PUTIN: THE RESULT OF WESTERN WEAKNESS – THE POWER VACUUM (By walter russell mead

PUTIN: THE RESULT OF WESTERN WEAKNESS – THE POWER VACUUM (By walter russell meade)

“President Obama and his European colleagues utterly failed to predict the invasion of Ukraine, and have repeatedly underestimated both Putin’s determination and his ability to defy cherished Western norms on the road to his long-term project of rebuilding the Soviet Union at Western expense. “

“Putin doesn’t see his job as one of building up a powerful force to counter a rising Germany. He sees his job as being able to take advantage of the coming failures and catastrophes of what he believes to be the grandiose and unsustainable Western project in Europe.”

“Putin believes that Germany is now a posthistorical nation in the sense that it is unwilling to fight. It may belong to NATO and have an army, but the German population as a whole is as pacifistic now as the British and French publics were in the 1930s. German politicians and newspaper intellectuals prattle on about NATO, Putin believes, but when the chips are down, they would rather yield a thousand Donbasses than fight a single campaign.”

“…In this calculation, Germany is overextended and lacks the wit, the will and the wherewithal to stabilize the large and elaborate construct of the enlarged, post 1990-EU. With Merkel in Napoleon’s place, Putin may see Europe today looking much as Alexander I must have seen it as Napoleon retreated from Moscow. Italy is mutinous, Spain in flames, Britain defiant and France is no happier with Merkel today than Austria was with Napoleon in 1813.”

“…The United States, meanwhile, is from this Russian perspective strategically clueless and largely out of the game. President Obama is amusing himself with various pursuits and his incoherent and crisis-ridden Middle East mix of policies gives him no time to think hard about Europe; Congress lacks the cohesion and the constitutional means to force an alternative on him.”

“…Putin seems to believe that the false foundations underneath the imposing façade of the West continue to erode at an accelerating pace. It does not take a strong push to knock over a house of cards; Putin, one suspects, still thinks he can win. He is certainly acting that way.”