Vladimir Putin is preening himself as the white knight of traditional values jousting against the dark dragon of wokeness. In fact, his history lecture to Tucker Carlson last week was a master class in cancel culture. He "proved" that Ukraine has no right to exist because it had always been part of Mother Russia.
Carlson looked like a stunned mullet for much of the interview, overawed by Putin's apparently encyclopaedic grasp of the history of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. As an expert in deconstructing and ridiculing woke narratives, Carlson should have realised that he was being played for a sucker. The ploy of cancel culture historians is to seize upon one injustice which cries to heaven for reparation - like slavery in the United States or colonial domination in Africa. They use this narrative as a smokescreen to divert attention from other aspects of the history. They fail to mention, for instance, slavery within Africa, or the benefits of colonial administration.
Putin ignored counter-arguments from Ukrainian historians. He even ignored the most tragic example of Russian oppression - the Holodomor, Stalin's genocidal policy of starving to death millions of Ukrainians to enforce collectivization and dekulakisation.
Weaponising history like this, however, is dangerous. It becomes a bomb which could blow up in your face.
Russia today is the result of imperial expansion under the Czars. Some lands governed by President Putin were only gathered into the embrace of Mother Russia in the 19th century. In the Caucasus region, Georgia, Chechnya and Dagestan were ruled by Persia until they were seized by Russia in a series of wars in the 18th and 19th centuries. What if Iran decided to take advantage of Russian weakness at some stage and recovers its ancient possessions? In fact, all of Russia's neighbours could mount an academically respectable case for taking a bite out of Russia's borders.
The vast lands of Russia's east are sparsely populated. Across the border is China, a country with ten times its population. After Tucker Carlson's interview, indignant Chinese nationalists suggested that China should reclaim Vladivostok, Russia's main port on the Pacific. "Going further afield, today's Mongolia and Russian Siberia were both territories of China in the [7th century] Tang Dynasty with its capital in Xi'an," said one Weibo user.
A war of conquest by China to take territory from a depopulated Russia seems unimaginable. But it's not. In 1969 China and the USSR clashed over disputed territory along the border. A few dozen troops died. The dispute was not settled until 2003.
Zichen Wang, a fellow at the China Center for China and Globalization and a former journalist with Xinhua News Agency, wrote on X: "historically some place belongs to somewhere can mean very little. why must we refer to the 8th or 13th century but not 220 BC? we live in the present day with laws, not the 8th century."
This is exactly the advice given by Tsakhia Elbegdorj, president of Mongolia from 2009 to 2017. He chided Putin for his historical amnesia. The Mongols ruled over the largest contiguous empire in history during the 13th and 14th centuries, including most of southern Russia. Does Mongolia have a right to reassert its territorial claims?
Elbegdorj regards Putin's history as a bare-faced pretext for domination. He wrote a year ago:
I know Putin does not tolerate freedom. I have sat with him on many occasions. He despises differences and competition. He fears a free Ukraine. As a deep narcissist, he could not afford to see more successful and prosperous neighbors.
Putin shines a klieg light on his country's grievances and shoves its wars of colonial domination into a dark closet. If Russia's right to Ukraine is accepted, what is to protect Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Mongolia, etc, etc - from being gobbled up by the Russian bear? At one stage Russia ruled some or all of their territories.
Despite Putin's urbane and reasonable tone in the Tucker Carlson interview, at the same time he was doing his damnedest to terrify neighbouring countries into thinking that they will be next. This week Russian authorities launched criminal proceedings against Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas plus officials in all three Baltic states for damaging or destroying Soviet monuments - on their sovereign territory.
The world has moved on since the Czars, except in the mind of Vladimir Putin.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, gave a terrific speech to the Security Council about respecting the UN's founding principle of territorial integrity. As the representative of a former colony, he spoke with some authority:
"Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart. Today, across the border of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders we inherited."
Admittedly, since the UN charter was signed in 1945, territorial integrity has been ignored and violated countless times. But a rules-based international order must still be the starting point for the resolution of historical grievances. Otherwise the 21st century is going to become a jungle filled with ravenous beasts.
The Estonian foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, delivered his annual policy speech this week. He was scathing about Putin's woke version of history:
"No one wants to live in a world where Putins roam, kidnapping and orphaning children, attempting to cancel their neighbors and mining nuclear power plants," he said. "Aggression must not succeed; it must not become a new acceptable reality. Otherwise, the world will become the domain of force, arrogance, callousness, authoritarianism."