Is the United States a waning superpower?
Russia is sure to give the world much more trouble again in the future, and its leaders do not care what the world thinks about it.
It bears mentioning that I could hardly have been more wrong in my assessment of the imminence of this attack on Ukraine. I have been working that over in my head these last several hours (not that it ever mattered what my perspective on international affairs might be...)
It is the brazen nature of such a detailed and comprehensive multi-front attack, being prepared right under the world's noses with no attempt at concealment, that has me pondering what has just happened.
Many people would probably agree by now that there is something dangerous in the squandering of credibility undertaken in recent years by the official sector, around the world, and here in the USA. These dangers might become manifest in world events in the most unexpected forms at any time.
Here we have a US/NATO' intelligence community' which in recent years seems to have forgotten how to release anything but an obvious Party Line to the public about security matters. Who could blame me, or anyone, for simply assuming that Biden et al. harping on about some pending Russian attack was just another example of how easily duped 'the west' is about anything to do with Russia these days?
A sort of mocking gesture toward the cry-wolf panic-mongers running things in the west, to show them that once the kinds of knee-jerky passing as policymaking throughout the 'covid' scare have so deeply compromised their credibility, Russia would no longer need to hide its intentions from such morons, because no one takes them seriously anymore anyway. Maybe that was the idea behind Russian plans and intentions—being made so flippantly obvious for weeks ahead of this campaign. They cried wolf!! one too many times, as it turns out, and that was the time they actually managed to be right about something.
It also shows that perhaps for the first time since the surrender of the Third Reich, what the United States might think about Russia's foreign policy adventures matters less now to the Kremlin than ever. 'Not everything is about you' springs to mind, as about all the Kremlin needs to say to this waning former superpower that isn't really the threat to Russia we might like to think we are.
This attack seems like Putin's first grand opportunity to carry out his international intentions in an arrogant posture of 'America who?'
Why, indeed, should the Kremlin now concern itself in the least with what this weak and clueless DC regime might think?
It brings to mind how I always wondered if the first nail in the Soviet Union's coffin was installing a long-term US military presence on the Eurasian mainland as a result of the first Persian Gulf war back in 1991. Just a few years before, while Brezhnev's regime had still held at least some shadow of the apparatus of totalitarian control over the entire USSR first developed by Stalin, it would have been unthinkable for such a massive and sudden military buildup by the US to take place at all. Especially given that Saddam's Iraq had been the closest thing to a satellite state the USSR had in the middle east.
For everything else Old Man Bush's little supreme-commander adventure meant to history, it cannot have escaped the Kremlin's notice that the US/UK and their allies had just waltzed right into a Soviet client state with complete impunity after the invasion of Kuwait, while Soviet interests in the matter, in its own front yard, hardly got treated as any kind of priority at all by the rest of the world.
Poor Russia, always having to be ruled by autocratic bullies, mostly (by my reading of their history) because of the immense power and influence inside their nation of their ancient organized crime sector, which takes over the entire economy on its own terms whenever there is any vacuum of totalitarian power in the central government.
Nothing happens in Russian politics in which accommodating the position of Russia's vast underworld in ruling the nation is not a paramount priority. I suspect even now that, though we will never really know, this attack on Ukraine has at its roots some kind of major objective on the part of Russia's mafia—probably having to do with some sort of radical conversion of the Russian economy into the world's first cryptocurrency super-state, which result now seems inevitable if these toothless 'sanctions' have any deleterious effect at all.
I have this gut feeling that these various 'cyberattacks' of late, as well as the immense resources thrown into Russia's longstanding efforts to lead the world in state-sponsored trolling, hacking, money-laundering, disinformation, and election-meddling—all using the internet as a strategic weapons platform, have all been components of the Putin long-game strategy, to once again wall off a re-expanded Russian empire into a neo-Stalinist enclave of pure isolationism. The kind of society where (just as for decades under Soviet rule) any form of contact with the outside world not directly approved by the Kremlin once again becomes a harshly punishable crime against the state. And what better means to achieve this in the 21C than to immerse the Russian economy in a total dependency on play money made of charged electrons, where every last transaction becomes an item of official intelligence to be used at will to keep the people obedient and fearful of The Boss?
