Economic Sanctions Won’t Work
Putin believes that he has adequately insulated himself and Russia against any economic sanctions that the United States and the European Union could levy against him and Russia for invading Ukraine.
Putin is greedy and delusional and will stop at nothing to achieve his goal of the reannexation of Ukraine and returning this sovereign nation to Russian influence and control….
I’m not an expert or an authority on such matters, but it seems to me that in order to prevent the armed conflict that appears to be inevitable, the US must lead an effort to change Putin’s military calculus.
Frankly speaking, diplomacy, as such, won’t work with an individual who is incapable of responding to anything other than the power of money and military might.
01/24/2022 @ 11:55 am
I regard Putin very differently. I think he has a more legitimate point than most in the West do, and I don’t think we have enough calculus to stop him.
Yes, Putin wants a return to the Soviet Union, but I don’t think that’s primarily because of glory, I think it’s because of Russian vulnerability. I don’t think Americans or Western Europeans are looking closely enough at what’s driving Putin and why.
In the US, we can’t relate to military vulnerability. For anyone to get at us they have to cross an ocean or a geographically large ally. Our total military losses over our history aren’t all that high. Russia is in a very different situation. The last time they were vulnerable, they got invaded and it cost them more people than any country has ever lost in the course of a war that we know of. They lost 20 million people to the Nazis. They take existential threats very, very seriously for essentially the same reason the Israelis do. People misread Israel the same way.
This is happening because the United States totally blew the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russians stopped exporting a revolution, meaning they ceased being a worldwide threat. We didn’t treat them like that. We needed to help them develop democratic institutions, offer them aid, and stop acting like the Cold War was still in progress. Instead we continued treating them as a rival, exploited them economically, and used their weakness to expand NATO, an organization founded to counter the Soviet Union. Now we’re talking about allowing Ukraine to join NATO and talking to the Russians like it’s no big deal. It’s a huge deal. Look at a map. It entails encircling Russia with a potentially hostile alliance. Russia didn’t belong contained by NATO; once it gave up exporting a revolution it belonged in NATO.
Russia was also right about the Crimea, a traditionally Russian area of great strategic importance. During the Soviet Union, it was given to Ukraine to administer for geographic reasons, no one ever figuring there would be separation and the result would be that the Crimea was no longer Russian.
There’s a possibility that Russia won’t invade Ukraine but for that to happen we all have to shut up about allowing Ukraine into NATO, even if Ukraine deserves it. Do that and expect a war. Putin will not believe he has the option of allowing Ukraine’s entrance into NATO no matter what we threaten him with. He would sooner launch nukes.
To push this is to misread Russian thinking very, very badly. The only way to get out of this is to back the Hell off or to make it very, very clear to Putin that he does not have to worry about a Western threat and to make that clear with policy. (I”m not sure what form that would take.) We are in a very dangerous time and it’s our fault we’re there.
01/24/2022 @ 12:26 pm
I think there are a number of developments in the last 30years or so that significantly update that perspective. Yes, we are talking about the USSR in one case, and Russia in the other, but that is not the main difference. They are, after all, the same people. The difference now is Russians have fully joined the world. They carry smartphones and go to rock festivals. Russians don’t favor Putin’s adventurism as a defense of being invaded, and I think they know full well that is not what is going on. This is not a defense of how the “peace dividend” was managed after the end of the Cold War. I agree there at it wasn’t maximized, but this is on Putin. This is not like Israel being surrounded.
Putin runs a criminal enterprise. A former professor of mined called it a “mafi-ocracy”. They have subverted the democratic movement within their former Soviet influence, and created oligarchs out of former national leaders. A couple of friends of ours are Russian ethnically, but grew up in Ukraine. They are bankers here in the US, and very Russian in their demeanor. They see themselves as quite Russian, and competitive and superior to evvvvvverybody. These children of the USSR are very western in their ambitions and worldview. We are not the philosophical enemies that we were a generation ago.
We also know a Ukrainian guy and his family. This guy put a bathroom in our house a year and a half ago. He was born in a Soviet prison. His mom was imprisoned because she was, and remains a Pentecostal Christian. Vitaliy is seriously Christian above all things. He’s the type of guy who quietly would go to prison for his faith. He’s not the type to say bad things about people, but I have questioned him on the subject, and they are not pro-Russia. I admit it is not a simple either/or question, but we are not talking about Indiana and Ohio here. There are some real differences, and both sides of the border there like the US. Lots of them from both countries come here for vacation and to live permanently. This new edition isn’t Peter the Great against the great military powers of the West. Putin is more John Gotti trying to control the waterfront and refuse collection, but on a global scale.
01/24/2022 @ 3:09 pm
‘Putin is more John Gotti trying to control the waterfront and refuse collection, but on a global scale.”
Putin is at the helm of an international criminal enterprise that is couched in and predicated on the sovereignty of the Russian people.
The problem is that the tension and conflict between democracy and authoritarianism hasn’t become an existential threat to Putin’s perception of domestic tranquility…
Koshersalaami is correct re the fact that the West blew it when Putin was permitted to fill the geopolitical void after the demise of the Soviet Union.