The White House is right to worry, but the cost of self-deterring in the face of Putin’s madness is too high to bear. At issue is not simply some tracts of eastern Ukraine and Russia-occupied Crimea, but rather the post-World War II liberal order. To compromise on Putin’s conquest, as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested, would be to reward aggression and lower the barrier to its use by immunizing aggressors from the consequences of their actions. In addition, if Putin is allowed to digest chunks of Ukraine, he will need to subsidize them in a way that will force Putin into further adventurism to distract Russians from the financial price of administering the new territory.
Instead of compromise, Putin’s threats require a supply of both defensive and offensive systems not only to Ukraine, but to Japan and pro-Western countries along the entirety of Russia’s frontier. Putin should know that while the Ukraine conflict is now limited to Ukraine, he puts Russian territory not only alongside Ukraine’s frontier at risk, but rather Russia’s entire periphery. After all, there is not a single neighbor of Russia that it has not victimized at some point in history.
Internally, Putin likely understands what Ukraine has become. While Putin hoped that the invasion of Ukraine might be like Catherine the Great’s Polish Wars, he has instead replicated the strategic disaster of the Russo-Japanese War. Putin knows that rather than expand territory and usher in a Golden Age like Empress Catherine the Great did, he has set Russia down the path of chaos, revolution, and perhaps territorial erosion as Nicholas II did. The humiliation of Russia’s defeat by Japan led to the 1905 Revolution that saw the creation of the Duma to constrain Tsar Nicholas II’s power, but it also presaged the collapse of the entire system and Nicholas II’s execution just over a decade later. Putin has, simply put, become a 21st Century Nicholas II.
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