Beware of Vladimir Putin. He’s a real threat.
Don’t forget this is a guy who is turning a reformed Russia into an autocratic state.
And he has nukes.
Which you can’t count on him to simply possess.
That’s the gist of a must-read op-ed in The Los Angeles Times written by Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also the author, most recently, of “Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991.” Some excerpts:
At the moment, our preoccupation is President Vladimir Putin’s next move outside Russia. Will he invade eastern Ukraine? Will he move into Moldova? But even more worrisome than these territorial issues is what Putin may have in mind for Russia itself.
The Russian president did not engineer the Ukrainian crisis, but he has exploited it to begin forging something far more dangerous than land grabs: namely, a political arrangement that could secure his rule of Russia for life. The annexation of Crimea has fueled nationalist hysteria and paranoia within Russia, and Putin has ridden that wave, reshaping his government into one that is far more repressive, ideologically driven, openly messianic and founded on a revisionist view of history that is explicitly anti-West and anti-American.
Putin heralded the birth of this new politics in an extraordinarily frank and disturbing nationally televised speech on March 18 to the Russian political elite.
He notes how Putin was essentially saying the West has tried to isolate Russia (which is, in fact, true).
This hostility toward the West, which Putin portrays as determined to victimize Russia, is not simply expedient and tactical. Rather, it has become Putin’s raison d’etre, shaping his decisions and offering a convenient justification for greater repression. Ultimately, perhaps, he will use it to justify his assumption of a lifelong office as Father of the Nation, Protector of all Russians and Defender of the Motherland. Meanwhile, anyone who opposes him is, in Putin’s words, part of the “fifth column” and a “traitor of the nation.”
The risks for Russia?
The perils of such a future for Russia are many and obvious. But not least among them is that it would mark a return to a personality-driven dictatorship. The many ovations and chants that greeted Putin’s Kremlin appearance March 18 suggested a new cult of personality that is already enormous and might one day rival even that of Josef Stalin.
And the risks for the world? Big, indeed:
What makes this development not only alarming but potentially apocalyptic is the fact that Putin’s unpredictable, revisionist and clearly aggressive regime has access to about 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on more than 400 land- and submarine-based long-range strategic missiles. And, in an ongoing $770-billion, 10-year rearmament and modernization program, Russia has heightened the threat of those weapons with an upgraded intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying as many as 10 warheads, each of them independently targeted and designed explicitly to evade U.S. missile defenses.
Several reactions are likely from his piece:
***Some will say it’s just a cold-warn mentality piece. Ahem, excuse me? What are we seeing in Crimea? What about the 30,000 troops Putin has poised near the Ukraine? Yes, you could close your eyes and say it’s old thinking to call Russia a threat, like if I closed my eyes and said I’m silly to bother with that toilet overflowing in my bathroom.
***Some will say (sigh) Aron is associated with the conservative AEI, a type of comment both left and right will make: try to discredit a writer or thinker by using a stereotype about their organization. AEI has many excellent thinkers and writers.
But it’s best to read his piece in full. Yes, Putin does pose a threat — to those who had such hopes in Russia that when Communism fell Russia would truly embrace democracy and become a full partner of European countries, act in a way that ended or diminished any arms race, and would put years of military domination of other countries behind it.
With Putin it seems less The Return of Communism than The KGB Strikes Back. Or Russian autocracy has risen from the grave:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.