I got it completely wrong- I will at least have the good grace to admit it. But the question is why? Well, as Triggernometry host and Russia expert Konstantine Kisin so recently pointed out in a recent UnHerd podcast- a part of the reason can be tracked to the institution mistrust many of us feel towards corporate media and government. With the recent history amongst the political and media classes towards deceit, inveiglement and obfuscation one can hardly blame us. In many ways the Biden Administration has only itself to blame for casting itself in the role of the Boy Who Cried Wolf on so many issues- to the extent that when they did eventually get round to telling the truth, so many of us didn’t believe them.
The other charge Konstantine makes in his interview is that in the social media age so many of us feel that we have to have an opinion on every subject, even when we know little on the subject of which we speak. In this, the rough paraphrasing of Proverbs 17:28 ‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt’ would seem apt for many, but I don’t think it necessarily applies in my case. I’ve been following geopolitics for over 25 years, have a good grounding in military theory, history and economics (although I have often been accused of mixing political economics with the purer form of the dismal science) and have been following Russia ever since I visited it on a school trip in 1986, when it was still the Soviet Union and only a few years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On reflection though, if I do have a criticism to make of myself, it is in the failure to understand Vladimir Putin in sufficient depth. My knowledge may have been deeper in many respects than so many of the more casual commentators who pass themselves off as informed journalists on the subject of Russia and Putin, but it has nonetheless proven inadequate to the task when analysing this specific issue. Regardless, I consider myself chastened on the issue, can only apologise to my readers for my deficit in understanding and would heartily recommend Konstantine Kisin’s commentary on this issue in the UnHerd podcast, as well as on many other subjects. I would have apologised sooner, had it not been for the fact that I recently visited Sweden to attend my brother’s wedding for the space of the past week, and haven’t been following the news to the same extent as usual.
But perhaps my chief failing on this issue is that Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is a geopolitical strategic blunder of the first order. By pursuing a strategy of brinksmanship he could have continued the geopolitical alignment between Russia, China and Germany whilst simultaneously making America and her Allies appear weak on the World Stage. He could have leveraged the situation to his country’s advantage by causing America to abandon its objections to Nord Stream 2. Most of all, over the past couple of decades he has, along with China, been highly successful in variously depicting America as a country with a history of interventions in the internal politics of other Sovereign Nations, with a penchant for foreign Forever Wars and at times an unreliable partner, prone to ignoring the Enlightened self-interest of its closest Allies- specifically Israel and the Iran Deal and in failing to recognise that the EU was by far the greater threat to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland (despite pretending to act as guarantor to the agreement, EU truculence with respect to the UK’s potential ability to circumvent EU trade restrictions through Northern Ireland threw the Peace into far greater jeopardy than any actions on the part of the British- such was their desire to punish the UK for Brexit and ensure that the British could in no way benefit from loopholes with the EU had already agreed to diplomatically, if not legally).
Unfortunately, if Mr Putin thinks that the invasion of Ukraine strengthens Russia’s standing n the world or weakens America, NATO or the EU, he is sorely mistaken. If anything, it all but ensures the resurgence of American and the West’s political and economic power over the long-term. The only thing that I can think is that he is hoping that the West’s accumulated debt in combination with the current inflationary spiral, rising fossil fuel and energy prices and above all the immediate necessity of the West to allocate significantly more spending towards their militaries, might somehow force a repeat of the collapse of the Soviet Union under Reagan- but this time with the situation reversed, and the West the recipient of the collapse, not Russia.
If this is the case, then his misreading of history represents a fatal flaw in his thinking. Whilst it is true that Reagan and America did cause the collapse of the Soviet Union by forcing them to try to keep pace with an ever increasing military budget expenditure, it was not the overall spending on the military which was fatal flaw in the Soviet economy, but the generally anaemic and criminally negligent mismanagement of the overall Soviet economy- which always occurs in centrally-run Statist economies. Recently, I began to research an essay on how to defend the Enlightenment, and I found that not only did the Ottoman Empire adopt a free market approach in many areas like sea trade, but so too did many parts of Hindu India at many times. Ancient China went through phases of free market economies interposed with more Statist periods. Without exception, in ancient China and elsewhere the free market periods were more prosperous and led to stronger civilisations, with the encroachment of Statism into the economy leading to periods of impoverishment, and a weaker and more decrepit civilisation.
Don’t get me wrong, Western debt, both private and public is a monumental problem. The ready supply of fiat money into the economies of the West during the pandemic, through quantitative easing and the application of Modern Monetary theory has forever proven the concept as an unsound economic theory, fatally flawed. And, contrary to what my few more progressive readers may think I still support the use of furloughs during this period- government should fix problems that it creates itself, and there is ample evidence now to suggest that far from the Corporate Bailouts favoured by the American Congress with its Socialism for the Rich, speedy recovery from major self-inflicted economic disruptions like the pandemic and lockdown restrictions is better ensured by protecting the spider veins of commerce, the SMEs of the economy (which generally tend to only grow organically, over time)- not the corporate giants of the economy who can easily be replacement by the rapid growth of smaller competitors, in all but strategically important areas. My point would be that furlough schemes are more likely to see debts rapid rapidly through economic growth than through the corporate bailouts of Socialism for the Rich.
