Springtime, 2022: Hoping for Brutus and the gang
Notes the Russian invasion of Ukraine, February - April 2022
Fiona Hill, Mr Putin
Catherine Belton, Putin's People
Michael McFaul, Twitter
Ronald Simes, The End of the Roman Republic
Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking
George Kennan, "The long telegram"
Vladimir Putin, "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians."
Robert Kagan, “What we can expect after Putin’a conquest of Ukraine,” Washington Post 2/21/2022
1. Conversations
A leftish professor friend, ever dismissive of the Russian interference in our 2016 election, recently used Facebook to post an essay by a former US diplomat who argues that the current crisis in Ukraine could have been avoided had we only followed his advice.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine is our fault, he argues. It would not have happened had not NATO admitted Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia -- all of which were, like Ukraine, once part of the former Soviet Union's zone of control. Trying to detach Ukraine from the Russian was a "fool's errand," and would never succeed. US policy makers made all this happen -- made NATO expand its roster -- and, as my professor friend has it, our policy makers all follow the direction of the military-industrial complex that "thrives under fear, chaos, and war..."
My response to my colleague, based on my conversations with Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian friends, and on the written statements of various European officials, was skeptical. "Ukrainians aren't Russians," I wrote. "Ukrainians say that they don't want to be part of the Russian empire."
Maybe because I grew up around refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and around many Poles who were convinced that Roosevelt and Churchill betrayed Poland and indeed all of eastern Europe at the Yalta conference hosted by Stalin, maybe that’s why I have a visceral acceptance of what they say – that they hate and fear Russia, and want no part of it, and regard all Americans as utterly naive, or worse, indifferent to their historic suffering at the hands of Russians.
2.
My friends are very upset. Ukrainian-Americans in our neighborhood have been sending medical supplies and other support to Ukraine since 2014, when Russians and their proxies in the eastern part of the country attacked and killed more than 13,000 civilians. They absolutely expect a full Russian invasion and attempted takeover of Ukraine.
One expects that this crisis will get uglier sooner. It's not far away. Today, 23 February 2022, the Pentagon releases another warning: the full-on Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent. A few days ago, somebody released an ugly piece of intelligence: that Russian operatives have drawn up a list of Ukrainians to be assassinated or put into camps. I know the aging children of Polish officers who somehow weren’t liquidated by Stalin’s men in the Katyn forest. I know people whose parents were tortured by the Hungarian secret police, executing Soviet policy after the brief uprising of November 1956 was crushed. I was a reporter in Chicago covering the huge street demonstrations of Solidarity sympathizers who were beaten, jailed, and worse when General Jaruzelski sent the tanks in to destroy the rebellion in 1981.
My Left friends want the US and all its evil capitalist allies to butt out. A very serious Democrat I know, 13-year Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Lucas Kunce who is running for US Senate in Missouri, said that the Europeans who buy Putin's gas and oil are funding his military adventurism and that the US should tend its own garden.
Yes, of course. All our European allies and trading partners are dependent on Russian oil and gas, so we should just say to them, "handle it, let us know how things work out."
The anti-war Andrew Bacevich, whose Quincy Institute remains skeptical (this is being written the day after Putin moved "peacekeepers" into Donetsk and Luhansk) of the Russian invasion, even puts the term "invasion" in quotes. The Quincy Institute's statement of purpose: "The practical and moral failures of U.S. efforts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force requires a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy assumptions...Yet the influence of the “military industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned of has led to a situation where the foreign policy debate within Washington is intentionally constrained and fails to incorporate the diversity of views needed for that rethinking."
The diversity of views, indeed, works out to be this:
NATO should never have allowed the anti-Russian former Russian colonies to join in their rush to join when the Soviet Union collapsed, so this is our fault for allowing NATO to accept people who wanted to join NATO;
Joe Biden should immediately impose sanctions, though sanctions will never work (so say the Wall Street Journal columnists, and the esteemed Biden-hating war-monger George Gates); and
Since Joe Biden cannot do anything right, we should all just accept that the Russians will be back, in force, doing what Russians do.
The critics and the chatting classes all say some version of isolationism, but also lament the lack of a decisive role for the USA in deciding the outcome – except when they lament any decisive role in deciding the outcome.
3.
Events invite the echo theory, in which the learned borrow from the prophet Ecclesiastes and say that there’s nothing new under the sun, that today is an echo of previous times. It's 1798 again, when Catherine the Great dismantled the fractious Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and divided the western parts with the Germans and the Austrians. It's 1945 again, when the Russians had all the power (they now have all the oil and all the gas), which is when Stalin asserted that he wanted what Catherine and the Romanovs before him had wanted: the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine of course, and complete domination of central Europe, too.
“They're there, we're not there, so they'll get what they want,” goes the thinking of the Realist school of American deep-think. Until recently, this is what Robert Kagan announced would be the outcome; since Putin’s war against Ukraine began, since the Ukrainian president proved defiant and a effective as an inspiring communicator, since hundreds of journalists, parliamentarians, and even school groups have embraced Ukraine (rock stars, movie stars, my neighbors with homemade flags of blue and yellow, our child’s choir singing the Ukrainian national anthem with the philharmonic) Kagan writes differently.
