Iran and Ukraine: The Illusions of Military Power

 

By David K. Shipler 

            The major wars raging in the Middle East and Europe are teaching a lesson, which will probably go unlearned. Two of the world’s strongest military forces are unable to defeat smaller countries that use asymmetrical warfare—that is, weapons and tactics less advanced than the arsenals they face. The United States and Russia are bogged down by Iran and Ukraine, respectively, whose governments’ continued existence is tantamount to a loss for Washington and Moscow.

            This is an interim assessment to be sure, for wars are judged by their outcomes, which are rarely visible in the short term. Today’s still photograph doesn’t necessarily predict the future. But so far, in failing to realize their ambitions, both Russia and the United States have displayed surprising vulnerabilities. Their armed forces seemed most formidable before they fired the first shot. Once the wars began, their destructive power turned out to be inadequate. The Iranian and Ukrainian governments, facing obliteration, had everything to lose unless they found inventive ways to fight back and survive, which they have done.

The parallel is not a moral one, obviously, for the world would be better without the Iranian regime and worse without a free Ukraine. But war is rarely virtuous, no matter the righteous pleadings of the perpetrators. Nor is the worthiness of a cause a guarantee of success.

            The current cases are especially instructive, because they are the product of two main errors made by both Russia and the US: unrealistic objectives and autocratic decision-making.

The ambitious goal for Vladimir Putin of Russia was to annihilate Ukraine’s national independence and distinctive culture. He spelled out his rationale in a long essay in July 2021, seven months before he invaded, when he wrote that Russia and Ukraine were not separate but occupied “one historical and spiritual space.” As a dictator, he had insulated himself from dissent by creating a bubble of sycophants in the Kremlin. Nor did he consult his citizens about going to war.

The ambitious goal for Donald Trump (and his Israeli partners) was to demolish Iran’s military and replace its Islamic government with one amenable to foregoing nuclear weapons. Among his shifting demands, after the war grew frustrating, came his threat of genocide as he declared last April that unless Iran capitulated, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As an aspiring dictator, he had also insulated himself from dissent by creating a bubble of sycophants—in the White House. Nor did he consult his citizens—or even Congress, as the Constitution requires—about going to war.

The Fragile World

 

By David K. Shipler                 

                As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia—and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less—mere business fraud—although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.

                The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak—or complicit—organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.

    Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.

                  Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.

    Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.

Vietnam, Israel, Ukraine, and the Fluidity of Global Politics

 

By David K. Shipler 

                We have entered a period of flux in international alignments. After decades of relative stability in the so-called “world order,” interests are being recalculated and affinities revised. It is a risky, promising, uncertain time.

Vietnam and the United States, once enemies, have just announced a comprehensive strategic partnership, whatever that might mean. Israel and Saudi Arabia are on the cusp of putting aside their longstanding antagonism in favor of diplomatic and commercial ties. The Saudis and Americans are exploring a mutual defense treaty. Russia seems poised to swap technology for artillery shells from its problematic neighbor, North Korea, once kept at arm’s length. Russia and China are making inroads in some mineral-rich African countries, at the West’s expense. A rising China has adopted a forward military posture, threatening Taiwan more acutely than in decades. Ukraine is lobbying anxiously for its survival against Russian conquest as doubts about continuing aid arise from a wing of Republicans in a party once hawkish on national security.

Upheavals such as these will require deft statesmanship. Both Beijing and Moscow are bent on denying Washington what they call the American “hegemony” that has mostly prevailed since World War Two. The Chinese and Russian leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, proselytize for a multipolar world, which appeals to developing countries resentful of post-colonial hardships. (Don’t they realize that Russia is the more recent colonial power, fighting to reimpose its historic colonialism on Ukraine?)

The global turmoil has tossed up a key choice for Americans: How engaged or how withdrawn shall we be? How entangled? How aloof? This will be an unwritten question on next year’s ballots. Both Putin and Xi will be watching. They surely hope for victory by the American neo-isolationism represented by hard-right Republicans—including Donald Trump. No such administration would stand astride the shifting tectonics of the emerging globe.

