Vladimir
Putin is not Hitler whose ultimate aim went far beyond slicing off pieces of
adjacent territory to unite the German peoples under the Third Reich. He sought
to dominate Europe and destroy the Soviet Union. Initially Hitler had no desire
to confront the United States, or even the United Kingdom, which he was
prepared to leave free to enjoy its empire if it would stop fighting him.
It
was only his megalomania fuelled by a series of easy victories and the utter
stupidity of Japan in bringing the US into the war that was the undoing of the
Fuhrer and his Axis allies.
I
would suggest that a more relevant date from history is 1962 when Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev was so confident he had the measure of the young and
relatively new US President, John Kennedy that he thought he could get away
with planting nuclear missiles on his client state of Cuba, little more than
100 kilometres from the American mainland.
It
was a simple bully boy tactic, backed by a modicum of logic: after all the US
was just as threatening with nuclear missiles stationed on the Soviet Union’s
doorstep in Turkey. However he miscalculated and blinked first in the
“eyeball-to-eyeball” confrontation. A year later Khrushchev had been deposed.
Would
the Soviet Union have ever used those Cuban-based missiles? Of course not; the
concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was clearly understood by both
parties even if then it hadn’t been widely debated. There was not even a need
for them. Both sides already had armouries of missiles quite capable of
reaching the other from their own homelands.
The
rationale behind Cuba was to show the world that not only had the Soviet Union
recovered from the ruins of World War II it was now the dominant superpower and
that its centralised system of government was triumphant over the decadent
democracies of the West. It would have influenced non-aligned nations in
Africa, Asia and South America to fall in behind the Kremlin, leaving the US
isolated and the remaining Western democracies in disarray.
Instead,
the events of 1963 created the seeds of the Soviet Union’s eventual failure. It
took a long while and for a time it seemed that international communism was
still on the march especially in South-east Asia, but the rot had set in and
was eating away at the philosophical foundations. Afghanistan proved the
edifice could be propped up only by brute force and eventually the leadership
tired of the struggle.
Russian
born Konstantin Sarkivisov, Professor Emeritus at Yamanashi Gakuin University
in Japan, believes the low-point for the former superpower came not with the
break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, but a decade later when Putin, in his
first term, seemed ready to abandon any pretence of continued rivalry with the
West and put out feelers for eventual membership of the EU and even NATO.
The
moves were opposed by Washington and even the lesser suggestion that there be
visa-less travel between Russia and the EU was rejected. From that point Putin
realised there was no point in courting the West. That Russia’s influence could
be rebuilt only through rivalry and confrontation.
So
we had the five-day war against Georgia, the threats to slice off territory
from Moldova, and now Crimea. The West’s answer to date has been a range of
economic sanctions, so mild they have hardly caused a ripple in the global
financial system. Worst of all, US President Barak Obama has specifically taken
the military option off the table even if Moscow uses force to annex further
parts of Ukraine with significant ethnic Russian populations. which most recent
events in the eastern part of the country indicate he is ready to do. Putin is
treading a risky course, but so far his gamble has paid off.
Writing
in Foreign Policy magazine, former
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says the biggest casualty in this
inadequate response will be the principles on which the West is built as it
stands by while Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova are punished by Russia simply
because of their desire to live in a free and democratic world.
Someone
is blinking – and it is not the Russian president.
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