Three years ago today, February 27, 2014, Pax Americana was abruptly ended when a small but ultra-elite detachment of Russian special forces, stripped of their official military insignia and reduced to "little green men", seized control of key state buildings and critical infrastructure across the heavily Russophone Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, virtually instantly effecting the first violent expansion of national borders in Europe since World War Two.
Today, both the US and the West generally remain in practical denial of what a monumental shift this event signaled: it was the moment that their triumphalist march since the end of the Cold War (1989-1991), which had already sputtered badly in the 2008-09 financial crisis, effectively went into full retreat.
In the days and weeks following the Crimean seizure, which Russia's Vladimir Putin clearly ordered both as vengeance for the pro-Western "Euromaidan" revolution which toppled his ally president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine in the preceding week and also as a prudent precaution against future NATO takeover of Russia's longtime principal warm-water naval base at Sevastopol, it became clear that the US-led alliance had no coercive options whatsoever to punish Moscow for its aggression. Instead, as the worst East-West standoff in a quarter-century escalated in the ensuing months with the rise of a Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the increasingly fantastic US and EU demand for Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine has become a virtual byword for Western fecklessness and timidity.
As of today, early 2017, Russia is emerging as the clear winner in the new Cold War lite whose origins can be traced to the Ukraine crisis of 2013-14. It has survived the West's determined effort to bring it to its knees through sanctions and economic blackmail, even as it has beefed up both its conventional and nuclear military posture to a level that intimidates the cream puffs of NATO and EU capitals, who have finally been put on notice by a new administration in Washington that their effective free-riding on American military might won't be tolerated any longer.
As it turns out, the very things that the West points to as signs of Russia's inherent weakness and inferiority - its ruthless suppression of dissent and civil liberties - are now the Kremlin's most salient strengths in what it clearly views as an existential war against the US empire: Moscow relishes its ability to brand its domestic opponents as nothing less than traitors and fifth columnists working with Washington and Brussels to undermine Russian sovereignty and integrity, and thus furnish an easy justification for their ruthless repression and terrorization.
Russia, not America, is now to be feared and respected as the big boss with all the big guns - and no compunction about using them, albeit judiciously. Its own borders are secure and sealed. It can conduct military operations in support of its friends in the Muslim world (i.e. Syria) that show no quarter to unruly insurgents and "terrorists", and even more to the point, aren't concerned with civilian casualties as a hindrance to accomplishing the brutal mission. Security and order take precedence over freedom and rights; sovereignty and cultural jingoism over open commons and universal brotherhood. Since 2014, Putin's Russia has effectively rewritten the post-post-Cold War values playbook - and the West still doesn't realize it.
Russia is on the move again in 2017 - the centennial of its great revolution which gave birth to the Soviet Union, a great double-edged sword in her history whose legacy is something of a love-hate matter for its present rulers. In the last three years, she has simply given up trying to become Western in the fullest sense of individual rights and pluralism of competing ideas; she may still tolerate some degree of these but in her essence has moved closer to China dramatically in terms of a founding and overarching worldview. And between her 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal and Beijing's $10 trillion economy, she is increasingly confident that it is America - under a divisive new president who (not so) secretly wishes he could also jail or even shoot hostile journalists - who will now follow Russia's cues on the issues that matter most.
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