October 31, 2022
Transnational Politics and the Subordination of the National Interest
Commitment to one’s nation—the entire nation, not just part of it—has been eroding, especially in the United States.
by Paul R. Pillar
Russian president Vladimir Putin made a speech last week that seeks to exploit a contemporary political phenomenon that is eroding, in the United States and other countries, a foundation of political order that goes back to the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia. Putin spoke of “two Wests”—one, with which Putin identified himself and Russia, that upholds “traditional, mainly Christian, values” and the other consisting of a “neoliberal elite” that pushes different values such as gay rights.
It is not new, of course, for an embattled autocrat to use every available tactic to try to divide his adversaries. Neither is it new for Putin to appeal to the right-wing side of Western culture wars. But the fact that this former Soviet KGB officer can plausibly expect to gain traction with such an appeal speaks to how far the underlying erosive phenomenon has gone.
Domestic political division, as manifested in extreme partisanship in the United States, and transnational affinities of the sort that Putin is trying to nurture, are two sides of the same phenomenon. The more that militant partisans see their countrymen on the other side of the political aisle as enemies rather than just as political opponents, the less they think of the nation as a community of interest with which they identify. That lessening in turn leads the same partisans to think of their interests, affinities, and sometimes even their loyalties to lie less with their nation than with a transnational community that speaks to their values, even if a Russian dictator does some of the speaking.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/transnational-politics-and-subordination-national-interest-205629
