BESIDES realist geopolitics, experts have pointed to Russia’s (or rather Vladimir Putin’s) invasion of Ukraine as rooted in an imperial nostalgia.

For Putin, it is utterly unacceptable that Ukraine will be drawn into the United States (US)-led “Western” sphere of influence, and the humiliation he felt when the Soviet Union disintegrated convinced him that military might is the only way to compensate for failures to constrain Ukraine diplomatically and geopolitically.

Such imperial vision that patently disregards the sovereignty of borders and people and views maps in terms of spheres of influence is not unique to Russia, of course.

It has been the way the US has long operated and the way China flexed its muscles in the South China Sea, which appear to suggest that the Chinese elites saw being a superpower and imperialistic as more or less the same thing.

Between two hegemons

But what marks Russia apart from the US is that if Washington operates as an undisputed hegemon, Moscow is acting like a humiliated partial hegemon.

An undisputed hegemon operates from a place of confidence: it is confident of the world’s acceptance of its hegemonic status (which is largely so for the US, even if most nations do so begrudgingly).

As a result, it often feels “called” to maintain the global order by both domestic and international pressure. That is why the Washington is always overcommitted, overstretched and overconfident.

It is not that being a hegemon means you get things your way all the time, and that is certainly not the experience of the US, most famously so in Vietnam and lately Afghanistan.

In fact, an undisputed hegemon has the luxury of keeping itself involved in military adventurist projects as it does not feel the risks of reputational loss.

Its elites do not see those losses as threatening its position of leadership in the world (rather, it may read inaction as more threatening).

For Russian elites like Putin, however, the humiliation of defeat matters.

This is because Russia has historically been operating from a place of deep insecurity due to its ambiguous relationship with a Christian European core that was taken to be the standard of “civilisation”.

How Russia’s “Eurasian” identity of being neither non-European nor “European” enough drove its recognition-seeking foreign policy is something international relations theorist Ayse Zarakol discussed in her book After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West.

Here is a summary of Russia’s identity predicament.

Historically, Russia is a former agrarian empire that stood at the edge of Europe and was, as compared with the many industrialised Western European states, the slowest to modernise.

Its failure to modernise led to its defeat in the Crimean War in the 1850s, and later to imperial “newcomer” Japan in 1905, all of which laid down roots to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Subsequently, the Soviet Union gained momentary superpower status during the Cold War, but struggled to get the “West” to afford it equal recognition despite its military, scientific, and economic achievements.

Instead, communism was regarded as “evil” and “barbaric”, the mirror opposite to Western capitalist enlightenment.

To be sure, my point is to not dismiss the reality of brutal Soviet rule but highlight that the ostracisation of communism, as it is with Islamism today, often comes with a culturist stigmatisation discourse that goes beyond merely criticising the ideology.

Pride and confidence in international relations

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the perceived recognition owed to Russia (in the minds of people like Putin) was further saddled with an experience of defeat and humiliation, which also explains the importance of pride in driving Putin’s foreign policy.

But pride and confidence is not the same thing; in fact, they are opposites. As most psychological profiles of bullies show, the need for pride comes from a lack of confidence.

Someone who is confident sees success as natural (sometimes to the point of being dangerously arrogant), but someone who is proud (and thus, insecure) sees success as proof of their worth.

Unfortunately, it means there is very little chance for Putin to de-escalate at this point, more so when Nato claimed it will not intervene militarily and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claiming that his country will not yield.

But it isn’t Putin alone that is inflicted with this pathos of pride. Many non-Western observers also gleefully took the invasion as a way to reveal the West’s impotence, something that does not carry any material benefit other than to their own egos.

This probably applies to our own country, too, which, like many other Asean nations, has refused to call out the blunt reality of a territorial invasion and opted for agnostic words like “conflict”.

Such a need to see the West humiliated is certainly understandable. Some called it payback for Western hypocrisy or their colonial past or simply the annoyance of having to listen to the West’s constant pestering of the non-West’s faltering democratic standards.

Some find it easier to blame the West for their own inadequacies. Malaysia’s Islamists, for example, often faulted “Westernisation” for the lack of purchase of their ideals instead of trying harder to convince, especially non-Muslims, that they will be treated better and fairer than they will be in a secular system.

But this deep desire to see the West humiliated also stems from an internalisation of the idea that the West (or the US, really) is indeed the world’s undisputed hegemon.

For example, the anger towards the US for not taking action to solve the Palestinian or Syrian crisis is underpinned by an assumption that the US as the hegemon should solve the crisis (never mind the imperial implications behind it).

The same pressure for action spelt in terms of moral duty is never applied to Russia or China, even if they are capable of doing something as superpowers.

In other words, while the term “superpower” is merely a material description, a hegemon is perceived to have a moral duty, which hardly makes it a crowd-pleaser, because politics often run against ethics.

Too much schadenfreude for our own good?

Yet, I am concerned about where this pride-taking that thrives on schadenfreude from the sidelines leads us. As a middle-power that still struggles to punch above its weight internationally, this obsession with a pride-guided sentimentality is bound to cloud our judgments and disrupt our priorities.

It suggests a kind of worldview that a recognition gap can substitute for a substantial/strategic gap, i.e. the idea that we will be taken seriously for showing our “authentic” selves and not because of what we can bring to the table.

It certainly is not reassuring that what followed the news about Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s order that we must use the national language in all official functions abroad was our diplomats’ chaotic evacuation from Kyiv.

What worries me is not our penchant for symbolic posturing, but what it signifies: overcompensation for strategic shortfalls.

We wanted so much for the West to be wrong to fit a conspiracy theory-fuelled-anti-West worldview that we did not care to get things right ourselves first.

Lastly, there is this serious misguidedness in thinking that an international order driven by particularistic nationalist pride instead of rules is going to benefit us as a Southeast Asian Muslim-majority middle-power.

There is no surety that just because non-Western superpowers can serve as a counterbalance to the US, all cultural identities will be afforded equal respect.

Both Russia and China, for example, have reasons to view Islam suspiciously due to how they see the potential of a Muslim separatism in Chechnya and Xinjiang, respectively, as existential threats.

A rules-based international order is still our best bet for peace and mutual flourishing, not to mention combatting long-term threats like climate change.

Because being under the mercy of clear and decipherable rules, however imperfect they are, is still much better than being under the mercy of egos.

By cheerleading for a pride-based order, we risk inflating egos at our own risk. – March 3, 2022.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.