From the mid-19th century until the mid-20th, the “German Question” was the
biggest and hardest question of geopolitics. The German Question, to put it simply, was whether or not a unification of German speakers under one rule would create a dangerously powerful state at the center of Europe. The answer to that question was decided in the end, as Otto von Bismarck had foreseen, by blood and iron. Two vast, catastrophic wars brought violence and destruction to the whole of Europe and finally left Germany defeated and divided. By the time of its reunification in 1990, demographic decline and cultural change had defanged Berlin sufficiently that the threat of a united Germany has receded. Germany still predominates over the European Union because of its size and economic strength. But it is no menace.
The same cannot be said of Russia, which has become more aggressive even as its economic significance has diminished. The biggest and hardest question of 21st-century geopolitics may prove to be: What do we do about Moscow?
Like the German Question, the new Russian Question is a function of the country’s Mittellage (“central situation”). Germany’s location was central in European terms. At its height, the German Reich extended from Koblenz to Königsberg, from the banks of the Rhine to the beaches of the Baltic. Russia today is central in global terms. It was the only one of the great European empires that extended into Asia over land rather than sea. The Soviet Union died an astoundingly peaceful death 25 years ago this month. Yet the Russian Federation still extends from Kaliningrad — as Königsberg has been known since its annexation by Russia in 1945 — all the way to Vladivostok, 4,500 miles and 10 time zones away.
In the 19th century, the tension between Russia’s westward-looking metropolises and its vast Asian hinterland furnished novelists and playwrights with wonderfully rich material. Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky could debate which direction Russia should take, but no one doubted the existence of the West-East dilemma. Nor was it a purely geographical phenomenon. The institution of serfdom meant that until the 1860s — and in practice long after that — a Russian gentleman only had to take a ride through his estates to leave Europe far behind.
But Russia’s West-East dilemma today is fast becoming the central problem of international politics, not literature. On one side lies a China that long ago surpassed Russia in economic as well as demographic terms and increasingly aspires to military preeminence in Asia. On the other side of Russia lies a Europe that, for all its prosperity, has become politically introverted and excessively reliant on the United States for its defense.
In his most recent book, World Order, Henry Kissinger contrasted four evolving and incompatible conceptions of international order: American, European, Chinese, and Islamic. Russia’s place in this scheme of things is ambiguous. “From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent,” Kissinger wrote. Russia is “a uniquely ‘Eurasian’ power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.” It has learned its geopolitics “from the hard school of the steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain with few fixed borders.”
Russia, it might be inferred, is the power least interested in world order. President Vladimir Putin would no doubt deny that. He would argue that the best basis for order would be for the great powers mutually to respect their spheres of influence and domestic political differences. On the other hand, Russia is clearly the power most ready to exploit the new tools of cyberwarfare that Kissinger warned presciently about in 2014:
The pervasiveness of networked communications in the social, financial, industrial, and military sectors has … revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the state of nature about which philosophers have speculated and the escape from which, according to [Thomas] Hobbes, provided the motivating force for creating a political order.… [A]symmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber powers both in diplomacy and in strategy.… Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system.
That crisis has already arrived. As I write, the burning question of American politics is how far the Russian government was successful in its efforts to influence the outcome of November’s presidential election. That Russia tried to do this is no longer in serious dispute. Russian hackers successfully accessed the emails of the Democratic National Committee. WikiLeaks acted as the conduit. The resulting email dumps and leaks probably reinforced voters’ negative views of Hillary Clinton. Given Donald Trump’s narrow margin of victory in key swing states, one might claim that this was decisive — though no more or less decisive than all the other factors that made up the minds of crucial voters in an election where “everything mattered.” President Barack Obama now says that “when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action” and that “we will.”
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What remains debatable is how far the Trump campaign was aware that it was receiving assistance from Moscow. If so, was there some hidden quid pro quo? Writing in Slate back in July, Franklin Foer argued that Putin has “a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump.” In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum called Trump a “Manchurian candidate.” The evidence for such claims is circumstantial at best. When he hired Paul Manafort as his campaign manager, Trump can hardly have been unaware of Manafort’s work for Kremlin crony Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt Ukrainian president between 2010 and 2014. Another former Trump campaign advisor with questionably close ties to Moscow was Carter Page, a vocal defender of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Proponents of the conspiracy theory also cite Trump’s description of NATO as “obsolete” and “expensive,” his desire to make a “great deal” with Putin if elected, and his repeated refusal to accept that Russia was behind the cybercampaign against his opponent — a campaign that he himself incited, if only jokingly, back in July.
Yet this controversy is generating more heat than light. First, there is nothing new about Russian attempts to influence Western elections: Such “psychological operations” were conducted by intelligence agencies on both sides of the Cold War. New technology has perhaps made them easier to conduct and more effective, but they remain (unlike, say, biological warfare) within the pale of international law. Second, in an election characterized by a general lack of restraint, Trump may simply have exploited an unlooked for but not unwelcome advantage. If another foreign government had supplied a liberal website with embarrassing emails hacked from Republican accounts, would the Clinton campaign have averted its gaze? Third, nothing Trump has said during the election binds him to be Putin’s confederate, as he made clear to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News in April. “I think I would possibly have a good relationship [with Putin],” Trump said. “I don’t know.… I have no idea, Bill. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”
The real question we need to ask is why the Russian government was so eager to influence the election in Trump’s favor. The answer to that question is not as obvious as might be thought. It is that Russia urgently — one might even say desperately — needed a friendlier president than Clinton would have been. Moscow’s meddling in American politics reflects not its strength, nor its strategic sophistication, but its weakness and dependence on Cold War tactics such as psy-ops.
