The Manifest Destiny mood is in full swing this Russian Spring, and it reminds me of congestive heart failure. The heart of a formerly massive empire enlarges again, yet not in a good way. Omega 3 oils may benefit the body, but is an expansion of an empire powered by non-renewable crude oil sustainable by the Russians?
The new Russo-Soviet Empire expands toward Europe and Asia Minor. She also sets sights on the Arctic. In that spirit I believe, a Russian-flagged opponent in online chess wrote to me the other day: “Alaska is Russia!”
After typing back the laughing-out-loud acronym, I realized it was only a placeholder, not a scoff, while I thought over the meaning of the chess player’s nationalist sentiment in the context of Russian state actions these past fifteen years.
From murder-by-Polonium 210 to the misty outcomes surrounding Katyn (which the Malaysian flight story could bring to mind), to Georgia’s de-Ossetiazation, to the Crimean plain-wrap rollover, Vladimir Putin has put the West on notice, counting on the West to acquiesce at every incremental rollback rooted in Andropovian chauvinism.
As if named the executor of the old-school Communist strongman Yuri Andropov’s last will and testament, Vladimir Putin is using his Teflon domestic credit card, petro-rubles, and his infamous international personality to boldly go where former Soviet despots have gone before. Adroitly, this time, Putin has remade Sovietism as Russian Orthodox Church friendly, however, not so much Georgian and Ukrainian Orthodox friendly, since apparently those culture mixes cannot apparently be trusted with their own nation states.
To see this problem accurately admits that Russia has her own long memory of invasion and incursion, but it would be inaccurate to see perimeter defense as the first goal of the current expansion. The real need is for more ethnic Russian citizens, however, with the real estate from which to draw funds to support them. Hence the land grabs from Georgia and Ukraine.
There is little real fear of European or even Eurasian mass land war, but there is more fear of an internal disintegration of Russian ethnic control over the fluctuating empire while a death by a million guerrilla cuts causes gangrene throughout the Federation. Putin sees himself, I believe, as the savior of Rus from Islamic militancy and from a secularized West. I think Putin believes that Islam would dominate Russia, rename it, and stamp-out Russian ethnic culture and existence while fearing that the West would acquire his country, break it up into parts, and sell it. In Putin’s view, only former KGB officers are entitled to do these things.
Today’s Russia is still run by ethnic Russians, however, the population of Russia is rapidly increasing among other ethnic groups, mostly Muslim. Some years back a Rand population study predicted that Moscow’s majority would be Muslim by 2050. Europe has seen similar trends.
Much of this takes place as U.S. forces withdraw and downsize from region to region in the Eastern hemisphere, no longer providing lightening rod and security services for Russia and China in Eurasia. The regions spanning Russia’s immense southern flank pose a challenge to Moscow that is not going away. The iron grips that Beijing and Moscow traditionally hold on dissent and protest will not encourage willing hosts for more expansion either. In the future, the SCO powers will have to provide their own security for mercantile and ethnic acquisitions. Such policing is expensive, and Soviet lessons of imperial congestive heart failure will echo loudly each time the Kremlin writes checks spent abroad.
Recent Pentagon defense policy purposes U.S. military might for domestic national defense more than global interest-defense, by appearances anyhow. That is overdue. Prolonged warfare, as read at West Point from General Sun-Tzu, will exhaust the state treasury. Other powers wait at the flanks. The U.S. has undertaken prolonged warfare since 1988, and the SCO powers wait at the flanks. The U.S. is far behind in building and rebuilding internal strength via infrastructure; domestic investment; civil engineering renewal; infrastructure security; more elegant, timely military spending adaptive to how that military itself has changed the security risk in the world; and in fulfilling the basic promises supporting the American way for U.S. citizens, including her sacrificial veterans.
