I share two experiences with Vladimir Putin. We both lived in Berlin during the 80s, on opposite sides of the Wall, and we are both students of Japanese martial arts. Both experiences are relevant to the current political situation in the United States.
By Western standards, East Berlin was a drab place in the 80s. Utilitarian architecture, blocky, gray apartment complexes. Family cars that looked like cheap 1950s models chugging down the streets. Nothing compared to the dazzling lights of West Berlin, with its Mercedes-Benz and BMWs zipping on down the autobahn, Kurfustendamm, the extravagantly elegant KaDeWe shopping mall, the colorful Kreutzberg with its ethnic restaurants. Despite its lack of grace and opulence, East Berlin was clean, orderly and efficient in true Prussian fashion. For Soviet officers, it was heaven. Far from the inefficiencies and corruption of Soviet Russia, it was an oasis of socialist success. Disciplined, hardworking Germans managed to make their economy work well enough despite the ideological straitjacket of Leninism. One of those Germans was a woman by the name Angela Merkel, one of few Western leaders who truly understand Putin. In East Berlin, Soviet officers were treated with respect and even deference. It was clear to all that they were the true imperial masters of East Germany, through their overwhelming military might. An assignment to East Berlin was a coveted reward for Soviet military and KGB officers. An additional bonus was that they got to harass the West from up close and personal. Soviet and East German intelligence operations successfully infiltrated West Germany throughout the Cold War. Parabolic antennas and listening posts dotted the East Berlin landscape, as their NATO counterparts were prominently visible in West Berlin. East German and Soviet intelligence operations had brought down West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had tried to make sincere overtures to the East. His right-hand man turned out to be an East German spy. Soviet officers in East Berlin must have felt truly powerful. Considering that only 4 decades before German tanks had rolled into Russia to open the bloodiest theater in World War 2, and that millions of Russian soldiers and civilians had died to repel that invasion, they must have felt they had a right to rule over their former aggressors. One of those Soviet officers was a young man named Vladimir Putin. He loved his life in orderly East Berlin, where his career was taking off. And then, in the space of two years, it all came crashing down. East Germany rose up and broke away, eventually to rejoin West Germany. The Wall was demolished. Bits and pieces of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe detached, and finally the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Once proud Soviet officers had to pack their bags and return to a chaotic, impoverished Russia that narrowly avoided civil war.
It’s easy to envision how this humiliating defeat must have shocked and angered Putin. That sense of power and control was gone, along with his cozy assignment in an orderly client state. What is less clear is that a majority of Russians felt very much the same way. Most Americans don’t really understand other countries, and they certainly didn’t understand Russia. Russians descend from Vikings, the Rus, who adopted Christianity (and the Greek alphabet that forms the basis of the Cyrillic one) from the Byzantines. Throughout their history, Russians have fought ferociously against ruthless external enemies (the Tartars, the Ottomans, the Japanese, the Nazis). And they have always been an empire, since the Middle Ages. Czars gave way to Soviets, but a multinational empire is what Russians have been used to throughout their history. Western style democracy never really took roots there. The average Russian would rather have an empire with a strong, pseudo-democratic dictatorship than a weak, chaotic representative democracy. Russians are ethnically less diverse than Americans, and socially conservative. They view the West as a source of debauchery and corruption, and since 1989 they have felt besieged and pushed around by the West. They have never truly considered becoming a Western client state under American hegemony, and they deeply resented the fact that their former client states flocked to the protective arms of NATO and the European Union. They felt disrespected, humiliated and threatened as much as the US would have felt if Canada and Mexico had joined the Warsaw Pact. They wanted revenge. Putin has been plotting that revenge since his ignominious departure from East Berlin. And he got back at the West, with interests. His people love him for it. How he did it has a lot to do with his martial arts training.
In the American imagination, we “won” the Cold War, presumably because of something brilliant President Reagan did. That perspective is simplistic, as we shall see. We may have won Cold War 1, but we lost Cold War 2, and by a wider margin.
