Russia – it may lose, but you can not win!
– Valentin Pikul
Back to reading the paper online this morning, having settled back into working from the Solarium and therefore having no interesting adventures to recount. Dean is draped across my arms as I type this, exhausted after a night devoted to keeping Peg and me awake with his and Slane's constant need for nocturnal attention. I should clang pots and pans next to their evil little feline ears to prevent the day sleeping that leads to these sleepless nights for us.
It's a beautiful morning out there; cold, clear, with the promise of highs in the 50s and sunshine all day long. Seems a pity to spend the day on Zoom, but that's what is on tap for me.
So, what's in the news that is worrisome this morning?
Well, besides the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that seems to have flared yet again, as it has since I was three years old, there is the matter of these directed energy attacks on key federal workers both abroad and across the street from the White House. The victims suffer headaches, nausea, brain fog, and often permanent brain damage.
Who would do such a thing? Why, the Russians of course.
Then there are the gas pumps running dry all up-and-down the eastern seaboard, victims of a ransomware attack that shut down a major fuel pipeline that runs from Texas all the way to New York.
Who do we have to thank for that one? The folks who created the ransomware, a bunch of asshats from somewhere in eastern Europe calling themselves Darkside, sound almost apologetic. They just designed the software as a tool of extortion, not to disrupt whole segments of the U.S. economy. It seems one of their customers, likely in Russia, was responsible for this attack.
Although there is not yet any direct evidence of Russian governmental involvement, you can't slip a ten of diamonds between their kleptocratic government and the organized crime elements that profit from their ties in Moscow. Two sides of the same coin.
Then there was the bounty they placed on our soldiers in Afghanistan.
And interference in the last two national elections.
It seems clear at this juncture that Russia is at war with us, using only tools that exploit asymmetries in risk and resources to avoid a direct military confrontation. But are we at war with them?
The question is what to do about a sclerotic, shrinking crime state trying to destabilize the planet like a dying star sometimes flashes to consume the surrounding solar system. There are only 145 million people in Russia, not even half our population, and the number recedes by the day because of lousy health care and a general pessimism that is long-documented over there. Its economy is a tenth the size of that of the U.S., smaller than Texas's in fact, and its military is likewise a tiny fraction of ours.
This is not the Big Red Machine of my childhood, the communist colossus with a messianic sense of its place in the world, a mental malignancy dating back to the days of the czars and Russia's proclaiming itself the "Third Rome". What we are seeing seems more like the terrorist lashings out of a declining Islamic world beginning in the middle of the last century, with nothing new to offer and an inflated sense of its place on the world stage.
But what if those Arab terrorists had had access to nukes, and a navy? That's the challenge for us as a country--there is no solution in the foreseeable future that involves using our overwhelming military superiority to impose our will on Russia.
So are we stuck putting up with this? Maybe. Then again, it seems as a starting point that we need to reframe their role on the world stage, no longer as a superpower offering a competing vision of progress to the nonaligned nations, but rather a rogue state like North Korea, isolated and declining and engaging in acts that resemble the vandalism of a retreating army. If they can't participate as a leader in an interconnected world, then neither can you or anyone else.
I spent a lot of time in my college days studying the Soviet Union. I read Russian, sort of spoke it, and wrote my senior thesis in USC's Defense and Strategic Studies Program on the integration of tactical nuclear weapons in Soviet theater doctrine. The paper was as scintillating as it sounds.
Later as an F-15 pilot, we studied what they flew, how they flew, how they thought about combat. We crawled around in jets their defectors brought us. We woke up every morning to the mantra, "The War Starts Tomorrow." That would be the war with the USSR, which likely would have meant the end of the world.
No one thinks much about the Russians now, and certainly not as the diabolical menace that ran loose in our imaginations back then. They are the international equivalent of the kid who pees in your gas tank overnight, then snickers in the bushes when you can't start your car for the drive to work in the morning. They are an annoyance, a sometimes dangerous one, but it's hard to imagine a scenario in which their pranking of our pipelines and voting booths gains them some sort of strategic victory. That would take a little introspection and honesty about their own backward, corrupt society, something that has never been the Russians' strong suit.
And of course I worry about my boy living there now, an American in a country that doesn't have much use for Americans. Is he in danger? Jim actually got arrested a few weeks ago for some petty crime like drinking a beer on the sidewalk, and found himself in the back of a Russian squad car with two gregarious officers who sang him Russian folks songs as they drove to book him and then charge him $6.79 to be released. All funny stuff, I guess, until it's not. One of the many, many things that keep me up at night.
But I'm not worried that the Russians are an actual threat to our country any more than the PLO or the Bader Meinhof Gang were a threat four or five decades ago. There's just too much inertia behind this ship. But to limit the damage we need to be able to isolate them, which means nurturing international relationships our last chief executive did all in his power to subvert, almost as if he were a Russian agent himself. Russia will behave when it's in their best interest to behave. We need to patiently lead them to that place.
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