JFK wrote Why England Slept in 1940. Europe had forgotten deterrence. So have we. Putin got the message.
Note: In the 1950s, Great Britain had 80,000 troops in Germany. In 2020, they had 1,000 troops. And you wonder why Putin invaded.
• • •
Not in the slightest did Vladimir Putin need Barack Obama to nurture his profound grievance over the dissolution of the USSR when he aggressively took over the Donbas region of Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, on Obama’s watch. Nor did Putin need Donald Trump when he resummoned Soviet immorality in having Alexei Navalny poisoned in 2020, on Trump’s watch. Nor did Putin need Joe Biden for his view that Ukraine belonged to Russia when two weeks ago Putin declared two rebel areas in Ukraine “independent states” and shortly thereafter launched a massive invasion of Ukraine on three fronts.
No, Putin’s vision of a recrudescent Russian empire, not rooted in democracy, not interested in affirmative relations with the West, not focused primarily on the welfare of the Russian people, not moved by the loss of life and other suffering caused by his armed forces — they’re all his own. Putin alone owns them. If anything, it is Putin’s Russian predecessors, the likes of Boris Yeltsin, more than any leader in the West who is the primary target of Putin’s disgust over what he takes to be Russian’s dishonor and Putin’s warped vision of the military need to recover it.
That said, it is the flimsy response of Obama and the EU to the naked Putin-ordered aggression against Donbas and Crimea that taught Putin a critical lesson, not in principle, but in tactics. It is very much Biden’s botched, ill-considered withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, 2021 that reinforced the lesson Putin had learned from Obama, not in principle, but in tactics. In principle, no American president or other American leader (at least since George W. Bush “looked into Putin’s eyes and saw a soul”) validated Putin’s vision of his country.
But tactics? A straight line extends from the open display of American weakness in its withdrawal from Afghanistan to Russia’sinvasion of Ukraine. To this we shall return, but do not think that the consequences of the Afghanistan debacle have no relevance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Afghan debacle continues today in the terrible suffering that American policy, in response to the Taliban victory, is imposing on the Afghani people, and to this too we shall return.
Tactically, the US has forgotten the requisite dimensions and timing of deterrence.Verbal threats do not deter. Economic sanctions do not deter the likes of Putin any more than they deter the likes of the ayatollahs running Iran. Economic sanctions against a dictatorship — which Iran is in name and Russia is in practice — do not hurt the dictators, they hurt the people, the innocents. It is in the nature of dictatorships, or at least dictators like the ayatollahs and Putin, that their vision transcends any suffering their aggression might entail.
Tactics: In its withdrawal from Afghanistan, Putin got a message: I can get away with it. No verbal threats from either the US or the EUstopped his invasion. No military hardware on the dimension that Ukraine required in facing Russia was delivered or even threatened to be delivered by any Western country.
In Afghanistan last August, the US delivered a message: the US no longer wishes to deter the great anti-democratic forces arrayed against the West.
Still more. Here is how the severe economic sanctions that the US applied in the wake of the Taliban victory are playing out. We may have here a paradigm of how the current, stiff sanctions against Russia may play out. We hope to be proven wrong in envisioning the American-wrought disaster in Afghanistan replicated in Russia. But as they say, people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
In Afghanistan, the US has created a Catch-22. It froze all of Afghanistan’s foreign assets; it imposed strict economic sanctions against the Taliban regime; it bankrupted the country. Because of all this the worst humanitarian crises in the world today is in Afghanistan. In the height of irony, the US is very busy trying to find work-arounds — around the very sanctions the US itself has imposed. Millions of Afghani people — who do not now and never did have any allegiance to the Taliban — have lost their jobs, lost their food, and are in danger of losing their lives. Not to guns, but to starvation. No sign of the putative goal of all this — a popular uprising against the Taliban — is seen. Is this what the punishing sanctions against Russia will yield? Not Putin’s change of mind, but sheer suffering?
Deterrence against an atomic superpower is not primarily in the economic sphere. It is in the military sphere: supply of weapons to the directly and massively threatened innocent regimes; massive movement of troops; clear intent to use them. Please allow us to repeat: British troops in the 1950s in Germany numbered 80,000; in 2020, 1000. As has been said, the best deterrent to an enemy launching a war is the threat of war.
The EU long ago surrendered its deterrent power, living in a fantasy land of ever reduced military expenditures, ever increased dependence of Russian energy and, perhaps most chimerical of all: the idea that economic engagement with a dictator will soften the dictatorship. (The same chimera governs the US talks with Iran.) The EU was so busy saving the climate, closing down its own energy sources, that it neglected to see that it was endangering its democracy, its independence, its very life.
The US surrendered its deterrent power in a different way, by abandoning the very hard-earned but, ultimately, the very effective deterrent power against the Taliban with its very small military force that did not suffer a single casualty in the 18 months prior to Biden’s gratuitous, precipitous withdrawal. Putin got the message. I can get away with it.
It is all very rich. When Ukraine voluntarily surrendered its entire nuclear arsenal in 1994 — the third largest in the world at the time — one of the guarantors of the territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine was . . . Russia! That was then. Today, it is: I can get away with it.
We pray that Putin does not get away with it.
We pray that even at this late date, the massive arming of Ukraine — as the US belatedly but massively armed England after Hitler rose — will be the primary response to Putin.
We pray that other European countries will follow in Germany’s wake, whose chancellor Olaf Scholz just this week said he would nearly double military spending — a reversal of decades of policy — and would reduce energy purchases from Russia.
We pray that China, witnessing the massive sanctions launched by the US and Europe against Russia, sees what would likely happen to it if it invaded Taiwan.
We pray that innocents on all sides of this conflict do not suffer more than they already have.
We pray for the safety of the Jews in Ukraine.
We pray for the stability of the countries such as Poland, which will now shoulder the burden of masses of Ukrainians seeking to escape.
We pray that the enemies of Israel, such as Hezbollah, will not take the opportunity to launch a war of their own in the hope that it would be overshadowed by the Russia-Ukraine war.
A twenty-two-year old, John F. Kennedy, published Why England Slept in 1940. A twenty-two-year old understood the world better than a long line of leaders in Europe and the US, most poignantly captured by the visceral images from the Afghan airport in August, 2021. JFK understood what his seniors learned too late — not too late to win the battle, but too late to prevent it.
We need prayer. We also need wiser, firmer, more sober, more courageous, more realistic policy.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