Cold War 1 was the geopolitical equivalent of boxing, a popular sport in the US. Boxing is a highly choreographed fistfight whereby two contestants of similar weights dance around each other, hitting each other hard but following a clear rulebook and fighting fairly and honorably. It’s a sport where the strongest or fastest person wins, and the loser acknowledges defeat. You don’t kick your opponent in the groin if you are losing in a boxing match. In Cold War 1, NATO and the Warsaw Pact spied on each other, provoked each other, funded proxy wars and threatened each other with doomsday arsenals. But no one pulled the ultimate trigger. Both sides followed unwritten rules of engagement. Both sides spent more money than they could afford to on massive military buildups and proxy wars. But the US had the advantage of a huge economy and the ability to borrow money on the international bond markets. The Soviet Union, trapped in communist ideology, could only rely on minimal foreign trade with its own client states and internal demand. So, it ran out of breath first, like a boxer with inadequate aerobic training. The Reagan military spending spree and tax cuts cost America the 1987 recession. Analogous military spending efforts and the war in Afghanistan caused economic collapse in the Soviet Union, which literally ran out of cash and disintegrated. In our naïve expectations, at this point the Russians should have accepted defeat, shaken our hand, embraced capitalism and become loyal friends, like the Germans and the Japanese after World War 2. Saint Reagan performed a miracle. Happy ending for all, like in a Hollywood movie from the 1940s.
Except, Germans and Japanese joined the West more out of a need for protection (from the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Koreans) than out of genuine admiration for Americans. As far as the Russians are concerned, we completely misread the situation. They have no interest in joining the West. All they want is to go back to a two-superpower world where they are as feared and respected as the US.
Enter Putin, the judoka. Judo is a sanitized version of Ju-Jitsu, a devastatingly effective combat discipline. Ju-jitsu is not a sport. It is not concerned with rules or winning points. Its goal is to incapacitate or kill a stronger enemy in the shortest possible time, using his own strength and momentum against him to throw his “ki” (center of gravity) off balance. In Ju-Jitsu, the graceful throws used in Olympic Judo are a setup for the killer blow (Atemi Waza). A good martial artist is aware of his own and his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses at all times (Zanshin). Putin understands his people, and their need to feel strong, proud and respected. He also understands the strengths and weaknesses of America much better than many Americans do. He knows that America is addicted to constant economic growth and that greed is America’s greatest weakness. He knows that America has the largest military on Earth but has just wasted tremendous resources in pointless wars of choice, and that such wars quickly become highly unpopular with the American public, especially if they are not over quickly. Americans are impatient, and have a short memory and an even shorter attention span. Putin knows that despite the constant NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, the democratic West will be reluctant to engage in a shooting war, and will do so only as a last resort. He also knows that Russia doesn’t have the huge population and enormous production capacity that China has. It has a smaller population than the US and much smaller than the EU, and its industrial capacity is not negligible but is vastly inferior to that of the West. But it does have three key strengths: 1) a huge military with massive nuclear capabilities (which comes with the ability to sell arms to third parties); 2) enormous oil and gas reserves and 3) a totalitarian government that doesn’t have to worry about criticism from a free press and enjoys vast popular support. This gives him the flexibility to be ruthless without a need for self-restraint while ignoring such niceties as international law, rules of engagement or civilian casualties.
The technique Putin used can be compared to a Tomoe-nage (circle throw). Faced with a stronger opponent who pushes you back on your heels, you pretend to hold his arms defensively and let yourself fall backwards. But as you fall you plant your foot in your opponent’s groin (in Judo, his abdomen), and throw him over your head to send him sprawling to the ground. If the groin kick is accurately placed, he will land in excruciating pain and unable to react. In Ju-Jitsu, you can then finish him off with a kick to the head.
Putin got rid of the shackles of ideological communism and started doing business with the West. Moscow became a capitalist paradise inhabited by a wealthy oligarchy. Pretending to fall backwards into a capitalist, pro-business stance, Putin befriended Western leaders, especially Italian tycoon Berlusconi, and made sure that the EU thought of him as a friend and business partner. Russian billionaires went on spending sprees in the West, becoming the patrons of famous British football teams and sailing their yachts around the Mediterranean. At one point, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Russia wanted to rediscover its European roots and become a Western country after all. However, internally Putin was heading towards fascism, not Western style democracy. He dusted off the Orthodox Church, a pillar of Czarist power and a strongly conservative, homophobic cultural influence on Russian society. He cultivated a macho image that made the average Russians feel empowered, by engaging in adventurous stunts of all kinds from horseback riding in the tundra to tiger hunting. Using his KGB skills, he made sure that internal critics succumbed to unfortunate accidents or were dispatched by faceless murderers. He established a nearly complete control over the media, creating a propaganda machine that would have been the envy of the old Soviet Union. Without much fanfare, he recreated a Soviet-style dictatorship without the weakness of communism. He exploited the West’s addiction to fuel by using oil and gas as a political blackmail tool. He blackmailed the West by cutting off gas supply through Ukraine. He used revenues from oil and gas sales to fund his enormous military, and then used this military to assert Russia’s influence in Georgia, East Ukraine, Crimea and finally Syria. He also used his profits to fund anti-European parties to destabilize the EU.
