Pax Americana
We are all either wary or weary of events unfolding in Ukraine. It has been going on since 2014 or since late November (not coincidentally just after the Biden election win), depending on when you mark time with regard to the West’s awareness and acknowledgement that Putin has been on the warpath. In the last 48 hours, things have gone from a question of whether Putin will back down to just how far he is prepared to go on this campaign to unseat the world order. He has sensed that the moment is right to press his advantage and that he has the will and the stomach for war that others, particularly the U.S. and Europe, do not. It doesn’t take a geopolitical genius to recognize that the Soviet Union fell apart after a decade of fighting the futility of an Afghan campaign and that Putin wants nothing more than the recovery of the lost glory of the Russian Empire that he grew up serving. Putin is willing to gamble that the American will to protect another distant land that few have traveled to, sitting in the far-Eastern reaches of Eastern Europe, will be less than welcomed. That’s still more trouble than he had hoped for if his autocratic sycophant, Donald Trump, had still occupied the Oval Office. The fact that Biden had been forced in 2021 to withdraw from Afghanistan on his predecessor’s terms after the U.S.’s own two decades of frustration at the hands of the Mujahidin set the stage just right for Putin.
Putin is a product of his history and that history revolves around the glory of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. He is a man of my age and his lineage involved his grandfather being the cook to both Lenin and Stalin. His older brothers had died during the siege of Leningrad so his sympathies for the West were probably very limited. While I was in college pursuing my educational and career whims, Putin was forced to take on Communist Party membership while at St. Petersburg State University. This, despite his skepticism about communism versus free markets. He spent the next fifteen years in the KGB, honing his tactical skills. That was followed by the Nineties spent rising in the ranks of the St. Petersburg city government. Under Boris Yeltsin, he finally made it into the Kremlin just as the U.S. began its Afghanistan juggernaut. Who the hell really knows what happens in the Kremlin, but its safe to say that Putin’s KGB skills served him well.
The man is purported to be worth $200 Billion as he has built his cadre of oligarchs who owe to him their fortunes and loyalty in the most Medieval of ways. The kleptocracy is hardly a new form of governance, but in some ways Putin has brought it to a level not seen since the days of Ghengis Khan. He is omnipotent in Russia and recognizes that Russia is simply too small to rule the world as it stands. The Russian Empire needs to be rebuilt if that is to happen and like all autocrats before him, and to paraphrase Woody Allen, who famously analogized that autocrats are like sharks…they have to move forward or they die. Putin understands that after twenty years in power, he needs some forward motion for himself and Russia to stay in power. Money means nothing to him at this point, but his next decade hinges on his ability to be in a stronger place and that translates into an otherwise meaningless invasion of Ukraine. I say meaningless because Russia may have economically needed Ukraine back in 1991, but today its more about Putin needing the show.
It’s fascinating to see pictures of Putin meeting with his ministers with a hundred feet between them. It must be hard to be Vladimir Putin, wondering who will try and poison or infect him next in a country with 144 million people who have good reasons for doing so. And now he wants to add 40 million more people who like him even less. The life of a dictator is never easy.
I understand that I am jumping to lots of conclusions and making more assumptions than I can honestly back up with facts, but of one thing I am certain. Vladimir Putin harbors a strong desire to see the post-WWII world order, often called the Pax Americana, come to an end after seventy-five years. All reigns end, but as all things modern, things happen faster these days. The Pax Romana brought peace and prosperity to the early civilized world around the Mediterranean for two-hundred years, two thousand years ago until the Barbarians were at the gates, so to speak. Then there was the Pax Mongolica that allowed the Silk Road and the followers of Marco Polo to soothe the people of Eurasia seven hundred years ago until the Black Plague brought things to a crashing halt. The British Empire brought on the Pax Brittanica for a century before WWI until the era of fascism that brought us to our last great European war. It may be my ethnocentric education, but it seems that the prize of Europe one way or the other figures centrally in the aspirations that break down the Pax. Indeed, whether its the fear of NATO or the craving for things European, it is all too familiar that Putin is trying to bring the Pax to an untimely end.
There is clearly a recession of democratic leanings around the world. Those cycles happen, but I am prepared to rely on the good sense of the majority and their indignation over being manhandled by autocrats to give them a good chance of keeping authoritarianism in abeyance, or at least from any long-term power. But I find it abhorrent that one man can push and shove his way into harming the tranquility of a vast number of other people, just for his own purposes. I’m hardly unique in those feelings. That’s the Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Pol Pot, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump phenomenon…just to name a few notable dictators we have known.
I honestly never thought I would live to see WWIII and in the last 48 hours that term is being increasingly thrown around. Maybe its the media. After all, I read on a number sticker today that “The Media is the Virus”. Donald Trump said today that he thought Putin was a genius for using the sly tactics he is deploying to sneak into Ukraine without creating the certainty of a large-scale invasion. The good news is that even the distorted and sycophantic Republican Party cannot get its heads around Putin’s “genius” moves. Even sheep-like politicians are finding themselves conflicted. Of course they are. Before Donald Trump, the GOP was the Party that stood for anti-communism. Russia was not the friend of the GOP. And then things changed. They changed based on an election where evidence strongly suggests that (ne….overwhelmingly suggests) that Russia hacked the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump whether he or his Campaign Manager Paul Manafort coordinated with that effort or not. Whether at the Helsinki Summit with Putin or in the Oval Office with the Sergeys (Kislyak and Lavrov), the chumminess with Russia and Putin was on display for all of us Americans to see in real time.
I understand that Republicans like to think everything the mainstream media says is a conspiracy. But I don’t understand how anyone can deny that the Pax Americana has been good for America and good for the majority of people in the world. Supporting and praising the “genius” of Vladimir Putin as he tries to dismantle the Pax has to be the ultimate “evil genius” play. I can’t help but paraphrase what Shakespeare had Julius Caesar say, “Yond Putin has a lean and hungry eye.”