Vladimir Putin is one angry Russian. Talk about frustration; this old KGB hand is so mad that Mother Soviet Union had to come crashing into the twenty-first century that he has decided to make believe the whole thing was just a big historical mistake.
The Soviet Union lives! And if Putin can make that a reality he will go down in Russian history as the greatest leader since...Stalin?
What does Putin really think he’s going to accomplish by marching into Crimea, ala the Soviet march into Czechoslovakia in the sixties? Exactly the same thing, that’s what. The world stood silently by as the Soviets annexed Czechoslovakia and they will stand by again as the Russian Bear grabs at its “rightful” territories that were split apart “by mistake.”
Why will the West stand by, as it always does when Russian leaders flex their Empire-building muscles? Because there never seems to be that appetite for another World War. Everyone knows that a bully with atomic bombs is a bully better left to his own devices.
Is there anything the West can do to head off further Russian expansion into former Soviet bloc territories? That’s a question that foreign leaders from Obama to Merkel don’t really want to deal with, and that’s exactly the way Putin is playing the game. When you hold the cards, you don’t forfeit the game. This is a very hard set of problems to deal with and the West is doing what it seems to do best in situations like this. It’s punting.
Unless there is a unified strategy coming out of Brussels in the next few weeks (there won’t be) we can look forward to a rebirth of something that looks very much like the old Soviet Union–and that’s always been Putin’s dream. Really, what good is being a brutal Russian dictator if you don’t have a Soviet Union-style geography behind you?
