THE LYMAN REPORT: Why Ukraine Matters in the 21st Century

 

Americans accept as articles of faith a fair number of myths, platitudes, and historical distortions as historic truths. Among the most problematic of these truths is the heralding of the internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the American victory in the four-decade-long Cold War. It would be more accurate to state that we survived the first phase of the Cold War, which was a sort of victory, but an incomplete one, more in common with 1918 than 1945. The Russian Federation, successor to the Soviet Union, never ceased to be a nuclear superpower with the United States as the primary target of its nuclear arsenal and, almost without exception, proved willing to sell technology and arms to potential U.S. global adversaries, including China, North Korea, Venezuela, Serbia, Syria, and Iran.

The plain truth of the matter is that the interests of United States and Russia remain diametrically opposed from the Arctic Circle to the Middle East and from the Baltic to Afghanistan. The Russians are not our strategic partners, allies in the War on Terror (indeed, the Soviets invented international terrorism), or in any way our friends, except perhaps in the wishful thinking of some of the people in our own State Department and White House. As Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in the early 19th century and presidential candidate Mitt Romney affirmed in 2012, Russia — by reasons of land mass, natural resources, and history — is our most significant geopolitical threat. Allied with China and Iran and other states dissatisfied with the status quo of the all-too-brief pax Americana, Russia is the center of gravity for an emerging anti-Western axis that may, in time, threaten our domination of the seas, access to raw materials, international trade, and the sovereignty of our allies in NATO and on the Asian Pacific rim.

We survived the first phase of the world struggle that has been called the Cold War, although for countless millions it was all too hot. The second phase began hardly a decade after the first phase ended, and it will be one of the big stories of the first half of the 21st century. It was hoped in the West after the breakup of the Soviet empire that its 15 successor states would become democratic consensual republics on the Western or American model. Most of them, including the Russian Federation, made a go of it and a few, primarily the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Ukraine, and Georgia, succeeded in creating working, if sometimes flawed, democratic institutions. These states either joined NATO and the European Union or sought membership in these organizations to become integral parts of the West.

The largest of the successor states, the Russian Federation, spanning eleven time zones, experienced sharp economic decline, violent secessionist movements in the Caucasus region, rampant crime and corruption, and military degradation through the 1990s, as bad as that of Weimar Germany in 1930. Democracy and pluralism were not the reasons for it, but they received most of the blame. As in Weimar Germany, the nation looked for a savior to restore national greatness and what was perceived to be the historic right of Russia to dominate its neighbors. They found such a figure in former KGB Lt. Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and Putin has effectively negated most of the progress toward democracy and pluralism that Russia experimented with after the fall of communism.

Since the Mongols imposed their yoke over Russia in the 13th century, Russians, by and large, have preferred to live under an authoritarian structure with a strong leader who serves as protector and father figure of the motherland — and they do call it the motherland. Aside from a small minority of liberal and Westernized elites, who have always congregated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russians have found personal freedom a terrifying concept and consensual government a surefire road to anarchy. In 1917, after only eight months as a democratic republic, Russians stormed the Winter Palace, not to overthrow an already deposed tsar, but to bring the Bolsheviks and Lenin to power. For the next 74 years the peoples of Russia and the Soviet empire lived under a totalitarian system that controlled all areas of life and, in return, offered a grim, often sordid existence with security of employment, shabby state-run health care, and old-age pensions for those not consumed by war or the gulag camps. Many older Russians, and some not so old, still look back on the Soviet years with nostalgia.

And in 2000 and 2004 Russians overwhelmingly elected and reelected Vladimir Putin, who in 2005 had his principal political opponent charged with tax evasion and sent to prison for nine years. After a four-year constitutional hiatus as prime minister, Putin was elected again in May 2012 in another landslide election. The majority, and it seems a large majority, of Russians embrace Putin’s New Order and all that comes with it: rigged elections, suppression of dissent, state control of the media, the reemergence of a Soviet-style secret police, militarization of the young, and persecution of gays, Pussy Riot girls, and others who fail to conform. You will not find many libertarians or free thinkers actively participating in public life in today’s Russia, and the courageous few who do still speak out in protest or march in the street risk busted heads or worse from the security forces of an increasingly violent police state. It is what was referred to in Imperial Russia as the law of the knout, the heavy, rawhide whip that land owners and Cossacks used to discipline the serfs, who were effectively slaves tied to the land until freed by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. Russians will always prefer the knout as long as it is administered by a fellow Russian.

