Beyond Great ForcesNovember/December 2019 155up, but within weeks, he capitalized on violence in Chechnya to renew
the war there, gambling (correctly) that a no-holds-barred Äght would
increase his popularity, and soon succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president.
Putin represented a sharp break with the past. Yeltsin and the pre-
Putin prime ministers under him had favored accommodation with
the West, acquiesced in £¬¡¢ interventions in the Balkans, recog-
nized Russia’s seemingly irreversible military weakness, and largely
abandoned Russia’s former friends, such as Syria. Putin oered
something new. Fearing that parts o the former Soviet Union were
becoming too close to the West, he supported separatist movements
in Georgia and Ukraine, annexing Crimea outright. Farther aÄeld,
he has backed Assad with limited military commitments to showcase
Russian power, and he is even taking sides in Libya’s civil war. Most
dramatically, Putin rolled the dice and covertly backed the U.S.
presidential campaign o Donald Trump as part o a broader eort to
intensify polarization in the United States and other Western coun-
tries. It’s hard to imagine all o this as part o any long-term plan.
Rather, Putin has proved a master o Russian and international poli-
tics, cutting and thrusting whenever his foes present an opening.
A dierent faceless bureaucrat coming to power after Yeltsin might
have shifted course, too. Russia’s weakness abroad and economic col-
lapse at home left the Yeltsin regime with few enthusiasts. Yet the
course o such change probably would have been more modest, with
less emphasis on adventurism abroad. Stepashin, for example, had
little interest in renewing the war in Chechnya, and he ended up join-
ing a political party that favors improved ties with the United States
and even membership in the ¤. Putin, by contrast, has evinced a
combination o pride, cynicism, nationalism, and comfort with risk, all
o which have made him willing to take on the West around the world
at a time when many observers have considered his country weak.
THE EGOISTS
L’état, c’est moi (I am the state), words often attributed to Louis XIV,
may seem to reÁect a bygone age, when the purpose o the state was
to reÁect the glory o one person. But Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, who has dominated his country’s politics for nearly
two decades, embodies how egoism can still shape foreign policy. For
decades, dierent Turkish regimes had pursued the country’s complex
set o interests in largely similar ways: trying to stay out o the