The Russian people are being forced to live in a dreamland, whether they want to or not, in which Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is a “sacred” duty of “defending the Motherland” and those supporting Ukraine are “international terrorist gangs.” Moreover, Putin’s propaganda tells them, Russia is winning.
The West, too, and American policymakers in particular, also may be living in a dreamland of sort, in which “the conflict could ultimately end not just in a Ukrainian victory,” but Putin’s regime may “suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union.”
“This hope,” Foreign Affairs magazine says, “appears to be a latent motivation for the harsh sanctions imposed on Russia, and it underlines all the recent talk of the democratic world’s new unity.”
The logic of that approach is that, deprived of access to Western goods, and increasingly burdened by battlefield losses and the effect of sanctions on the Russian economy, “both elites and ordinary Russians will grow increasingly fed up with Putin, perhaps taking to the streets” and eventually “Putin and his regime may be shunted aside in either a coup or a wave of mass protests.”
Fat chance. “This thinking is based on a faulty reading of history,” the Foreign Affairs article says (read it here).
“The Soviet Union did not collapse for the reasons Westerners like to point to: a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, military pressure from the United States and Europe, nationalistic tensions in its constituent republics, and the siren song of democracy. In reality, it was misguided Soviet economic policies and a series of political missteps by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that caused the country to self-destruct.
“And Putin has learned a great deal from the Soviet collapse, managing to avoid the financial chaos that doomed the Soviet state despite intense sanctions. Russia today features a very different combination of resilience and vulnerability than the one that characterized the late-era Soviet Union.
“This history matters because in thinking about the war in Ukraine and its aftermath, the West should avoid projecting its misconceptions about the Soviet collapse onto present-day Russia.”
But Putin “grossly miscalculated by invading Ukraine,” and the West could still undermine his power by staying unified. “If the war grinds on,” it may indeed weaken Russia internationally. “But Western leaders cannot hope for … a quick, decisive victory” and “will have to deal with an authoritarian Russia, however weakened, for the foreseeable future.”
The article goes into further detail about how and why the Soviet empire broke apart. I won’t go into those details here.
What’s important is that while Putin has set up Russia to survive Western sanctions (by means described in the article), his country’s isolation (e.g., inability to get parts for its oil production equipment) eventually will wear down its economy. And here’s the key point: The West “appears prepared to keep going.”
In this context, “the West” includes not only the U.S., but Europe and specifically the European Union countries. However, the U.S.’s support is crucial. Foreign Affairs notes, “It won’t be easy to maintain this unity.” For one thing, Europeans are suffering much more from energy shortage and prices than we are, and if the U.S,. pulls its support for Ukraine, the E.U. is unlikely to remain steadfast.
Biden is unpopular in domestic polls because of a perfect storm of afflictions besetting ordinary Americans — the pandemic, inflation, and a smorgasbord of worries. But he’s been effective in rallying and unifying Western opposition to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine; and “if the West is serious about stopping Putin, it will have to keep up the pressure.” You won’t get that kind of leadership from Trump, if he returns to power, and it’s questionable whether you’d get it from any potential 2024 GOP nominee, given Republicans’ obsession with the domestic culture war and their focus on domestic political enemies.
However, if the U.S. and its allies stay the course, and if “the sanctions regime does drag on and becomes institutionalized, the West may yet succeed in undermining Putin’s system,” Foreign Affairs says, because “Moscow’s talented economists will eventually become unable to shield the country from devastating macroeconomic impacts. … In the long term, it is possible to imagine this seriously weakening the Russian state. … The sanctions will gradually drain Russia’s war chest and, with it, the country’s capacity to fight.”
Russia almost certainly will remain an authoritarian state, with or without Putin. But a Russia unable, or rendered unwilling, to carry out further aggression is a much less dangerous state. It’s not wholly unreasonable to frame the issue in terms of this question: Do you want World War 3, or do you want to contain Russia’s newfound militarism before it reaches that point?
With that in mind, American voters should be damned careful about who they put in charge of our foreign policy. Otherwise, we may find ourselves saddled with bigger problems than gas and grocery prices; because, as history has twice taught us in the last century, European conflicts that get out of control don’t stay in Europe.