To view the Russian leader as a gift may seem perverse. Yet, history teaches that growth, understanding and, dare I say, enlightenment typically depend on trauma, crisis and catastrophe. Putin has given us a healthy dose of all three and therein an opportunity to flourish. The Russian invasion of Ukraine follows a string of such “teachable moments” including the financial meltdown of 2009, the social upheavals of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, COVID-19, and of course the granddaddy of reflective inflection points, global climate change.
Each of these “events” should be seen as signals that something is dreadfully wrong and thus occasions to wake up and examine hardened habits of thought and action. Sadly, the gift that Putin is offering is being treated much like the other above-mentioned gifts in our refusal to awaken from our slumbering ways.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has rattled political leaders and the foreign policy establishment. Given the devastating nature and seismic implications of Putin’s actions, one would have expected greater imagination from our politicians and pundits. While the Biden administration receives credit for the coalition it has mustered, its hackneyed framing of “autocracy versus democracy” tarnishes the luster. Biden is reflecting the foreign policy establishment’s adherence to the simplistic good versus bad, friend versus foe dualistic mentality that cleaves originality from any solution. Suggestions that the U.S. may have provided a model for Putin’s aggression through our past military forays are treated with ridicule and the charge of heresy.
But perhaps heresy is exactly what we now need to jolt ourselves out of the stale patterns of thought that have delivered diplomatic debacles and political stalemates across the globe. Putin’s invasion should be the spur to rethink our grand strategies (to make them truly grand) and redesign our statecraft (to evince workable solutions).
Our collective failure of imagination is on full display everywhere from our atavistic adversarial treatment of China to the recent Summit of Americas where discordant views were expelled in hopes that isolation would silence blasphemy. However, history reveals that shunning foes won’t vanquish their views, and rebuffing apostates fosters only more apostasy.
Pundits and politicians remain stuck in the anachronistic mindset of Newtonian physics. If geopolitical theater were only that simple. A pivot from a mechanistic, billiard-ball metaphor of geopolitics to a quantum perspective on competition and cooperation, in which foes can be friends and adversaries can act as allies, offers a freshness that today’s circumstances demand. Replacing the mechanistic “either/or” democracy versus autocracy framing with the quantum “both/and” expands the range of possibilities significantly.
However, the orthodoxy of our foreign policy swivels narrowly between liberal internationalism’s multilateral approaches and the realist’s realpolitik devoted to bilateralism based on military might rationalized by divinely ordained U.S. global leadership. The world is not responding.
For all our talk about “innovation,” we do very little of it, at least when it comes to our policy stratagems or our epistemological models. We remain mired in convention tragically oblivious to the turbulence enveloping us. As Aristotle wrote so long ago, “It is … not easy to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit.” Especially habit that bestows so much power to the selected few.
Geopolitically, we find ourselves in what may be referred to as a “liminal moment” — a transitional stage in which we struggle to loosen the bonds of past realities while groping for the norms of a new world order. This rite of passage is disorienting, rife with confusion. But experience, from the spiritual to the secular, tells us that transitory disorientation is necessary for development. Just as pressure births the diamond, geopolitical abrasions can unearth precious strategic visions. Yet, the tyranny of orthodoxy marching behind the banner of U.S. exceptionalism refuses to countenance any challenge — any confusion — to its cognitive, political and economic standing.
The first step is to realize that new solutions will only follow new modes of thinking. Einstein famously said, “We cannot solve our problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Yet, we persist in trying. What passes as “strategic thinking” today suffers from a deficiency of curiosity and an excess of hubris. A new mode of thinking hinges on creating ways of reconciling our prejudices and presumptions with the prejudices and presumptions of others, moving beyond the either/or straitjacket of today’s thinking.
What is true for foreign policy is true for domestic policy and the tempestuous state of our civic discourse. True leadership, authentic exceptionalism, seeks reconciliation while accepting that differences will endure, conflict is endemic and long-lasting consensus possibly chimerical.
Let us not squander Putin’s gift but rather accept the paradoxical nature of the times and seize this opportunity to think and act anew.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Griffin Thompson is a retired State Department foreign policy official, now teaching foreign policy, energy, and climate change courses at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Chicago. He is also a Payne Fellow at the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines.