But where Mr Putin is most deficit in his thinking is in failing to understand that where both parties in a potential conflict possess nuclear arsenals much of the strategy is inverted. He is obviously resource-minded because otherwise he wouldn’t have pursued a policy which saw Russia encourage nullify Europe’s diplomatic and economic leverage through gas dependence. But what he has failed to foresee is that where direct conflict cannot in most circumstances be pursued for fear of escalation, resources matter less than finance- this is the lesson of the Napoleonic War amplified by the nuclear age. Britain didn’t win the Napoleonic conflict because it was militarily superior- at least not on land, although Nelson and Sea Power certainly played a role. They won the Napoleonic War because they were able to outspend the French through the issuing of the Dutch innovation of bonds, of which they were an early adopter, but which the French had failed to incorporate as a technology.
And make no mistake, Britain, America and the UK’s offshore financial industry control an overwhelming percentage of the world’s financial nodes- as well as much of the world’s productive economics, through capital. True, a percentage of the world’s nodes which control the world’s economy are located in Germany, or more commonly and increasingly in China or Asia, overall- but America and the UK between them can severally limit Russia’s ability to operate all but the most primitive and basic economy in the world. The leveraging of this overwhelming financial advantage in economic warfare is already being discussed and debated over, with talk of Russia being shuttered away from the world’s SWIDT system- although this is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as far as the options likely being discussed in the corridors of power in the West.
Meanwhile, in order to pay for a newly improved and expanded military America and Europe will need to make some hard choices. They will likely need to slim down many areas of existing government and insist upon the reallocation of public sector workers into more strategically relevant areas of government spending wherever possible, with at least some major redundancies sure to follow. At the same time, it might be time for the West to consider shifting at least some areas or portions of social spending to a funding mechanism which furnishes zero interest debt facilities repayable upon death, rather than through government largesse.
Ironically, this will only strengthen the West- because although government commissioning will never be able to match the market in terms of efficiency, the allocation of labour and capital, and value for money, spending on any form of infrastructure, whether through direct investment in the military or in military or civilisation innovation, at least has the benefit of still being a more efficient allocator of resources than social spending or welfare. This was the lesson of the NASA era and America’s military spending during the Cold War under Keynesian economics- it may have been incredibly wasteful and inefficient as an allocator of capital, but the jobs and productive economics which it generated was at least preferable to the social spending instituted under Johnson’s War on Poverty. This reallocation of government funding towards spending designed to help people directly, rather than the previous spending which at least had the benefit of producing gainful employment for so many citizens as a useful by-product of military and innovative strength at least had the benefit of being immensely superior, in an economic sense, to the enfeebling welfare which succeeded it. By forcing this necessary change in Western economies, Putin may well have reawakened a sleeping giant.
One has to wonder whether China will follow Russia into folly in relation to Taiwan. I can’t see them being that stupid, although having been chastened by events once, I should at least concede the possibility. But one has to concede the downstream consequences of such an action. For one thing, they would quickly see a huge number of the commercial resource monopolies they have accumulated around the world in vital areas of economic production evaporating, their patiently negotiated mining and mineral deals torn up, their contracts voided. For another, they could quickly see a large portion of the UN leverage created by their Belt and Road initiative, through the furnishing of infrastructural lending quickly and expediently reclassified as Odious Debt- a convention which applies to government lending when it can be argued that the Sovereign Nation borrowing the nation has no feasible means of ever repaying the debt.
But Putin’s biggest failing relates to his reliance on China as a strategic ally and as market for the resources of Russia’s petrochemical exporting economy. It may surprise many to learn that the planners and thinkers in China are every bit as pessimistic about China’s eventual economic prospects and their chances of emergent as the global economic superpower in the current Thucydides Trap between America and China, as is the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment about America’s chances of reversing American decline.
China has the bomb of a declining youthful population waiting to go off in their economy. They call it the 421 problem- the inevitability that eventually one adult son or daughter will need to take care of the needs of two retired parents and four retired grandparents. And unlike America or Europe, China cannot simply rely upon a shift towards the type of highly successful market dominant approach to immigration which Australia has pioneered- with all or most inward migration falling into the category of skills and knowledge which the country desperately needs rather than the cheap low value labour which an nonselective mass migration system which has proven so disastrous in so many Western countries. Europe and America is where everybody wants to move to, after all.