To illustrate this refocusing, U.S. convictions filled the air against Russian troops taking Crimea this month, yet when asked by Ukraine for arms and intelligence support, the chin-rubbing, policy parsing began. It was the same with the invasion of Georgia. Still, I am persuaded that if the Pentagon won’t tell the American people that the NSA et al. is monitoring their LOL’s, Tweets, and Likes, neither will it tell the world that it is supporting the Ukrainians with measured intelligence product. Measured because the Ukraine is compromised by Russian agents who would pass it on as quickly as Tweets proliferate about cute pets.
As Crimean ground erodes under Russian troops, treads, and tires, FSB operatives run amok there. Helping Ukraine with intelligence and arms without military support would be like giving advice from the corner to an untested fighter against a recent heavyweight title holder in his home town. That heavyweight has been in training for some time now, underwritten by Gazprom and China’s 270 billion dollar bid for Russian oil last summer, plus the lucrative European gas trade. That’s not even mentioning arms sales. So force seems off the table before the start.
Even U.S. sanctions over the Ukraine were surgically considered, not wishing to broadside the entire Russian Federation with collateral economic damage and feel the reverberations through Europe and Russia’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization partner, China. Which brings us to the end of this broad perspective and review, and to the prescriptive cap. Putin himself has said the West is too interrelated with his country for the West to wisely to impose sanctions. Have we been sleeping with the enemy? When she slaps the children of democracy around (Georgia and Ukraine) do we turn a blind, numb eye?
How did we get here? The Russian Federation has been working seriously with China and others to supplant U.S. power in the world since the U.S. bombed Serbia within Russia’s former zone of influence, hitting the Chinese embassy in the process, and continually spoiling China’s will for Taiwan. They have been keeping their enemy (the US) close ever since. That US decade of projection woke the ghost of Andropov which then possessed Vladimir Putin throughout his bloody survival and rise to run the Kremlin.
Since, the Kremlin has flattened the usual suspects, China has rolled-over Tibet, used Burma, and infiltrated Nepal. In these events we see something not altogether unwelcome to Western security planners: a consolidation of power under formerly more predictable empires. Such consolidations provide impetus and justification for a new U.S. military build-up while increasing economic reasons why the larger empires would not choose to decimate their gains by engaging in a world war with Mutually Assured Destruction.
In heated agreement, the U.S. winks at slogans like “Alaska is Russia!” and chuckles at radical theories by retired KGB professors squinting through tinted square glasses under the influence of Cuban cigars and Vodka, fantasizing about the U.S. breakup and future auction to Russia, Canada, Mexico, and China. Yes, I can see how tolerance would then reign on the American continent between those parties.
Here is a reality check for Moscow’s more enthusiastic nationalists. The U.S. is making the right moves to bring troops home, and get busy rebuilding and revitalizing the homeland. Meanwhile, young nationalists in Russia will need to get busy defending the homeland as their leader invokes more immediate regional rancor toward the age groups who do the fighting and dying. I don’t relish that for anyone, and would consider it in part a tragic outcome of Putin’s desire for glory days that weren’t really so glorious for most Russians.
In due time, the fruit of U.S. efforts will ripen as they did in the 2oth century, with improvements on the old mistakes to the betterment of life in the world. While a new economic and intellectual-propertied resurgence happens in the U.S., it appears that Russia and China will have their hands full grappling with old questions of identity. Will they have the vision to do what works, or will they usher in what they fear by trying old ways of dealing with it?
U.S. domestic renewal and reinvestment will benefit the free world, and it will make the US more productive, educated, and secure.
In the meantime, Congress must re-evaluate the involvement of foreign state-owned and state-run organizations seeking admission to U.S. equities and futures exchanges through IPOs as if they were free market businesses. These entanglements tend to leverage despotic government investments in U.S. markets against sound foreign policy based on human freedom and republican democracy.
As the detritus of tsunamis and human irresponsibility glows in the Pacific trash vortex, the US, China, Russia, and the rest of the Pacific powers have a lot more on their plates than traditional ethnic rivalries and archaic balance of power games. But you wouldn’t know it by the news, would you?
Politically Well 