Imagine a fortress, the walls and towers of which are made of rubber. They shift and bend, including new lands within their borders only to exclude them after at the whim of the castle overlord. They wave and stretch, they shrink and grow.
Plastic and malleable, their protection is steady yet temporary - and the inhabitants of the houses within these walls have no ability to predict when they will be left defenseless. Such is the overall state of "siege mentality" today - the attitude of societies, groups, or even entire countries, based on the shared feeling of being threatened by some outside force and, hence, the shared need to unite against it. In the foundation of it, as nearly always, is the basic sense of human community and our eternal struggle to find "our own", "our kind", a place and company where we belong. Humans are, at their core, a social species, and don't fare well alone in the long run.
A siege mentality feeds upon this natural urge. What is this mentality? It's "us versus them" - when a group identifies their enemies (real or perceived, or even manufactured) and rallies its members against them, perpetually threatened and in a state of "war". It boosts internal cooperation, cohesiveness, readiness to endure, etc. It comes from the medieval - when actual castle and fortress sieges were widespread. However, there's now a significant difference between the mentality of those medieval people in a besieged fortress and a mental construct of modern societies, besieged or seemingly besieged by an enemy force. Back then, castle walls were made of stone and mortar, today - of rubber and pragmatism.
Several countries of today have been consistently accused of possessing this mentality - namely Russia, Israel, Poland, China, among others. Here's my point of view: all of us do. In a smaller or larger measure, every country employs a siege mentality for its ends and to boost the cohesiveness of its society. It is a simple-to-use meal-ready-to-eat for the mind. And, in a curious recursive manner, every country loves to accuse their ideological, economical, or military adversaries of possessing this mentality - bolstering its own internal siege mentality. It is a self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, eternally-growing, malleable and plastic rubber castle.
Let's look upon the red, swallow-tailed crenelations of the rubber Kremlin wall. Why, one might ask, would you say they're made of rubber? It's as clear as day in the Russian case: the walls are ever firm, the enemy outside them is the "collective West", a term coined presumably around 2021, as this interesting article suggests, as there were no mentions of that particular phrase in official Kremlin statements before 2021. These walls have, for a long time, included states like Serbia - the NATO bombings are hard to forget. As this article is being written, in 2024, the rhetoric of Russian media is clearly meaning "our enemy" when they say the "collective West". And, in fact, there's equal measures of propaganda and truth behind it - going back in time far away, to the medieval times of actual fortresses and walls. Russia has been pursuing two particular points - that Russia and other countries outside Europe and North America are the majority (which, numerically, they are) and that Western activities are always aimed, with a neo-colonial flavor, at undermining the Russian state and other developing countries to maintain the post-WWII world order. This creates the hip paradigm of the threatened majority, with Russia continuously calling for new cooperation initiatives among the developing world and stating that the leadership role and the colonial-style supervision of western countries are over.
Let's now take a closer look at this trio of neighbors: Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. For decades, all of them were included within these rubber walls with an uneasy peace established between Azerbaijan and Armenia under the supervision of the Russian peacekeeping force. The cause for tensions? The everlasting dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the wake of the first war over the region, it became de-facto independent; now, 30 years later, Azerbaijan has forcefully retaken it, much to the ire of many countries. Armenia accused Russia for not fulfilling its peacekeeping obligations, with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs blaming Armenia for not following its own part of the deal. Now, Russia and Azerbaijan have opened an impressive slew of new initiatives and agreements, drawing closer to each other as Azerbaijan draws farther from the "collective West" and the U.S. in particular. Armenia, to the contrary, has always maintained a European-oriented outlook, which caused Russia, who views the West as its almost eternal rival, great inconvenience. Armenia has viewed itself always as a European state, despite its post-USSR heritage and its membership in CSTO (which, after Azerbaijan's latest actions, is teetering on the brink of dissolution). In the latest years, Armenia drew especially close to France, and has been visited by many European and U.S. officials and delegations, as they see its willingness to cooperate with both sides - opening a convenient chink in Russia's armor.
Finally, Russia's patience ran out. Armenia "flew too close to the Sun", and we now witness stone turning into rubber. Armenia suddenly found itself outside the castle walls, despite its still-active CSTO membership, Azerbaijan quickly seized initiative and cut itself a piece, while Russia and Armenia mutually accused each other of breaking previously-signed agreements. Now Azerbaijan has found itself protected by these rubber walls, much closer to the castle's keep - with agreements, initiatives, and a trade deal motherlode waiting to be prospected. The proverbial "us" of the Russian siege mentality has shifted; Armenia is now not "us" anymore, and, as always, this shift has been very prominent in Russian media - with news and rhetoric mirroring the change, pitting the public against Armenia, focusing on how close Armenia has gotten and keeps on getting to "them". At the same time, the "U.S. spies" rhetoric in Azerbaijan has strengthened as the U.S. has taken a pro-Armenian position in the Nagorno-Karabakh's question. The castle walls of "us" protect Baku - for now. For how long? When will they bend again to include new lands and nations and exclude others, the ones who turned into "them"?
Russia is not the only one building these castles. The walls of the U.S. castle have not been as rubbery as some others, and yet they exist as well, standing tall and firm. On different levels of society across the world and nations, you will find smaller and smaller castles, stacked like Russian dolls: my family versus theirs, our subculture versus this subculture, liberals and progressives versus conservatives, the donkeys versus the elephants, Russia versus the collective West. Siege mentality is easy to instill and maintain - the more control over consumed media, the easier. Should it be weeded out? Or is this natural urge foundational to our species and we always have to look for "them" to blame and rally against, to bolster our own group? If so, one should truly wish for an alien invasion. Maybe then humans across Earth will finally unite, surrounded by mutual castle walls.