Again, I apologise for underestimating Vladimir Putin. I mistook him to be a geopolitical thinker and strategist of the highest calibre. By invading Ukraine he has proven himself to be the complete opposite. I thought he was pursuing a strategy which seriously could have undermined the West through brinksmanship, diplomacy and the strengthening of Russian economic interests to the point that their could well have been a Russian resurgence very much at America’s expense in terms of international standing, diplomacy and trading power. But by going ahead with the invasion he might been aiming at an American and more general European or Western collapse, but although the road for the short-term foreseeable future may be rocky, he will have inevitably accomplished the complete opposite. He either doesn’t understand the economics, particularly at the level of generally far more reliable actuarial science, or he hasn’t foreseen the second and third order effects to his actions, in terms of the developing world realigning to back America and Europe, at the expense of Russia and China.
On a lighter note, for investment purposes it is worth looking at BP a potential future investment at some later date. Although they are currently suffering from the fall lout of being a part-owner in the supplier of fuel to the Russian military in the Ukrainian invasion, through Rosneft, as this FT article explains, they also happen to have been a key beneficiary in the granting of North Sea oil drilling licenses, as this article shows. I am, however, by no means a financial or investment expert, and would heartily recommend taking expert advice before deciding to invest. My thinking was that the share prices are sure to bottom out with the current furore, yet significant investment groups are likely to look again at capital investments in under utilised Western fossil fuels sources, as prices surge.
The reason you and everyone else got it wrong is exactly the kind of thinking you espouse in this article. You assume that Putin made this move for economic reasons and that his economy will suffer so it is a bad move. YOUR ARE THINKING LIKE A 21ST CENTRUY ECONOMIST!! You need to start thinking like a 19th or early 20th century despot
This invasion has nothing to do with economics, although Putin's stranglehold on European energy and Biden's anti-oil polices limits any sanctions the west imposes to a cruel joke. This invasion is about the honor and glory of restoring the former Soviet Union and restoring Russia's place in the world as a superpower.
Putin is succeeding brilliantly at this and as long as the west in addicted to his oil and gas, all they can do is whine. Putin does not have to understand economics. You have to understand power. And with $100+ oil., his economy will do just fine.
I have no expertise in these matters, but here goes: This article outlines Putin's Russian Orthodox religious reasons, based on events in 988 CE, for wanting to own or at least control Ukraine. "Putin's spiritual destiny", by Giles Fraser: https://unherd.com/2022/02/putins-spiritual-destiny/ .
In his scheme of things, everything depends on regaining Ukraine and especially Kiev (Russian pronunciation - for us, please, the Ukrainian Ky'iv). The Russian Orthodox Church and so, I guess, a majority of Russians share the same view. I have not read any MSM reports of the Russian Orthodox Church objecting to the invasion.
Patriarch Kirill could easily have objected to the invasion on 2022-02-24: http://www.patriarchia.ru/en/db/text/5903803.html . Perhaps he is doing his best to avoid a dose of novichok - as, quite likely, are Putin's apparently hesitatingly "Yes" men on his security committee. Patriarch Kirill calls only for people to overcome their divisions and not kill civilians.
According to Giles Fraser, the Russian Orthodox Church split from all other Orthodox churches when the Ukrainians separated from them, and were supported by HQ in Constantinople.
So in Putin's mind, he can enjoy yanking the West's chain, menacing everyone with his nuclear weapons, sending in hundreds of thousands of soldiers as expendable thugs with cruise missiles, bombers and tanks, to restore Christendom in the world with Russia as its true leader, centred in Kiev.
If the West had the guts to stop buying Russian hydrocarbons and mining output, for years, and to stop selling everything - especially machinery and semiconductors - to Russia, then the country would collapse to the extent that it couldn't use China to bypass these import restrictions. I assume that Russian military equipment uses home-grown semiconductors. However, no country can compete internationally or even run a 3G or 4G cellphone system, or make such phones, without access to chips from a handful of leading semiconductor manufacturers. China probably has the capacity to design and make these - though not absolute leading edge chips with smaller than 14nm design rules due to the USA and others denying them access to EUV lithography equipment, which is made by only one company, ASML in The Netherlands.
What are the Russian oligarch's women doing to do without their imported baubles and trips to Paris and ski resorts? What are the oligarchs going to do with grumpy womenfolk or without them at all if they decamp to more convivial countries?
The whole purpose of being an oligarch is to ensure a supply of such women.
Already, the oligarchs - who seem to be less pious than Putin - are griping about invasion-driven restrictions on their lifestyles. Imagine not being able to sail their mega-yachts into casino harbours as they please!
How is Putin going to survive without his cashed up and happy oligarchs?
I think most people can be forgiven for not thinking that Putin would do something as blatantly harmful to Russia's standing as this. Rightly or wrongly, few understood how this is not about relations and trade as the West conceives of them. It is to a large extent about something else, which makes such things as massive death tolls and reputational costs seem like minor considerations.
