Antony J. Blinken
If Xi Jinping is the world’s most powerful man, conventional wisdom puts Vladimir Putin a close second. He’s made his own bare-chested virility synonymous with a resurgent Russia. Mr. Putin seems to be playing on every chessboard, from what Russia calls its “near abroad” to the Middle East, from Europe to America. When it comes to sowing doubt about democracy and fueling dissension among Americans, Mr. Putin is eating our lunch. And Russia retains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, with new weapons in the works that Mr. Putin saw fit to brag about during last week’s state of the nation speech — even if his rhetoric far outpaced their technical reality.But elsewhere, Russia’s adventurism is feeding a growing, gnawing case of indigestion. And it masks a deep-set rot in Russia itself. Mr. Putin is a masterful painter of facades. But his Russian village looks increasingly less Putin and increasingly more Potemkin.
Let’s start with Syria. It’s true that Moscow’s in extremis intervention prevented the collapse of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and preserved Russia’s sole foothold in the Middle East. But having put his finger in the dike, Mr. Putin can’t remove it or Mr. Assad will drown. So Russia is stuck in the middle of multiple conflicts it cannot control — between the Assad regime and the rebels; between Turkey and the Kurds; between American-led coalition forces and the Islamic State; between Israel, Syria and Iran; between Sunni and Shiite. This Rubik’s cube of conflicting interests makes partners on one front adversaries on another.
Far from abating, Syria’s civil war is raging — slowly but surely becoming more lethal to Russia’s forces, more damaging to its reputation, and more of a drain on its resources. Moscow is fully complicit in Mr. Assad’s murderous campaign against the primarily Sunni opposition, which has now reached new levels of depravity with the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Ghouta, a suburban area outside Damascus. Moscow’s alliance with Mr. Assad and Iran in slaughtering Sunnis risks alienating Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey. It also will inflame Russia’s own Sunni Muslim population and their brethren in Central Asia and the Caucasus, lighting the fuse for more terrorism directed at Moscow.
Mr. Putin insists that any Russians now fighting on the ground in Syria are guns for hire. But American intelligence believes that the man who controls them is Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a prominent oligarch close to Mr. Putin who takes his orders from the Kremlin and is one of the 13 oligarchs recently indicted in the United States’ special prosecutor’s investigation of Russian meddling the 2016 election. Irregular or not, the Russian fighters in Syria increasingly find themselves in crossfires of their own making, including an ill-advised attack on American-backed anti-Islamic State forces in eastern Syria. When American air power came to their defense, as many as 200 Russians may have been killed. Mr. Putin swept the debacle under the rug to avoid acknowledging the deaths at home — having repeatedly declared mission accomplished — or risking direct conflict with the United States.
Syria may not be Russia’s new Afghan quagmire yet, but its quicksand is sucking Russia in deeper and deeper.
Meanwhile, whatever national pride Mr. Putin piqued in seizing Crimea is getting old, and the region’s needs make a consistent claim on Russia’s treasury. Worse, his intervention in Eastern Ukraine has precipitated many of the very developments Mr. Putin sought to prevent.
NATO is more energized than it has been in years — not because of President Trump’s browbeating, but in response to Mr. Putin’s aggression. The alliance now has forces on regular rotational air, land and sea deployments along Russia’s border, and its budget is increasing, in part with a sustained infusion of funds from the United States. The European Union has revived the idea of strengthening its own defense capacity, spurred on by Mr. Putin’s threats and Mr. Trump’s rhetorical retreat from America’s commitment to Europe’s defense. Europeans are getting more serious about energy security. They are multiplying new routes, connections and sources for fuel and renewable power. That’s making it harder for Mr. Putin to use oil and gas as strategic levers. American-led sanctions, despite Mr. Trump’s reluctance to impose them, have done real, sustained damage to Russia’s economy.
As for keeping Russia’s fist on Ukraine’s future, Mr. Putin has managed to alienate the vast majority of its citizens for generations. Systemic corruptionis now a bigger bar to Ukraine’s European trajectory than is Moscow.
Mr. Putin embarks on foreign adventures in part to distract his people from Russia’s putrefaction at home. Reform is stagnant. The single-cylinder economy can’t break its addiction to energy. Corruption and kleptocracy are all-corrosive. The population is aging and declining. The opposition is repressed but resilient.
As former Vice President Joe Biden — for whom I worked as national security adviser — told the crowd at the annual Munich Security Conference last month, “By almost any objective measure, this is a country” that is “in serious decline.”
The irony is that the United States and Europe have more to fear from a weak Russia than a strong one. The shakier things get, the more Mr. Putin will lash out.
But even as he plays a weak hand, Mr. Putin holds a trump card: his low-cost, high-impact meddling in Western democracies.
Mr. Putin’s primary goal in the 2016 elections was to delegitimize our institutions and pit Americans against each other. Mr. Trump insists at every opportunity that there was no collusion by him or his campaign. Special Counsel Robert Mueller will figure that one out.
But every time Mr. Trump attacks a core American institution (the intelligence community, the F.B.I., judges, the media, Congress) or denigrates one group of Americans (take your pick) or spreads fake news, he is doing Mr. Putin’s work for him. The collusion is now — and it is the greatest source of Mr. Putin’s depleting but still very dangerous strength.
Antony J. Blinken, (@ABlinken), a deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, is a managing director of the Penn Biden Center, a co-founder of WestExec Advisors and a contributing opinion writer.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
0 Response to "Behold Vladimir V. Potemkin"
Post a Comment