The Obama administration was aware of these moves. It is likely that an important motivation for Obama’s pursuit of policies that kept the price of oil low was to limit Russia’s ability to leverage oil revenues. Sanctions placed on Russia because of its annexation of Crimea also limited its ability to use its natural resources as a weapon. Putin’s opponent was pushing back again. Then, the opportunity for a perfect throw presented itself. A divisive electoral campaign in the US pitted an experienced candidate who would have continued Obama’s policies against a candidate who was Putin’s dream: inexperienced, megalomaniacal to the point of narcissism, greedy and indebted to Russian banks, who had rescued him from bankruptcy. An isolationist who openly criticized NATO and praised Putin’s strongman policies. With perfect timing, Putin planted Russia’s foot in the groin of America and sent us sprawling. He used Russia’s intelligence services to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. He helped install a Russian stooge into the White House, who promptly obliged by filling his cabinet with oil industry executives and greedy cronies, none of whom has the slightest foreign policy experience. The Secretary of State nominee himself is an oil executive who has received a “Freedom Award” from Putin for doing business with Russia, and who is surely salivating at the thought of more Russian oil.
Tomoe-nage, and Cold War 2 was lost. American greed, its internal divisions and its vulnerability to Trump’s demagogy were the momentum Putin used to throw us off balance. A brilliant move, which, like in a real life martial art confrontation, was helped by an overconfident and unbalanced opponent who had no “Zanshin”.
Let’s not minimize the extent of this humiliation. To put it bluntly, we have been badly outmaneuvered, and we are face down in the dirt. At this time, America is sliding towards a right-wing klepto-oligarchy much like today’s Russia. While a majority of Americans do not support this trend, they have no representation in Washington, and an authoritarian tide is mounting. A large segment of our population, bamboozled by decades of right-wing propaganda, is beginning to warm up to the idea of a strongman-led pseudodemocracy.
What an irony, if in the end both democracy and communism were to morph into their old nemesis, fascism.
By Western standards, East Berlin was a drab place in the 80s. Utilitarian architecture, blocky, gray apartment complexes. Family cars that looked like cheap 1950s models chugging down the streets. Nothing compared to the dazzling lights of West Berlin, with its Mercedes-Benz and BMWs zipping on down the autobahn, Kurfustendamm, the extravagantly elegant KaDeWe shopping mall, the colorful Kreutzberg with its ethnic restaurants. Despite its lack of grace and opulence, East Berlin was clean, orderly and efficient in true Prussian fashion. For Soviet officers, it was heaven. Far from the inefficiencies and corruption of Soviet Russia, it was an oasis of socialist success. Disciplined, hardworking Germans managed to make their economy work well enough despite the ideological straitjacket of Leninism. One of those Germans was a woman by the name Angela Merkel, one of few Western leaders who truly understand Putin. In East Berlin, Soviet officers were treated with respect and even deference. It was clear to all that they were the true imperial masters of East Germany, through their overwhelming military might. An assignment to East Berlin was a coveted reward for Soviet military and KGB officers. An additional bonus was that they got to harass the West from up close and personal. Soviet and East German intelligence operations successfully infiltrated West Germany throughout the Cold War. Parabolic antennas and listening posts dotted the East Berlin landscape, as their NATO counterparts were prominently visible in West Berlin. East German and Soviet intelligence operations had brought down West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had tried to make sincere overtures to the East. His right-hand man turned out to be an East German spy. Soviet officers in East Berlin must have felt truly powerful. Considering that only 4 decades before German tanks had rolled into Russia to open the bloodiest theater in World War 2, and that millions of Russian soldiers and civilians had died to repel that invasion, they must have felt they had a right to rule over their former aggressors. One of those Soviet officers was a young man named Vladimir Putin. He loved his life in orderly East Berlin, where his career was taking off. And then, in the space of two years, it all came crashing down. East Germany rose up and broke away, eventually to rejoin West Germany. The Wall was demolished. Bits and pieces of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe detached, and finally the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Once proud Soviet officers had to pack their bags and return to a chaotic, impoverished Russia that narrowly avoided civil war.