If a statesman is judged on the success or failure of his political aims, then Putin has to be rated as the most successful statesman, thus far, in the 21st century. Since being plucked from relative obscurity in 1999 as Boris Yeltsin’s designated successor to the presidency, Putin has taken the Russian Federation from economic ruin, national humiliation, internal disorder, and unsecured frontiers to dynamic economic growth as the world’s eighth-largest economy (admittedly based almost entirely on energy extraction), an impressive military revival, security and expansion of the frontiers, and domination at the regional level over all his neighbors. It is no mean achievement and Putin deserves much of the credit for it.

His latest fait accompli, the almost bloodless annexation of the Crimean peninsula, has few modern precedents: Hitler’s bloodless Anchluss with Austria in March 1938 and his walkover invasion of the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia a year later being the only comparable acts of easy, unchallenged, painless aggression in the last hundred years. As with Hitler’s annexations of German-speaking regions in the late 1930s, Putin’s territorial grabs in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Crimea have met with overwhelming approval at home and in the territories being annexed. He can point to the rigged (though almost certainly reflecting majority opinion) vote in the Russian-speaking Crimea to become part of the Russian Federation. Similar plebiscites are likely to produce the same outcome in the Russian-speaking South Ossetia and Trans-Dniester mini-states (a narrow strip of land between the Dniester river and the Ukrainian border, which proclaimed independence from Moldova in 1990).

In a 1939 radio broadcast Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, made his famous comment about Russia’s future actions:

“It [Russia] is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

Putin sees Russian national interest as the reconstitution of what had been the Soviet Union and before that the empire of the Romanov tsars. In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union into 15 separate republics, Lt. Colonel Putin of the KGB elite returned to Russia from a plum assignment in Germany and faced a grim future without employment or prospects. Before entering politics in St. Petersburg, he briefly considered driving a taxi to support his family. This tough, energetic former KGB officer with the soulful eyes of a Dostoevsky character mourned the passing of the Soviet state as a geopolitical catastrophe and burned with humiliation over real and imagined slights from the United States and its NATO allies. The worst of these national humiliations was reflected in the Clinton and Bush plans to expand NATO to the very borders of the Russian Federation, perhaps only 300 miles from Moscow if Ukraine joined the Western alliance! It was an intolerable prospect for any Russian nationalist with a paranoid fear of Western intentions.

Ukraine had been the crown jewel of the Russian and Soviet empires, more than what India had been to the British or Algeria to the French. The loss of Ukraine is what the return of Texas to Mexico would be for the United States, followed up by an alliance between Mexico and China.

Putin’s grand strategy for a resurgent Russia in the 21st century is the same as it was in 19th and 20th centuries. It is to put as much buffer territory as possible between the Russian heartland and the great powers in the east, west, and south. Space has always been Russia’s first line of defense, and it has saved Russia from defeat four times in the last three centuries. Since Alexander Nevsky defeated the Teutonic knights eight centuries ago, the grand strategy of Russian rulers — whether tsar, commissar, or oligarch — has been to extend the buffer as far as possible and then extend it even farther to provide a buffer zone for the buffers. All the great conquerors from the West — Charles XII, Napoleon, Ludendorff, and Hitler — exhausted their armies and drained the strength of their empires in the endless space of the Russian-dominated land mass. For Putin and Russia, expansion at the expense of neighbors, either through outright annexation or satellite domination, is a defensive, not an aggressive, strategy. It is the single greatest reason why Russia will probably never be a part of the West.

History tells us what we can expect from Putin and the Russian Federation in the months and years ahead. The Russians will apply pressure wherever and whenever they encounter weakness and lack of resistance, as they did during the Cold War. As one American cold warrior described this strategy, the Soviets were like hotel burglars wandering the hallways at night looking for an unlocked door and when they found one, they brazenly went in. NATO and the other Western alliances existed to keep all the hotel rooms secure, and the United States was and still is the hotel dick. The Russians are employing the same strategy that the Soviets applied during the Cold War with considerable success, particularly during periods of American decline and military demobilization, such as right after World War II and during the years of the Ford and Carter presidencies.

