“He is ‘pretty smart,’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a Florida fundraiser, assessing the impending invasion like a real estate deal. ‘He’s taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions,’ he said, ‘taking over a country — really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people — and just walking right in.’”
That was former President Donald J. Trump —a former president of the United States of America —in a New York Times article praising Russian President Vladimir Putin in the run-up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which the former KGB agent instigated to. assuage his ego and bolster his notion of former Soviet glory.
I have written often on this blog that two things would doom civilization going forward — the lack of education and the lack of Alexandrian leadership (leadership from the front). The first engenders the second. We have seen the lack of leadership throughout the pandemic, which was always going to be a disaster but which was turned into a catastrophe by obfuscation (China, the country of origin),, political exploitation and divisiveness (the United States, Brazil) and inconsistent, unclear communication (Australia and the Novak Djokovic debacle). More on all of this in a later post.
But it turns out that this has been nothing more than the tip of the Titanic-destroying iceberg compared to what is now happening in Ukraine. In all the commentary I’ve read and watched about what is unfolding, nothing struck me as more chilling than CBS national security correspondent David Martin’s comment on PBS’ “Washington Week” Friday, Feb. 25, that rather than Russia being deterred by economic sanctions, it is the United States and the West that are being deterred by the threat of nuclear holocaust.
The thinking is that Putin had already factored in the economic fallout to himself and his sycophants as he has been planning this for years. As to the fallout for the Russian people, whose lives are hard and about to get harder, he doesn’t care any more than he cares about the Ukrainian people. He’s another narcissist whose damaged identity is tied up in something else, in this case the former Soviet empire. Restore that empire and you shore up that identity — until he decides he’s aggrieved by something else, for the paradox of a narcissist is that while he has everything the best, he’s still put-upon. He can never be happy and since the narcissist is incapable of self-reflection and is never wrong, it stands to twisted reason that others must be doing something evil to make him unhappy and must not only be defeated but crushed. Hence the fatuous idea, being touted by the illogical, power-hungry Republicans, that the United States and NATO backed Russia into a corner. Really? Putin’s been dreaming of this ever since the drunken, buffoonish presidency of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
In outsize grievance and aggrandizement, Putin has much in common with fanboy Trump. But unlike Trump, Putin is a smart narcissist. (In calling Putin “savvy,” Trump is, unfortunately, correct.) Having factored in the economic cost to himself, which is all he cares about in that regard, Putin can, it is true, dangle the nuclear sword of Damocles over the head of the world, knowing that the U.S. and the rest of the West doesn’t want to go down that path. He also knows that the U.S. hardly speaks from the moral high ground — see the invasion of Iraq, which unlike Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11 — and he knows that in any conflict in which the world needs American leadership, he can always count on American isolationists to throw a monkey wrench into a united front. (See pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh and the America First-ers of the 1930s as well as many of the Republicans of today.)
So we are left with the global equivalent of watching a thug beat someone up on a city street while others stand around — some protesting, some wringing their hands and others pausing only to move on with their lives. It’s beyond heartbreaking and disheartening. It’s criminal and outrageous and it puts you in mind of the quote, misattributed to the great 18th-century Irish statesman Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Such was my thinking Feb. 26 — coincidentally the anniversary of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 — but the developments of the weekend in this fast-breaking story have taken up the challenge of the preceding quote, buoying the spirit. The United States and Germany are supplying Ukraine with arms. The European Union has closed its airspace to Russian planes. France has seized a Russian cargo ship. Just as important, the U.S. has teken the lead in following the money as the West cuts off select Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system. Sanctions may not be everything and their effect, as President Joe Biden pointed out, may not be immediate. But everyone doing his/her part helps, as do the tennis players scrawling “No to War” on camera lenses at matches, soccer players refusing to play in Russia and social media gatekeepers dispelling disinformation about what’s going on in Ukraine. Also on the intel front, American intelligence seems to be holding, while poor Russian intelligence is helping to slow the Russian advance, along with the Russian inability to fight at night, something the Americans excel in..
Even the Chinese are inadvertently helping as Putin’s new BFF — wily President Xi Jinping — triangulates, ginning up the war on Chinese social media while abstaining from offering Russia support at the United Nations. Clearly, Xi sees Putin as the canary in the coal mine. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, Xi may take this as the green light to go after Taiwan. But if Putin gets bogged down in the Soviet version of Afghanistan — which now appears more likely — Xi will step back. Either way, you’ve got to figure he befriended Russia as the weaker partner. If the West plays its cards right down the road, a huge if, we can all use this to our advantage — playing Xi off against Putin.
In the short term, there will be pain to be sure. There already is if $5 gas prices are any indication and that’s nothing compared to the refugees whose immediate needs must be met, and the poor North Africans who can no longer rely on the breadbasket that was Ukraine.
The breadbasket that is Ukraine, for most important in all this is the resistance of the Ukrainian people led by courageous President Volodymyr Zelinsky, who is displaying leadership from the front. This is being met by the brave Russians who are protesting at home. Here history is an instructive comfort as it favors the long game we must all now play. Just as the colonists held off the British Empire, the Vietnamese the Americans and not so long ago the Afghans the British, the Soviets and the Americans, we must never underestimate the power of a people to defend what is theirs.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” the anthropologist Margaret Mead noted in 1976. “indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”