Ukraine is a litmus test. No matter the obscenities committed by Russia against helpless civilians. No matter Russia’s martial expansionism in the heart of Europe. No matter the mantle of democracy and freedom proudly worn by the United States. The extreme Republican right is playing on the ethnocentrism of its base and a weariness of foreign involvements.

How Strong is Putin?

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                We don’t know. That’s the honest answer.

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists could estimate the pecking order of the grisly men (almost always men) who made up the governing Politburo by observing how they lined up atop Red Square’s Lenin mausoleum for the parade on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Or their positions as they walked into a ceremonial hall. Or whose name adorned one or another declaration. Physical proximity to the General Secretary of the Communist Party was a clue to influence and a possible successor—and was watched closely by scholars, diplomats, and journalists.

                Inner politics was encrypted then. Kremlinology was like a puzzle with only a few visible pieces. But looking back, the Soviet Kremlin seems less opaque than Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin today. There are no puzzle pieces now, only misfits or blanks filled by deduction, guesswork, and wishful thinking.

                Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin’s political standing at home has been an obsession in the West, where conventional wisdom has ricocheted back and forth. At first, he was a formidable foe, a canny calculator of military and diplomatic maneuvers. Then, when his army stalled in the face of Ukrainian resistance, he became a monstrous blunderer whose humiliation would surely bring him down.

                But as he wielded his dictatorial powers to obliterate the remaining freedoms Russians had gained since the Soviet collapse in 1991, Putin was the ruthless strongman, unconquerable in the moment. As the war ground into a bloody stalemate, however, and criticisms of the military escalated from the right, his pedestal showed cracks.

Then, he was pronounced weakened and vulnerable when units of Wagner, the private militia, slipped from under his thumb and launched an abortive mutiny by marching toward Moscow. “How Revolt Undermines Putin’s Grip,” said the lead New York Times headline on June 25. The appraisal flipped two months later, after the (presumably non-accidental) plane crash that killed Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The lead Times story declared: “Mutineer Dead, Putin Projects Image of Might.”

So, which is it? A Russian president in peril or in command?

In Ukraine, Both Sides Are Losing

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A year into Europe’s largest land war in nearly 80 years, the prospect of “winning” remains not only elusive but—more telling—defined by wishful thinking rather than military reality.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine seems capable of achieving its ambitious aims. Perhaps, looking far into the future, Russia will succeed in taking over all of Ukraine. Or perhaps Ukraine will manage to expel Russian forces from its entire territory, including Crimea and the eastern Donbas region that Moscow grabbed in 2014. Perhaps. But so far, neither scenario looks possible.

Instead, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a conflict of mutual loss. Russia is losing its soldiers and weapons, its global standing, its economic vitality, its modicum of cultural and political freedom, and hundreds of thousands of talented citizens who are fleeing abroad. Convicted prisoners, freed to fight, are coming home, along with traumatized troops bearing shame and emotional scars. Russian society is being wounded.

Ukraine is losing population to death and migration, its houses and bridges and factories and farms, its energy grid, its medical system, and its reliable independence. If it survives, it will be hobbled by neediness and severe militarization. The coming generation will not easily erase the terrors endured in childhood.

Yet there is talk of “victory.” What that means today is certainly not what will be claimed eventually in whatever compromise may be reached, for this war—unlike Vietnam and the two World Wars—is not susceptible to the categorical defeat of either side. Both portray it as a clash of virtues and values, a colossal contest over the entire international order.  

Putin's War Shrinks and Widens

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Russia’s war in Ukraine might be one of the strangest in history. Even while his army is being pummeled into retreat, President Vladimir Putin expands the goals of the conflict into a messianic campaign against the entire West. As his military holdings shrink on the ground, his strategic ambitions spread into a miasma of self-delusion. It is a dark comedy with monstrous effect.

                Not only does Russia aim to retake the Ukrainian part of the lost Soviet empire, according to Putin. Not only must Russia parry American military threats to preserve its very existence, he claims. But also, more deeply, Russia must fulfill its mission, borne of its thousand-year history, to lead toward a multipolar world: to defeat the arrogant West’s “faltering hegemony”; its “neo-colonial system”; its “enslavement” of the less wealthy; its “pure Satanism,” its “radical denial of moral, religious, and family values.”

