I experienced the fall of the Soviet Union on a short-wave radio my wife bought for me. My most vivid recollection is of the farewell broadcast by a long-time English-language Soviet propagandist.
He apologized to his listeners for misleading them for decades and concluded by hoping that the Soviet Union would evolve into a mid-level European power. Like Spain, he said.
This was never in the cards. To borrow from John McCain’s description of Russia, Spain is not a “gas station.” Nor does it possess nuclear weapons. Nor does it span eleven time zones.
Also, Russians have seldom been satisfied with mid-tier status, not for long anyway. They prefer epic poetry to the romantic kind.
Putin understood this. That understanding helps explain his rise and his consolidation of power.
Putin’s preference for the epic also explains his attempt to crush Ukraine. Did his people’s preference extend that far? Maybe at first, to the extent they thought about it.
Right now, it looks like Putin’s attempt will fail. Indeed, it’s possible, though far from certain, that Ukraine will win this war outright.
Ronald Reagan said of the Cold War that his strategy was “we win, they lose.” When it comes to the war in Ukraine, my preference is Ukraine wins, Russia loses.
I say preference because my desire to see Ukraine win isn’t strong enough to support committing U.S. troops to accomplish this. Fortunately, it may not take U.S. troops for Ukraine to win.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration seems not to desire victory for Ukraine. Some key members of Biden’s Cabinet have said that’s the goal. But Biden disapproved of these comments. He seems to favor to favor a stalemate, followed by the negotiation of a face-saving peace for Russia.
Why, given Putin’s obvious hostility to America, his indefensible aggression against a friend of the U.S., and his other mischief including military backing for our Middle East enemies, would the Biden administration not want Ukraine to win outright? Because of fear that, if he is losing, Putin might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
That possibility can’t be ruled out (and it exists even in a stalemate scenario). But if Putin did resort to nukes, Ukraine would be the immediate victim. Yet, Ukraine has made clear that it will press for victory, including the retaking of Crimea.
Maybe, the Ukrainians, like the Russians, are too fond of epic poetry to know what’s good for them. However, I’m inclined to think they are better able to assess their interests than Joe Biden and his team are. Remember, that’s the gang that brought us the Afghanistan fiasco.
What would the likely consequences of a Ukrainian victory be? It’s difficult for outsiders to say. The same is probably true of insiders and experts. I wonder how many of them predicted that Russia’s offensive would stall and then be reversed. (I’m reminded of an expert on the Soviet Union who excused his profession’s inability to foresee the fall of Khrushchev by noting that, after all, Khrushchev didn’t see it coming either.)
This article takes a stab at describing the consequences of a Ukrainian victory. The author writes:
Experts with whom I spoke all agreed that the war will have long-lasting implications for Russia and, as a consequence, for geopolitics. At the very least it puts to rest for the foreseeable future Putin’s notion that he will oversee the rebirth of Russian greatness, of a new Russian empire. At worst, it means that Russia’s decades-long slide that led to its Cold War collapse (and its struggles ever since) will be accelerated, and the country will be consigned by its floundering dictator to a period of greatly diminished global influence.
Suddenly, Spain might be an attractive model.
Columbia University professor Stephen Sestanovich offers a different model. He says “it’s going to take quite a comeback [for Putin] to be more than [former Serbian President Slobodan] Milošević with missiles.”
But a Milošević with missiles and “a gas station” might still be a menace. What, then, of the possibility that Putin will be ousted if Russia loses his war with Ukraine?
Jill Dougherty of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service addresses this question:
The prospect of defeat in Ukraine carries potentially grave threats to Vladimir Putin's rule. The closer he comes to losing, the more desperate he may grow, with little to stop him from striking out in savage retribution. . . The Kremlin can try to redefine ‘victory’ and ‘defeat,’ but someone will have to be blamed and, already, Putin is denouncing his internal ‘enemies’ and ‘Fifth Column traitors,’ leaving Russia an angry, resentful, and isolated country.
General Mark Hertling, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, questions whether replacing Putin would make much difference:
Russia’s aristocracy might replace Putin, but would it be with a leader who can help the Russian culture rebound from over a century of oppression, secrets, wars, kleptocracy, class division, and really poor leadership that has seeped into every element of the society?
Replacing Putin with a slightly more rational and more pliable replica is certainly one possibility. However, I don’t see why we should rule out the possibility that a defeat in Ukraine would be more transformative than that.
Consider the gloomy aftermath of such a defeat that Tom Nichols, a former Naval War College professor and Russia specialist, describes:
No matter how this war ends, post-Soviet Russia as a great power is finished for a long time to come. Putin unwound 30 years of social and economic development, somehow thinking he could sustain great power status on wars of aggression, selling natural resources, and keeping a nuclear arsenal. (Great powers do not have to go shopping for weapons in North Korea.). . .
The moral stain of the Ukraine war and its many crimes is going to last for generations, and a post-Putin Russia will not get the same benefit of the doubt from the rest of the world the way it did after the Soviet collapse. He's going to leave the country poorer, more hated, and more isolated than at any time since Stalin’s death.
The rational response to this state of affairs would be to purge the elements that visited such a disaster on Russia, address the domestic dysfunction, and try to make amends with the West. Why assume that Russia won’t respond rationally?
But even if it doesn’t, a world in which “Russia as a great power is finished for a long time to come” — or even just for a couple of decades — is a world to be desired. Thus, the Biden administration should be doing more to help bring about that world.
This means providing many more of the armaments that have played a role in turning the war in Ukraine’s favor. As one EU official says, “It is 100 per cent true that more weapons mean more Ukrainian territory, and less blood, less tears.”
And greater jeopardy for Vladimir Putin.