On Ukraine, America Has Good Options
1:02 PM, MAR 4, 2014 • BY SETH CROPSEY
Vladimir Putin is aggressive, increasingly armed, and dangerous. Besides his recent attack against Ukraine, he invaded Georgia in 2008 and has been rearming since well before then. Like his Communist and czarist predecessors, Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s control. Russian military spending—for example, on its impressive new nuclear attack submarine, theSeverodvinsk, along with Moscow’s ambitious plans to rebuild its Pacific fleet—indicate that Putin does not regard the post-Communist contraction in imperial reach as permanent.
He is also highly vulnerable. He is sustained by the export of oil and gas, whose revenue lines the pockets of his political base, Russia’s plutocracy. But he needs foreign technology to extract and export energy, and he depends heavily on unchallenged control over the gas and oil markets to his main purchasers in Europe. Large oil and gas revenues and aggressiveness is a toxic brew. The invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula this past weekend demonstrates again that Putin is moving deliberately to gather back what was lost when the Soviet empire imploded.
As with stars, the death of empires is usually explosive. However, unlike stars, imperial explosion is not bound by physics to occur simultaneously with the precipitating event. The Ottoman Empire perished a slow death that ended in the early 20th century. Current Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s embrace of the old Ottomans’ religious fervor, his longing for the associated caliphate and his navalist ambitions show that a century can pass before a state convulses in partial reaction to its lost imperium. |
