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kyledean99 's review for:
The Wizard of the Kremlin
by Giuliano da Empoli
I've read a handful of books lately that attempted to explain why Russia invaded Ukraine, or in the case of older books why Russia had acted so aggressively in its 'Near Abroad' in the last two decades.
The strongest (and most common) arguments centre on Russian resentment of the post-Cold War era: Russia's lost status (and empire), American triumphalism, and Western enthusiasm for liberal military interventions in the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa. Moscow went very quickly from being the capital of a global superpower, to being told to get to the back of the queue for membership western institutions, alongside little Georgia and Moldova.
But compared to more rationalist explanations, such as Mearsheimer's (and many Russians') claim that Russia has merely responded predictably to an unnerving NATO expansion to its borders, these 'resentment' explanations feel a little unsatisfying. I could grasp the NATO argument intuitively (even if it's nonsense): Brits wouldn't much appreciate Chinese or Russian forces being based in Ireland, for example.
By contrast, the strength of feeling that Russia has been mistreated, and must therefore create this very aggressive and expensive foreign policy to rectify this feeling (rather than to make the country wealthier or more secure) isn't very intuitive to those that don't and can't feel it. Realism translates perfectly well between political cultures, but subjective feelings of injustice less so - how *could* the Russians be so upset about Kosovo, for example?
What this book does, more than any work of non-fiction, is share this resentment with the reader, in the first person. Da Empoli builds this intuition of Russian resentment. We feel his, Putin's, and his country's humiliations at various stages of the book, mostly in ways that would be imperceptible to Western senses. It all begins to make a little more sense, and to the writer's credit, this from a book written *before* the 2022 invasion.
The strongest (and most common) arguments centre on Russian resentment of the post-Cold War era: Russia's lost status (and empire), American triumphalism, and Western enthusiasm for liberal military interventions in the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa. Moscow went very quickly from being the capital of a global superpower, to being told to get to the back of the queue for membership western institutions, alongside little Georgia and Moldova.
But compared to more rationalist explanations, such as Mearsheimer's (and many Russians') claim that Russia has merely responded predictably to an unnerving NATO expansion to its borders, these 'resentment' explanations feel a little unsatisfying. I could grasp the NATO argument intuitively (even if it's nonsense): Brits wouldn't much appreciate Chinese or Russian forces being based in Ireland, for example.
By contrast, the strength of feeling that Russia has been mistreated, and must therefore create this very aggressive and expensive foreign policy to rectify this feeling (rather than to make the country wealthier or more secure) isn't very intuitive to those that don't and can't feel it. Realism translates perfectly well between political cultures, but subjective feelings of injustice less so - how *could* the Russians be so upset about Kosovo, for example?
What this book does, more than any work of non-fiction, is share this resentment with the reader, in the first person. Da Empoli builds this intuition of Russian resentment. We feel his, Putin's, and his country's humiliations at various stages of the book, mostly in ways that would be imperceptible to Western senses. It all begins to make a little more sense, and to the writer's credit, this from a book written *before* the 2022 invasion.