It seems reasonable to speculate, as that august journal the Daily Mail does: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10551251/Did-Covid-send-Putin-mad.html that COVID-19 that infection and/or the lockdowns and general weirdness has negatively affected Putin's judgement. I recall that there are seasonal factors involving no-yet-melted ice which make invasion an urgent matter, to be accomplished soon, or a year from now.
Who in the West really understands these things? There is no set of facts. The relationship is disputed, dynamic, has multiple facets due to a hundred million people being involved, and guess what? They are not all the same.
Maybe Putin will prevail, be a hero in his land, and Russia will somehow weather the storm. This will be easy as long as the West thinks it can't do without Russian oil and gas, which seems to be the current position of many governments.
Maybe Putin will do something even crazier (to us). How is he going to live with himself and those who adore him as being a strong, Russian, leader if he doesn't quickly subdue Ukraine and have Kiev and its people's celebrating him becoming Saint Vladimir II. I recall that sainthood is usually a posthumous appointment, but surely some exception could be made in his case.
Maybe the Ukrainians will somehow prevail and more and more Russians will be aghast at the killing and the political, economic and religious isolation their leader has forced them all into. I read somewhere that "most Russians know, or are related to, someone in the Ukraine". I assume this goes beyond the 18% or so who are Russian speakers. I have also read that many Russians in Ukraine are not so keen on Putin either.
In the long term, it is hard to imagine this invasion being a stable, sustainable, path forward for Russia. The parallels to Nazi Germany are so scary that I think the strongest possible isolation steps should be taken. Some argue they would be ineffective, counter-productive etc, or raise the price of gasoline in the USA too much in an election year.
Anything less would encourage China to invade Taiwan. If either invasion succeeds then we are stuffed. No-one can handle the costs and tension of isolating the whole of China and Russia from the rest of the world. We would have to accept that we depend on massive trade with two thoroughly successful dictatorships, nuclear armed and in cahoots.
I don't think any of these could be ruled out. The man-made disaster of the global response to COVID-19 proves beyond doubt that it wrong to assume that the people who control whole countries have a clue what they are doing.
Did Russia really want to join NATO in the early 1990s? In his first article above Leonid Ragozin indicates that they could have been invited, but were not: "The question of why integrating Russia, with its enormous nuclear arsenal, back in the 1990s was not a number one priority for the West, still remains unanswered.". I have no idea whether integrating Russia into NATO and the EU was a possibility then. If it was, then to what extent was the US armaments industry behind this not being pursued?
Considering the debt situation, inflation and imminent economic corrections, slow-boil environmental stressors and increasing prevalence of weather-driven disasters, aging nuclear-armed dictators driven by the prospect of religious-national glory on millennium time-scales is the last thing we need.
Perhaps enough wiser minds in Russia will see the folly of what Putin has started and make his reign untenable. Perhaps the same process will occur in China. Not everyone is as hell-bent on righting thousand year old wrongs as these aging leaders
> it all but ensures the resurgence of American and the West’s political and economic power over the long-term
I don't follow your reasoning Geary. There's still nothing like conquering a neighbor to demonstrate your power and resolve and credibility. As a purely monetary calculation I don't think there can be much doubt that the invasion is a looser, but I think Putin is interested in a show of muscle and ... well, I suppose there's still the tiny chance that he will have his ass kicked but it doesn't seem likely. Successful invasions have always been tonic to despots, no?
Thanks for the link to the Konstantin Kisin interview, Geary. He often has interesting things to say. It's funny, maybe he and President Zelensky are both examples of how comedians -- with their insights into the human condition -- can be surprisingly knowledgeable in the political sphere. I have to admit I also thought that Putin was merely posturing over Ukraine, jockeying for concessions from NATO. However, I am also unsurprised now that he has invaded. It has seemed to me for a very long time that he is an utterly amoral character. Maybe all politicians are, but with Putin it goes to the bone. As Alexei Navalny quipped in a court hearing, he will go down in history as Putin the Poisoner. In fact, it's where he's at his most creative -- he must have a veritable Baba Yaga's cauldron from which he has conjured dioxins, nerve agents, and radionuclides. And while some of the poisonings may have been for genuine political gain, such as Yushchenko in Ukraine and Navalny himself, the Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings seem more like pure vindictiveness. They also seemed specifically designed to taunt the West and show that he, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, could act with impunity when and where he liked. If the tragedy in Ukraine is ever to have a silver lining, I hope it will be to show the true face of Putin to his domestic audience and hasten his departure from the political stage.
