Just as individual narcissists appear to be inflated egotists but are really insecure souls trying to cover their fragility, narcissistic nations and groups that parade their power are often actually haunted by fear of their own weakness. Narcissists crave recognition, but they can never get enough. Narcissists crave psychic security but act in self-destructive ways that ensure they are often under assault. ...
My fear is that Putin knows only one way to deal with humiliation, which is by blaming others and lashing out. A couple of years ago my colleague Thomas L. Friedman wrote a prescient column about the politics of humiliation in which he quoted Nelson Mandela: “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.”
When grievance and humiliation reach a tipping point in someone or in a group, so does the likelihood of their lashing out violently. There's a phrase for it: "going postal". If one feels powerless in the face of him who humiliated you, you regain a sense of power by walking into his office and blowing him away: "Now who's humiliated, chump? You, that's who, because you're dead. You don't exist and I do. I'm even gonna be on TV now." Or in the case of someone like Dylan Roof, it's not a particular individual you lash out at but representatives who are proxies for the group he blames for his grievance.
Brooks is arguing that humiliation and grievance are at the root of what Putin is doing in Ukraine, and I tend to agree with him, at least insofar as it explains what seems to be the recklessness of this all-out invasion. As with most potential mass murderers before they act, nobody believed he was that far gone, but he was and is. And there are those on the American Right who are rooting for him, not because they care one way or the other about the suffering of the Ukrainian people--they care only about their own sense of grievance. And Putin's project to annihilate the Ukrainians is a proxy for their fantasies to annihilate those they blame for humiliating them. "Putin. Putin. Putin...," they all chanted as just before Marjorie Taylor Greene took the stage at the America First Political Action Conference last week.
And so now the dilemma for the rest of us about what to do. The West's policy so far in dealing with Ukraine's Putin disease fits the moment: quarantine the afflicted to prevent the disease from spreading; put him on life-support with infusions of antibodies; stand by and hope he survives.
But it's is going to be very, very difficult to stand by and watch Putin to continue to act out his violent fantasies and not intervene more forcefully. Zelensky there and Vindman here are arguing that NATO will inevitably be compelled to intervene as things get worse, so why not intervene now? Maybe they're right.
But the fear of nuclear escalation is, I think, justified, especially if we're dealing with a cornered Putin who thinks he has nothing to lose. He's already crossed into war criminal territory, and if the whole underlying motivation of this war is to go postal on the West, what better way than to go nuclear. Maybe there are factions within Russia that would stop him. Maybe not. Unless we're sure of it, containment is the better policy.
Update: After writing this, I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Masha Gessen, which, if you're interested in more nuance than a post like this could ever pretend to deliver, is well worth listening to. It largely supports the "humiliation" hypothesis. The first half of the interview focuses on Russian public opinion in Putin's Russia; the second half on Putin's motivations for invading Ukraine. They discuss Putin's largely historically skewed and largely ignorant fantasy of restoring the Russian Empire, and then they go on to talk about how much of what is driving Putin largely derives from his intense feelings of Russia's having been humiliated by the West. This humiliation was particularly provoked by NATO's intervention in the Balkans in the 90s without Russia's even being consulted about it, and then the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in Russia's backyard. Putin sees the U.S. insistence on a rules-based international order as an absurd fiction that clearly the U.S. feels no compunction about flouting when its convenient for U.S. interests, and so feels no compunction himself about flouting it.