On Russia and the limits of asymmetric warfare

We take a break from the festive season to attend, briefly, to matters geopolitical.

This piece follows from a comment thread between our own djchefron and Randy Abraham, to which I interjected in my usual fashion.

Washington Monthly has this excellent article on how Republicans are trying to rewrite history vis a vis recent US relations with Russia.

Our DJ quoted the article's opening paragraphs:

In 2001, George H.W. Bush said, “I looked [Vladimir Putin] in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy…I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

In 2008, Hillary Clinton responded by saying, “He was a KGB agent — by definition he doesn’t have a soul.”

In 2009, the Obama administration launched a “reset” in the U.S. relationship with Russia.

In 2012, Mitt Romney said that “[Russia] is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

In 2012, Barack Obama responded by saying “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

In the years since Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election to damage Clinton and support Trump, those statements have caused confusion because not many Americans are well-versed in the events that transpired in Russia over those years.

(Emphases mine, as you will soon find out why.)

From the article, it seems that Barack Obama and George W. Bush got Vladimir Putin all wrong, and Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney (!) had the bead of him.

Randy responded with this astute comment:

The 2012 Obama comment has been misconstrued. Romney was talking about billing more battle ships, and Obama was talking about combatting cyber and nontraditional warfare.

To which I responded:

However, I think both PBO and HRC didn't expect Russia to do what it's done. Hillary didn't trust the KGB agent, and PBO kept that gimlet eye on Russia, but I don't think either of them expected the full-out asymmetric warfare Russia would conduct.

No, President Obama wasn't "weak on Russia". But why would you start another conflict when you didn't have to—remember, Pres. Obama's 2012 comments were before Russia attacked Ukraine—and when you were trying to wind down from your immediate predecessor's disastrous wars?

However, generals and political leaders all have the fault of fighting the last war. War is such a fraught and chaotic thing, that you perforce have to go by what you know from before. It's what led the French to construct a useless defensive line after World War I. It's what led the US to commit tank brigades to a jungle, guerilla war in Vietnam. By the time you realize you're in a new type of conflict, it's too late, and you have to play catch-up. Most of the time, it's a futile exercise to adapt to the new realities.

Russia did what the US didn't: it adapted to its new circumstances.

Putin may brag about amazing, marvelous, no really they're awesome new weapons systems. They have yet to materialize.

The fact is that America is very good at blowing up shit. And it's very good at devising new methods of blowing up shit. No other power in the world's history has been as good as the US at this skill, which it has honed over the past few decades. The Russian Federation's predecessor, the Soviet Union, tried to keep up with America in this endeavor, and, well, now it's the Russian Federation, and it has a male mortality rate on par with the more "third world" parts of the globe.

However, Putin and his mandarins detected a soft underbelly: America's vaunted openness. The World Wide Web may have been invented by a knighted Brit, but it was America which made it what it is today. And, despite the best efforts of Omnicorp USA, it's still, mostly, an open platform, where you can talk to a woman in Shanghai from your bungalow in Venice, CA, for just the price of your internet connection.

This very openness leaves America and the West vulnerable to bad actors. And Putin realized that he could, through the use of this open platform—and the feckless, greedy corporations which monetize it and are leery of doing anything to stop the money flowing—weaponize the divisions already present in American and Western society. (Divisions made all the more glaring, at least in America, because we had a black man in the White House who was head and shoulders above his white peers, which caused those peers from the opposite end of the political spectrum, and many other white people, to lose their shpadoinkles. America would be punished for its effrontery at electing—TWICE—Barack Hussein Obama.)

Brexit was his dry run. And when that proved a smashing success, he immediately turned to ratfucking the US elections, glomming onto the Revolt of the Untermenschen propagated by Donald Trump.

Because make no mistake: Putin's appeal isn't to the intelligentsia. It isn't to the people in the West who know their dicks from their asses. Russia has never trusted the well-educated. It has, in fact, worked throughout its history to silence them, subvert them, or kill them. Stalin's assault on the educated classes wasn't an aberration; it was different only in the scale with which he could execute it.

Putin engaged—and continues to engage—in asymmetric cyber-warfare because it was his only chance to protect his own position against a growing American-led coalition against his regime. His economy is one dependent on resource extraction. If Europe didn't depend on Russia for oil and gas, Russia would be Zambia with nuclear weapons. It has no industry of which to speak save for resource extraction. Only oil and gas keep it from being a completely failed state.

But a nation can engage in this type of warfare for only so long. Eventually, its targets slough off their torpor, or install leadership which is opposed to it. Putin won a Pyrrhic victory in 2016 in the US. He leveraged a sneak attack against America's democratic edifice. It was the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century.

But Pearl Harbor has a lesson for Putin. It roused a sleepy nation, content to allow the world to descend into barbarity, to action. And America in 1941 isn't America in 2019/2020. We are not the insular, isolationist country we were in the days before World War II.

Look at the picture of Pres. Obama staring down a cowed Vladimir Putin. This is the future. This is the future which awaits Russia and its quislings here and in Europe. They should fear what's coming. Their ephemeral victory will be as ash in their mouths. We won't forget or forgive.