Niall Ferguson
Russia’s Farcical Mutiny Is Deadly Serious for
China and Iran
Today’s geopolitics and economics have more in common with
the 17th century than the 20th. Is that a greater threat to the
democracies or the autocracies?
The embattled tsar.
Photographer: Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images
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July 2, 2023 at 5:00 AM GMT+1
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Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg
Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The
Politics of Catastrophe.” He is the founder of Greenmantle, an advisory firm,
FourWinds Research, Hunting Tower, a venture capital partnership, and the
filmmaker Chimerica Media. @nfergus
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In Friedrich
Schiller’s The Death of Wallenstein, the downfall of a
mercenary has a dark, tragic majesty. It was the first play I ever saw in a
German theater, in Hamburg in the late 1980s, and I still remember the way
Schiller’s verse thundered through the auditorium, the quintessence of Sturm und
Drang.
Albrecht
von Wallenstein was one of the towering figures of the Thirty Years’ War. Born
into a poor Bohemian Protestant family, he converted to Roman Catholicism and
acquired wealth, power and ducal status in the service of the Holy Roman
Emperor Ferdinand II. In a singularly bloody career, he fought the Turks, the
Venetians, the Danes, the Swedes and even his own countrymen — in short, he
fought whomever the emperor paid him to fight.
But
Wallenstein’s unauthorized attempt to negotiate peace in 1633 finally convinced
Ferdinand — who already suspected him of plotting a coup — to dispense with his
overmighty commander. In 1634, Wallenstein was charged with high treason and,
within a week, assassinated.
It
remains to be seen if a similar fate awaits Yevgeny Prigozhin, the modern-day
Wallenstein who last weekend briefly but spectacularly defied Russia’s would-be
emperor, Vladimir Putin, by proclaiming a mutiny, seizing control of the city
of Rostov, and sending a well-armed convoy of his Wagner Group cutthroats
northward toward Moscow.
The genius of a Schiller
will not be required, should anyone ever decide to dramatize the
Prigozhin putsch. This strange affair was not so much Sturm und
Drang as Rowan & Martin.
Readers old enough to have watched NBC’s late-‘60s comedy show may remember the
bespectacled German soldier who would lisp from behind a potted plant: “Very
interesting … but stupid.” That pretty much sums up the Putin &
Prigozhin Laugh-In.
At the height of the farce,
Putin gave an address that was fire and brimstone. “Exorbitant ambitions and
personal interests have led to treason,” he declared. “Our actions to defend
the state will be harsh.” Russians should remember that the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917 had led to “an enormous collapse, the destruction of the
army and the fall of the state, the loss of huge territories, and in the end,
the tragedy of civil war.” But this was more The
Godfather than Battleship Potemkin: a
blustering attempt by the capo dei capi to put a rebellious
mafioso in his place. The reality is that the abortive mutiny revealed how
badly Putin’s failed invasion of Ukraine has eroded his domestic power base.
His military leaders were
divided, some condemning Prigozhin, others lying low and waiting to see what
happened. As Anne Applebaum observed,
ordinary Russians watched the antics of Wagner in Rostov with a mixture of
apathy and excitement, taking selfies of themselves with Prigozhin and his men.
You don’t do that sort of thing if you really fear the Godfather in the
Kremlin. Never has the English journalist Xan Smiley’s old line describing the
Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with rockets”
seemed more apt.
What is the wider
significance of the crisis in Russia? Two weeks ago, I warned that the
geopolitics of Cold War II seemed to be pitting Halford J. Mackinder’s vast
Eurasian “Heartland” against Nicholas J. Spykman’s “Rimland.” If the Heartland
consists of a new “Axis” of China, Russia and Iran, the Rimland is the
coalition the US has formed with its European and Asian allies to support Ukraine.
But I worried that the Rimland was showing signs of division. A couple of
officials in President Joe Biden’s administration took the time to challenge my
argument. The Prigozhin mutiny seems to have proved them right. Maybe it’s the
Heartland, not the Rimland, that’s cracking up.