It’s easy to envision how this humiliating defeat must have shocked and angered Putin. That sense of power and control was gone, along with his cozy assignment in an orderly client state. What is less clear is that a majority of Russians felt very much the same way. Most Americans don’t really understand other countries, and they certainly didn’t understand Russia. Russians descend from Vikings, the Rus, who adopted Christianity (and the Greek alphabet that forms the basis of the Cyrillic one) from the Byzantines. Throughout their history, Russians have fought ferociously against ruthless external enemies (the Tartars, the Ottomans, the Japanese, the Nazis). And they have always been an empire, since the Middle Ages. Czars gave way to Soviets, but a multinational empire is what Russians have been used to throughout their history. Western style democracy never really took roots there. The average Russian would rather have an empire with a strong, pseudo-democratic dictatorship than a weak, chaotic representative democracy. Russians are ethnically less diverse than Americans, and socially conservative. They view the West as a source of debauchery and corruption, and since 1989 they have felt besieged and pushed around by the West. They have never truly considered becoming a Western client state under American hegemony, and they deeply resented the fact that their former client states flocked to the protective arms of NATO and the European Union. They felt disrespected, humiliated and threatened as much as the US would have felt if Canada and Mexico had joined the Warsaw Pact. They wanted revenge. Putin has been plotting that revenge since his ignominious departure from East Berlin. And he got back at the West, with interests. His people love him for it. How he did it has a lot to do with his martial arts training.
In the American imagination, we “won” the Cold War, presumably because of something brilliant President Reagan did. That perspective is simplistic, as we shall see. We may have won Cold War 1, but we lost Cold War 2, and by a wider margin.
Cold War 1 was the geopolitical equivalent of boxing, a popular sport in the US. Boxing is a highly choreographed fistfight whereby two contestants of similar weights dance around each other, hitting each other hard but following a clear rulebook and fighting fairly and honorably. It’s a sport where the strongest or fastest person wins, and the loser acknowledges defeat. You don’t kick your opponent in the groin if you are losing in a boxing match. In Cold War 1, NATO and the Warsaw Pact spied on each other, provoked each other, funded proxy wars and threatened each other with doomsday arsenals. But no one pulled the ultimate trigger. Both sides followed unwritten rules of engagement. Both sides spent more money than they could afford to on massive military buildups and proxy wars. But the US had the advantage of a huge economy and the ability to borrow money on the international bond markets. The Soviet Union, trapped in communist ideology, could only rely on minimal foreign trade with its own client states and internal demand. So, it ran out of breath first, like a boxer with inadequate aerobic training. The Reagan military spending spree and tax cuts cost America the 1987 recession. Analogous military spending efforts and the war in Afghanistan caused economic collapse in the Soviet Union, which literally ran out of cash and disintegrated. In our naïve expectations, at this point the Russians should have accepted defeat, shaken our hand, embraced capitalism and become loyal friends, like the Germans and the Japanese after World War 2. Saint Reagan performed a miracle. Happy ending for all, like in a Hollywood movie from the 1940s.
Except, Germans and Japanese joined the West more out of a need for protection (from the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Koreans) than out of genuine admiration for Americans. As far as the Russians are concerned, we completely misread the situation. They have no interest in joining the West. All they want is to go back to a two-superpower world where they are as feared and respected as the US.
Enter Putin, the judoka. Judo is a sanitized version of Ju-Jitsu, a devastatingly effective combat discipline. Ju-jitsu is not a sport. It is not concerned with rules or winning points. Its goal is to incapacitate or kill a stronger enemy in the shortest possible time, using his own strength and momentum against him to throw his “ki” (center of gravity) off balance. In Ju-Jitsu, the graceful throws used in Olympic Judo are a setup for the killer blow (Atemi Waza). A good martial artist is aware of his own and his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses at all times (Zanshin). Putin understands his people, and their need to feel strong, proud and respected. He also understands the strengths and weaknesses of America much better than many Americans do. He knows that America is addicted to constant economic growth and that greed is America’s greatest weakness. He knows that America has the largest military on Earth but has just wasted tremendous resources in pointless wars of choice, and that such wars quickly become highly unpopular with the American public, especially if they are not over quickly. Americans are impatient, and have a short memory and an even shorter attention span. Putin knows that despite the constant NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, the democratic West will be reluctant to engage in a shooting war, and will do so only as a last resort. He also knows that Russia doesn’t have the huge population and enormous production capacity that China has. It has a smaller population than the US and much smaller than the EU, and its industrial capacity is not negligible but is vastly inferior to that of the West. But it does have three key strengths: 1) a huge military with massive nuclear capabilities (which comes with the ability to sell arms to third parties); 2) enormous oil and gas reserves and 3) a totalitarian government that doesn’t have to worry about criticism from a free press and enjoys vast popular support. This gives him the flexibility to be ruthless without a need for self-restraint while ignoring such niceties as international law, rules of engagement or civilian casualties.
