Let us be honest with ourselves. The British intelligence community’s recent analysis of Vladimir Putin’s image management is not a revelation. It is an admission of defeat. For years, the Kremlin has been weaving narratives that resonate with a global audience weary of the West’s moralising. Meanwhile, our own spin doctors produce content that feels like a stale episode of a BBC drama: predictable, smug, and utterly disconnected from the chaos of realpolitik.
We are witnessing a contest not of arms but of archetypes. Putin positions himself as the strongman emperor, a latter-day Marcus Aurelius (minus the philosophical humility) standing athwart the decadence of a West that has abandoned its own traditions. He understands that in an age of information overload, the potent image beats the factual report every time. Compare his carefully choreographed appearances—the shirtless Siberian horse rides, the sombre church visits—to the disjointed, focus-grouped postures of Western leaders. The contrast is not merely aesthetic; it is epistemological.
The British analysis, as leaked, frets that Putin’s image ‘exploits’ a vacuum left by the West’s own narrative ineptitude. But this is like blaming a huckster for winning at a carnival game rigged by the carnival master. The West, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States, has spent decades dismantling its own cultural narratives in the name of progress. We mocked patriotism, we sneered at history, we taught our children that their civilisation was a catalogue of crimes. And then we wonder why hungry souls look eastward towards a leader who offers certainty, even if it is the certainty of a gilded cage.
Consider the tired tropes of Western reporting. Every article about Russia must mention ‘disinformation’ and ‘autocracy’ while glossing over the fact that our own information environment is a swamp of corporate propaganda and algorithmic manipulation. The intellectual class, my own tribe, has become a priesthood of the hollow. We deconstruct everything and construct nothing. Putin, by contrast, constructs a simple mythology: Russia as the last bastion of traditional values, the defender of Christianity, the nation that says ‘no’ to a decadent globalism. It is a lie, but a coherent lie. Our truth is incoherent.
The intelligence community’s belated hand-wringing is a symptom of a deeper rot. We have forgotten that power requires a story. The Roman Empire did not fall because of barbarians at the gates; it fell because it lost the ability to tell itself a believable story about its own purpose. The late Empire’s intellectuals wrote elegant critiques of imperial decay while the legions melted away. Today, our think tanks produce elegant reports on Russian ‘influence operations’ even as our own cultural influence evaporates. We are the new Byzantines, debating the sex of angels while the city walls crumble.
What is to be done? The answer is not more counter-narratives or better fact-checking. It is the recovery of a western story worth telling. One that does not apologise for its history but learns from it. One that offers development, not just ‘stability’. One that trades the drab language of technocracy for the vivid tongue of prophecy. Until we produce leaders who can speak to the soul as well as the spreadsheet, Putin’s image will continue to dominate. He is not a genius; he is merely the only man on the stage who remembered that politics is, at its core, a battle of imagination.
In the meantime, our intelligence experts will continue to analyse shadows while the fire rages. The West’s greatest vulnerability has never been its enemies. It is its own lack of conviction.