The thing about Russia is that it really ought to have been the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth for centuries by now, simply because it possesses within its borders more natural resources than any three other major powers combined, save for that permanent crippling accident of geography that leaves Russia without any warm-water seaports it can rely on to conduct international trade.
This is the country that had to sail its Baltic Sea fleet 15,000 miles, around Africa and across the Indian Ocean, in 1904 to face a threat from Japan, only to have that weary and demoralized fleet destroyed in detail in a matter of hours on its first encounter with Japan's navy at Tsushima Straits.
This is the country that had a chance to hold vast influence in North America by holding on to its onetime colony of Alaska, only to end up selling it off for pocket change after the American civil war, simply because Russia could not manage to build 5000 miles of railway across Siberia fast enough to make the sustaining of the Alaska experiment possible at all.
Russia's vastness is both its greatest strength and its most debilitating weakness. The resources at the disposal of the Motherland and her people are nearly endless, guaranteeing that it requires an iron-fisted regime run by a singular godlike figure of absolute rule to be able to face all the permanent threats from all sides which any Russian state has had to deal with for a thousand years.
The Russian worldview is not simply paranoid but with good reasons written in the blood of her people for centuries. I can easily see how, especially given the saturation of Great Patriotic War hero-worship in Russian cinema and TV over the past several years, any exercise of military power by the Kremlin can be sold to the people as some purely defensive undertaking, in order that Russia not be attacked again from abroad as it has been over and over again in recent centuries. The idea that Ukraine is some kind of security threat to the Motherland may read as preposterous to the western mind, but I expect to the Russian world view this might be an easy sell.
And for those who still don't buy it? This is also a country that is already boasting to the world on its own TV channels about how many arrests, and immediate criminal prosecutions are unleashed on its own citizenry for what we may be pleased to call 'peaceful protest' in objection to this latest Putin war. You can go right ahead and be an internationalist social-democracy liberal in Russia, right out in the open; in fact, Lenin and his crew had plenty of uses for this western-leaning 'intelligentsia' who were all for overthrowing the Tsar in favor of some kind of social-democratic republic, and then when they had served their purpose in making the second 1917 revolution possible, were placed at the top of the lists of enemies of the people, to be duly rounded up and either sent into exile or summarily shot by the new Bolshevik secret police.
Russia, for all its virtues as a great nation with a rich history and impressive culture, has this one horrific weakness of having to be ruled by reckless self-regarding delusional bullies and probably always will.
No matter what the outcome of this current conflict, the one thing that we can be fairly assured of is that the world after this war will still be a world containing a Russia ruled by one kind of brutal thug or another, a Russia whose people will more or less obey their bosses for lack of any real alternative, and a Russia that is certain to give the world much more trouble again in the future and not care a whit what the world thinks about it.
Maybe Putin knows what he is doing and has some master plan of which this Ukraine campaign is but one small component, or maybe he has begun to outrun his own formidable abilities and experiences out of pure hubris and the increasingly isolated, xenophobic position among his own people any permanent dictator ends up in sooner or later, and shot his wad on one big gamble, which in the long run is sure to cost him more than he was really prepared to bear in terms of Russia's future world position.
But then again, one might have written that about Stalin, when he signed that pact with Hitler just before carving up Poland between the two of them. And then be reminded that just six years later, Stalin had half of Europe under the Red Army's thumb. That this achievement cost the Soviet peoples over twenty million souls but was to Stalin just a cost of doing business, will probably never be cause enough for the Russian people to find some new spirit of liberal-democratic self-determination sufficient to the task of ending the rule of delusional bullies over their Motherland.
