politicians frustrates efficient government.
But the English Parliament endures because it fundamentally works. It is effective in uniting tax-payers behind the King’s initiatives. It is effective at constraining the King’s excesses, desires, whims. It is efficient in passing legislation that creates a body of laws that are congruent with the culture and disposition of the English people (Starkey, 2023).
This was inherited by the Americans, and though they rhetorically channeled many French Enlightenment ideas, especially from Voltaire, Roussou, and Montesquieu, the institutions they established were fundamentally English (Starkey, 2023). The Bill of Rights codified America’s most fundamental civil liberties into the Constitution (originating from the Virginia Declaration of Rights). All of them were understood as basic rights of English citizens that could not be removed by the Crown without due process–a framework essentially laid out in Magna Carta. And the Americans abided by the English definition of due process—a public hearing or trial. And the Americans abided by the English understanding of basic rights–as reservations by law made unto individual citizens to protect them against the undue intrusion of the Governing body into their personal affairs or the confiscation of their property.
French Despotism
The French Revolution made grandiose declarations regarding rights for all mankind and codified them in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But the National Constituent Assembly could not put these rights into people’s minds or write them on their hearts.
Prior to 1789, the French were not in any sense a free people. As the French Monarchy collapsed and the legislature’s dominance by radicals became complete, all norms and traditions of behavior, governance, procedure, and due process became irrelevant. The rationalists attempted to create the perfect society—an enlightened society. However, the Great Terror—the liquidation of the aristocracy and clergy—and the complete remaking of French society resulted not in a stable republic but in 5 republics, 2 monarchies, and 2 empires, as each successive regime failed (Starkey, 2023).
Ultimately, the procrustean nature of French rationalism prevented the creation of a stable polity. Recall from mythology the Greek psychopath Procrustes. He preyed on travelers, inviting them into his home where he had a bed for them to spend the night. If the traveler was too tall for the bed, Procrustes cut the man’s legs off to fit. If the traveler was too short, he was stretched in a rack to fit. The rule of untethered reason and universalism—stretching and bending people to an arbitrary will in violation of their history, collective knowledge, and lived experience—is the torment of human society.
The Russians Have Their Own History
Russia’s history is far more despotic than France’s. The Russian economy was still fundamentally a feudalistic economy in the early 20th Century. Russia’s serfs were freed by Czar Alexander II in 1861, who feared a revolt, but they were saddled with redemption payments to compensate the landlord both for their freedom and to gain ownership of the tiny plot of land their family had farmed for generations. These redemption payments essentially bound many serfs to the land they were born on, in service to the same nobleman their family had always served (Nafziger, 2012).
The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil War paint a clear picture of the cruelty that Russian society was willing to both tolerate and perpetuate. After centuries of serfdom, the Russian people had to endure 90 years of slavery under Communism until the Soviet Union finally collapsed under its own weight in 1991.
Oddly, the 1936 Soviet Constitution guaranteed citizens essential civil liberties, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and legal equality for women (The Soviet Constitution, 1936). Like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen before, words on paper mean nothing if they do not coincide with the fundamental values derived from the history of the people themselves. No sacred text could override the nature of Communism or the normative governance inherited by the Russian people from their own despotic culture.
Conclusion
Freedom, like peace, is mutually understood. It doesn’t emanate from grand declarations of rights. Nor are human societies the product of freedom. We are not born free. We are born into dependency—utterly and exclusively dependent on our mothers for milk and warmth, who are in turn dependent on our fathers for protection and provision, who are in turn dependent on a community for assistance and resources. These dependencies are rooted in human biology, and they intuitively dictate the nature of human cooperation.
As local norms undergo an intergenerational process of continued negotiation, what emerges are traditions: solutions to life’s complex problems. To be sure, traditions constrain liberty, as they remove from the individual temporarily gratifying pathways and choices, but they are also necessary preconditions for liberty. They govern voluntary interactions within communities, creating a practical moral framework for mutual cooperation, without the intrusion of state authorities.
Most importantly, this means that values are anything but universal. They are rooted in place, developed from the collective experiences of a specific people—a product of their history (Starkey, 2023).
One need only look at the difficulty the United States had in exporting its values of democracy, rule of law, and civil liberties to places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. If it was self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, as Jefferson claimed, then one would have expected the Americans to be received as liberators. Instead, these cultures rejected American norms, and rural villages produced thousands of young men eager to fight a foreign occupier.
In my book Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition and Conventional Military Conflict, I explain that Russia has never known freedom. The behavior of Russian soldiers in war, the indifference or encouragement by Russian officers, and the apparent orchestration of this behavior by authorities in Moscow is to be expected. They do not share Western Values. Their history is not characterized by freedom or self-determination or even individualism, and Moscow sees the Russo-Ukrainian War as a fight for its very survival.
Vladimir Putin and his national security cadre are pursuing the same grand strategy as historic leaders like Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Vladimir Lenin. Russia has always achieved security by expanding over the vast Eurasian Plain until it can anchor its political boundaries on hard geographic barriers (the Carpathian Mountains, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, the Gobi Desert, etc.). In the aftermath of World War II, Joseph Stalin successfully conquered Eastern Europe and forward staged heavy ground forces in Germany. This is the Russian definition of security, and all of it was lost during the Soviet collapse in 1991.
Separately, Russia is in demographic decline. Birth rates are far too low to replace the existing workforce, sustain the tax base, and man the army (Zeihan, 2023). The average life expectancy is 59 for men and 72 for women. Citizens commonly suffer from cardiovascular disease attributed to stress, drug habits, and alcoholism. Other common causes of death include HIV, tuberculosis, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Moscow’s capacity to restore the defense-in-depth through military force is rapidly fading. The window for war is now.
NATO beware—Russia will execute this war with utter ruthlessness to take what they think is theirs. They do not share the Western moral framework. They will ignore tedious moralistic sermonizing at the UN.
All the regime in Moscow understands is strength.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
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