Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine has obviously critical implications for United States foreign policy.[1] Among other things, this expanding Russian “crime against peace”[2] has undermined once residual hopes for superpower reconciliation or “détente.” In essence, whatever the variable particulars, we are now embroiled in “Cold War II.”
Are there any discernible psychiatric elements to this “war?” As a key player in world politics, is the Russian president fundamentally rational or irrational? And how should a meaningful answer be determined?
There are some additional questions. Is it plausible that Mr. Putin might sometime pretend irrationality as a calculated step toward “escalation dominance?”[3] How could American analysts reliably distinguish between authentic enemy irrationality and pretended enemy irrationality? How credible are Putin’s periodic threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine? To be sure, assessing an adversarial head of state is not “normally” a psychiatric task.
Still such informed queries need not imply “abnormality.” Inter alia, such an implication could mean dispensing with variously tangible distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal.” This dispensation need not suggest that findings of “abnormality” would be insignificant, but only that Putin’s most injurious traits could present in obscure or unforeseeable ways.
In some cases, owing to the higher likelihood of decisional miscalculations during crises, these qualities could prove more portentous than “normalcy.” Here, though counter-intuitive, a perfectly rational Vladimir Putin could pose greater global perils than an irrational Putin. As to a Russian president who would become genuinely “mad,” prediction would become all but impossible. Then, using a poplar gaming metaphor, all bets would be off.[4]
What then?
Credo quia absurdum, warned the ancient philosophers. “I believe because it is absurd.”
There is more. It will be important for US decision-makers to differentiate between a Vladimir Putin who is “merely” evil from one who is abnormal, irrational or “mad.” Though there exist no intrinsic or “essential” meanings to such potentially overlapping descriptions, current strategic theory centers most conspicuously on judgments of “irrationality.” More precisely, an irrational national decision-maker is one who does not value national survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences.
Such matters would always be multifaceted and bewildering. Nuance would be critical. Accordingly, specific designations of “normal” and “abnormal” could appear sharply delineating or mutually exclusive. But US foreign policy decision makers could also discover that any true qualities of abnormality, irrationality and madness are more correctly thought of as isolable points along a common continuum than as sharply distinct analytic alternatives.
There is much more to understanding Vladimir Putin and his belligerent threats than first meets the eye. Sigmund Freud wrote about the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914) while tracing assorted connections between “abnormal” and “normal.” He was surprised to learn just how faint the supposed lines of any tangible conceptual demarcation could actually be. Exploring parapraxes, or slips of the tongue, a phenomenon that we now popularly call “Freudian slips,” Freud concluded that certain specific psychopathologic traits could sometimes be discovered even in “normal” persons.
What then?
What would this mean?
How might it impact US foreign policymaking in “Cold War II?”
After the Holocaust, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed Nazi (SS) doctors. Perplexed, as a physician, that such monstrous crimes could have been justified as “hygiene,” Dr. Lifton was determined to answer some basic and necessary questions. Most elementary was the altogether reasonable query: How could Nazi doctors have managed to conform large-scale medicalized killing of innocent and defenseless human beings with their otherwise normal private lives?
In similar fashion, US decision makers and other world leaders ought now to inquire about Vladimir Putin and his all-too-many underlings, separatist enablers and otherwise witting allies.
How can these people witness the daily aggression and genocide[5] now being inflicted in Ukraine by thousands of Russian soldiers and continue “per normal” with their day-to-day lives?[6]
In response, history could be instructive. It was not unusual for Nazi doctors to remain good fathers and husbands while murdering Jewish children. These defiling physicians (doctors sworn by Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”) were capable of supervising genocidal mass murders six days a week (on Sundays they “normally” went to church). Now we must ask along very similar lines of questioning:
Are Russian soldiers and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators murderers[7] who are also able to remain good fathers and good husbands?
Robert Lifton carried on his examinations of the Nazi “biomedical vision” as a Yale Professor and Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Research in Psychopathology and Psychotherapy. For this American-Jewish physician, such examination was not just some random undertaking of narrowly intellectual curiosity. Rather, adhering to widely-accepted and reason-based protocols, Dr. Lifton embarked upon a series of carefully rigorous scientific studies.
To the physician, the Oath of Hippocrates pledges that “I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.” When asked about this unwavering duty, most interviewed SS doctors experienced no personal contradictions. In Nazi pseudo-biology, “The Jew” was “a source of infection.” Ridding society of Jews, it followed, was a properly “anti-infective” medical goal. The Nazi doctors saw such murderously irrational “excisions” as a proper “obligation” of “healing,” “compassion” and (above all) “hygiene.”