It is Russia's fate, apparently beyond anyone's capacity to make it otherwise, that she will always have some kind of dictatorship ruling over her people.
And it is the world's fate, time after inevitable time (and this Ukraine affair was only a matter of time all along, just as soon as Putin could make sure that Ukraine really would be left on her own to defend herself ) to find some way to share a planet with Russia, which certainly is not going to just go away, no matter how annoying or unreliable a neighbor she has been to the rest of the world so much of the time.
The fact that I was so off in my calculations a few days ago is kind of scary, really.
I am not entirely ignorant in this area of international affairs, but then neither is Putin. He wanted to see if he could dangle his plans right out in the open for weeks on end, rub the noses of his enemies in them while the whole time denying he has any hostile intentions, and then go right in and over-run a major regional power with ties and arrangements with most of the world, in the full assurance that that world would not lift a finger to help them out in their darkest hour.
Just like Poland, 1939.
Godwin's Law aside, the pre-WWII parallels worthy of examination abound here.
Before Poland came Austria's Anschluss; the Ruhr, Rhineland, and Saar incursions; and of course, Czechoslovakia's treacherous abandonment at Munich by a timid Britain and France, Putin's bizarre readings of European and Ukrainian history bear striking resemblances to Hitler's personal views on Austria's entire existence as a nation-state apart from his vision of Deutschland Uber Alles. His ignominious subjugation of the Belarusian state into Kremlin-puppet status is reminiscent to Japan's flimsy rationales in 1931 for installing the exiled adolescent Manchu' emperor' as nominal head of a new state called 'Manchukuo'; while Putin and his vassals' ongoing glib indifference to world opinion calls to mind the Japanese mission to the League of Nations that year, walking out of the meeting called to denounce the invasion of Manchuria. His smug insistence of no hostile intentions even while he makes his final invasion plans reek strongly of the cynicism of Japan's using its diplomatic corps to distract and deceive the FDR administration, right up until the moment the first planes began to arrive over Oahu...
Not to mention, how Putin's brazenness in using western surveillance as his own propaganda tool for weeks reminds me of Khrushchev, counting on the same U2 spy planes as the one he had just shot down over Russia two years prior, to photograph new missile installations in Cuba in 1962 because he meant for that project to be right out in the open to begin with. Accurate US intel on Russian intentions, used as a propaganda weapon in Russian hands, is no new thing at all.
I was right about one thing; this is definitely more Kremlin saber-rattling. The thing is, when that outfit goes to rattling sabers, they never seem to have minded how many people get hurt by the flailing of the blade. They can even, with a straight face, blame them for getting in the way.
The question now is, just as in 1938 when Austria ceased to be a state overnight without a shot fired and for years afterward, how much more saber-rattling does this strongman have in mind, and in what directions? More is certain to follow; I am at least confident about that much.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
[corrected syntax from text]: "to show them that once the kinds of knee-jerkery passing as policymaking throughout the 'covid' scare have so deeply compromised their credibility, Russia would no longer need to hide its intentions from such morons, because no one takes them seriously anymore anyway." [paragraph 5]
Well presented, CC. The odd comma was lost in translation, and we both missed my misspelling of Czechoslovakia, but given the rapid pace of material being generated about this war, and in the spirit of this author's own theme here that not everything is about Americans' opinions on world affairs these days, what do a few typos and editorial glitches mean in the scheme of things? I hope some or all of these thoughts my help others gather their own. Whether I am right about them or not has been presented to us all by history this week as kind of our own problem to solve. Personally, I have always welcomed the idea of finally no longer living in a superpower's middle kingdom at whatever expense her leaders might presume to charge the rest of the world, but such matters too have always been way over my head to actually address much less solve. Just the very fact that I nonetheless do have the right to those opinions is what I hope I would have courage enough to defend from direct challenge as the Ukrainian common citizenry are doing even as I write these words. Slava Ukraina.