To beat Vladimir Putin, we’re going to need to be a little more like him.
The last two weeks have witnessed the upending of the European order and the close of the post-Cold War era. With his invasion of Crimea and the instant absorption of the strategic peninsula, Vladimir Putin has shown that he will not play by the West’s rules. The “end of history” is at an end—we’re now seeing the onset of Cold War 2.0.
How many people believed history was over and that Putin was a nice guy who would play by the rules? Outside of some neo-cons and maybe a few economists, we’re talking about nobody at all. The game Schindler is playing, however, requires some imaginary naive foils for his tough guy act. Well, now that that the imaginary dummies have been put in their place, what does Mr. Reality have in mind?
To beat Vladimir Putin, we’re going to need to be a little more like him.
Is that our goal? To “beat” Putin? Really? Our goal should be to protect the prosperity and security of the United States. And that goal requires some tradeoffs as we deal with the fragile and not too stable Russian government. Putin is not by any means the worst possible result in Russia – the forces of nativism, xenophobia, and nostalgia for power could produce all sorts of unpleasant post-Putin regimes. It is in the US interest to play the long game here, to move Russia towards a less dangerous evolution. For example, having a nation with so nuclear missiles fall apart would not be in our interests and that is a possibility – as Schindler well knows.
While the George W. Bush administration bears its share of the blame here, there is no denying that the Obama White House has repeatedly fumbled the ball with Russia. The famed “reset” was a fine idea if Dmitry Medvedev were actually running Russia, which he certainly was not.
Here Schindler pretends that the “reset” was some naive handholding exercise. But among the things that the reset got the USA was a renewed effort by the US and Russia to round up and safeguard the nuclear weapons material left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union. While I’m sympathetic to the people of Crimea, a cold-eyed appreciation of US interests indicates that keeping nuclear bombs out of the black market may have been more important to us. But if your narrative depends on painting Obama as a naive patsy and Putin as tough guy, maybe you can’t address these issues.
Moreover, this White House’s mishandling of Syria, essentially outsourcing U.S. policy to Moscow, only encouraged more hardball from Putin, as was predictable to those who understand this Kremlin.
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