                That is a tall order for a country with a limping economy, few international friends, and an army that looked formidable until the first shot was fired. It also suggests a war in search of an ideology—or at least a rationale trying for resonance in both Russia and developing countries that feel exploited.

In a way, it seems a lame throwback to the communist era of Russian evangelism for worldwide social justice. But it also reveals something more significant.

Putin seems to fancy himself a brilliant global analyst. He has been holding forth in various writings and several long speeches, most notably on September 30 in annexing Ukrainian territory that his troops didn’t entirely hold, and then on October 27 in a three-hour session at the Valdai International Discussion Club—an annual gathering of fawning Russian and foreign guests who lob softball questions after he pontificates at length.  

Several conclusions can be drawn from this disconnect between solid ground and atmospherics. First, Putin is not stupid and he is not unaware. He is Donald Trump with a sheen of sophistication. He is a cunning wordsmith who weaves lies and truths together into webs of alternative reality.

Second, he is a chess player with the long view, cognizant of historical trends and able to think several moves ahead. But he does not play well when he is emotional; emotion is not helpful in the logic of chess. And despite his steely pose, Putin reveals his emotions with a mystical reverence for Russian destiny. It has thrown him off his game.

And that leads to the third conclusion, perhaps the most important. Whether in sincerity or opportunism, Putin is tapping into a strain of ethno-nationalism that has endured through upheavals of state rule from czarist monarchy to Soviet communism to transitory pluralism to post-communist autocracy.

Call it Russianism, the label I settled on when I first encountered the phenomenon under Soviet rule in the late 1970s. A liberal writer saw it as the country’s only mass movement, and the most dangerous.

The Age of Absurdities

 

By David K. Shipler 

              In the last week, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have treated the world to fantasies and fables so pernicious in their implications for global freedom and security as to defy satire. Both men, aided by sycophants, have anchored us firmly in an era practically unmatched in modern times, where completely fabricated narratives cause wars and shape governments.   

In a televised speech, Putin declared the West guilty of designs on Russia’s very existence, implicitly threatened nuclear war if Russian territory is attacked, then made sure it would be attacked by orchestrating a forced “referendum” to annex Ukrainian territory in the Donbas region, thereby converting it into Russian land worthy of the ultimate defense!

Trump told Fox News that he could declassify the nation’s most sensitive secrets just by thinking to himself that they are no longer secret, and that the FBI—in its raid on his luxury club Mar a-Lago—was really after Hillary Clinton’s emails! And, of course, elections should not be trusted (unless he wins), because the 2020 election was stolen.

Late-night comedians cannot laugh away this parallel universe, because millions of Russians believe Putin, and millions of Americans believe Trump. We are on the brink of a wider war between Russia and the West because of Putin’s imaginary tale of American and European preparations for attack. We Americans are on the brink of losing our precious democracy because of Trump’s imaginary tale of election fraud and his Republican Party’s calculated program of placing partisans in official positions to create actual fraud next time around.

It almost doesn’t matter whether Putin and Trump are convinced of their own lies, or whether they are just clever manipulators. Enough of their citizens are spellbound by their rhetoric and charisma to intoxicate the two men with the illusion of broad and righteous support. Neither the recent cracks in Russia’s enforced unanimity nor the polarized hostility of American politics has induced moderation in either of the fabulators. Each has doubled down into his manufactured world of unreality.

The Waning of America's Mission

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

              Here is the problem: The United States cannot campaign for democracy around the globe when too few Americans are willing to defend democracy at home. And since one of the major political parties has internalized Donald Trump’s authoritarian desires, making them its own, no serious foreign leader or activist can look upon the United States as a reliable model. No matter what President Biden says about the worldwide contest between dictatorship and democracy, the age of American evangelism appears to be over—or at least headed for a long pause.

              During the First Cold War, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the late 1980s, Soviet communism and American democracy staged an ideological rivalry across international boundaries in practically every region of the world. These were two irreconcilable theories of government and economics, both driven by strong moral arguments and deep cultural beliefs.

              Few Americans would have seen the Soviet Union as a moral enterprise, but that is exactly how many Russians saw themselves, as carriers of a torch of social justice. All countries, all peoples, would be better off in socialist, centrally planned economies, so the argument went, which would level the gross disparities under capitalism. And that could be done only with a one-party system, not the messy chaos of pluralistic democracy.

