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William Hancock's avatar

As someone who lived a couple of times in Russia totaling four years, and has lived the last nine in Poland, I think you must draw some distinction between the USSR and Russia today. For one thing, the USSR was run by committee. There was always a party chairman but he lacked absolute power. There were at least a few checks on power. You could see this when Khrushchev liberalized faster than the Politburo was comfortable with and wound up deposed. Then Brezhnev quickly retrenched. What is going on in Russia today is categorically different than the USSR. There is a serious lack of adults in the room. The USSR was run more by consensus. That is not the case today. Putin has marginalized any serious rivals for power and the Gosduma and Federation Council are just rubber stamps. Even the Siloviki have seen their power eroded. Russia today is a one man show. And I'm not always sure how rational that man is.

I don't see appeasing Putin as a realistic alternative for the West. We kind of tried that after 2014 and his appetites only grew. I was living in Russia at the time of the Georgian War in 2008. Did being allowed to take South Ossettia and Abkhazia pacify Putin? Not especially. Nor did taking Crimea and much of Donbas. You have these Russian nationalist "philosophers" who dream of a Russian dominated Eurasian state extending from Vladivostok to Dublin and South to the Indian Ocean. Putin appears to be sympathetic to such thinking. I don't see where the West has much room to negotiate with that thinking. Nor should the Ukrainians. How do you reach a compromise where your goal is to remain alive and the other side thinks you have no right to? People should watch the ubiquitous political talk shows from Russia. It is hard to forge a compromise with lunatics.

Russians need to look realistically at their country. When you get away from the major cities, especially Piter and Moscow, it is an impoverished country. Russians cling to the history of WWII and the achievements of Yuri Gagarin because basically everything since then has been downhill. Russia was never really a great country. It was a poor country with thousands of nuclear weapons and a lot of tanks. At some point, Russians need to chose whether they want to live in poverty and isolation in the delusion that they are a great country, or take steps to make Russia a good country. I started out as a Russia optimist but have become a Russia realist. I expect Putin to be gone before the 2024 elections in Russia but to be replaced by someone pretty similar. But the tolerance of Russians for this heightened level of repression is finite. And Russians under forty are not the stoic sufferers that their parents and grandparents were. But they do still suffer from this kind of learned helplessness where everyone waits for someone else to try to change things. Russians are the only ones who can change Russia, it can't be imposed by the West. But there is no reason to make life easy for tyrants. It is always harder for democracies to retain their resolve than for authoritarian governments where the people have no say. But I would argue that now is the time to muster such resolve. The consequences of timidity will be far worse than the consequences of steadfastness. Perhaps appeasement was a viable tool in a different era. But it was typically the weak who were forced to appease the strong. Russia is not strong. NATO has four times the soldiers, five times the combat aircraft, far more sophisticated weapons and more than twenty times the GDP. It seems to me if anyone will have to do some appeasing, it will ultimately be the Russians.

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DENNIS B MURPHY's avatar

Great article.

Kirkpatrick's framing of "coddling" was just that-framing. The USA hardly coddled China and the USSR.

I am anything but a 'hawk' but I do support our ongoing efforts to help Ukraine. As indicated, too many nations have slid back to autocracy- we should support one that wants to move toward democracy. We should do so in large part to atone for our support of dictators in the past IMO.

It should be noted that our support for such dictators is in large part responsible for the immigration issues which have been politicized the last few years. Had we not destabilized latin america politically and economically for about 100 years we may not have the current problems

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