A slight bone to pick: the idea that the EU was being truculent over Northern Ireland and the GFA seems like an astonishing type of myopia peculiar to UK commentators. In the four years that the House of Commons spent in an uproarious political punchup, attempting to lecture each other on what sort of Brexit the British public had actually voted for, Irish politicians were tramping the corridors of power in Europe making allies. They perceived -- entirely correctly -- that Westminster hadn't the slightest interest or any deep knowledge of the political problems that Brexit would cause for the island of Ireland. And they were right. We had the astonishing spectacle of a member of the ERG insisting on radio that he (and all British people) were entitled to Irish passports. We had a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who thought that Unionists were people who wanted Irish reunification! The cluelessness of senior British politicians beggared belief. The broader EU may not have been overly concerned about Ireland either, and Macron was pushing to use the situation to bargain Ireland into accepting corporate tax reforms. But ultimately they quite rightly listened to the concerns of the country that was a continuing member of the bloc, and not the one that was exiting.
It was never about punishing the UK. The implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland were signposted clearly and often in the Brexit negotiations. Theresa May attempted to come to a sensible compromise but it was ultimately rejected by hardliners in her own party. And there is a certain irony that the NI Unionists who helped sink her are now the most vociferous complainers about the resulting situation that they themselves voted for. But then, Boris Johnson had promised them that there would never be border checks on the Irish Sea ... shortly before he introduced exactly that. Though lately he does seem to have a certain amnesia about his duties under the Northern Ireland Protocol that he negotiated.
We like to regard our politicians and leaders as 'rational' beings in possession of more information and advice than us. This is not necessarily the case and emotions and beliefs often play a more significant role than facts. Thus your belief that 'independent' sources were more 'reliable' than mainstream media. This indeed can be and often is the case but it isn't always so. The reverse is frequently so (this is the trap that those who believe that the US election was 'stolen' fall into).
With Putin certain historical situations provided a playbook. The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten Germans were all indicators of how things might play out. China is shrewder here and knows that to support this kind of action is not beneficial. Currently President Xi's advisers are holding the line. Putin has never been rational, logical yes but operating from an emotional base. To him strength has always been paramount and within a closed world view he is incapable of admitting other views. He understands economics perfectly well but just doesn't assign any importance to them except as a tool to obtain control.
Today, September 3, year of grace 2022, what do you think of your article?
Rhetorical question. Don't need to know your answer to it, but i hope in my heart that you are at least a little bit embarrassed and drew some conclusions.
They say that when you have to eat crow you should do it right away and make it quick. We accept your apology, Geary. Everybody’s got to be wrong about some things and you’ve always shown a commitment to honesty. I’d rather read commentators who were willing to admit mistakes than ones who somehow got everything right.
Perhaps one of the easiest mistakes to make in foreign affairs is assuming your adversaries will always do whatever is in their own self-interest or always make clever moves. But Britain and the US don’t have a monopoly on making mistakes.
“ Recently, I began to research an essay on how to defend the Enlightenment, and I found that not only did the Ottoman Empire adopt a free market approach in many areas like sea trade, but so too did many parts of Hindu India at many times. Ancient China went through phases of free market economies interposed with more Statist periods. Without exception, in ancient China and elsewhere the free market periods were more prosperous and led to stronger civilisations, with the encroachment of Statism into the economy leading to periods of impoverishment, and a weaker and more decrepit civilisation.”
You’re sounding more and more like free market fundamentalist! I mean that as a compliment.
“ Don’t get me wrong, Western debt, both private and public is a monumental problem. The ready supply of fiat money into the economies of the West during the pandemic, through quantitative easing and the application of Modern Monetary theory has forever proven the concept as an unsound economic theory, fatally flawed. ”
I could hardly agree more. Debt isn’t a problem until it is. I seriously wonder whether a debt crisis of epic proportions could be a Talebian Black Swan lurking around the corner.
“ At the same time, it might be time for the West to consider shifting at least some areas or portions of social spending to a funding mechanism which furnishes zero interest debt facilities repayable upon death, rather than through government largesse.”
What do you mean by that? I think I’ve got the idea but wanted to be sure.
“ Ironically, this will only strengthen the West- because although government commissioning will never be able to match the market in terms of efficiency, the allocation of labour and capital, and value for money, spending on any form of infrastructure, whether through direct investment in the military or in military or civilisation innovation, at least has the benefit of still being a more efficient allocator of resources than social spending or welfare. This was the lesson of the NASA era and America’s military spending during the Cold War under Keynesian economics- it may have been incredibly wasteful and inefficient as an allocator of capital, but the jobs and productive economics which it generated was at least preferable to the social spending instituted under Johnson’s War on Poverty. This reallocation of government funding towards spending designed to help people directly, rather than the previous spending which at least had the benefit of producing gainful employment for so many citizens as a useful by-product of military and innovative strength at least had the benefit of being immensely superior, in an economic sense, to the enfeebling welfare which succeeded it.”
I also agree with that.