The Soviet Union itself had achieved nothing close to communism’s shared wealth, of course, with warrens of privilege reserved for the few at the expense of the many. Karl Marx would have been appalled. But no matter: Myths can be inspiring, and Moscow worked feverishly to spread that one to allies and client states, often as a condition of aid. After the Vietnam War, for example, it successfully pressed North Vietnam to snuff out the vibrant private entrepreneurship of the South Vietnamese, which took many years to recover.

The United States, meanwhile, was crusading for both private enterprise and pluralistic democracy, also as a moral enterprise. Not that either country neglected its national security interests; both Moscow and Washington were circling each other warily in many corners of the international arena, jockeying for influence wherever possible. The U.S. didn’t mind cozying up to dictators that were anti-communist, and even helping overthrow duly elected leftists who threatened Western business interests, as in Chile, Iran, and Guatemala, for example.

Many pro-democracy activists abroad saw through the hypocrisy yet also counted on the U.S. to support human rights, at least rhetorically. Inconsistency, a hallmark of foreign policy, doesn’t erase basic lines of belief. And the First Cold War was marked by an intriguing symmetry: Both the Soviet Union and the United States were inspired by the evangelical drive to spread their own systems for what each saw as the good of humanity.

Now, as the Second Cold War takes shape, the ideological landscape is quite different. The United States is losing faith in its own democracy. The Republican Party is placing partisans in key positions to undermine future elections, which will make the U.S. look familiar—but not inspiring—to those in countries where voting is manipulated by strongmen.

"Sacred Hatred of the Enemy"

 

By David K. Shipler 

                As the Red Army swept westward into Germany toward the end of World War II, Russian soldiers wantonly burned villages; looted homes, committed rape, and murdered elderly women and other civilians in cold blood. Soviet Major Lev Kopelev, a German-speaking scholar of German literature assigned to the army’s Political Administration to propagandize the enemy, reported the crimes up the chain of command. He argued vehemently against the impulsive executions. He drew his pistol once and stood between a young girl and two Russian tank soldiers who were bent on raping her.

                He saved her, but not himself. Repeated calls for restraint made him a suspect, not a hero. “You engaged in propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy,” said his interrogator. “You spent your time rescuing Germans and weakening the morale of our own troops; you engaged in agitation against vengeance and hatred—sacred hatred of the enemy.”

Major Kopelev was expelled from the Communist Party, arrested, tried, and sent to the GULAG for nine years. He tells the story in his 1977 memoir, To Be Preserved Forever, whose title comes from the official order stamped on secret police dossiers that are never to be destroyed.

                I have been thinking about him in these terrible days of Russian crimes in Ukraine. Russia’s troops are doing pretty much what their predecessors did back then, as we’ve learned after they’ve retreated from towns near Kyiv. I wonder if there is a Lev Kopelev among them and, if so, what will happen to him.

The War of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

 

By David K. Shipler 

                To the extent that we think we know the fears and expectations of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, they seem fraught with contradictions.

On the one hand, Putin labeled Ukraine as an incipient NATO base with malicious designs on Russia itself. On the other, he supposedly thought his “special military operation” would be a cake walk, seizing Ukraine’s capital and toppling its government in a matter of days. How could both be correct?

On the one hand, Putin portrayed Europe and the United States as formidable threats to Russian security. On the other, he disparaged the West as fragmented, decaying, polarized, and weakened by internal disorder. Those two versions cannot coexist in the real world.

                So, which of Moscow’s prophecies have proven true, and what does that imply for Putin’s future posture toward Western democracies? And which of the West’s anxieties about Russia have been realized, and how will those determine policy going forward?

It’s not good news. In the perverse calculus of war, even one side’s frustration and defeat can reinforce the convictions that led it to attack in the first place. So it might be with Putin. His terrifying assault has provoked a flood of NATO weapons into Ukraine, justifying his assessment of the risk posed by the North Atlantic Alliance. And Russia’s war of choice has galvanized most democracies in a unified front of economic punishment, surely enhancing Putin’s dogma regarding Western hostility.