The technique Putin used can be compared to a Tomoe-nage (circle throw). Faced with a stronger opponent who pushes you back on your heels, you pretend to hold his arms defensively and let yourself fall backwards. But as you fall you plant your foot in your opponent’s groin (in Judo, his abdomen), and throw him over your head to send him sprawling to the ground. If the groin kick is accurately placed, he will land in excruciating pain and unable to react. In Ju-Jitsu, you can then finish him off with a kick to the head.
Putin got rid of the shackles of ideological communism and started doing business with the West. Moscow became a capitalist paradise inhabited by a wealthy oligarchy. Pretending to fall backwards into a capitalist, pro-business stance, Putin befriended Western leaders, especially Italian tycoon Berlusconi, and made sure that the EU thought of him as a friend and business partner. Russian billionaires went on spending sprees in the West, becoming the patrons of famous British football teams and sailing their yachts around the Mediterranean. At one point, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Russia wanted to rediscover its European roots and become a Western country after all. However, internally Putin was heading towards fascism, not Western style democracy. He dusted off the Orthodox Church, a pillar of Czarist power and a strongly conservative, homophobic cultural influence on Russian society. He cultivated a macho image that made the average Russians feel empowered, by engaging in adventurous stunts of all kinds from horseback riding in the tundra to tiger hunting. Using his KGB skills, he made sure that internal critics succumbed to unfortunate accidents or were dispatched by faceless murderers. He established a nearly complete control over the media, creating a propaganda machine that would have been the envy of the old Soviet Union. Without much fanfare, he recreated a Soviet-style dictatorship without the weakness of communism. He exploited the West’s addiction to fuel by using oil and gas as a political blackmail tool. He blackmailed the West by cutting off gas supply through Ukraine. He used revenues from oil and gas sales to fund his enormous military, and then used this military to assert Russia’s influence in Georgia, East Ukraine, Crimea and finally Syria. He also used his profits to fund anti-European parties to destabilize the EU.
The Obama administration was aware of these moves. It is likely that an important motivation for Obama’s pursuit of policies that kept the price of oil low was to limit Russia’s ability to leverage oil revenues. Sanctions placed on Russia because of its annexation of Crimea also limited its ability to use its natural resources as a weapon. Putin’s opponent was pushing back again. Then, the opportunity for a perfect throw presented itself. A divisive electoral campaign in the US pitted an experienced candidate who would have continued Obama’s policies against a candidate who was Putin’s dream: inexperienced, megalomaniacal to the point of narcissism, greedy and indebted to Russian banks, who had rescued him from bankruptcy. An isolationist who openly criticized NATO and praised Putin’s strongman policies. With perfect timing, Putin planted Russia’s foot in the groin of America and sent us sprawling. He used Russia’s intelligence services to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. He helped install a Russian stooge into the White House, who promptly obliged by filling his cabinet with oil industry executives and greedy cronies, none of whom has the slightest foreign policy experience. The Secretary of State nominee himself is an oil executive who has received a “Freedom Award” from Putin for doing business with Russia, and who is surely salivating at the thought of more Russian oil.
Tomoe-nage, and Cold War 2 was lost. American greed, its internal divisions and its vulnerability to Trump’s demagogy were the momentum Putin used to throw us off balance. A brilliant move, which, like in a real life martial art confrontation, was helped by an overconfident and unbalanced opponent who had no “Zanshin”.
Let’s not minimize the extent of this humiliation. To put it bluntly, we have been badly outmaneuvered, and we are face down in the dirt. At this time, America is sliding towards a right-wing klepto-oligarchy much like today’s Russia. While a majority of Americans do not support this trend, they have no representation in Washington, and an authoritarian tide is mounting. A large segment of our population, bamboozled by decades of right-wing propaganda, is beginning to warm up to the idea of a strongman-led pseudodemocracy.
What an irony, if in the end both democracy and communism were to morph into their old nemesis, fascism.
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