With the ground war raging in Ukraine having been played to a standstill — thank God, although the shelling continues — many have attempted to analyze its sole instigator, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have considered the so-called encroachment of NATO, a defensive organization that would probably not exist without Russian aggression; the supposed failure of American presidents to read the 800-pound gorilla in the room; the obliviousness of a Europe that reportedly saw Russia as nothing but a giant gas station with onion domes; the alleged corruption of the former Soviet satellites that Putin would seek to crush to corral — Chechnya, Crimea, Ukraine.
But as with any analysis of his former BFF, President Donald J. Trump, the political with Putin must begin with the personal. As with Trump, Putin is a narcissist. The difference is that while Trump is an ultimately ineffective narcissist — too intellectually lazy and disorganized to be Machiavellian — Putin is the worst kind of narcissist, a wily malignant nihilist.
I make this observation not as a psychiatrist or psychologist but as a longtime cultural writer with first-hand experience of narcissism who has born witness to lives destroyed by it. But then, one of the foremost experts on the subject was not a psychiatrist but an historian. In 1979, the end of the “Me Decade,” Christopher Lasch published “The Culture of Narcissism,” taking a clinical definition of a psychological disorder — an ego so damaged that it must explode lest it implode — and applying it to American society.
As Lee Siegel wrote in The New York Times in 2010, Lasch’s definition (drawn from Sigmund Freud), finds that “the narcissist, driven by repressed rage and self-hatred, escapes into a grandiose self-conception, using other people as instruments of gratification even while craving their love and approval. Lasch saw the echo of such qualities in ‘the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations, the horror of death.’”
Taking a page from Lasch, we must consider the personal in the political here but also the political in the personal. The narcissist is a paradox. He — and it’s usually a he — is better than everyone else, perfect even. And yet, he’s always aggrieved. The events of the end of the 20th century gave Putin, a former KGB agent, all the grievance he needed, as totalitarian regimes toppled, beginning with his own Soviet Union. Putin saw the West and its avatars — the United States, the Soviet Union’s old archrival; the European Union,’ NATO — as the aggressors. (Remember that a narcissist projects onto others what he would despise in himself if he had any self-awareness and accountability.) Western-loving Ukraine and its Churchillian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have crystallized the grievance.
Experts insist that Putin wants to restore Russian imperialism. But its more than that. For him, empire equals identity. Restore the empire — Russian, Soviet, it doesn’t matter — and you restore the narcissist’s always fragile illusion, always one step from collapsing, of self. Some of this could be, would be laughable. The Trumpian side of Putin’s narcissism is his obsession with image — the part of narcissism that relates to the original Greek myth — the bare-chested lumberjacking, the emperor-in-tiny-clothes Kremlin entrances, the state control of the media.
But in the last we see the narcissism that is no laughing matter. This narcissism is a zero-sum game in which the narcissist’s opponents must not merely be defeated. They must be crushed, obliterated. In this the narcissist has helping hands. And this is the great tragedy of narcissism, not that there are narcissists — they are rife in the digital age and among the world’s “strongmen” leaders — but that they are enabled. (China, anyone?) At home, you have only to consider a Republican Party that would twist itself into a pretzel and deny its essence to ride the coattails of Trump’s popularity with the base. Indeed, the Repubs were going to take a page out of the pro-Putin, anit-Ukraine Trump playbook when a funny thing happened: It turned out that the American public — left, right and in between — didn’t like being threatened by Russian nukes and didn’t enjoy seeing images of children, pregnant women and journalists in Ukraine being blown up. Because if such people aren’t safe, no one is.
Of course, Americans of any political persuasion are free to express their opinion in ways that their Russian counterparts cannot. “Putin’s Road to War” on PBS’ “Frontline” includes the dispiriting sight of Putin’s distanced advisors — Covid-phobic, he practices social distancing in the extreme — cowering before him and rubber-stamping the horror he would unleash on Ukraine. Maybe they are cowards. Perhaps they see themselves as pragmatists.
`There are three ways to cope with a narcissist. One is head-on and it is always an exit strategy. Be prepared to walk away or die. Think of a dying Sen. John McCain, who took on Trump, knowing he had nothing left to lose.
The second way is kiss up, kick down. Think of Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who smiled at her boss but turned a sour, disdainful face toward the press. This is a winning strategy until you’re no longer in power and the people you abused to placate the narcissist now turn on you like a pack of jackals. How popular is Sanders now?
Then there’s the third and ultimately only strategy. This requires a stealth approach in which you and your allies keep the narcissist at bay while covertly thwarting him at every turn. It is the most dangerous game of all, because it requires an airtight coalition that goes all in. Think of the Trump aides who hid papers from him in the hope of staving off some of his more lunatic decisions.
This is the strategy the West has chosen in its war on Putin, a passive-aggressive dance of defensive measures that threads the needle so as not to ignite a nuclear World War III. Purists and virtue-signalers would say we are standing by and doing nothing while the innocent are slaughtered, and they would be right — to an extent.
But a narcissist with nukes forces you to play defense. The only saving grace is that just as the narcissist has no self-awareness, he has no awareness of others. Putin underestimated Ukrainian resolve. He underestimated Zelensky’s charisma. And he underestimated the West’s loathing of him and its own economic power, mistaking forbearance for weakness.
The time may come when a desperate Putin ups the stakes, and we have to be McCain rather than the Trump aides, to confront the narcissist head-on rather than obliquely. In the meantime, I would advise those who keep criticizing us for saying what we won’t do or will do or should or shouldn’t have done in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam, to pipe down. This isn’t about us. It isn’t even about Ukraine. It’s about Putin. It’s about narcissism. And a relationship with such a narcissist is like diving into the shallow end of an empty swimming pool: You’re only going to break your neck. So it doesn’t matter what you say or do. The narcissist dwells in an alternate universe in which the only truth is that he is perfect and yet “poor, poor, poor me.” You can’t negotiate with such a person, because you can’t reason or have a relationship with such a person.
We must continue buttressing Ukraine and maintaining the Western coalition, knowing that President Joe Biden’s branding Putin “a war criminal” is code for all of us working together, many behind-the-scenes, to bring about Putin’s ultimate, inevitable destruction.