Reading Putin's Mind

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                The great guessing game today is about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner thinking. He is “surprised,” and “shocked,” we are told by numerous commentators in the West: He “expected,” he “believed,” he “thought” that his war against Ukraine would be swifter, easier, and—yes—even celebrated by Ukrainians themselves. He did not think Ukrainians would rise up to defend their country with such alacrity. He did not think the rest of Europe would unite in such a tight formation against him. He did not expect the economic sanctions to be so punishing.              

                Whether this is speculative mind-reading or solid deduction, it’s important to get right, because it will inform assessments of what he might do going forward and what might induce him to stop. That’s why intelligence agencies have teams devoted to interpreting the psychology of world leaders.

It’s wise to recognize how assertions that look ridiculous from outside can look indisputable inside, as in Putin’s charge that Ukraine was a neo-Nazi base preparing military aggression against Russia—and in President George W. Bush’s charge in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Both fictions launched devastating wars, and each side apparently believed them sincerely. Putin, whose dictatorship does not exactly reward dissent, seems to operate in the echo chamber of his narrowing inner circle. “Behind closed doors they repeat the same garbage,” said one Western analyst with access to sensitive information.

                If that is so, then the war is driven by the strong logic of self-deception. That means that it is likely to continue and perhaps conclude with false triumphalism. Putin will need a claim of victory. But to give him that, short of Ukraine’s utter demolition and defeat, will require reading a mind that may be largely illegible.

“I think Putin has been surprised by many aspects of this,” the Russian émigré writer Julia Ioffe told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “that Ukraine didn’t fall within a couple of days, by the Ukrainian resistance, and the fact that Ukrainians aren’t greeting him as liberators.” And how did she know that Putin was surprised? She didn’t say.

It’s a reasonable assumption, but an assumption nonetheless, that Putin and his military made calculations that they simply got wrong, that his cost-benefit analysis went awry, that perhaps he wouldn’t have invaded had he known.

There is a pitfall here. For Putin, that kind of balance sheet does not seem decisive. The West can load up the debit side with weapons and sanctions, but that still leaves out the “emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones” of his attachment to Ukraine described perceptively by Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before the invasion.

Young Voices from Ukraine

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Victims of war are usually caught in the present. In the midst of crisis, it's hard to think about the big picture or what comes next. But six young adults in Ukraine, during an online discussion last week, summoned up the power to reach beyond their personal immediacy into a larger time and place.

                The session, attended by young people from at least twenty-six countries, was organized by a broad array of international youth organizations and moderated by Saji Prelis of Search for Common Ground, which manages conflict-resolution projects around the globe. (Full disclosure: My son Michael Shipler is a vice president of Search.)

                If you have an hour, it’s worth spending it watching the discussion here, because you can hear and see what you cannot read: the chords of sorrow and resolve in their voices, the grieving beauty in their eyes. And by the end, which will not be an end for them, of course, you will be torn by inspiration, which they throw up against the tragedy.

                At Saji’s wise request, not knowing what oppression that elusive future will bring, I am using only their first names, even though they gave consent for their full names to appear on the screen during the live stream. Neither they nor we can calculate the dangers going forward.

Most appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are fluent in English. They have the innocence of idealism. They are not children, but they are young enough still to imagine and to strive. They are not yet jaded or calloused or—as far as we can see—wounded. But they understand the wounds of others and are trying to heal them, in part by seeing their struggle as being not only for themselves.

                Yulia is trapped with her two small children in besieged Sumy, near the Russian frontier, having missed the brief opportunity to escape in the first days of the war. The town is under heavy Russian bombardment. Anna, a medical doctor, crossed into Romania, where she is treating evacuees. Alina recorded a gentle but defiant message as she fled to the Kyiv train station. Yuliana, a psychologist in Lviv, is trying to help with trauma. Roman, also in Lviv, is assisting refugees flooding into the city’s train station.

Recollections of Kyiv

 

By David K. Shipler 

                An event that now seems sadly remarkable occurred in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in 1975, when it was part of the Soviet Union. At the time, Kyiv enjoyed such a pleasant ambiance of broad boulevards and relative prosperity that Communist rulers made it one of a few “closed cities,” along with Moscow and Leningrad, where no Soviet citizen could reside without a government permit. Otherwise, millions would have flocked there to escape the deprivation of the countryside.

