Nato economic and technological superiority, let alone the nuclear umbrella, have made Western leaders complacent about the prospect of a Russian victory – not just in Ukraine, but in Europe as a whole. Putin’s key to victory lies not in an all-out war against Nato, but in the use of non-military weapons and the subversion of democratic polities. In short, Putin wins once liberal democracies lose the will to fight – and that day might be catastrophically close.
If it comes, it is only the beginning of the spread of a dangerous new ideology the type of which has been unseen for decades.
Putin has already succeeded in muddying public discourse in the West. While Russian state TV prepares its domestic audience for war and genocide, pro-Putin voices in the West denounce as “warmongers” those who want to support Ukraine with the means for self-defence.
Ruscism has also been injected into the culture wars. False promises of “national rebirth” and “traditional values” appeal to disenchanted conservatives in the West, while the Left is happily feeding on anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. As the recent Ivy League protests have shown, there is even a willingness to embrace terrorist groups such as Hamas, a close ally of Iran – which, in turn, supplies Russia with the Shahed drones used for murdering Ukrainian civilians.
Another success for Putin is the enlistment of key figures in the West. In Germany, where I live, this is evident in some infamous cases. It is less important whether they are “useful idiots”, paid-up lobbyists (such as former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder) or (alleged) recipients of bribes. What matters is that the democratic discourse has been compromised by agents willing to do the bidding of “ruscism”.
The “fascistisation” of populist movements is likely one of the most significant developments in recent years. For over a decade, scholars have debated whether nativist, illiberal, and anti-elitist positions could be termed fascist – and all too often, the term has been abused to denigrate opinions outside the political mainstream. Russian influence, however, has changed everything – and the fact that Putin has infiltrated opposition voices across Europe and the United States might turn out to be his most clever investment.
The German AfD is a case in point. Founded in 2013, the party was led by liberal and conservative economists who argued that the euro was incompatible with notions of national sovereignty and, in addition, economically harmful to both Greeks and Germans. Having missed the electoral threshold by a narrow margin in the same year, the party was saved benefitted from Angela Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis in 2015. In 2017, the AfD entered the Federal parliament for the first time and has since become a fixture in German politics.
At the beginning, the AfD’s positions appeared to be not that dissimilar to those of conservative parties outside Germany: hostile to overreach from Brussels, critical of unrestricted immigration, and fiscally conservative, the AfD professed to merely occupy Right-of-centre positions vacated by Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
Quickly, however, it became clear that the AfD was anything but conservative. In 2018, its chairman Alexander Gauland declared that “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of birds*** in over 1,000 years of glorious German history”. As most moderate voices left over the years, the influence of the extreme right and the Thuringian party leader Björn Höcke, who wants to fuse the national and the social, grew stronger. “The most important book published in 2018”, according to Höcke, was aptly entitled “solidarity patriotism”.
More recently, he has told Elon Musk on Twitter that provisions in the German criminal code, which ban Nazi slogans, “aim to prevent Germany from finding itself again.” His usage of the Nazi stormtrooper catchphrase “Everything for Germany” has since earned him a hefty fine by a German court.