Do Vladimir Putin and his compliant subordinates have similarly “cleansing” views of Russia’s Ukrainian genocide? Based on readily available evidence, this is hardly a difficult question.
Resembling their Nazi forbears, perpetrators of the ongoing Russian genocide in Ukraine must prepare to consider Putin-ordered mass murders as a crime justifiable by metaphor. Literally millions of Holocaust murders offer irrefutable evidence of just how easy it is to subordinate science and reason to the most preposterous forms of comparison.[8] With any such willful subordination,[9] otherwise normal military behavior is giving way again to once unimaginable levels of inter-state and intra-state predation.
There is more. The duality of good and evil within each individual person is a very old idea in western thought, most notably in German literature, from Johan Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche to Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. Always, in studying this clarifying literature, we may learn that the most critical boundaries of caring and compassion are not between “normal” and “abnormal” persons, but within each individual person. As Putin-ordered Nuremberg-category crimes continue to escalate,[10] it is high time to recognize that the porous walls of human normalcy and abnormality can allow a single individual to navigate effortlessly between polar extremes.
Pertinent oscillations would take place between cruelty and altruism, violence and calm, right and wrong, or reason and anti-reason.
In the best of all possible worlds, truth could never be manipulated as political contrivance. It is, after all, an exculpatory trait, both in specific psychiatric assessments and in serious judgments of international relations. Still, at any identifiable moment of human history, the veneer of human civilization has remained razor thin. It has remained brittle, fragile, tenuous, ever- ready to crack along multiple and mutually-dependent interstices.
After attending the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, political philosopher Hannah Arendt advanced the controversial hypothesis that even extreme evil can be ordinary or “banal,” that it can be generated by the seemingly benign absence of authentic thought.[11] This novel interpretation was widely challenged and disputed following the trial, but it remained identifiably rooted in certain classical views of individual human dualism, particularly Goethe’s Faust. Hannah Arendt’s troubling idea of evil as mundane was further reinforced by various-earlier studies of nefarious human behavior in the crowd, the herd, or the mass, especially in overlapping works of Soren Kierkegaard, Max Stirner, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gustave Le Bon, Carl G. Jung, Elias Canetti and Sigmund Freud.
In all these thematic writings, a common focus is placed upon the potentially corrosive impact of group membership and identity on individual human behavior. Freud’s own best contribution remains his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). Here, the psychologist-philosopher already understood that Reason is at perpetual war with Anti-Reason and that political dictatorships will inevitably favor the latter.[12]
Robert Lifton likely knew all this. Still, he sought something more, some other isolable mechanism by which the ordinary or “normal” evildoer could render himself or herself “abnormal.” Ultimately, he discovered this esoteric mechanism in an intra-psychic process Lifton labeled as “doubling.”
Different from the traditional psychoanalytic concept of “splitting,” or what Freud preferred to call “dissociation,” doubling is the means whereby an “opposing self” begins to replace portions of the “original self,” in effect usurping and overwhelming that original self from within. When this happens, we may learn further, the opposing self is able to embrace evil-doing without restraint and while the original self still seeks to remain “good.”
Significantly, for optimum understanding of Putin’s grave crimes against Ukraine, doubling may permit Russian evil doers to avoid personal guilt and thus live simultaneously within two coinciding but adversarial levels of human consciousness.
As a “maneuver,” however unwitting, doublingallowed Nazi doctors to be murderers and decent family men at the same time. In similar fashion, doubling is likely the way that shameless Putin-functionaries are able to reconcile the blatant ordinariness of their public lives with derivative displays of personal cruelty. As with Nazi doctors and the Jews, it is plausible that “know nothing” Putin-followers regard the harms being inflicted upon “sub-human” Ukrainians as not merely pleasing, but also as a welcome form of “healing.”
Sometimes, truth may emerge through paradox. To wit, there can be an abnormal side to normalcy. For the future, in thinking about how best to protect human beings from yet another genocidal national leader, all states and peoples would be well-advised not to think of such leaders in starkly polar terms – that is, as “normal/abnormal” or “good/evil.”
