Putin may be weakened, but not weak
Published by Newsmax: Ukrainian officials rejoiced at their good luck last weekend, as it looked that Russia might devolve into civil war. “We are little-by-little running out of popcorn,” an advisor to Ukraine’s defense minister joked.
Civil unrest in the world’s leading thermonuclear power is no laughing matter.
The events of Saturday may have brought the world closer to nuclear conflict than any moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
If Western officials were surprised, they wasted no time expressing their schadenfreude. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg decried Putin’s “big strategic mistake,” British Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, told Parliament, “clear cracks are emerging,” and even as the Wagner mutineers blinked on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speculated more instability to come.
“I don’t think we’ve seen the final act,” he told ABC.
The final act. No doubt that sounded ominous to Russian listeners. Putin certainly suspects American involvement in the Wagner uprising, despite President Biden’s claims, “we were not involved, we had nothing to do with this.”
If the American president maintained a shred of credibility as an honest broker, those words might have calmed tensions.
But Joe Biden’s credibility is in shambles, most especially as it’s related to Ukraine.
Let’s review. As vice-president, Mr. Biden was America’s emissary to Ukraine. In 2014, he lectured former Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko on corruption, “You have to be whiter than snow.” This, while his own son Hunter took a $50,000-a-month seat on the board of Ukraine’s largest oil and gas company, Burisma.
In April 2021, 84 days after being sworn in as president, Biden ordered an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, vowing, “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit.” Four months later, the world watched what unfolded as the worst American military defeat since Vietnam. Biden’s plan abandoned American citizens, our allies, $85 billion worth of equipment, and 20 years of blood and treasure to the Taliban.
Yet despite his strategic Afghan disaster, the American president talked tough on Ukraine and the eastward expansion of NATO. In December 2021 he vowed to destroy Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas line if Putin invaded, “We will bring an end to it.”
A month later, with 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s border, the American commander-in-chief backpedaled about a Russian invasion, “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”
The president then made it clear what he thought about Ukraine’s long-term chances of success: Russia would “be able to prevail over time.”
With this welcome mat, unsurprisingly, Putin invaded the next month.
Having failed at deterrence, President Biden veered from one guardrail to the other, calling for regime change in Russia. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain power,” he said in March 2022.
This, even as his senior-most intelligence official, Avril Haynes, warned the Senate Committee on Armed Services that Putin’s perception of an existential threat could lead to his use of nuclear weapons.
When both the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines mysteriously blew up in September 2022, fulfilling Biden’s vow, the White House denied responsibility, calling an award-winning journalist’s story on the operation, “utterly false and complete fiction.”
So should Putin now take President Biden at his word that America and the West are not seeking regime change and fomenting a coup d’état?
Hardly.
Which brings us to the stakes of this war.
For the United States, our reputation is on the line, plus another $100 billion or so in assistance. If the war drags into a stalemate, we’re trapped in yet another fruitless “forever war,” unable to withdraw or cut off support without risking a collapse of our fragile ally.
For Ukraine, obviously, the outcome is existential. With a population a quarter the size of Russia, its highly dependent on the West for survival. Nothing would further enhance its security more than NATO, the U.S., or both getting pulled into the conflict.
For Russia’s leader, the outcome is equally dire, if not more so. History has not been kind to failed strongmen, particularly in Mother Russia. If he didn’t before, Putin certainly now understands Machiavelli’s maxim on mercenaries: capable captains “always aspire to their own greatness” and will oppress you, whereas the less skillful mercenaries will ensure a dictator gets “ruined in the usual way.”
If things deteriorate in that usual way, Putin holds one last power no 16th-century prince could imagine. Russia boasts 5,977 nuclear weapons, more than any other nation. Nearly all have been modernized, unlike the United States’ arsenal, which largely depends on aging tech from the 1960s.
Would Putin use them?
Putin warned in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference that the world was no longer unipolar and that the expansion of NATO represented a “serious provocation.” In July 2021, he again vowed that Russia would accept a neutral Ukraine, but never a Ukraine aligned with NATO against Russia. When it comes to Ukraine, Putin’s actions have been consistent with his words.
So it is worth noting Putin words on Russia’s nuclear posture. His “National Security Concept” allows nuclear engagement “to repel armed aggression if all other means of resolving a crisis situation have been exhausted or turn out to be ineffective.”
That’s nothing to pop corn about.