Is Putin winning? Depends on how you define success
Once again, Vladimir Putin is on the move in ways the Obama White House did not anticipate. Once again, U.S. foreign policy analysts can’t agree on whether he’s acting out of brilliance or desperation.
Is Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria a geopolitical masterstroke? Is he filling a regional vacuum, creating a new Baghdad-Tehran-Damascus-Moscow axis, demonstrating the impotence of U.S. policy? Is his provocation putting NATO on the ropes?
Or is Putin actually acting out of weakness, trying to save a deteriorating position? Should we ignore his bluster and macho photo ops, take note of his slumping economy and sanctions-bitten inner circle, and assume that his Syria intervention will lead to quagmire and blowback?
The curious reality is that these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, because whether Putin is “winning” depends on how you define success.
If success means a more prosperous Russia with an array of client states, a solid domestic foundation for Putin’s regime and Russia’s re-emergence as an attractive civilizational rival to the liberal democratic West (a recurring fantasy of Putinists), then there isn’t anything particularly impressive about the Russian leader’s record.
You can argue that he’s been playing a bad hand well, but his cards still look considerably worse than they did when oil prices were higher, or after his splendid little war with Georgia in 2008.
But suppose we judge Putin’s maneuvers by whether they’re weakening the Pax Americana and the major institutions (NATO, the EU) of the post-Cold War West.
On this metric, he is having more success. His annexation of Crimea, for instance, saddled Moscow with all kinds of nearterm and long-term problems. But it established a meaningful precedent regarding the limits of Western power, a kind of counterexample to the first Gulf War, by proving that recognized borders still can be redrawn by military force.
His Syrian machinations, similarly, haven’t restored the Assad regime’s control of that unhappy country. But they have helped prove that America’s “Assad must go” line is just empty bluster.
Putin’s gambits also have had second-order consequences for the fraying, fractious European project. His Ukrainian wars and Baltic saber-rattling have heightened none-too-buried tensions between Eastern Europeans and their German “partners.” His support for populist parties of the left and right (from Syriza to the National Front) has widened the cracks in the EU. And now his Syrian intervention is likely to at least temporarily worsen the refugee crisis that’s dividing and disorienting the entire Continent.
To be clear: Putin is a Russian nationalist, not the leader of Spectre or the League of Shadows. He doesn’t want chaos for its own sake, and he no doubt believes that a weakened NATO, a divided EU and a crumbling Pax Americana are necessary for his empire’s return to greatness.
But that return seems far out of his reach, and what’s closer to his grasp is something more destructive — a wrecker’s legacy, not Peter the Great’s, in which his own people gain little, but the world grows more unstable with every move he makes.