Putin's Emergency Politics

Much has changed for Vladimir Putin since the terror attacks in Paris. The trope that aggressions in Crimea and Ukraine show that he is more of a threat 

to the West than ISIS was useful to President Obama’s critics, but that’s now older than yesterday’s news. Given the joint French-Russian airstrikes against ISIS in Syria last week, Russia is now a de facto Western ally. Putin the pariah has a shot at redemption, or so it might seem.

Just weeks ago, François Hollande declared that the Russian leader was “not our ally in Syria,” and warned — albeit obliquely — that Mr. Putin should refrain from propping up President Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime. In August, France canceled the delivery of two Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia, selling them to Egypt instead. But the tables have turned. This week, the French president plans trips to Moscow and Washington to foster Russian-American cooperation in stamping out the Islamic State.

Mr. Putin is a proven master at manipulating emergencies — real or imagined — to get what he wants. Witness how he consolidated his hold on power by skillfully distorting the nature of his domestic critics and has used the threat of extremism to re-centralize Russia’s political system. In essence, he applies his own brand of emergency politics to keeping the country in a near-constant state of alarm; security takes precedence over political, legal and marketplace freedoms.

Until the Paris attacks, the prospects for Mr. Putin’s Middle East adventure were not looking good. Russia was bolstering the Assad regime’s air force, but neither the Syrian Army nor its Iranian allies were showing any real gains against rebels on the ground, and ISIS was not a primary target. Then, on Oct. 31, a Russian passenger jet carrying tourists home from Egypt went down in the Sinai Peninsula. It looked like Mr. Putin had led his nation into a deadly quagmire, and his innocent countrymen were paying the price.

Though the Russians must have known that a bomb had destroyed the jetliner, the Kremlin stopped short of officially declaring a terrorist attack, thereby freeing Mr. Putin from a political obligation to retaliate. Instead, in a difficult logistical operation, some 70,000 Russian tourists were evacuated from Egypt, their luggage sent home separately by military transport. The details were broadcast in news reports that were surreal even by the state-run media’s standards; no political context or reasons for the evacuation were given. Since no one seemed to know the reasons for the crash, the reactions of the victims’ families were generally subdued.

Then, on Thursday, Nov. 12, ISIS suicide bombers struck a Beirut marketplace, killing 43 people. The next day, Paris was hit. Mr. Putin seized the initiative. On Sunday, Nov. 15, he used the G-20 summit meeting in Antalya, Turkey, to meet privately with Mr. Obama and apparently signaled his willingness to compromise on Mr. Assad’s place in the future of Syria. On Monday, Nov. 16, he and Mr. Hollande agreed to coordinated airstrikes against ISIS. On Tuesday, Nov. 17, he announced that the Russian airliner had in fact been downed by a terrorist’s bomb, and vowed vengeance.