The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Columnist
Why Putin Doesn’t Respect Us
Just
as we’ve turned the coverage of politics into sports, we’re doing the
same with geopolitics. There is much nonsense being written about how
Vladimir Putin showed how he is “tougher” than Barack Obama and how
Obama now needs to demonstrate his manhood. This is how great powers get
drawn into the politics of small tribes and end up in great wars that
end badly for everyone. We vastly exaggerate Putin’s strength — so does
he — and we vastly underestimate our own strength, and ability to weaken
him through nonmilitary means.
Let’s
start with Putin. Any man who actually believes, as Putin has said,
that the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe” of the 20th century is caught up in a dangerous fantasy
that can’t end well for him or his people. The Soviet Union died because
Communism could not provide rising standards of living, and its
collapse actually unleashed boundless human energy all across Eastern
Europe and Russia. A wise Putin would have redesigned Russia so its vast
human talent could take advantage of all that energy. He would be
fighting today to get Russia into the European Union, not to keep
Ukraine out. But that is not who Putin is and never will be. He is
guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations toward his people and
prefers to turn Russia into a mafia-run petro-state — all the better to
steal from.
So
Putin is now fighting human nature among his own young people and his
neighbors — who both want more E.U. and less Putinism. To put it in
market terms, Putin is long oil and short history. He has made himself
steadily richer and Russia steadily more reliant on natural resources
rather than its human ones. History will not be kind to him — especially
if energy prices ever collapse.
So
spare me the Putin-body-slammed-Obama prattle. This isn’t All-Star
Wrestling. The fact that Putin has seized Crimea, a Russian-speaking
zone of Ukraine, once part of Russia, where many of the citizens prefer
to be part of Russia and where Russia has a major naval base, is not
like taking Poland. I support economic and diplomatic sanctions to
punish Russia for its violation of international norms and making clear
that harsher sanctions, even military aid for Kiev, would ensue should
Putin try to bite off more of Ukraine. But we need to remember that that
little corner of the world is always going to mean more, much more, to
Putin than to us, and we should refrain from making threats on which
we’re not going to deliver.
What
disturbs me about Crimea is the larger trend it fits into, that
Putinism used to just be a threat to Russia but is now becoming a threat
to global stability. I opposed expanding NATO toward Russia after the
Cold War, when Russia was at its most democratic and least threatening.
It remains one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course,
laid the groundwork for Putin’s rise.
For
a long time, Putin has exploited the humiliation and anti-Western
attitudes NATO expansion triggered to gain popularity, but this seems to
have become so fundamental to his domestic politics that it has locked
him into a zero-sum relationship with the West that makes it hard to see
how we collaborate with him in more serious trouble spots, like Syria
or Iran. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is engaged in monstrous,
genocidal behavior that also threatens the stability of the Middle East.
But Putin stands by him. At least half the people of Ukraine long to be
part of Europe, but he treated that understandable desire as a NATO
plot and quickly resorted to force.
I
don’t want to go to war with Putin, but it is time we expose his real
weakness and our real strength. That, though, requires a long-term
strategy — not just fulminating on “Meet the Press.” It requires going
after the twin pillars of his regime: oil and gas. Just as the oil glut
of the 1980s, partly engineered by the Saudis, brought down global oil
prices to a level that helped collapse Soviet Communism, we could do the
same today to Putinism by putting the right long-term policies in
place. That is by investing in the facilities to liquefy and export our
natural gas bounty (provided it is extracted at the highest
environmental standards) and making Europe, which gets 30 percent of its
gas from Russia, more dependent on us instead. I’d also raise our
gasoline tax, put in place a carbon tax and a national renewable energy
portfolio standard — all of which would also help lower the global oil
price (and make us stronger, with cleaner air, less oil dependence and
more innovation).
You
want to frighten Putin? Just announce those steps. But you know the
story, the tough guys in Washington who want to take on Putin would
rather ask 1 percent of Americans — the military and their families — to
make the ultimate sacrifice than have all of us make a small sacrifice
in the form of tiny energy price increases. Those tough guys who thump
their chests in Congress but run for the hills if you ask them to vote
for a 10-cent increase in the gasoline tax that would actually boost our
leverage, they’ll never rise to this challenge. We’ll do anything to
expose Putin’s weakness; anything that isn’t hard. And you wonder why
Putin holds us in contempt?
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