Putin seemed at first to have been getting a great ROI. All he had to do was shift his troops to his western border, thrust them into Belarus, snarl recognition of his proxies in Donbass and Luhansk, and watch oil prices soar and everybody around the world fret, suffer inflation anxiety, look nervously at one another while he grew ever-richer from all that oil revenue.
And Ukraine in 2022 will be like Poland in 1981, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956: ground under heel like a cigarette butt.
Except…
4.
It is now late April 2022, six weeks into the war. Putin is still snarling, threatening escalation, but today there is a video of him and his chief general, Shoigu, the polyglot from faraway Tuva near the Mongolian border, half-Mongol himself, a Russified Soviet man. He would be an unlikely Brutus. (Putin’s hand shakes like that of a man with Parkinson’s, some Twitter physician reticently relates.)
The only way out of this is with the Julius Caesar scenario -- the rebellion of knife-wielding aristocrats who become convinced that the one to whom they ceded all power is too bad for their business. They have certainly long since concluded this, after the Ukrainians and Biden and NATO have pushed Putin so hard that he has overextended and faltered. One presumes that American and Europeans technicians are succeeding in penetrating Putin’s sealed-off audience, punching through internet hedges and cell-phone barriers with texts and photos and videos that challenge the Putin narrative inside his isolated country. One expects that a tiny bunch of brave oligarchs and siloviki sharpen knives that are held, ultimately, by Hsi Jin Ping, who offers them relevance, even though it’s not one person, but a group, that is going to have to go.
Caesar had it all set up, too. Caesars all follow Julius Caesar’s lead, as when he packed the Roman Senate with his soldiers, guys who owed it all to the big man. Yet and still, the Brutus group whispered, planned, and acted.
This version will be something like this over the next month:
A. Putin’s invasion, which is slaughtering thousands of Ukrainian civilians, also kills thousands of Russian conscripts, and because this isn’t little Georgia or little Crimea, because Ukraine is a huge country full of people who detest, loathe, fear, and know Moscow, and whom the collective West is helping, and the pain we all see every minute we check our feeds is pain that is also increasingly visible to soldier-moms. All those missing twenty-year-olds: people are noticing that they’re missing.
B. The balking begins now, already. The bullying that cowed all Putin’s cabinet — is there a meeting in which the bullied bark back?
And then, by perhaps even before around summer:
C. The Chinese intervene to broker a deal for everybody to stay within their borders, and it’s their presence that makes the next group say that it was them and the Chinese, not NATO and the Americans, who concluded this deal. The Chinese are heavily invested in taking over the world via their Belt and Road initiative, and want order, plus all the gas and oil that the Putin’s successor can sell them.
Along the way, everybody will have underestimated Joe Biden – except that it’ll be Biden who miraculously pulls off a rollback of Putin and Putinism by the steady, competent, decisive overt action. One hopes that it will be helpful to the Brutus group that installs a Navalny, or a collective presidency, who singly or jointly can organize the Colonels whose future the old Generals almost destroyed following Putin’s orders as they squandered almost everything on this vain adventure.
Caesar got stabbed by brave Brutus and the gang. Then a trio of pretenders emerged, with Octavian besting the distracted Marc Antony, making peace with the oligarchs of old Rome, winning the confidence of the army, and creating a calmer, more pleasant order that let everybody get richer.
So, because we know what Putin will do (he told everyone in his 2021 essay, and Fiona Hill and Tim Snyder have been telling us all along what he’d do), one can only say, we knew that this was coming, but we really did not understand how quickly, and how thoroughly, it would go wrong.
Every one of the western Realists has been incorrect, and were incorrect within weeks of this horror. Henry Kissinger was chief among them. The analysts who have been most cogent are not those photographed with their copies of Thucydides and von Clausewitz and Kissinger’s dissertation, but rather the technicians: Fiona Hill and Michael McFaul, who speak Russian and are specialists in Putin; the retired quartermasters and NATO commanders, who cite specific shortcomings in Russian logistics; the Polish and Baltic soldiers, who explain carefully (they’d all grown up with mandatory Russian-language classes) that the small-group, lightly-armed Ukrainians on ATVs and tractors are effective against Russians because Russians must still await command from Stalin.
And the Ukrainians, of course. Zelenskyy as omnipresent spokesman, with his plain and powerful language. Competence and courage in the face of incomprehensible brutality. Competence: it was a couple of Ukrainian missiles, not NATO ordinance, that destroyed the Moskva, and made Putin’s messaging stumble.
Six weeks in, it becomes clear: This won’t last long. But the people who sweep Putin away will be the aristocrats who have lost too much in allowing this. There are too many money guys who like oligarchic capitalism, who’d rather keep their London clubs, their New York condos, and their Chinese prospects than take orders from one angry old spook for very much longer. But mainly, there are his chiefs whom he insulted, belittled, bullied. It will be them, not us, who end him.
There's nothing new under the sun. a