Unlike President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, Putin understands that war is not an obsolete institution and peace, or what passes for peace, can only be maintained through a balance of power. Military hard power can still be utilized to achieve immense geopolitical ends, as he has proved in Georgia and Crimea and will likely do so again in eastern Ukraine. The administration has responded with the soft power of more economic sanctions and travel bans. While these things do have an effect, providing they are long term and universally applied, Putin is betting that the economic sanctions and travel bans will be halfhearted, short term, and easy to endure. He’s probably right.

The Russo-Ukraine war has already started, if only at a low level with subversion, provocation, and intimidation as the means to keep Ukraine destabilized and its 45 million people divided by ethnicity, language, and history. As a sovereign nation, Ukraine has to act to restore order in its eastern industrial cities, and when it does, the Russians have their excuse to intervene to protect Russian speakers from harm. The new government in Kiev knows this and knows that agent provocateurs, including some Russian special forces, have orchestrated the violence and the seizure of government buildings in Kharkiv, Donetsk, and nine other cities and large towns. When Putin intervenes and orders his 40,000 troops, the elite of his army, to cross the border into eastern Ukraine, it will be to stop the disorder and violence that he has created.

While Putin is not Hitler (no one other than Hitler is Hitler), Putin has borrowed his tactical playbook from that of the Nazis in the late 1930s. Needing a plausible excuse to invade Poland in 1939, Hitler employed an SS special unit under the master provocateur Alfred Naujocks to stage attacks on the German radio station at Gleiwitz along the Polish border, leaving dead concentration camp inmates in Polish uniform behind so the Poles could be accused of unprovoked aggression against Germany. Putin has shown that he can stage the same kind of violent provocations that can make a Russian intervention seem like a responsible police action to restore civil order and protect fellow Russian speakers from being attacked. Enough people will believe this political theater to provide some ambiguity to the act of aggression and allow Russians and Russian allies to blame the United States for the crisis.

While the far left points to U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan to make the case for moral equivalency, there is one significant difference between American interventions and Russian interventions. Since the end of the Spanish American War, the United States has invaded or intervened in more than 60 nations around the world, but in every case the end game objective of the invasion or intervention was to get out and go home as soon as possible. In many cases, the local population was dismayed by the U.S. departure. With the Russians, the end game objective is exactly the opposite. When Russians march into your country, rest assured they are there to stay.

Russians have very rarely been seen as liberators, except by other ethnic Russians. Even at the end of World War II, the Latvians, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians viewed the Russian liberation from Nazi tyranny as merely the replacement of one oppressive police state with another, perhaps one more permanent and more culturally destructive. They were right, and today the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe are more concerned than anyone about the Russian advances into the former Soviet republics through annexations and coercive membership in their Russian-dominated Customs Union. They believe that they are next on the hit list, and they are. Putin will not tolerate those nations and the Baltic republics being NATO members allied with the West.

Can Putin’s grand strategy for reestablishing the empire of the Soviet Union and the tsars be defeated in this second phase of the Cold War? It will be difficult — not because the United States and the Europeans lack the resources to do so; the United States alone has an economy six times that of Russia with more than twice the population — because there is a lack of national will to stop it either here or in Europe. And without the national will behind it, economic and even military superiority, which we do not have in Europe, has little effect on the outcome of events. The Russians laugh at our sanctions. For them to be a geopolitical superpower again means much more than the latest prices on the Moscow stock exchange and whether another Starbucks or McDonald’s will open on Red Square.

In an ideal world the United States would have a president who would lead public opinion and use the bully pulpit to arouse Americans to the nature of the threat. Instead we have a president who is comfortable with complexity and believes that there is a mutually amenable diplomatic solution to all international problems. Instead of a balance of power based on force against force to maintain peace and prevent general war, President Obama believes steady negotiation and disarmament will persuade or shame our adversaries into making diplomatic concessions. He sincerely believes that we have moved beyond history into a posthistorical era of global cooperation among the great powers. Putin is an old-fashioned nationalist and Russian patriot. Based on his background, experience, and actions, the Russian president regards such a premise as contemptible.

In the short term, Ukraine is doomed. The nation has few working tanks and combat aircraft and even its armed forces and security services are divided by ethnicity, language, and loyalties. No one will come to its aid, even to sell it arms and spare parts, as Obama would feel that was provoking our Russian partner and not exercising the proper restraint. There is not a single American armored regiment in Europe, and we no longer preposition tanks and heavy equipment in Germany as we did before the Soviet breakup. There are more Russian soldiers and tanks inside the Kaliningrad enclave (formerly the German port of Konigsberg) between Poland and Lithuania than are currently assigned to NATO forces beyond the Elbe. Putin can do anything he wants in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region with little fear of being challenged by military force.