The
striking point about the past year is that all three members of the new
Heartland Axis are afflicted with internal problems. It’s not just that a
mercenary warlord could march on Moscow apparently unimpeded. Last year, the
Iranian regime was rocked by the protests that followed the death in custody of
Mahsa Amini, just the latest bout of popular unrest following
episodes in 2009, 2012, 2017, 2018 and 2019. And the Chinese Communist Party
was forced to abandon zero-Covid in the face of a wave of student protests
— not the first time in Chinese history that Beijing undergraduates have
challenged the country’s leadership. All in all, this is pretty heartening for
Team Biden. It would appear that the major authoritarian regimes are afflicted
with the usual pathologies of unrepresentative government.
But what if democracies are
also vulnerable to such internal crises? After all, it’s not that long ago that
a coup of sorts was
attempted in the US, not forgetting the copycat affair in Brazil. Even if he did not
plot an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump tried in several ways to
challenge the 2020 election result. He has just been indicted for wrongfully
retaining highly classified documents in his possession, sharing their contents
with people who lacked appropriate clearances, and then seeking to cover up
these actions. And yet none of this appears to have dented his popularity with
Republican primary voters.
Meanwhile, Biden is falling
over himself to make nice with Narendra Modi, whose government in India looks
increasingly like one of those illiberal democracies that Fareed Zakaria warned us about back in the 1990s. Like
Hungary. Or Turkey. All in all, it might be said, there are quite a few “mini
Putins” among America’s allies. A significant number, including Modi, don’t
seem especially keen to
help Ukraine beat Russia.
Confused? Well, my
framework for understanding what is going on today is not 20th-century, but
three centuries older. Sorry, Putin, the events of last weekend were not your
version of 1917, with Prigozhin as Lenin to your Nicholas II. (Or Kornilov to your Kerensky?
To be frank, I’m not sure where Putin was going with that analogy.) I
suspect Russia is heading rapidly toward a new Time of Troubles, the period of
anarchy between 1598 and 1613 that followed the death of Ivan the Terrible.
When Putin falls, I predict there will be more than one claimant to the throne,
just as there were multiple “false Dmitrys” in the early 1600s, all pretending
to be Ivan’s youngest son.
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The early
17th century was a time of troubles in many places. In Europe it culminated in
the Thirty Years War, which dragged on for another 14 years after Wallenstein’s
assassination, reducing Germany to one vast charnel house. In the British
Isles, it was a time of internecine conflict — known variously as the Great
Rebellion, the Puritan Revolution, the English Civil War, the English
Revolution, or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms — that produced just under five
years of republican government (the Commonwealth), followed by dictatorship
under the “Lord Protector” Oliver Cromwell. In France, Cardinal Richelieu
battled the Protestant Huguenots at home and the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand
abroad. In China, the same period saw the fall of the Ming dynasty, its control
of northern China lost to the Jurched leader Nurhaci, its fate sealed in 1644,
when the rebel Li Zicheng captured Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged
himself.
Why was this such a time of
crisis? When I was an undergraduate, historians liked to blame it on cooling
global temperatures — the “Little Ice Age” — though
the role climate change played has probably been overstated. As the chart below
shows, temperatures in Central Europe trended lower in the 17th century,
compared with the previous and subsequent centuries.
Even if
one does not buy the evidence of global cooling, it was certainly an era of
plagues, of famines and of inflation. This chart shows the spike
of inflation in the German lands in the 1620s, when coin debasement was rampant
— the memorably named Kipper- und Wipperzeit, literally “the Tipper
and See-saw time”:
The
Thirty Years’ War and Inflation
Source: Paul Schmelzing
Note: Seven-year averages.
At the root of the crisis
in the Western world, however, was technological change. The printing press had
spread throughout much of Europe in the course of the 16th century,
propelling not only religious reformation but also religious war. Improvements
in naval technology, meanwhile, were allowing European traders to cover ever
larger distances in their voyages and European warships to win ever more
battles. On land, as the historians Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker have
described, a military revolution produced standing armies and
significant improvements in weaponry.
Taken
together, these changes weakened the hold of established medieval institutions
such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. All the great
kingdoms of Europe found themselves, at least for a time, in a state of chaos.
Power could be seized by warlords such as Wallenstein and Cromwell.
Most
commentators on current affairs are weighed down by their knowledge of the 20th
century, which is taught to excess in schools and colleges. This distorts our
perspective, leading us to underestimate the profound differences that have
arisen since our grandfathers were young men. The 20th century was a time of
astonishing centralization of both economic and political life, which made
possible feats of mobilization — not only the world wars but also grandiose and
generally disastrous economic plans of Stalin, Hitler and Mao — that are
unthinkable today. The most the 21st-century state can do, as became clear in
2020, is to lock people up in their homes. And only the Chinese were truly
serious about lockdowns. (In the West, there was rampant cheating of the sort
that would have got you shot or at least jailed during World War II.)