Now, thousands are fleeing.

In September 1975, I accompanied three American and two Soviet astronauts on a tour of tentative friendship. During a partial thaw in the Cold War, they had joined with handshakes in space during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, then came down to the hard gravity of Earth, traveling through the Soviet Union together in a pageant of hope. They were received with warm bear hugs and flower-bearing children as they tried jokingly to speak each other’s language and toasted their two countries’ exploratory steps toward cooperation.

 Russian hosts made sure to feature World War II’s Soviet-American alliance that had defeated Nazi Germany; the seven-city trip took the astronauts to significant spaces of wartime memory. Wreath-laying and somber pilgrimages at tombs and monuments were woven into the itinerary: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Kyiv, which had been occupied by Germany from 1941 to 1943; a war memorial on the way from the airport to their hotel in Leningrad, which endured a 900-day siege; an evocative monument with religious overtones in Volgograd, the site of the ferocious battle of Stalingrad with its two million dead.

At a dinner in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, the Soyuz 19 commander, Maj. Gen. Aleksei A. Leonov, raised his glass in a passionate toast likening the rendezvous in space to the meeting of American and Soviet soldiers at the Elbe River near the war’s end. The Soviets created a collage of two photographs overlapping: the American and Soviet astronauts and the American and Soviet soldiers reaching out to shake hands at the Elbe.

                If any American president ever again wants to strive for an emotional connection with the Russians, here is some simple advice: Remember and celebrate that noble partnership of victory.

A Russian Tragedy

 

By David K. Shipler

 

                As terrible as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be for Ukrainians, it also spells suffering for Russians, who cannot shake their own society’s paranoid, authoritarian traditions. Long gone is the modicum of pluralistic politics attempted briefly under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Vanished is the relatively relaxed acceptance of multilateral interests in “the near abroad,” as Russia calls its European neighbors. Now, as if reaffirming its tragic history, Russia is firmly back into autocratic form under Vladimir Putin, with its attendant xenophobia, insularity, and belligerence.

                For all its bigness and might, Russia has a thin skin, easily penetrated by slights and humiliation. There have been plenty of those inflicted by the United States and Western Europe, most dramatically in breaking promises from the early 1990s to refrain from expanding NATO. But even with that, Putin’s pugnacious sense of victimization runs far beyond reality. It depends on a demonization of the outside world as vitriolic as in Communist times. It depends on a vertical flow of power as dictatorial as the czars’.

                Putin’s raging, wounded speech February 21 setting the stage for war brought back a memory from the 1977 Soviet Union, when a Moscow police lieutenant stopped a West German television crew from filming the smoke-damaged exterior of the Rossiya Hotel after a fire that killed at least twenty. The reporter asked why. The officer explained, “We do not want to let foreigners laugh at our misfortune.”

The remark offered a telling insight. To imagine that foreigners were eager to mock Russia over a deadly fire must have required extraordinary self-torment, a loneliness of unfathomable pain. There is every indication, 45 years later, that Russia’s leadership remains stuck in that state of mind.

The sense of persecution echoes into Putin’s current remarks. Ukraine “has been reduced to a colony [of NATO] with a puppet regime,” the Russian president declared. It “intends to create its own nuclear weapons,” and “Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.”  Its policy is “to root out the Russian language and culture and promote assimilation.” It is subjecting ethnic Russians to “horror and genocide” in Ukraine’s Donbass region, which—he neglected to mention—was being wracked by an eight-year civil war that he launched and fueled. Those crimes, he said, were being ignored by “the so-called civilized world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed themselves the only representatives of.” He called Ukraine’s democratic movement, which overthrew the pro-Moscow government in 2014, “Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism.”

These dystopian fantasies about Western designs on Russia’s pride and security make a volatile chemistry. Whether he believes them or not, he uses a technique once described by a Soviet professor as characterizing sophisticated propaganda: “a truth, a truth, a truth and then a lie.”