In the Third Reich, doublingwas not the only reason that “normal” individuals were able to be complicit in crimes against humanity.[13] Elements of “groupthink,” especially an overwhelming need to belong, have always expressed a dominant decisional influence on human behavior. Clinically, at least, whatever sorts of explanation might ultimately emerge as most persuasive, we humans may finally have to accept that the most odious and contemptible national leaders have sometimes been clinically “normal.”
Such conclusions ought to be kept in mind as US national security officials prepare to better understand the “psychopathology of normalcy.” In support of such necessary preparations, these officials should focus more diligently on fact-based explanations[14] than on narrowly simplistic or conspiratorial ones.[15] Analyzing Vladimir Putin has already become an urgent task for America’s scholars and national policy makers, but it is also a task wherein US assessments of adversarial normalcy need not imply any diminishing dangers. Even a completely “normal” Vladimir Putin could underestimate American military reactions and/or overestimate his own forces’ capacity to fend off American nuclear reprisals.
At some still-indeterminable point, one when violence-stoking hatreds are channeled by the Russian President into the crudely belligerent nationalism[16] of “Mother Russia,” they could precipitate a catastrophic international war. And this prospect could include a nuclear war.[17]
In the final analysis, truth will be exculpatory: “Happy are those who still know that behind all speeches are the unspeakable lies.” This cryptic observation by Rainer Maria Rilke, the Dionysian[18] poet (a poet generally associated with dense philosophical issues of “being”) laments the lies of individual leaders like Vladimir Putin. Though the virulent particulars of such lies are ever-changing around the world, their overall generality of meaning remains constant. Such welcome generality also represents an inherently gainful trait of science, medicine and law.[19]
Why does the famous Edward Munch “scream” (see image above) resonate so tellingly? It is because so many “normal” human beings are able to grasp thatin a self-defiling world that is presumptively normal, not to be abnormal represents a special form of madness.[20]Now, amid the ongoing horrors of Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, it is this unique form of madness that is most worrisome.
Even if Vladimir Putin could be judged more-or-less normal, there would remain multiple perils for a US President to consider,[21] some of them unprecedented or sui generis. Though both abnormality and irrationality could render Putin increasingly dangerous to world order,[22] even national leaders who would remain normal and rational amid such evident global absurdity could bring this long-suffering planet to irremediable misfortune. After experiencing or witnessing Putin-inflicted horrors of anti-Ukraine violence,[23] humankind’s only plausible hopes lie latent in certain complicated fusions of truth, intellect, justice[24] and prudence.[25]
This means, among other things, that the core task before a beleaguered humankind is intellectual; it is not narrowly political.
As always, in Moscow and elsewhere, Reason and Anti-Reason can coincide. More particularly, as 20th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers observes in Reason and Existenz (1955): “The rational is not thinkable without its other, the non-rational, and it never appears in reality without it. The only real question is in what form the other appears, how it remains in spite of all, and how it should be grasped.” Until we can prepare to answer this many-sided question with refined thinking and accumulated expertise, Putin’s aggression against Ukraine will glow ever more menacing.
[1] See: RESOLUTION ON THE DEFINITION OF AGGRESSION, Dec. 14, 1974, U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 U.N. GAOR, Supp. (No. 31) 142, U.N. Doc. A/9631, 1975, reprinted in 13 I.L.M. 710, 1974; and CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS, Art. 51. Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, Bevans 1153, 1976, Y.B.U.N. 1043. Significantly, Russia’s current aggression – resembling Nazi Germany’s attacks on assorted nations between 1939 and 1945, made possible subsequent crimes of genocide.
[2] See: https://www.roberthjackson.org/article/london-agreement-charter-august-8-1945/
[3] See by this writer, Louis René Beres: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/united-states-nuclear-strategy-deterrence-escalation-and-war
[4] Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman,” inquires Luigi Pirandello in Act II of Henry IV, “with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your constructions? Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather, with a logic that flies like a feather.”
[5] Some of these egregious Russian crimes nay not be literally genocidal in strict jurisprudential terms, but nonetheless qualify as “genocide-like” crimes. For precise characterization of the concept “genocide-like crimes,” by this author, see: Louis Rene Beres, “Genocide and Genocide-Like Crimes,” in M. Cherif Bassiouni, ed., INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW: CRIMES (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers, 1986), pp. 271 – 279.
[6] Political philosopher Hannah Arendt would have said “banal lives.”