Putin is more than happy to engage in talks between foreign ministers in Geneva, taking any free concessions he can get from the West but keeping the pressure on in eastern Ukraine until he gets what he wants or can orchestrate a provocation to justify intervention. He sees the region between the Don and the Dnieper Rivers as part of a nationalist Russia and only on maps drawn by the West is it part of Ukraine. Incorporation of this vast region will link the Russian hinterland to the Crimean peninsula with huge strategic and economic benefits. Not only that, but it well tell the world that Russia is back in a big way, and that message will resound in Damascus, Teheran, Beijing, and all other places where the governments are antithetical to Western interests and values.

In the long term, Ukraine should be the writing on the wall that awakens Western resolve. The Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are as much a part of NATO as Britain and France, and the United States is obligated by our solemn commitment (Article Five of the  1949 NATO Treaty) and national honor to go to war in their defense. That will mean permanently stationing air and naval assets as well as some ground troops in those countries and conducting joint exercises with them on a regular basis. The Baltics, Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians are far more supportive of NATO than the war-weary Western Europeans who look upon these nations as a convenient buffer from the Russians and NATO itself as a Cold War relic.

The new NATO is in the east, and the cornerstone of that alliance has to be American military and economic power combined with a national will coming from Washington. And there is good reason to expand NATO to include Finland, which is already being intimidated by Russian troop movements on its long border, and Sweden, which experienced numerous Russian naval incursions into its home waters during the last Cold War, knowing all too well that if the balloon went up, they were on the Russian target list. This won’t happen, of course, but that is another consequence of weakness, both in leadership and capabilities.

Lt. Colonel Putin has proven to be a master of statecraft who sees the world not as it is today but as it will be in the 2020s and 2030s, when he intends that the Russian Federation will be a global superpower as it was from 1945 to 1991. While U.S. defense expenditures are cut by sequestration, rising entitlement costs, and isolationist sentiment, Russian and Chinese military spending is rising each year without any real dissent at home. By 2020, the U.S. Navy’s eleven carrier battle groups will be reduced to only eight to cover the entire globe, the U.S. Army will shrink by almost 20 percent to a level not seen since 1940, and appropriations for aircraft and spare parts will be cut to the point where U.S. air superiority can no longer be counted a certainty in a future conflict.

No U.S. soldier or sailor has been killed or wounded by an enemy aircraft since 1953, but that is not a state of affairs preserved by natural law, but by spending the necessary billions to keep the designers and production lines at Lockheed Martin, Grumman, and Boeing working at full capacity. No new U.S. nuclear weapons have been built in this century, and our rusting nuclear deterrent may one day fail to deter as Putin and Beijing are developing new generations of survivable, accurate, and mobile long-range strategic weapons for the future. When Henry Kissinger was asked what can you do with nuclear superiority, he wisely replied, “Anything that you want.”

The price of weakness has a cost that we are only beginning to pay. Americans will try to ignore the world around them and take comfort in the two great oceans that protect our shores from global predators. No longer will our great fleets keep the sea lanes open for world commerce. No longer will Americans travel into space, but only watch as a Chinese flag is planted on the moon and we spend the $75 million a pop to hitch rides from the Russians to the International Space Station. No longer will allies like Israel, Japan, and South Korea be able to depend on the United States for their security, and the Europeans, living close to a hungry bear, may have to make some accommodation with the Kremlin to keep their comfortable lifestyles. Nuclear proliferation will be the only option for rich nations no longer protected under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Australia, and perhaps Germany, Poland, and Brazil will be forced to join the nuclear club. The ultimate consequence of American weakness will be a much more chaotic, volatile, and dangerous world where wars between nation states will once again come back into fashion and sooner or later the use of nuclear weapons in some territorial, religious, or ethnic dispute that we were too weak, uninvolved, or indecisive to prevent.

Ukraine is the first, not the last, act of aggression we will see in Europe from Vladimir Putin. And right now, I see no one with presidential ambitions on the American political scene, with the possible — and I do say possible — exception of Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who might be capable of standing up to Putin and stopping America’s precipitous geopolitical decline.

 

Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.