Putin & His Enablers
Vladimir Putin props up totalitarians in neighboring countries, crushes dissent at home, pursues cyberwarfare abroad. He invaded a sovereign nation and targeted civilians with missiles, indiscriminately hitting hospitals and apartment buildings. He then kidnapped their children.
This past weekend, the thug whom he allowed to build a merciless mercenary force briefly turned on him and marched toward Moscow, threatening to turn the tragedy of Russia into something worse.
For some commentators on the left and right, it is clear who is to blame for this: The United States.
If we hadn’t encouraged the expansion of NATO, they argue, Putin wouldn’t have felt so “unsafe.” If we hadn’t given Ukraine weapons, the war wouldn’t have “escalated.” The darker corners even buy Putin’s propaganda that Ukraine “isn’t a real country.”
We somehow drove Yevgeny Prigozhin to despair, and nearly plunged Russia into civil war. Why can’t we just worry about the problems at home?
Because you can’t be America first and not worry about what happens in the rest of the world.
What is happening is the fault of one man, and one man only: Vladimir Putin. From the time he took power, Putin desired another empire. He saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a historic injustice, and the former captive nations as wayward sheep.
What people do you sacrifice to make Putin feel “safe”? Ukraine, Belarus . . . how about the Balkans? Does he get Poland and Hungary? Barack Obama let him take Crimea in 2014. Putin came back for the rest of the country in 2022. Concessions don’t satisfy Vlad, they only embolden him. Ask Neville Chamberlain.
And what would we have gotten if we allowed him to swallow Kyiv? An even stronger petro-dictatorship with superpower ambitions. A leader able to better manipulate the price of oil, even if we built up domestic production. Think we’re spending too much on the military now? What if Russia is at Western Europe’s doorstep? Or do we not care about those countries either?
As for China, its Communist leaders would love to have a Russia that distractingly menaced Europe and America while it pursued its own global ambitions.
True, a toppled Putin is itself a scary scenario. Would the next would-be Prigozhin be able to keep the country united, keep nuclear weapons secure?
But these are questions that the America and the rest of the world must deal with eventually. Putin won’t not live forever, whether he dies of a coup or the cancer that reportedly haunts him.
Appeasing Putin now doesn’t make the future of Russia any more secure. We should continue helping Ukraine in pursuit of victory, then do what we can to rebuild that country. Meanwhile, we should encourage — without direct intervention — the most moderate elements of Russian society to try for a better future.
The years since the fall of the Berlin Wall have seen an expansion of prosperity and peace nearly unparalleled in history. There were failings, mistakes, but Pax Americana lifted billions out of poverty and avoided the large-scale wars of the past.
It’s no surprise the hate-America left would deny this and claim we have no moral right. It’s disappointing to see swaths of the right taken by this delusion, as if isolationism will magically solve all our problems.
Be careful what we wish for? We wish for a better world, one free of despots like Vladimir Putin.