It is ugly and will get uglier. Vladimir Putin isn’t going to stop anytime soon. You don’t launch a full-scale military assault on another nation and two days later say, “Oh, I think I’ve made my point,” and go home. He was never interested in negotiations, he was never open to argument, he set this in motion and will follow through to the imagined victory point in his head.
He has shocked the West. He wanted to shock the West.
In doing so he has shattered the European peace, broken international law, and attempted to re-establish brute force as a primary political determinant of the future. All this constitutes a major upheaval.
We will find out if world leadership is up to it, and American leadership equal to the moment. So far the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that fractious alliance, has held together, and the U.S. tactic of publicly sharing its intelligence proved wise.
People draw parallels to World War II, and there are some, but this isn’t 1938. The Speaker of the House, on returning Wednesday from the Munich Security Conference, said, “This is our moment. . . . This is a Sudetenland.” There was something bizarrely rah-rah and certainly half-baked about her statement.
Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland took place in a prenuclear world. The world of 2022 has thousands of nuclear weapons of all sizes, weights, purposes and delivery mechanisms. Sudetenland occurred in a world of physicalness—big printing presses, hand-calculated bank balances. Our world is run by computers vulnerable to devastating cyberattacks. Sudetenland was a quick and largely unresisted invasion. Ukraine won’t be bloodless, and there’s no reason to believe it will be quick.
The point is we are not repeating history. This war is uncharted territory. So no, we’re not living through something you streamed on Netflix; you don’t know the end of the story; and if you’re in government you may or may not be Churchill, we’ll see.
When I was a kid they used to say a coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man but one. In time I came to think no, the imaginative die a thousand deaths, the dullard but one. You have to maintain an eye for peril and see its implications. The world is in new peril.
On the unimaginative end of the spectrum there is J.D. Vance, a candidate for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Ohio, whose Theory of Enacted Populism apparently involves hearing the most careless thing a voter says in a diner and repeating it with an air of ingenuous self-discovery. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He cares about fentanyl coming over the border and killing our kids. So do a lot of us, but responsible people care about both. This is a lousy moment for mindless pandering.
You may not care about war but war cares about you. Russia isn’t Upper Volta with a gas station; it’s Upper Volta with a gas station, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and a furious owner. What he does may have repercussions. If you would lead, you don’t get not to care.
I see little profit in continuing to go over who blew it most since the collapse of Soviet communism. Did the West in its blithe triumphalism miscalculate by letting NATO move east? Did our diplomats, those Brooks Brothers smoothies, patronize the old apparatchiks in their boxy gray suits? Yes, they did. I’m where George Kennan was: It was a mistake to enlarge NATO by admitting former Warsaw Pact states; it fueled resentment, encouraged paranoia and embarrassed democrats in Moscow who’d pushed against communism at some cost.
But that debate shouldn’t freeze thought now. Argue later who was the biggest jerk 25 years ago. Whether the U.S. and the West were wrong or not, Mr. Putin is still wrong to invade Ukraine.
Is Mr. Putin mad? Are his actions the result of increasing instability?
“[Emmanuel] Macron noticed a change in Mr. Putin’s demeanor when speaking to him on the phone over the course of the pandemic. ‘He tended to talk in circles, rewriting history,’ a close aide to Mr. Macron said.” This is from reporters Ann M. Simmons, Noemie Bisserbe and Bojan Pancevski in their Wednesday front-pager in the Journal.
Mr. Macron, a French official said, found Mr. Putin “more rigid, more isolated” than in the past.
In his speech to the Russian people on Monday, Mr. Putin’s mind circled within a tightening narrative of grievance. Lenin and Stalin failed to make Ukraine’s standing clear, Khrushchev messed up Crimea. The speech has been called fiery but it wasn’t; it was preoccupied with the historically arcane and made no attempt to persuade anyone outside Vladimir Putin’s head. It had the wound-up particularity of the local grocer when he talks about his 30-year feud with the butcher down the street.
It was Mr. Putin’s speech the night the war began that had real menace. In an unscheduled statement on Russian television, he warned those nations that might “consider interfering” with Russia’s actions that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.”
That was some kind of threat from a man with a nuclear arsenal and a talent for malware. It was followed by the sound of explosions in Kyiv. He is trying to scare the world.
Sometimes leaders are mad. Sometimes they want you to think they’re mad. Sometimes both.
What is important from the West is unity and strength—not “toughness” but strength. You don’t have to make a great show of determination if you’re really determined, you just have to be who you are.
Mr. Putin is alone, not that he cares; everyone knows who the bad guy is in this drama. No country has said he is in the right, not one, not even China. He is alone, burnishing his credentials as a junior monster of history.
The opinion of the world matters and has a force of its own.
Wars are expensive, occupations extremely so; it costs money to keep an army on the ground, to fuel and feed it. There is the human cost: young men will die. This will all cost Mr. Putin and the cost will increase with time. He knows this, he’s factored it in, but the West should make it costlier wherever possible.
All the West is going to have to play a long, cool, careful game. Leaders and officials should do nothing to provoke. In Europe they should speak in one voice to the extent possible: define, describe, be precise, no histrionics. Don’t taunt. Britain’s defense minister, Ben Wallace, said Wednesday said they’d “kicked the backside” of the Russians in the Crimean war in the 1850s, and “can always do it again.” That war is mostly remembered for the Charge of the Light Brigade. Sometimes it’s good to quiet your rousing voices and concentrate on not letting this become World War III.
The West is on the right side. It should keep its height, keep its nerve and hold together. Be cool, press hard, resist.
Let the world see what happens to a man who does what Vladimir Putin is doing. Show gravity. Because it’s all very grave.