BRET STEPHENS: PUTIN’S MOMENT
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579487473582984500?mg=reno64-wsj
The Kremlin has an interest in conquest. The White House makes the taking easier.
If I were Vladimir Putin I’d invade eastern Ukraine this week. Strike while the iron is hot.
Never again will the taking be so easy. Never again will the government in Kiev be so helpless. Never again will the administration in Washington be so inept, its threats so hollow. Never again will the powers in Europe be so feeble and dependent. Never again will Western monetary policy do so much to prop up energy prices.
While Mr. Putin is at it, he might consider invading one of the Baltic states. Barack Obama isn’t about to ask Americans to die for Estonia, where a quarter of the population is ethnically Russian. The U.S. president wants “nation-building at home,” after all. Let him have at it.
Even now, the West misses the point. We have convinced ourselves that Russia is inherently weak; that its economy would collapse if the price of oil were to fall; that human and financial capital are in flight; that its population is shrinking (and frequently drunk); that the regime has lost the support of an urban middle class disgusted by endemic corruption. And so on.
Seeing his soul? A portrait of the Russian president by George W. Bush. The Bush Center/Grant Miller; Note: Detail
All true. And all the more reason for Mr. Putin to strike. We’ve come to think of Mr. Putin as the embodiment of ruthlessness. He’s that. But he also has a genius for self-reinvention. Agent of Soviet communism turned political patriarch of Russian Orthodoxy. St. Petersburg technocrat turned Moscow strongman. Enemy of the oligarchs turned godfather of the oligarchs. Law-and-order economic modernizer turned old-school Russian revanchist.
Maybe the disguises go with the KGB training. Maybe it’s just a well-honed survivor’s instinct. Whichever way, Mr. Putin has been frog-like in his ability to jump off his lily-pad the moment it begins to sink under his weight. He’s never had trouble landing on another one.
A staple of political commentary since Mr. Putin seized Crimea is that he is making a big mistake. Typical of this view is an op-ed in Monday’s Book Review: ‘The Road to Glob… More quote details and news » by Oxford historian Robert Service, who compares Mr. Putin to Nicholas I, the reactionary 19th century czar who blundered into the disastrous Crimean War. The comparison would be somewhat more apt if NATO were making plans to lay siege to Sevastopol.
Oh, but we’ll soon lay siege to Russia’s economy, right? Wrong. As the Journal’s Paul Sonne and Anton Troianovski reported Monday, Angela Merkel attended an industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, over the weekend where a company named Tavrida Electric was displaying its wares. Tavrida’s CEO is one of 33 people sanctioned by the European Union as governor of the new pro-Russian regime in Sevastopol. And yet, the Journal reports, “the impact on Tavrida has been zero so far.”
It’s true that sanctions could be made a lot tougher. We could impose asset freezes and travel bans on, say, executive suites at Gazpromand Rosneft and other state-controlled Russian companies. Questionable bank accounts in Switzerland and Cyprus could be frozen. We could subject the Russian economy to the kind of treatment we imposed, briefly, on the Iranian economy. And we could accept the consequences of such sanctions, as the Kremlin responds tit-for-tat by cutting off gas supplies to the Baltics, shipping advanced antiaircraft missiles to Iran, or freezing us out of the International Space Station.
In short, the West could win a sanctions war with Russia, but it would take an iron political stomach. Mr. Putin knows Mr. Obama. He knows that the U.S. president has the digestive fortitude of a tourist in Tijuana.
And that’s why Mr. Putin should move quickly. Russia’s chokehold on Europe’s energy supplies won’t last forever. The easy Fed money that jacks up the price of commodities won’t last forever. Even Mr. Obama’s presidency won’t last forever. On present course, Russia will get weaker, which leaves Mr. Putin with two options: liberalize or conquer. The first option would ultimately require him to step down from power and put him at risk of legal prosecution. The second option gives him the chance to re-legitimize his regime by whipping Russians into a nationalist frenzy and stay in power till he dies in bed.
If you were Mr. Putin, which option would you choose?
That’s what makes the White House’s repeated offers of an “off-ramp” so silly. For the Kremlin, foreign conquest is the off-ramp. And if a Western off-ramp is offered with every fresh Russian insult and assault, why take the first one? Let’s take this metaphor to its logical conclusion: If the Obama diplomatic freeway has an off-ramp every few miles, it means Mr. Putin is probably betting he can drive all the way to the state line before he pulls over to fill the tank.
Which, in his case, is a T-72.
Mr. Obama has a habit of underestimating his foes. He thought al Qaeda was on the run. He thought Bashar Assad would be gone by now. He thinks Iran will abandon its nuclear programs in exchange for sanctions relief. He thinks of Vladimir Putin as the kid with the bored expression, slouching in the back of the classroom.
News for the law professor. That kid is smarter than you are. He’s bored because you bore him. He’s about to eat your lunch.
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