Can Putin be a US ally?

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin enjoyed a remarkable year of successes that were capped with a cunning act of mercy by releasing his longtime rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky as well as two members of the dissident band Pussy Riot from their Siberian cells. Victorious in the tug of war with the European Union in Ukraine, dominant in the interim agreement between the P5+1 (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) and Iran, well positioned to manage the Geneva 2 negotiations to end the Syrian civil war in Russian ally Bashar al-Assad’s favor and poised to preside over an extravagant televised Winter Olympics at Sochi, Putin starts 2014 as the most powerful leader in Europe and Asia.

Putin is, in fact, an easy match in continental authority and personal ambition to the disconsolate, retreating U.S. President Barack Obama.

Why this equation of Putin and Obama matters now is that there is a body of evidence that the last decades of globalization have reached foreboding limits. There is a well-articulated case that the strategic map begins to resemble the eve of world conflict in 1914.

Once again, the great powers are pawing the ground at each other’s borders. The planet is anxious that the global cop on the beat — Great Britain in 1914 and the United States in 2014 — has withdrawn in order to tend a weedy, unpaid-for garden. Once again, the threat of regional skirmishes exploding into global war is no longer unforeseeable.

Now is the time the tentative United States needs a strong ally with a stable regime and a global punch, and this curriculum vitae aptly describes Putin, beginning his 15th year as czar of all the Russias in everything but crown and blood.

In sum, Putin can offer a helping hand in each region where the U.S. is regarded as obtuse and untrustworthy, such as the Middle East, North Africa and East Asia.

Historian Margaret MacMillian presents the potent similarities between 2014’s tangle of competing powers and the collapse of the powers 100 years ago. She argues that the burgeoning, interconnected globalized trade of 1914 — the Panama Canal, the colonial partition of resource-rich Africa and Asia, the trans-Atlantic merchant fleets — didn’t deter the crowns of Europe from throwing away their prosperity in a spasm of mobilization any more than the wired-together world markets today would cool a fever of patriotic bloody-mindedness.

MacMillan, a Canadian granddaughter of wartime British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, points to the Middle East — with its weak rulers, paralyzed governments and clashing militias — as the equivalent of the perpetually warring Balkans that ignited the 1914 crisis.

She closes her warning by speculating that the U.S. may not be willing or able to guarantee global stability much longer and that it may take an international crisis to engender a new “stable international order.”

In fact, the building blocks of global crisis are at hand. The Syrian civil war, the surrogate war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Iranian nuclear weapon threat, the nuke-armed rogue Kim Jung Un, the contrived escalations by China in the East China Sea and South China Sea, the deep enmity between Beijing and Tokyo, the neocolonialism for raw materials in defenseless Africa, the relentless homicides of Al-Qaeda — all are the tinder of planetary strife.

With three years to go in Obama’s weary presidency, the administration and Congress should seize the opportunity for greater global stability by finding a way to construct an alliance with Putin.

Reasons against such a partnership are legion. Putin is a crude Russian nationalist, most decidedly not a Jeffersonian democrat, and like all romantic dictators, he is unlikely to relinquish power in his lifetime. He has angered Western leaders with his crackdowns on dissidents and LGBT-rights activists. Nevertheless, the Obama administration’s suspicions about Putin, like the George W. Bush administration’s, are chiefly based on a homegrown moralistic arrogance, what the scholar Walter Russell Mead argues is an American intellectual assumption that “liberal capitalist economics and liberal political values is carrying the world swiftly and smoothly toward the triumph of Anglo-American values.”

Reasons for an expedient alliance with Putin start with a recalculation of the balance of power in the Middle East. Putin and Obama share an understanding of and disgust with nihilist deviltry tricked up as jihadism. Putin seeks stability with Tehran and Damascus, if just to maintain a Shiite wedge that can help contain the spread of jihadism in Central Asia. The U.S. needs help immediately to leave Afghanistan and longer term to contain the fury between Riyadh and Tehran. Both Putin and Obama are adamant in defending Israel and its large Russian population from the cutthroats. There is also a shared fear of nuclear weaponry, based on 60 years of their countries’ always being at the horizon of mutually assured destruction.

Significantly at present, Washington and Moscow have reason to doubt the awakening Chinese revanchism in the hands of militant Xi Jinping and the provocative People’s Liberation Army. Russia’s energy fields are in sparsely populated Siberia within easy reach of Chinese diplomatic aggression. U.S. allies South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Australia are in the way of China’s unilateral claims on land and sea.

In 1914 the great powers destroyed each other because none of them were capable of refusing the rush to launch textbook offensives. A European nightmare followed not only through 1918 but for the rest of the 20th century. In 2014 the U.S. needs an ally as iron fisted and well seated as Putin to guard against accidents that will be all nightmare from the first instant.