Let Czar Putin overextend himself

Vladimir Putin says he isn’t a czar, but increasingly he’s behaving like one. So why not let him go the way of Russia’s last czar—and sink himself by overextending himself militarily?

Despite the risk that a weak or dithering response by the West to Putin’s new advance into Syria will only encourage the hardliners around him, it may well be that Washington and NATO’s best response is to let Putin fight. Russia’s leader has imperial ambitions, but he does not have the economy to support them, especially as a decade of high oil prices recedes into the past. Aside from arms and vodka, Russia sells no competitive products internationally. The ruble now costs about three times less of what it was before the financial crisis of 2008, and it doesn’t help that politically Russia is isolated. Even China and India–the two countries that traditionally take the side of Russia’s foreign policy and whose economies are in much better shape–are unlikely to make any substantial contributions to Putin’s mission in Syria, if they were to jeopardize their relations with the US and EU.


Meanwhile, the Russian people are already paying a very high price for the annexation of Crimea: 19th century-style land-grabs may stimulate nationalism but not the economy. The Northern Caucasus may also explode again, as the relative peace in Chechnya is contingent on massive sums of cash sent from the Kremlin to Grozny and on the personal allegiance of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to Putin. As Leo Tolstoy persuasively showed in his novel Hadji Murat, this is the kind of allegiance that can change at any moment.

In this political and economic environment, only a madman in Putin’s shoes would want to involve his country into another costly war. Even roads are still non-existent in Russia: almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet Union, there is no good highway connecting two major Russian cities: Moscow and St. Petersburg.

So perhaps it’s wise to welcome Putin to the fight. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already took the initiative by paying a visit to Putin in Moscow on Sept 21. The two leaders discussed the consequences of Russia’s aid to Assad for the state of Israel.
Putin, of course, sees the Syrian issue another way. By sending tanks and equipment to Syria and declaring forthrightly that he supports Bashar Assad, he is seeking to move past Ukraine, and he wants readmission into the councils of the major powers, which are themselves edging toward an acknowledgement that simply calling for Assad’s ouster is neither workable or wise at this juncture. It was little surprise that in Putin’s address to the United Nations on Monday, he barely mentioned Ukraine while blaming the U.S. and NATO for instigating the chaos in the Middle East, even drawing a direct parallel between the attempts to export socialism by the USSR and attempts to export democracy by the West.

In Putin Russia has not seen such a tremendous concentration of power since the Romanovs of the czarist era. Autocratic and secretive, the Kremlin’s current decision making is reminiscent of Byzantine and Roman politics, not even of the good old Soviet days. In an interview last week with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Putin told Charlie Rose that he is not a czar but in reality, even in the USSR, key foreign policy decisions took more time and were made more collegially. It took more than a year and many heated discussions for Brezhnev’s Politburo to dispatch the Soviet 40th army to Afghanistan—the last time the Kremlin seriously overextended itself. It took only a few days or maybe even hours for Vladimir Putin to make up his mind regarding the future of Crimea.

Putin seems to have defined his new Middle East strategy just as fast. Officially, Russia’s president claims that his goal is to build a new coalition to fight Islamic State, as he indicated in his UN address, and the terrorist group does indeed pose a serious threat to Russia, as Sunni Moslem communities in Central Asia and the Caucasus provide fertile recruiting soil for terrorists. Putin claims that over 2,000 citizens of Russia and post-Soviet states are already fighting on the side of Islamic State. The most recent destructions and executions in the Syrian town of Palmyra must have also been played a role: Putin’s native St. Petersburg has been referred to “Northern Palmyra” since the reign of Catherine the Great and romanticized in Russian poetry, literature and art.politico