The Origins of Cold War II

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The new Cold War, which now grips Europe and the United States, is not all Russia’s fault. A seed was sown in the American assurances broken by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who reversed verbal pledges to refrain from expanding the Atlantic military alliance toward Russia. The Russians didn’t get it in writing, and some analysts doubt that commitments were made, but official records of conversations suggest American bad faith.

That past doesn’t excuse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive effort to reconstruct Russia’s sphere of influence. He has ignored one commitment that actually was put in writing, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which obligated Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Negotiated in exchange for Ukraine’s relinquishing Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, it was brushed aside by Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began an ongoing proxy war against Ukrainian forces in the country’s east.

There are myriad reasons for Putin’s own expansionism, including Russia’s historic anxieties about the West’s political and military encroachment. Nevertheless, the past American behavior helps explain his distrust of the U.S., his sense of victimization, and his worries about national security. As exaggerated as those concerns might appear to the West, whose alliance has not threatened to attack Russia, they are amplified by Moscow’s experience with Washington after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said that he was “swindled.”

Declassified documents tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.

Putin, Emotional Chess Master

 By David K. Shipler 

                You can almost picture Vladimir Putin, perpetual president of Russia, hunched over a chess board the shape of Europe, divining strategies many steps ahead of his fractious, ambivalent opponents. A gas pipeline here, troops and tanks there, propaganda everywhere to set the stage for the twenty-first century’s Great Russian Expansion.

He is a skillful player. He reads the other side, detects its weakness, studies its patterns of resolve and hesitation. He appears coldly rational. Yet some who watch him closely see something beyond careful calculation. That is especially so when the issue is Ukraine, now in his military’s crosshairs.

“Putin’s attachment to Ukraine often takes on emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones.” write Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Alongside his tangible geopolitical concerns, they believe, he is driven by the personal compulsions of historical fabulation and ethereal bonds to a land that he denies constitutes a country. Its capital, Kyiv, was the center of the Slavic state Rus a millennium ago. Its size places it second only to Russia in Europe. Its historic kinship with Russia is exaggerated by the Russian leader to justify making it the target of a sacred claim.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union into fifteen countries along the lines of its fifteen republics, including Ukraine. Imagine the trauma—as if the United States fragmented into fifty independent nations, with a searing loss of dignity and global standing. Putin called the Soviet breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Rumer and Weiss see him impelled to retake the prize of Ukraine to burnish his legacy.

 “No part of the Russian and Soviet empires has played a bigger and more important role in Russian strategy toward Europe than the crown jewel, Ukraine,” they note in their essay. “The country is essential to Russian security for many reasons: its size and population; its position between Russia and other major European powers; its role as the centerpiece of the imperial Russian and Soviet economies; and its deep cultural, religious, and linguistic ties to Russia, particularly Kyiv’s history as the cradle of Russian statehood.”

 Washington policymakers gave no hint of understanding any of that when they moved to fill the power vacuum left by the Soviet collapse.

Biden and Putin at a Crossroads

 

By David K. Shipler 

                If President Biden were to act on all the competing (and unsolicited) advice that he’s getting about how to handle Vladimir Putin when they meet tomorrow in Geneva, here’s how it would go: Threaten to harden sanctions, promise to relax them. Threaten to invite Ukraine into NATO, promise not to. Brandish cyber weaponry against Russian infrastructure, propose a cyber treaty against hacking and ransomware. Trumpet outrage over Russia’s rights abuses, make the points quietly and create a working group of mid-level officials for private discussions. Rattle the nuclear saber, seek new arms control. Compete in the Arctic, cooperate in the Arctic. And so on.

It is crucial to get this right, not only to reduce the risk of nuclear miscalculation but also to forestall a dangerous new alignment between Russia and China. A Russian-Chinese rapprochement has been discussed for more than two decades. “If the West Continues the Expansion, Moscow Will Drive East,” was the headline of a 1997 piece by Alexei Arbatov, head of the International Security Center at Russia’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations. It’s not a prospect that has delighted Arbatov. “We currently have wonderful relations,” he said a year ago, “but Russia needs to keep its distance. We cannot go back and forth between extremes, from China being the world's greatest threat to it being our strategic ally or partner.”

A couple of old jokes from Soviet days underscore the issue. One quotes a headline from fifty years in the future: “All Quiet on the Finnish-Chinese border.”

