What Putin Misunderstands About Ideology

26 January 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

INTRODUCTION

My main field of specialization, within meta-science (my major field), has always been ideology. It’s a field in which no university offers a Ph.D or other doctoral degree, but I have been studying it intensively on my own ever since the 1960s. The closest existing field to it is political psychology, but unlike that, it includes also ethics (the analysis of moral beliefs); and, unlike philosophical ethics or the religious sub-category of that, it’s purely scientific, which means that it is based only on all of the empirical evidence about it and excludes as being evidence anything that is not derived from trustworthy historical records; so, all mythological ‘evidence’ is excluded from being considered in it. If I were briefly to define the field, it is scientific ethics, but anyone who would interpret that phrase to mean “ethics of science” would get it wrong. It’s instead entirely non-philosophical, non-speculative, ethics. It is only ethics that is 100% empirically (meaning historically — not at all mythologically) based. It might also be called “post-philosophical ethics,” because all of philosophical ethics is based only on opinions, not on any empirical studies, it’s not rooted purely in historical accounts but also in other people’s opinions and in myths.

If a person’s ideology is derived from a national culture or from a religious culture, instead of 100% from the relevant empirical data, which are all of the relevant historical data, then it is philosophical instead of scientific — and that’s not being discussed in what follows.

THE CASE OF VLADIMIR PUTIN

Vladimir Putin’s ideology is extraordinarily but by no means 100% post-philosophical, because it has additionally been affected both by his national culture and by his religious culture. The best-stated clearest and most concise representative that I have yet seen of it comes not from himself (because he avoids talking about conceptual matters as much as he can), but instead from an article that appeared on January 24th at RT News and which succinctly stated the ideological difference between Putin and Trump, so that readers can understand why U.S.-Russia relations could become even worse under Trump than they’ve been under Biden and Obama. Before I get into my analysis of it, you should read that article, which is titled “Fyodor Lukyanov: Here’s what Trump 2.0 means for the US and Russia: The 47th president wants to end conflicts but not resolve them”. He describes Trump (just like all recent U.S. Presidents) as maximally aiming to increase sales for America’s military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. By the phrase “wants to end conflicts but not resolve them,” is meant to negotiate a deal with Russia in which Russia’s essential national-security concern — to prevent any possibility for a U.S. nuclear missile to become positioned a mere 317 miles or 510 kiilometers, five minutes of missile-flying distance, away from The Kremlin on the Ukraine-Russia border (the border that is by far the closest one of all to The Kremlin) — won’t be addressed. Lukyanov is saying that Trump doesn’t consider an opponent’s needs but only his own demands — even if those conflict with those needs (such as Russia’s need to permanently prohibit an American nuclear missile being placed a mere 317 miles from The Kremlin). However, Lukyanov doesn’t come right out and say this, nor has Putin himself done so. (Perhaps that’s so as not to alarm the Russian public about how enormous for them the stakes are in Ukraine’s war and why Russia will not under any circumstances allow the U.S. Government to continue controlling Ukraine’s Government — why Ukraine must be neutralized or else be taken entirely by Russia.) The key passage in Lukyanov’s article is this:

Trump’s worldview has been consistent for decades. Public declarations from the 1980s, long before his political career began, reflect the same core beliefs he holds today. Trump’s ultimate goal is American supremacy – but not the liberal global leadership championed by his predecessors. His version of supremacy is transactional and utilitarian. Alliances, institutions, and relationships are valuable only if they benefit the US materially. Those that demand sacrifices without offering returns are liabilities to be discarded.

Trump’s America is not interested in moral authority, global stability, or solving the world’s problems. It is focused on extracting the maximum benefit from every interaction, whether in economics, security, or politics. If others refuse Trump’s ‘deal’, coercion quickly becomes his preferred strategy.

That is a truthful statement about Trump’s historical record of decisions and actions. Lukyanov later notes that, “This aversion to military conflict explains his preference for economic warfare. Trade wars and aggressive negotiations are his tools of choice, often targeting close US allies rather than adversaries.” A good example of that is Trump’s threat to use force if Denmark’s Government refuses to sell Greenland.

Ideology can summarily (and leaving out many crucial details) be described in game-theoretic terms as follows, relating to Lukyanov’s article:

Trump always seeks win-lose games so that he can come out on top (he is a “supremacist”), but tries to do that by negotiation first, and only if the opponent won’t negotiate about a particular matter will Trump resort to physical coercion (military war) in order to achieve his aim. He never likes win-win games or lose-lose games, but ONLY win-lose games, and he always demands that he must come out on top. That is the essence of Trump, as Lukyanov describes him. All of Trump’s decisions and actions (not his mere promises) have been consistent with that.

However, Lukyanov (like Putin himself) doesn’t quite understand the implications of this; he says “Trump’s ‘America First’ policy focuses on national interests, which opens the door for pragmatic deals based on mutual benefit.” That is win-win, so Trump isn’t like that; Trump will instead demand that America (its billionaires — that’s all he, just like his recent predecessors, really cares about) must win more than Russia (and, for Putin, that means the Russian public must win — NOT necessarily that Russia’s billionaires must) win. If Trump can’t get a deal in which “America” (its billionaires, who control its largest corporations and especially its military manufacturers, who derive their profits from selling to the U.S. Government and its colonies’ Governments) beats “Russia,” then Trump will want to use America’s diplomatic and military power in order to achieve by coercion what he wants. The aggressor is intrinsically America’s Government, NOT at all Russia’s (and this has been the case ever since the war in Ukraine first started), because Russia has real national-security needs, and America always ignores them. So, unless Trump will suddenly change his basic ideology (change win-lose to win-win), those negotiations will fail and Trump will increase his threats to Russia, which will only strengthen — not reduce — Russia’s resolve to reject Trump’s “deal.”

Putin (like Lukyanov) does not understand this, because Putin’s underlying ideology is to maximize win-win games (which ideology is progressivism), not win-lose games (which ideology is conservatism — supremacism). Putin even thinks that conservatism is (as Lukyanov put it) “driven by national interests and pragmatic calculations,” and that the opposite, which he mis-calls liberalism (the mixture of progressivism and conservatism) instead of progressivism, is not. However, actually, win-lose, in this case, helps ONLY America’s Billionaires, who control America’s armaments-manufacturers and extraction companies (basically, the war-industries — and America’s armaments-manufacturers have been America’s most profitable corporations ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991).

Since Putin is exceptionally intelligent (which Trump, Biden, Harris, and G.W. Bush, have not been), he almost certainly won’t accept Trump’s proposed deal. The two men have value-systems (and not MERELY nationalities, and cultures — as Putin might assume to be the case) which are at odds with one-another. And that is the reason why Putin really ought to stall and not even begin to ‘negotiate’ with Trump until Ukraine’s Government has already become trapped and all that Trump will be able to ‘negotiate’ with him about Ukraine is about how the U.S. and Russian Governments will, in their agreement, be referring to Ukraine’s surrender. Nothing is certain, but either Ukraine or Russia will surrender in this war; and the Russian people simply cannot afford to be the ones doing it — not even if Trump demands it. I think that Putin is aware of this, and will behave accordingly.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.