Putin's "Forever Wars" - A Call to Action
Reflections on Russia and the United States: February 3, 2024
For autocrats like Vladimir Putin, war is an essential tool of governance. Repeatedly in these essays, I have highlighted autocrats who are also kleptocrats, having stolen assets from their own people. They need war to solidify their political power and repress any domestic resistance. War allows them to protect the financial resources that they have hidden in offshore accounts or through the purchase of elite properties in the West where their ownership can be hidden. Bill Browder’s books on his financial dealings with the Putin regime asserts that Putin and his national security cronies have stolen at least one trillion dollars from Russia; he conservatively estimates that Putin’s share of that stolen money is $200 billion.
When Putin, a relatively unknown political figure, was chosen by Boris Yeltsin as his successor – and someone who would protect the Yeltsin family’s financial assets – Putin and his closest advisors quickly used force to deal with terrorism in Russia. Some believe this strategy was generated by Russian security to create Putin’s image as a man of action, unafraid of crushing any resistance to the Kremlin’s leadership. After several apartment buildings exploded in Moscow, with the blame quickly linked to Chechen terrorists, Putin made his famous statement, “We will go after them where they are. If, pardon me, we find them in the toilet, we will waste them in the outhouse.” After years of weak leadership by Yeltsin, who struggled with alcoholism and heart problems after his re-election in 1996, this “tough guy” action by Putin generated enthusiastic support for the new president.
For those of us working in Russia when Putin became president in 2000, we were hopeful that US-Russian relations would now become “normal” when Putin quickly established a friendship with President George W. Bush after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. That hope dissipated in a few short years. By the end of his first two terms as president in 2008, buoyed by Russia’s impressive economic growth, Putin chose to use the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 as a platform for expressing his views on national security issues. To the shock of many attendees, Putin attacked the West with a list of complaints ranging from the expansion of NATO to missile defenses in space. He used strong language blaming the West for its hubris and its efforts to dominate the world by interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. Three months later, at the annual Victory Day celebration in Red Square on May 9, Putin described the United States as comparable to the Third Reich with its “same contempt for human life.” Here’s how Steven Lee Meyers, a reporter for the New York Times, described Putin’s speech: “It was as if the bear that was the Soviet Union had woken from two decades of hibernation.”
It was not long before Putin engaged Georgia in a brief war in 2008, followed by an intervention in Ukraine in 2014 that is still ongoing, plus military involvement Syria in 2015 where Russian forces are supporting its dictator, Bashar al-Assad. By now it should be clear that Putin and his national security cronies are committed to warfare as a principal tool in their efforts to undermine Western democracies and replace the security agreements hammered out after World War II by a new world order created by a network of dictators who have become a new “axis of evil.” The four principal countries who have formed this “axis” are Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. Each of these leaders want to form a coalition to subvert western democracies and use force and chaos to create spheres of influence in the regions that they control.
Western democracies are slowly waking up to the reality that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are connected because of the violence and chaos supported by these four dictators. But there is another major dimension of this war that often gets overlooked. Putin does not see Ukraine as the target of his armed forces. Putin refuses to even recognize Ukraine as a real country, and the genocide his troops have committed make that clear. To Russia’s president and his national security council, the conflict is a war against NATO, and especially the United States.
Russia is a dying colonial power whose leadership is not concerned about the welfare of the Russian people, and its leaders are willing to let their country become a “failed state.” Preserving their political power and protecting their stolen wealth is what is driving the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Their leadership clearly believes that Russia is currently at war with the United States – which Putin recently called an “empire of lies” – and its European partners. It seems that most Americans do not understand this, and this lack of understanding is perilous. As Robert Gates, the former U. S. Secretary of Defense, noted: “Nothing makes war likelier than putting one’s head in the sand and pretending that the United States is not affected by events elsewhere. . . failing to deal with aggressors only encourages more aggression.”
As Professor Timothy Snyder recently argued, “It is rare to have a chance to halt a war of aggression and prevent genocidal occupation at zero risk [to Americans] and with the loss of zero [American] soldiers.” The U.S. Congress must approve funding right now so that Ukraine can win this war. The money and equipment to support Ukraine is marginal when compared to the cost that will result if Ukraine loses the war or is forced to cave in to Russian demands. If that happens, it will not be long before Russia invades its NATO-related neighbors, which Putin has already threatened. A continuing weak response from the United States will mean that our country will need to send our children and grandchildren to the same bloody battlefield where the Ukrainians have suffered such great losses defending their democracy and ours. Russia’s aggression needs to be stopped now.