At this point the staggering miscalculation shown by Vladimir Putin in invading Ukraine is fairly obvious to everyone (except perhaps to Putin himself). He expected a quick victory over Ukraine’s armed forces and he didn’t get it. He expected most Ukrainians would embrace their Russian invaders—or at the very least meekly submit to Russian rule—and he didn’t get that either. He expected a disjointed, tepid response from the NATO alliance, and he got that one wrong as well.
But he had very good grounds for at least some of his expectations. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent interviewed acclaimed historian and Russian expert Timothy Snyder about the motivation for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Snyder believes one of the primary reasons Putin launched this ill-conceived war was a perception that the West—and particularly the U.S.—would fold under the weight of its own internal discord and divisions. The Trump-inspired insurrection that occurred in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021—and the subsequent efforts by Republicans to ignore, sanitize, and whitewash it—provided Putin with the confidence that any U.S. response to his war would simply underscore its innate weakness and impotence.
Snyder points to a now-deleted “declaration of victory” that was posted on Feb. 26—rather prematurely, as it turns out—by the Russian state-controlled press. As reported by the BBC, that declaration boldly announced that Russia was taking its rightful place in the world, and that a “new world order” was in the offing:
"Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a historic responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution of the Ukrainian question to future generations," the article says.
It concludes by claiming that the military action "is Russia's return of its historical space and its place in the world", which has put the Anglo-Saxons of Europe and the US in their place.
"Western global domination can be considered completely and finally over," it claims.
According to Snyder, based on the events of Jan. 6, Putin likely believed ”that the West just basically needed one more push to fall into total disarray.” From the interview:
If you watch Jan. 6 clips over and over again, you can get that impression. The Russians really have been fixated on Jan. 6.
They thought a successful military operation in Ukraine would be that nudge: We’d feel helpless, we’d fall into conflict, it would help [Donald] Trump in the U.S., it would help populists around the world.
As Snyder observes, the Jan. 6 insurrection—and worse, the lack of accountability (so far) for those at the top who planned it—confirmed everything that Putin had been telling himself for years, namely “that democracy is a joke everywhere.”
But the deeper point is that Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election on Jan. 6 made the American system look fragile. They think, “One more Trump and the Americans are done.” In invading Ukraine, they think they’re putting huge pressure on the Biden administration. They’re going to make Biden look weak.
That probably was their deep fantasy about the West: Successful military occupation in Ukraine; the Biden administration is totally impotent; we humiliate them; Trump comes back; this is a big strategic victory for us.
On one level this could be seen as yet another instance of a megalomaniacal dictator placing too much credence in his own propaganda. But it also shows the depth and scope of Trump’s betrayal of this country, and the betrayal by every Republican who has abetted it since Jan. 6. If our most powerful and dangerous geopolitical foe is motivated enough by our purported “weakness” to risk a world war, what does that say about the people who gave him that idea in the first place, the ones who by their reckless actions put our country in this position?
The fact that Trump and many elected Republicans behaved like pathetic sycophants to Putin during his entire administration was certainly bad enough. But as Snyder points out, they compounded their treachery by orders of magnitude when they instigated (and later endorsed through their votes) the attack on our democracy on Jan. 6. From that point forward, Trump’s Big Lie and the subsequent lies that have now metastasized through the entire Republican party quite literally provided aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin, bolstering his confidence that he could start an unprovoked war without any serious consequences to himself or his own country. The refusal by Republicans to take responsibility for those events and own up to Trump’s lies gave him all the motivation he needed.
No comments:
Post a Comment