Does Putin have rational goals?
The bloodshed is all the more terrible because the logic is crazy.
When Russia was Communist, it was evil. Now it’s not Communist, it’s evil.
Putin is evil because he is an ‘extreme’ nationalist - Hillary Clinton told Reno voters so in 2016. It’s a good thing she didn’t mention FDR, who according to National Review was America’s ‘First Nationalist.’
Perhaps Goldilocks knows a way of being just-right patriotic: enough to send poorboys to fight, but not enough to let their families have a fair share in America’s stupendous economic growth. No Beverly Hills for the hillbillies.
Trump is evil because his followers want to Make America Great Again, whereas Biden is good because he wants to Build Back Better, which means the same only more so. Why can’t they be friends?
We are not at war with Russia and yet we’re not neutral. We support Ukraine; that is, northern and western Ukraine, not the Ukraine Ukraine has been shelling for eight years.
We hate neo-Nazis; unless they are in the tanks of the Azov Battalion, complete with swastikas.
Secession is wrong in Crimea and Donbas, but okay in East Timor and South Sudan, and absolutely wonderful in 1776 America.
We won’t accept the referendums ongoing in Russian-occupied Ukraine because they’re a ‘sham’; but we did accept the one in Kosovo, which had been taken from Serbia by force of arms.
Foreign invasion is never justified; except e.g. in Iraq or Tibet. Oddly enough, countries who refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court include America and China as well as the Russian Federation.
Don’t you feel the doublethink bashing your head on both sides?
Anyone who attempts to understand what Putin is doing is treated as an apologist, nearly a traitor; but I’m going to do it anyway, because I won’t collude with this madness.
What’s really going on? A 2019 report from the Rand Corporation begins:
As the 2018 National Defense Strategy recognized, the United States is currently locked in a great-power competition with Russia.
That document was titled ‘Extending Russia’; another one (or another version) by the same named team is called ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.’
Clearly, the US has been fighting post-Soviet Russia for a long time. To be fair, Rand here are advocating merely economic means.
The CIA, whose chief was seen in Kiev around the time of Yanukovych’s overthrow, tend to be less squeamish. But why single out Langley? Former Secretary of State Madeleine Allbright thought the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were ‘worth it’; a toll a thousand times worse than King Herod’s, if the Catholic Encyclopedia is to be believed.
The war is not directly between Russia and the US, thank goodness. A study published last month estimated that a full-scale nuclear conflict would kill five billion people worldwide from starvation.
No, the strife is conducted via proxies and Ukraine is not the first or last to be so used. For example, there was Georgia in 2008; now there is growing tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory in Karabakh. Russia borders 14 countries: oh, the opportunities for mischief-making!
It’s easy to become engrossed in these military struggles, which are almost an entertainment for us if we’re not directly affected; but let’s step back and try to work out what Putin is trying to achieve. Not that it’s just about him - propaganda seeks to oversimplify and fire up emotion to stop us thinking:
I’m not a mind reader, but I can suggest some goals that might make sense to Putin:
Defend ethnic Russians living abroad
Secure Russia’s energy supplies to western Europe
Safeguard the waterborne trade between the Volga, the Don and the Black Sea
Seek mutually beneficial economic links with countries to the south and east
Starting a war in Ukraine was an absolutely brilliant way of blocking at least the first three objectives. Unbalanced sufficiently, Russia will fall.
Except.
The geniuses in Washington and the Pentagon must calculate that Putin will never, never push the button.
That’s what their predecessors thought in the Cold War. Except:
After the 1991 collapse some scholars went to talk to those actually in charge in Russia. They read documents. They discovered that we’d been wrong in crucial ways all along.
Actually the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.
Maybe now, the wargamers reckon the worst that will happen is the use of battlefield nukes in Ukraine, the great breadbasket that is so vital to Third World countries. Radioactive clouds can swirl harmlessly far away from the US (less so around Europe.) These people are clever: they drink lots of coffee, and they know things.
I’ll go into detail about Putin’s putative goals in further posts.
Meanwhile, for your amusement, here is the first millisecond of a nuclear explosion; the rest you know too well.