“ China has the bomb of a declining youthful population waiting to go off in their economy. They call it the 421 problem- the inevitability that eventually one adult son or daughter will need to take care of the needs of two retired parents and four retired grandparents.”
That’s the crux of it. However, for the next decade I still think China is far more dangerous and powerful than Russia and I’m not so sure a Taiwan invasion would blow up in their faces (as much as I sincerely hope such an invasion doesn’t happen).
The reason you and everyone else got it wrong is exactly the kind of thinking you espouse in this article. You assume that Putin made this move for economic reasons and that his economy will suffer so it is a bad move. YOUR ARE THINKING LIKE A 21ST CENTRUY ECONOMIST!! You need to start thinking like a 19th or early 20th century despot
This invasion has nothing to do with economics, although Putin's stranglehold on European energy and Biden's anti-oil polices limits any sanctions the west imposes to a cruel joke. This invasion is about the honor and glory of restoring the former Soviet Union and restoring Russia's place in the world as a superpower.
Putin is succeeding brilliantly at this and as long as the west in addicted to his oil and gas, all they can do is whine. Putin does not have to understand economics. You have to understand power. And with $100+ oil., his economy will do just fine.
I have no expertise in these matters, but here goes: This article outlines Putin's Russian Orthodox religious reasons, based on events in 988 CE, for wanting to own or at least control Ukraine. "Putin's spiritual destiny", by Giles Fraser: https://unherd.com/2022/02/putins-spiritual-destiny/ .
In his scheme of things, everything depends on regaining Ukraine and especially Kiev (Russian pronunciation - for us, please, the Ukrainian Ky'iv). The Russian Orthodox Church and so, I guess, a majority of Russians share the same view. I have not read any MSM reports of the Russian Orthodox Church objecting to the invasion.
Patriarch Kirill could easily have objected to the invasion on 2022-02-24: http://www.patriarchia.ru/en/db/text/5903803.html . Perhaps he is doing his best to avoid a dose of novichok - as, quite likely, are Putin's apparently hesitatingly "Yes" men on his security committee. Patriarch Kirill calls only for people to overcome their divisions and not kill civilians.
According to Giles Fraser, the Russian Orthodox Church split from all other Orthodox churches when the Ukrainians separated from them, and were supported by HQ in Constantinople.
So in Putin's mind, he can enjoy yanking the West's chain, menacing everyone with his nuclear weapons, sending in hundreds of thousands of soldiers as expendable thugs with cruise missiles, bombers and tanks, to restore Christendom in the world with Russia as its true leader, centred in Kiev.
If the West had the guts to stop buying Russian hydrocarbons and mining output, for years, and to stop selling everything - especially machinery and semiconductors - to Russia, then the country would collapse to the extent that it couldn't use China to bypass these import restrictions. I assume that Russian military equipment uses home-grown semiconductors. However, no country can compete internationally or even run a 3G or 4G cellphone system, or make such phones, without access to chips from a handful of leading semiconductor manufacturers. China probably has the capacity to design and make these - though not absolute leading edge chips with smaller than 14nm design rules due to the USA and others denying them access to EUV lithography equipment, which is made by only one company, ASML in The Netherlands.
What are the Russian oligarch's women doing to do without their imported baubles and trips to Paris and ski resorts? What are the oligarchs going to do with grumpy womenfolk or without them at all if they decamp to more convivial countries?
The whole purpose of being an oligarch is to ensure a supply of such women.
Already, the oligarchs - who seem to be less pious than Putin - are griping about invasion-driven restrictions on their lifestyles. Imagine not being able to sail their mega-yachts into casino harbours as they please!
How is Putin going to survive without his cashed up and happy oligarchs?
I think most people can be forgiven for not thinking that Putin would do something as blatantly harmful to Russia's standing as this. Rightly or wrongly, few understood how this is not about relations and trade as the West conceives of them. It is to a large extent about something else, which makes such things as massive death tolls and reputational costs seem like minor considerations.
It seems reasonable to speculate, as that august journal the Daily Mail does: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10551251/Did-Covid-send-Putin-mad.html that COVID-19 that infection and/or the lockdowns and general weirdness has negatively affected Putin's judgement. I recall that there are seasonal factors involving no-yet-melted ice which make invasion an urgent matter, to be accomplished soon, or a year from now.
The true, tangled, relationship between Russia, as currently defined, and the people and state of Ukraine, in recent years, is surely extremely complex. Yet it is only briefly alluded to in MSM articles. Leonid Ragozin has two recent articles which give some insight into these complexities: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/1/30/putin-no-longer-fears-a-democratic and https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/2/24/is-putins-gamble-on-ukraine-rational .
Googling his name lead to a longer and apparently more sophisticated critique, by Luke Smith, in a journal which is probably a good source of such insights: https://neweasterneurope.eu/2022/02/23/a-response-to-leonid-ragozins-putin-no-longer-fears-a-democratic-ukraine/ - which indicates that Leonid Ragozin is mistaken in many ways.