[7] International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, comprise: (1) laws on weapons; (2) laws on warfare; and (3) humanitarian rules. Codified primarily at The Hague and Geneva Conventions, and known thereby as the law of The Hague and the law of Geneva, these rules seek to bring discrimination, proportionality and military necessity into belligerent calculations. On the main corpus of jus in bello, see: Convention No. IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, With Annex of Regulations, Oct. 18, 1907, 36 Stat. 2277, T.S. No. 539, 1 Bevans 631 (known commonly as the “Hague Regulations”); Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3114, T.I.A.S. No. 3362, 75 U.N.T.S. 85; Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3316, T.I.A.S. No. 3364, 75 U.N.T.S. 135; Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3516, T.I.A.S. No. 3365, 75 U.N.T.S. 287.
[8]. Twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gassett clarified the generic bases of such a leader-induced declension in his classic The Revolt of the Masses (1930): “It’s not that the vulgar believes itself to be superexcellent and not vulgar, but rather that the vulgar proclaim and impose the rights of vulgarity or vulgarity itself as a right.“
[9] During his presidential tenure, too little attention was directed toward Donald J. Trump’s open loathing of science and intellect. Ironically, the Founding Fathers of the United States were intellectuals. As explained by American historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 145. A post-Trump conclusion ought now to surface: How far we Americans have fallen.
[10] Regarding Nuremberg-category crimes, see: AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind….” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.
[11]See Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).
[12] On this key theme, see especially Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952). In a diagnosis that seems to fit perfectly with America’s recent struggles against Trump-inflicted criminality, Jaspers summarizes a lethal problem of “normalcy.” In essence, notes Jaspers: “The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.”
[13] Crimes against humanity are defined formally as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during a war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated….” See Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Aug. 8, 1945, Art. 6(c), 59 Stat. 1544, 1547, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, 288.
[14] But see Karl Jaspers, Reason and anti-Reason in Our Time (1952): “There is something inside all of us that earns not for reason, but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….”
[15] Recall, in this connection, Bertrand Russell’s timeless warning in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916): “Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.”
[16] Authoritative legal assumptions concerning solidarity between states concern a presumptively common legal struggle against aggression and genocide. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, had already been mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[17] For early accounts by this author of nuclear war effects in particular, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
[18] In German, “Existenzphilosophie.”
[19]In law, responsibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin for such Nuremberg-category crimes is not limited by his official position or by any other requirement of direct personal actions. On the underlying principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb) 12 LAW REPORTS OF TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS 1, 71 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp. 1949); see: Parks, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES, 62 MIL.L.REV. 1 (1973); O’Brien, THE LAW OF WAR, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY AND VIETNAM, 60 GEO.L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. DEPT OF THE ARMY, ARMY SUBJECT SCHEDULE No. 27 – 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907) 10 (1970). The direct individual responsibility of leaders for crime s of war, genocide and genocide-like crimes is unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the Act of State defense. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Strat. 1544, E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, Art. 7. Under traditional international law, violations were the responsibility of the state, as a corporate actor, and not of individual human decision-makers in government or the military. Today, even if Putin could argue persuasively that Russian military violations in Ukraine were being committed without his express authorization, he would still remain legally responsible.
[20] This form could center on oft-cited differences between n rationality and non-rationality in world politics. See, by this author, Louis Rene Beres (Israel): https://besacenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/516-Israeli-Security-and-Enemy-Rationality-Beres-Author-approved-version.pdf
[21] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Air and Space Operations Review, USAF (Pentagon): https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASOR/Journals/Volume-1_Issue-1/Beres_Nuclear_War_Avoidance.pdf
[22] The term world order reform has its contemporary origins in a scholarly movement begun at the Yale Law School in the mid-and late 1960s, and later “adopted” by the Politics Department at Princeton University in 1967-68. The present author, Louis Rene Beres, was an original member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project and wrote several early books in this scholarly genre.
[23] https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2022/05/louis-rene-beres-putins-nuremberg-level-crimes/
[24] Regarding considerations of justice in these matters, neither international law nor US law advises specific penalties or sanctions for states that choose not to prevent or punish genocide by others. All states, most notably the “major powers” belonging to the UN Security Council, are bound, inter alia, by the peremptory obligation (defined at Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) known as pacta sunt servanda, that is, to act in continuous “good faith.” This pacta sunt servanda obligation is itself derived from an even more basic norm of world law commonly known as “mutual assistance.” This civilizing norm was famously identified within the classical interstices of international jurisprudence, most notably by eighteenth-century Swiss legal scholar, Emmerich de Vattel, in The Law of Nations (1758).
[25] The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarks prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further upon René Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.