Another is one that Biden could update at his summit.

Putin: Joe, I had a dream last night that Washington was all in red. The White House was red, the Capitol was red, there were red banners everywhere.

Biden: What a coincidence, Vladimir! I had a dream last night that Moscow was all in red. The Kremlin walls were red, there were red stars on the towers, there were red banners across the streets.

Putin: What’s so strange about that? What did the banners say?

Biden: I don’t know. I can’t read Chinese.

Putin has surely heard this joke, so if he has even a shred of self-deprecating humor, he’d probably steal the punch line before Biden could get it out.

The Constitutional Stress Test

By David K. Shipler

                For a country ostensibly devoted to the rule of law and worshipful toward its Constitution, the United States is in a peculiar state of dishonoring both. It has a president and a supposedly conservative political party that brushes away the ingenious checks and balances that the Framers devised to restrain authority. It is politicizing its judiciary and entangling its legislature in partisan stalemates while its executive branch evades, ignores, or derides the other branches of government.

This could have more than a transitory impact on the dynamics of the democratic system. In resisting the constitutional duty of Congress to monitor and limit executive behavior, Donald Trump and his acolytes are undermining a keystone of constitutional governance. The damage might turn out to be more serious than a phone call with the president of Ukraine, and more lasting than an impeachment inquiry. Conceivably, once the judicial branch gets involved, a “conservative” Supreme Court could codify curbs on the legislature’s authority to subpoena, question, and investigate administration officials. Such cases are now being litigated.

How is Congress to enforce its orders? By declaring recalcitrant officials in “inherent contempt” and seeking to have them fined or arrested? That would be an extraordinary step, and nobody seems to know how it would be carried out. Otherwise, though, Congress is defied with impunity, and the system is impaired. The smooth running of government would have to be discussed in the past tense, when it relied on a basic respect for the norms of balance among the branches, when it did not conduct debates across an unyielding divide of political tribalism.

Rethinking Russia--Part Two

By David K. Shipler

                Donald Trump certainly acted like a guilty man when it came to accusations that he and his campaign had cooperated with Russia in promoting his candidacy. If a playwright had created such a character, he would have been considered too obvious.

                This is the fourth key question in assessing Russia’s actions during the 2016 campaign. The first three—whether the Russians hacked the Democrats’ emails, whether the Russians impersonated Americans online to exacerbate fissures in the society, and whether those activities helped elect Trump—were examined in Part One. Now we look at numbers 4 through 6.

                4. Based on Trump’s display of anxiety about the Russia investigation, his attempts to stop it, his aides’ interactions with Russians, and the lies some told to Congress and FBI agents, the assumption of a cover-up seemed reasonable. Trump and some of his people acted as if they were hiding something illicit or illegal.

Furthermore, the Mueller report said, dozens of Russian tweets and posts were cited or retweeted by campaign officials, including Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Michael T. Flynn. But there is no evidence that they knew of the Russian origins. And the investigation didn’t find cooperation or coordination or conspiracy. Rather, the evidence it lays out portrays a haphazard array of contacts among Americans and Russians in erratic pursuit of two apparent goals: profitable business opportunities and improved superpower relations.

Foreign Policy: Jazz or Football?

By David K. Shipler

            American football is a convenient metaphor, and it’s sure to be overused on this Super Bowl weekend. But what if we turn it around and recognize that our foreign policy is actually the metaphor—a metaphor for football, and that our trick tactics and testosterone-driven plays internationally are often modeled on what works in the National Football League?

             The decision this week to ramp up US military deployment in Europe, like putting more muscle on the line, is designed to cow Vladimir Putin’s “aggression,” to use the word that is kicked around casually by the Pentagon. It seems logical if you think you’re in a game to win by defeating the opponent rather than finding victory on common ground. The real world of foreign affairs is rarely a zero-sum game, however, and there’s never a final whistle.

 The American-Russian face-off is full of football-style moves that look tough but have had the perverse effect of strengthening the hand of the other side. Expanding NATO, which commits the United States to go to war to defend any of its members, has alarmed Moscow as the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have joined the alliance, along with Eastern European countries once in the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s reaction has been the opposite of what’s good for the West.