Who in the West really understands these things? There is no set of facts. The relationship is disputed, dynamic, has multiple facets due to a hundred million people being involved, and guess what? They are not all the same.
Maybe Putin will prevail, be a hero in his land, and Russia will somehow weather the storm. This will be easy as long as the West thinks it can't do without Russian oil and gas, which seems to be the current position of many governments.
Maybe Putin will do something even crazier (to us). How is he going to live with himself and those who adore him as being a strong, Russian, leader if he doesn't quickly subdue Ukraine and have Kiev and its people's celebrating him becoming Saint Vladimir II. I recall that sainthood is usually a posthumous appointment, but surely some exception could be made in his case.
Maybe the Ukrainians will somehow prevail and more and more Russians will be aghast at the killing and the political, economic and religious isolation their leader has forced them all into. I read somewhere that "most Russians know, or are related to, someone in the Ukraine". I assume this goes beyond the 18% or so who are Russian speakers. I have also read that many Russians in Ukraine are not so keen on Putin either.
In the long term, it is hard to imagine this invasion being a stable, sustainable, path forward for Russia. The parallels to Nazi Germany are so scary that I think the strongest possible isolation steps should be taken. Some argue they would be ineffective, counter-productive etc, or raise the price of gasoline in the USA too much in an election year.
Anything less would encourage China to invade Taiwan. If either invasion succeeds then we are stuffed. No-one can handle the costs and tension of isolating the whole of China and Russia from the rest of the world. We would have to accept that we depend on massive trade with two thoroughly successful dictatorships, nuclear armed and in cahoots.
I don't think any of these could be ruled out. The man-made disaster of the global response to COVID-19 proves beyond doubt that it wrong to assume that the people who control whole countries have a clue what they are doing.
Did Russia really want to join NATO in the early 1990s? In his first article above Leonid Ragozin indicates that they could have been invited, but were not: "The question of why integrating Russia, with its enormous nuclear arsenal, back in the 1990s was not a number one priority for the West, still remains unanswered.". I have no idea whether integrating Russia into NATO and the EU was a possibility then. If it was, then to what extent was the US armaments industry behind this not being pursued?
Considering the debt situation, inflation and imminent economic corrections, slow-boil environmental stressors and increasing prevalence of weather-driven disasters, aging nuclear-armed dictators driven by the prospect of religious-national glory on millennium time-scales is the last thing we need.
Perhaps enough wiser minds in Russia will see the folly of what Putin has started and make his reign untenable. Perhaps the same process will occur in China. Not everyone is as hell-bent on righting thousand year old wrongs as these aging leaders
> it all but ensures the resurgence of American and the West’s political and economic power over the long-term
I don't follow your reasoning Geary. There's still nothing like conquering a neighbor to demonstrate your power and resolve and credibility. As a purely monetary calculation I don't think there can be much doubt that the invasion is a looser, but I think Putin is interested in a show of muscle and ... well, I suppose there's still the tiny chance that he will have his ass kicked but it doesn't seem likely. Successful invasions have always been tonic to despots, no?
Thanks for the link to the Konstantin Kisin interview, Geary. He often has interesting things to say. It's funny, maybe he and President Zelensky are both examples of how comedians -- with their insights into the human condition -- can be surprisingly knowledgeable in the political sphere. I have to admit I also thought that Putin was merely posturing over Ukraine, jockeying for concessions from NATO. However, I am also unsurprised now that he has invaded. It has seemed to me for a very long time that he is an utterly amoral character. Maybe all politicians are, but with Putin it goes to the bone. As Alexei Navalny quipped in a court hearing, he will go down in history as Putin the Poisoner. In fact, it's where he's at his most creative -- he must have a veritable Baba Yaga's cauldron from which he has conjured dioxins, nerve agents, and radionuclides. And while some of the poisonings may have been for genuine political gain, such as Yushchenko in Ukraine and Navalny himself, the Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings seem more like pure vindictiveness. They also seemed specifically designed to taunt the West and show that he, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, could act with impunity when and where he liked. If the tragedy in Ukraine is ever to have a silver lining, I hope it will be to show the true face of Putin to his domestic audience and hasten his departure from the political stage.
A slight bone to pick: the idea that the EU was being truculent over Northern Ireland and the GFA seems like an astonishing type of myopia peculiar to UK commentators. In the four years that the House of Commons spent in an uproarious political punchup, attempting to lecture each other on what sort of Brexit the British public had actually voted for, Irish politicians were tramping the corridors of power in Europe making allies. They perceived -- entirely correctly -- that Westminster hadn't the slightest interest or any deep knowledge of the political problems that Brexit would cause for the island of Ireland. And they were right. We had the astonishing spectacle of a member of the ERG insisting on radio that he (and all British people) were entitled to Irish passports. We had a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who thought that Unionists were people who wanted Irish reunification! The cluelessness of senior British politicians beggared belief. The broader EU may not have been overly concerned about Ireland either, and Macron was pushing to use the situation to bargain Ireland into accepting corporate tax reforms. But ultimately they quite rightly listened to the concerns of the country that was a continuing member of the bloc, and not the one that was exiting.
