Dear America,
The Republicans, who have neither scruples nor shame when it comes to campaign tactics, have criticized the Biden administration in the past for being deliberate in imposing sanctions on Putin and his billionaire myrmidons for invading Ukraine while he led the diplomatic effort to obviate the Russian war. And now that the Biden administration has done all it can to avert war, half of the Republicans are urging more sanctions in the form of boycotting Russian oil while the other half, Trump included, congratulate Putin for being clever. It remains to be seen whether enough of the electorate will be astute enough to recognize that the party is hopelessly dysfunctional with party loyalty being their sole motivation and the fate of the nation, much less the world, is supposed to entrust them with their fates. But really, the Republican Party is rapidly becoming an irrelevancy in light of the need to deal Putin a paralyzing blow...one way or another.
From this point on, the need to render Putin's chauvinistic ambitions moot, or in the alternative to render him so, the American polity will likely become ever more inured to Republican ambitions and concentrate on that goal as the impeller in the efforts of the nation and the world to cope with Putin's malevolence, perhaps once and for all. That's the key consideration for every next step: will it be just for now or forever that our collective effort anathematizes Putin and his country. Thus, the ever escalating nature of sanctions, either as a function of their duration or of the addition of new ones is what matters, and domestic politics has nothing to do with it. Prudence should be our guiding light, not political ambition, the latter seeming more trivial, petty and ulterior as we go. In that light, I believe that our ensuing steps should be ever more likely to nullify Putin's power, and thus they need to be rendered with the Russian people in mind.
For example, when Putin makes pronouncements that are tantamount to the threat of nuclear war--and he has done so in a less than subtle way already, which I suspect won't be the last thing he says or does on the subject--it should be the goal of our intelligence agencies not only to inject direct quotes into the Russian political consciousness, but to make it clear how reckless and outright dangerous they are, not just to Ukraine and the rest of the free world, but to the Russian people as well. When it comes to nuclear war, where one of us goes, we all go. We have to convey to the Russian people, and that includes the oligarchs who enable him, that Putin's reckless obsession with Russian glory's restoration is a threat to humanity, and to the extent that they are part of it, to them too. What I am advocating is that, while we can't interdict Putin's propaganda dissemination, we can match it. Of course we would have to be subtle in our attempts to undermine adulation for Putin, which is analogous to that of many Americans' for Trump, and for mostly the same reasons: xenophobia, national prideful-ness and delusions of grandeur, susceptibility to conspiracy theories and so on. Our anti-propaganda has to be laid like mines across Russia and left to be stepped on, and thus no longer ignorable, for as long as it takes. The way in which that will work on the problem is that the longer the strategy is pursued, the more tenuous Putin's power will become, simply as a function of numbers. The more ordinary Russians abandon blind fealty to what we see as a madman by virtue of having his madness placed under their very noses, , and perhaps more importantly the noses of those whom Putin has enriched with his kleptocracy, the more likely Putin will see that a change of course would behoove him. That's why gradual effort is so important.
We cannot force Putin into preemptive actions. We have to coax him into rational concern with his diminishing prestige, which will force him to contemplate the value of what he has and the folly of mindlessly pursuing more. From now on, we have to be cautious, subtle and persistent, not increasingly bellicose and high-handed ourselves. That's what the Republicans don't get. In the matter of Ukraine...in the matter of dealing with Putting...haste will not make waste. It will make peril. While we have to continue to enable Ukraine's opposition, and we have to do it with vigor, it's patience that will be the virtue that saves the world, not machismo.
Your friend,
Mike
