Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

March 18, 2022

In the annals of actors-turned-politicians, no transfer of skills from one stage to the other has ever been more compelling than that of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi.

The former comedian and star of the predictive comedy series Servant of the People (now back on Netflix in both Canada and the US) — in which Zelenskyi as a teacher is propelled through a series of plot points only slightly less unbelievable than how it happened in real life to the Ukrainian presidency — has been issuing a call to arms to save his country by selling himself as its embodiment to major democracies.

Zelenskyi spent the third week of Russia’s illegal war against his country on a virtual speaking tour of major Western capitals to channel Winston Churchill’s role in cajoling American support to fight the Nazis, only without the Lend-Lease Act and naked White House perambulating.

In marshalling his persuasive powers, Zelenskyi used the classic rhetorical devices of logos, pathos, ethos and kairos — logic, emotion, ethics and timelessness, summed up in his message as: Save me and save yourselves; human beings are suffering; do the right thing; and, we’ve been here before.

Those devices were deployed in aid of persuading Western governments to reverse their aversion to a no-fly zone — the modern phenomenon of an aerial exclusion zone first implemented by the United States and coalition partners over Iraq following the first Gulf War. No-fly zones were also used in Bosnia between 1993-95 and Libya in the fin-de-régime death throes of Muammar Gadhaffi in 2011.

Western governments have explained their reluctance to implement a NATO-led no-fly zone over Ukraine by citing Russia’s status as a nuclear power currently led by a 20-year dictator who may or may not have staggered into history’s club of absolute-power-addled lunatics. In an apparent effort to dispel any remaining doubt as to that status, Putin has been generating an hourly feed of evidence in the form of gratuitously sadistic assaults on civilian targets.

Which creates both a humanitarian-tactical conflict of interest for Putin (ridiculous to say within the larger moral context of his war crimes, but there it is) as well as a problem for observers that, in a civilized world, would not exist. But as we’ve all witnessed in narrative after narrative in the post-Obama operational realm, civilization itself has been under siege by a relentless parade of weaponized wackos from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro to Putin. The current uncivilized problem is the Venn diagram overlap between Zelenskyi’s imperative for a no-fly zone and what appears to also be Putin’s.

Putin apparently wants NATO, the West and the United States to be squeezed between the rock of a potential quagmire (a more likely scenario than a nuclear conflagration) and the hard place of the reputational degradation attached to the perception that the alliance is afraid of him.

The no-fly zones in Iraq were established to protect the Kurds in the north and Shia in the south from Saddam Hussein. The no-fly zone in Bosnia was established to protect Bosnian Muslims from Slobodan Milosevic. The no-fly zone in Libya was established as part of the R2P humanitarian intervention to prevent what appeared to be a genocide-in-the-planning by Gadhaffi against the population of Benghazi. Vladimir Putin is aware of these precedents. He is aware of the humanitarian trajectories that produced those no-fly zones through public outrage — especially the most recent example of Libya, which included a heated debate in Washington and the same Western capitals Zelenskyi beseeched this week, as well as an especially adventuresome sidebar involving a catalyzing role by the French philosopher and follicular legend Bernard Henri-Lévy.

So, why has Putin been feeding precisely the sort of headlines that arouse the entirely justified revulsion required in democracies to justify humanitarian interventions when he could be conducting a far different sort of military strategy? While contempt for human beings has been a gruesomely reliable calling card of the aspiring world order whose interests Putin is serving in his unprovoked attack on a European democracy, the contempt for human beings displayed in attacking hospitals and theatres and other unmistakably civilian targets isn’t being indulged in a vacuum of cause and effect. Since the predominant debate of this war continues to be whether NATO, the West and/or the United States will be prevailed upon to escalate involvement based on the democratic impetus of humanitarian intervention, the more immediate question should be why is Putin fuelling that impetus?

Right now, he apparently wants NATO, the West and the United States to be squeezed between the rock of a potential quagmire (a more likely scenario than a nuclear conflagration) and the hard place of reputational degradation attached to the perception that the alliance is afraid of him — a theme already being telegraphed, including in some of the same chatter circles asking for an intervention.

Because the overwhelming critical mass of emotion in this conundrum is on the side of humanitarian urgency, Putin’s immediate aim seems to be to exploit the qualities of empathy and compassion so lacking in his own behaviour. How does that factor into the West’s response? No leader, diplomat, mother, father or any other sane human being should ever have to contemplate such overwhelmingly tactical considerations, but history’s cyclical intersections with industrialized depravity require it.

Valdimir Putin’s actions are entirely consistent with a wannabe new world order brand that has disgraced the presidency of the United States, scorched-earth the Amazon rainforest and avoidably amplified the mortality of a global pandemic, among other dystopian, anti-democracy power consolidation stylings.

What that means for this latest extravaganza of narrative warfare remains to be seen. But the choice architecture in coping with what amounts to a whole new arsenal of evil should always include a pre-emptive dose of disbelief about stated motives, intentions, alliances and possible outcomes. One alliance we can take at face value is the confluence of geostrategic interest shared by Russia and China, which is why it makes sense to place the burden of intervention to stop Putin, for the moment, on Beijing.

This is not an old-fashioned war.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.