It was never about punishing the UK. The implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland were signposted clearly and often in the Brexit negotiations. Theresa May attempted to come to a sensible compromise but it was ultimately rejected by hardliners in her own party. And there is a certain irony that the NI Unionists who helped sink her are now the most vociferous complainers about the resulting situation that they themselves voted for. But then, Boris Johnson had promised them that there would never be border checks on the Irish Sea ... shortly before he introduced exactly that. Though lately he does seem to have a certain amnesia about his duties under the Northern Ireland Protocol that he negotiated.
We like to regard our politicians and leaders as 'rational' beings in possession of more information and advice than us. This is not necessarily the case and emotions and beliefs often play a more significant role than facts. Thus your belief that 'independent' sources were more 'reliable' than mainstream media. This indeed can be and often is the case but it isn't always so. The reverse is frequently so (this is the trap that those who believe that the US election was 'stolen' fall into).
With Putin certain historical situations provided a playbook. The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten Germans were all indicators of how things might play out. China is shrewder here and knows that to support this kind of action is not beneficial. Currently President Xi's advisers are holding the line. Putin has never been rational, logical yes but operating from an emotional base. To him strength has always been paramount and within a closed world view he is incapable of admitting other views. He understands economics perfectly well but just doesn't assign any importance to them except as a tool to obtain control.
Today, September 3, year of grace 2022, what do you think of your article?
Rhetorical question. Don't need to know your answer to it, but i hope in my heart that you are at least a little bit embarrassed and drew some conclusions.
They say that when you have to eat crow you should do it right away and make it quick. We accept your apology, Geary. Everybody’s got to be wrong about some things and you’ve always shown a commitment to honesty. I’d rather read commentators who were willing to admit mistakes than ones who somehow got everything right.
Perhaps one of the easiest mistakes to make in foreign affairs is assuming your adversaries will always do whatever is in their own self-interest or always make clever moves. But Britain and the US don’t have a monopoly on making mistakes.
“ Recently, I began to research an essay on how to defend the Enlightenment, and I found that not only did the Ottoman Empire adopt a free market approach in many areas like sea trade, but so too did many parts of Hindu India at many times. Ancient China went through phases of free market economies interposed with more Statist periods. Without exception, in ancient China and elsewhere the free market periods were more prosperous and led to stronger civilisations, with the encroachment of Statism into the economy leading to periods of impoverishment, and a weaker and more decrepit civilisation.”
You’re sounding more and more like free market fundamentalist! I mean that as a compliment.
“ Don’t get me wrong, Western debt, both private and public is a monumental problem. The ready supply of fiat money into the economies of the West during the pandemic, through quantitative easing and the application of Modern Monetary theory has forever proven the concept as an unsound economic theory, fatally flawed. ”
I could hardly agree more. Debt isn’t a problem until it is. I seriously wonder whether a debt crisis of epic proportions could be a Talebian Black Swan lurking around the corner.
“ At the same time, it might be time for the West to consider shifting at least some areas or portions of social spending to a funding mechanism which furnishes zero interest debt facilities repayable upon death, rather than through government largesse.”
What do you mean by that? I think I’ve got the idea but wanted to be sure.
“ Ironically, this will only strengthen the West- because although government commissioning will never be able to match the market in terms of efficiency, the allocation of labour and capital, and value for money, spending on any form of infrastructure, whether through direct investment in the military or in military or civilisation innovation, at least has the benefit of still being a more efficient allocator of resources than social spending or welfare. This was the lesson of the NASA era and America’s military spending during the Cold War under Keynesian economics- it may have been incredibly wasteful and inefficient as an allocator of capital, but the jobs and productive economics which it generated was at least preferable to the social spending instituted under Johnson’s War on Poverty. This reallocation of government funding towards spending designed to help people directly, rather than the previous spending which at least had the benefit of producing gainful employment for so many citizens as a useful by-product of military and innovative strength at least had the benefit of being immensely superior, in an economic sense, to the enfeebling welfare which succeeded it.”
I also agree with that.
“ China has the bomb of a declining youthful population waiting to go off in their economy. They call it the 421 problem- the inevitability that eventually one adult son or daughter will need to take care of the needs of two retired parents and four retired grandparents.”
That’s the crux of it. However, for the next decade I still think China is far more dangerous and powerful than Russia and I’m not so sure a Taiwan invasion would blow up in their faces (as much as I sincerely hope such an invasion doesn’t happen).