The Atlantic: The strategy that can defeat Putin.

[Tomconroy]

Reading some optimistic stuff this morning;




MARCH 7, 2022
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About the author: Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State. He is the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.

First came the shock: the sight of missiles and artillery shells slamming into apartment buildings, helicopters pirouetting in flames, refugees streaming across the border, an embattled and unshaven president pleading with anguished political leaders abroad for help, burly uniformed men posing by burned-out tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, Russian police spot-checking cellphones on Moscow streets for dissident conversations. Distress and anger and resolution were natural reactions. But the time has come to think strategically, asking what the West—and specifically the United States—should do in this crisis and beyond.


French Marshal Ferdinand Foch once said that the first task is to answer the question De quoi s’agit-il?, or “What is it all about?” The answer with respect to Ukraine, as with most other strategic problems, is less straightforward than one might think. At the most basic level, a Russian autocrat is working to subjugate by the most brutal means possible a free and independent country, whose independence he has never accepted. But there are broader issues here as well. The other wars of the post–Cold War era could be understood or interpreted as the consequence of civil war and secession or tit-for-tat responses to aggression. Not the Russian attack on Ukraine. This assault was unprovoked, unlimited in its objectives, and unconstrained in its means. It is, therefore, an assault not only on that country but on all international norms of decent behavior.

A broader world order is at stake; so too is a narrower European order. Putin has made no secret of his bitter opposition to NATO and to the independence of former Soviet republics, and it should be expected that after reducing Ukraine, he would attempt something of a similar nature (if with less intensity) in the Baltic states. He has brought war in its starkest form back to a continent that has thrived largely in its absence for nearly three generations. And his war is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad.


In short, the stakes are enormous, and with them the dangers. And yet there is good news in the remarkable solidarity and decisiveness of the liberal democracies, in Europe and outside it. The roles of Australia and Japan in responding to the Russian invasion are no less significant than those of Britain or France. In that respect, Ukraine 2022 is not Czechoslovakia 1938, not only because it is fighting ferociously but because the democracies are with it in material as well as moral ways. It differs, too, in that this time the aggressor is not Europe’s most advanced economy but one of its least; its military is not the fearsomely effective Wehrmacht but a badly led, semi-competent, if well-armed, horde better suited for and inclined to the massacre of civilians than a fight against its peers. Russia’s failure to command the air, its stalled armored columns, the smoking ruins of its tanks and armored personnel carriers all testify to the Russian army’s weakness. So too does the continuation in office of the long-serving chief of general staff and defense minister who planned and led this operation, a debacle in the face of every advantage of positioning, timing, and material superiority.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/strategy-west-needs-beat-russia/626962/

[pfitz59]

1. Perhaps he thought himself a new Bismark

Limited war for limited gain,

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Maybe Putin will have an epiphany similar to Afghanistan,

that it really isn't worth the investment.

[Chainfire]

8. Putin's strength is in his image of being a real manly man. (The shirtless horse rider.)

You can't be a real manly hero and lose a fight you pick on your small peaceful neighbor. He can not back down without losing his mojo. He will escalate before he walks away. A "hero" like Putin would rather bring the world down in flames than to be seen as a "loser." His virtually unlimited power has led him to believe that he is a god. Gods can't fail.

I do not believe that Russians are bad people, however, their traditional stoicism works against their best interest. The Russians are going to have to remove the cancer or live with the consequences. Russians, as well as Ukrainians are Putin's victim. Putin doesn't care any more about his subjects than his "enemy." You can tyrants or peace, not both.

[plimsoll]

9. What is self image worth to a narcissist?

If anything he’ll double down. Ukraine fought back, they were supposed to capitulate. People think he isn’t the badass he pretends to be. These are slights he’ll have to avenge.

[Duppers]

10. Nailed it!

[JHB]

3. So Putin's a Neocon

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

-- Bush White House aide, strongly suspected of being Karl Rove, to journalist Ron Susskind

[Lonestarblue]

6. Karl Rove has done great damage to our democracy with no remorse.

His goal was to create conditions where Republicans would hold permanent power with Democrats always being a minority party in government, even as a majority of the people. Only Trump, many members of his administration, and the Republicans who enabled him (like McConnell) are more evil. Like Putin, they have all worked to convince people to ignore facts and to buy their BS reality.

[uponit7771]

18. +1,

[Irish_Dem]

4. Excellent and very accurate article.

Gives the West a strategy to defeat Putin.