As Nadia Schadlow argues in
an excellent new essay for the
Atlantic, the US federal government today operates at a snail’s pace. The
20th-century national security state gave us the Manhattan Project, the
Marshall Plan, the interstates, the Apollo program. Such feats are unimaginable
today. Just replenishing existing weapons stocks takes years.
By
contrast, I think there is no period in history more akin to our own than the
17th century. In our time, as has often been remarked, the internet has played
the role of the printing press. The drastically reduced cost of reproducing
text and images broke the church’s monopoly on both, just as the internet has enabled
everybody who wishes to express and disseminate an opinion to do so — no matter
how idiotic or illiterate.
In the
17th century, a certain amount of what was printed contributed to what
ultimately became a Scientific Revolution. But a great deal more was devoted to
alchemy, astrology, witch-finding and obscure arguments about the difference
between transubstantiation and consubstantiation — in short, to superstition.
(Wallenstein was one of many people who based his decisions on bogus
horoscopes.) In our time, I have long marveled at how much more attention is
paid on social media to conspiracy theories than to theories based on evidence.
Four hundred years ago, it
was regarded as perfectly normal that a monarch might delegate economic and
military functions to private actors such as monopoly trading companies and
mercenaries (or, at sea, “privateers,” a category
not wholly distinct from pirates). No corporations in the 20th century were as
powerful as the Dutch and English East India Companies in their heyday.
In our time, too, power has
seeped away from the state, back to private corporate entities. Wagner, whose
mercenaries have been deployed from Syria to Mozambique to Venezuela, is only
one of many nonstate actors engaged in organized violence around the world.
And, of course, the big tech companies now dominate the innovation frontier in
artificial intelligence, as well as owning a rising proportion of the communications infrastructure on
which modern states rely.
As American University’s
Audrey Kurth Cronin argues in a new paper, “companies such as Alibaba, Amazon,
Apple, ByteDance, Meta (Facebook), Google (Alphabet), Microsoft and Tencent are
geopolitical actors with more resources and power than most nation-states.” 1 Think only of the role of SpaceX’s
Starlink, Elon Musk’s brainchild, in helping the Ukrainians defend their
country.
As Cronin
notes:
The
Starlink satellite app was Ukraine’s top downloaded app in March 2022, and it
kept President Zelenskyy online, even when high earth orbit Viasat satellites
went down. There are some 15,000 Starlink user kits in Ukraine, mostly donated
by SpaceX or by private sources — though USAID may have paid for some 1,300 of
them. … And when Elon Musk decided that Starlink should not be used for offensive
targeting against Russians [e.g., in Crimea], the US government was powerless
to change its stance.
This is not a world Vannevar Bush would
recognize. Cronin shares my view that it much more closely resembles the world
of the 17th century. If Prigozhin is a poor man’s Wallenstein, then Musk’s
satellite network resembles the East India Company’s merchant fleet. It was “John Company,” not the
First Lord of the Treasury, who decided the extent of Britain’s Indian Empire.
It is SpaceX that determines the battlespace in Ukraine.
It goes against the
21st-century grain to be told we have anything in common with the men and women
of Shakespeare’s time. But I was reminded by the German author Andrea Wulf
earlier this month — when we participated in a fascinating conference at the
Santa Fe Institute — that Shakespeare had periods of unfashionability after his
death. He owed his revival in the 19th century partly to German Romantics,
notably his translator into German, August Wilhelm Schlegel (one of the many
flamboyant literary types brought to life in Wulf’s book Magnificent Rebels). In
the 20th century, George Bernard Shaw sneered at “bardolatry.” I have a hunch
that today’s audiences get more from, say, The Tempest than
audiences in the 1920s.
As Henry Kissinger argued
in a remarkable essay published
in the Atlantic five years ago, the rapid progress of artificial intelligence
may well herald the end of the Enlightenment. “Paradoxically,” he wrote, “as
the world becomes more transparent, it will also become increasingly
mysterious. … What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory
power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the
world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them?”
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