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Once again, Vladimir Putin is on the move in ways the Obama White House did not anticipate. Once again, U.S. foreign policy analysts can’t agree on whether he’s acting out of brilliance or desperation.
Is Putin’s bombing campaign in Syria a geopolitical masterstroke? Is he filling a regional vacuum, creating a new Baghdad-Tehran-Damascus-Moscow axis, demonstrating the impotence of U.S. foreign policy? Is his strategy of provocation putting NATO on the ropes?
Or is Putin actually acting out of weakness, trying to save a deteriorating position? Is his Middle Eastern gambit, like his Ukrainian intervention, a flailing, foredoomed to regain ground that Russia has lost of late? Should we ignore his bluster and macho photo ops, take note of his slumping economy and sanctions-bitten inner circle, and assume his Syria intervention will lead to quagmire and blowback?
The curious reality is that these interpretations are not mutually exclusive because whether Putin is “winning” depends on how you define success.
If success means a more prosperous Russia with an array of client states, a solid domestic foundation for Putin’s regime and Russia’s re-emergence as an attractive civilizational rival to the liberal democratic West (a recurring fantasy of Putinists), then there isn’t anything particularly impressive about the Russian leader’s record.
Putin probably would trade all his territorial gains in Crimea and Donetsk for a Ukraine that was still securely in his diplomatic and economic orbit. He clearly would be better off if his one Middle Eastern client were not presently losing a civil war to ISIS and the Nusra Front. And he would presumably prefer that the Russian economy were not grimly stagnant and likely to remain so.
You can argue that he’s been playing a bad hand well, but his cards still look considerably worse than they did when oil prices were higher, or after his splendid little war with Georgia in 2008.
And even his somewhat successful plays highlight the extent to which Russian power remains atrophied compared to its Cold War past. The front line of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe is territory that Moscow once ruled with ease, and even there Putin has to settle for stalemates. His Middle Eastern foray is inevitably limited; even after a major defense buildup, Russia is hardly positioned to lead a sweeping military campaign far from its own territory.
American hawks fear a repeat of Putin’s Crimea gambit in the Baltic states, which are certainly vulnerable to Russian mischief. But there, too, Putin would be playing for slivers of territory in his own backyard while probably reaping domestic backlash and further weakening an already-weakened economic hand. A Russia that can’t control what happens in Kiev is not exactly poised to dominate Eastern Europe; Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968 this is not.
But suppose we judge Putin’s maneuvers by a different standard: not whether they’re delivering ever-greater-influence to Moscow, but whether they’re weakening the Pax Americana and the major institutions (NATO, the EU) of the post-Cold War West.
On this metric, the Russian leader is having more success. His annexation of Crimea, for instance, saddled Moscow with all kinds of near-term and long-term problems. But it established a meaningful precedent regarding the limits of American and Western power, a kind of counterexample to the first gulf war, by proving that recognized borders can still be redrawn by military force.
His Syrian machinations, similarly, haven’t restored the Assad regime’s control of that unhappy country. But they have helped prove that America’s “Assad must go” line is just empty bluster, and that a regime can cross Washington’s red lines and endure. So, too, with the new bombing campaign: Without necessarily winning anything beyond Assad’s continued survival, it’s breaking NATO’s interventionist monopoly and giving the region’s powers someone new to play off against the West.
Putin’s gambits also have had second-order consequences for the fraying, fractious European project. His Ukrainian wars and Baltic saber-rattling have heightened none-too-buried tensions between Eastern Europeans and their German “partners.” His support, financial and diplomatic, for populist parties of the left and right (from Syriza to the National Front) has widened the cracks in the EU. And now his Syrian intervention is likely to at least temporarily worsen the refugee crisis that’s dividing and disorienting the entire European continent.
To be clear: Putin is a Russian nationalist, not the leader of Spectre or the League of Shadows. He doesn’t want chaos for its own sake, and he no doubt believes that a weakened NATO, a divided EU and a crumbling Pax Americana are necessary preconditions for his own empire’s return to greatness.
But that return seems far out of his reach, and what’s closer to his grasp is something more destructive — a wrecker’s legacy, not Peter the Great’s, in which his own people gain little from his efforts, but the world grows more unstable with every move he makes.
Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.
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