[dalton99a]

7. Kick

If the Russian government does not simply collapse, and possibly even if it does, negotiations will occur. Conceivably, if Moscow is feeling pressure now from sanctions, losses, and the psychological jolt of its initial failures, preliminaries may be under way. At some point the West, with Ukraine, may wish to offer Russia an “off-ramp,” particularly after Putin exits power—but there is no point in doing so now. States, like individuals, accept off-ramps only when they are looking for them, and thus far Russia has offered no indication that Russia is seeking a way out of its predicament. Moreover, it is a Soviet technique of old, for which arms controllers in the United States in particular have always had a fatal weakness, to induce opponents to begin negotiating against themselves. Let the Russians make the first proposals.

For the United States, the decade ahead will require not merely the initial moves made by the Biden administration but a more profound readjustment of strategy. A new defense-strategy document has been in the works for months now; it should be set aside and rewritten for a very different world. There will be no overwhelming shift to focus on China. Rather, the United States will have to be, as it was for most of the 20th century, an ambidextrous power, asserting its strength and managing coalitions in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific. That will, in turn, require larger defense budgets and, no less important, a change in mindset.

More profoundly, American administrations will have to accept the primacy of national-security concerns in a way that they have not for decades. That does not exclude reform at home — the experiences of the Civil War and Vietnam, among others, suggest that doing both simultaneously is possible. But it does mean that national security will have to be at the forefront of American thinking. Americans will have to hear from their leaders why that is so — and because this president is insufficiently eloquent to do so adequately on his own, he will need to recruit surrogates from both parties to aid him. The Republican Party’s political leadership in Congress has rallied to the Ukrainian cause; the Biden administration should take advantage of that.

Many hazards lie ahead, for that is the nature of conflict with an unscrupulous and possibly somewhat deranged opponent. But all the odds are on the West’s side. The valiant Ukrainian population is willing to fight to the end and, for the moment, the West has found the unity and resolve to aid it. The Western economies are far and away the wealthiest, most resilient, and most advanced. The Western militaries deteriorated after the end of the Cold War, to a shocking degree, but their disarmament is not comparable to their desultory state in the 1930s. And the West faces not an ideological challenge comparable to Nazism or Communism but a vicious form of nationalism entrenched in a country that saw a million more deaths than births last year, that is burdened with a corrupt and limited economy, and that is led by an isolated, aging dictator.

Vladimir Putin has one advantage only. As a KGB officer he learned to play head games with his enemies, be they dissidents or foreign powers. Fear is not the consequence of Russian actions but rather their object. It is Moscow’s chief weapon, and Russian leaders are adept in its use. But fear is also susceptible to the remedy applied by the Ukrainians today, and by many others in the past. Courage, as Churchill famously said, is the virtue that makes all other virtues possible. Without courage, the West cannot succeed, but with it, it cannot fail.

[KPN]

11. This is where the author went off the tracks in my view.

He is far more hawkish relative to federal budget priorities than I believe we should or even need to be. Our defense spending is ethically corrupt in the face of the existing socio-economic inequities that tear at our country’s fabric. The idea of actually increasing it without first providing for at least greater, if not basic economic security of our people is personally unappealing —and in my view would be a huge mistake; it would be a give me to GQP defense as well as deficit hawks.

[lagomorph777]

13. Yup - too much emphasis on hardware; not enough on defeating foreign and domestic propaganda.

The latter is what has weakened us so much in the past decade.

[crickets]

21. 👆👆 Bingo.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

12. Good article thank you. Just heard on CNN though that only 5% of the Russian armament

has been destroyed. This seems completely insurmountable to me if the goal is to completely annihilate Ukraine

[Beetwasher.]

14. 5% in Two Weeks

Not bad.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

15. Well CNN didn't quantify. Quite a difference, thanks.

[intrepidity]

17. Well, it's only been two weeks nt

[Laura PourMeADrink]

22. Duh. But it does mean that it's in this moment in time Russian forces

Have 95% of their armaments, right?

Personally I think this is an important point because there's so much noise out there about Ukraine winning the war.

[intrepidity]

23. Yeah. I worry for what's ahead.

95% is still a LOT. And I'd bet he didn't send his best stuff yet.

We (all the allies) need to massively over-deliver and fast.

[Sherman A1]

16. 5% destroyed, but one wonders how much is out of action due to supply or maintenance issues.

By all measures this campaign should have been but over by now. That it isn't is very telling.

[uponit7771]

19. That's horrible against mostly unmounted troops and AA/ATGM

[UTUSN]

20. PUTEEN's military 'not fearsomely effective" - but now it just takes a couple of nukes

[marie999]

24. If Putin cannot win with conventional weapons, I believe he will use tactical nuclear weapons.