17 August, 2016

The Crises that Could Bring Down Putin - not so much.

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/this-week-in-geopolitics

"The Crises That Could Bring Down Putin"

Interesting, but (to me) ultimately unpersuasive.

Writing about a Russian dictator’s potentially “losing his grip on power” is a mug’s game: in the first place substantially underestimates that grip. 

Yeltsin, the example provided, was *not* a cutthroat climber in the sense of Russian leaders historically; no, he was the (Bill) Clintonesque sacrificial lamb shoved to the front of the group of annoyed Politburians in the late 80s as a domestic-protest-move.  I believe they probably expected he was – in the long-established tradition of Soviet politics – going to  disappear.  That he didn’t either signaled that Gorbachev was either strikingly different (still not sure that’s true) or astonishingly weak by that time.  In other words, the Politburo handed Yeltsin the reins when it looked like the stagecoach was about to crash, and he was stupid enough to hold them.  After they got through the bumpy bits, those same elites took the reins back away from him.  So he’s of nearly no use as an example.

In the second place, it discounts (as usual) the characteristically unique level of paranoia in the Russian psyche.  I’m not saying that this makes them impossible to predict, that would be silly.  But it’s typical of western analysts to begin their examination from a position of empathy: “how would I feel if I were a Russian, and what would be the consequences?”  Russians are NOT Westerners.  The term ‘inscrutable’ used to be applied to Oriental states whose motives & goals themselves were hard to understand.  Whenever a faraway country would do something completely baffling for reasons we couldn’t even rationalize after the fact, it was shrugged away with “well they’re just inscrutable”.  It’s declined in usage because of the quasi-racist overtones it eventually assumed, but I would posit that given our radically different cultures, history, and outlook: to Americans, Russians remain inscrutable.

No, the average Russian believes as a given fact every day that:
1)            Russia is in danger from its enemies, and
2)            As Russians, saving Mother Russia will require their personal sacrifice – certainly in comfort/quality of life, but up to and including their lives. (This isn’t to say that they are blindly patriotic and will sacrifice themselves for Putin personally; not at all.  But for Russia as a nation distinct from its government?  Pretty much so.) 

The only thing Russian leaders can do is highlight the immediacy of that danger to spur the Russian people to ‘hunker down’ through tough times as needed, and to prove that they (the leader) is the particular strongman that can shepherd Russia through (today’s) crisis.  The art, for a Russian leader (Stalin was a master, enabled by the existential crisis of the war) is to get “out of the direct path” of the threat to Matya Rossiya.  “The roof just started leaking, I just happened to be the guy standing here with a hammer and shingles”.  “Well of course we had to secure our bases in Crimea, the west had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Ukraine and was trying to strangle the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea”.  Notice, Putin’s action isn’t the narrative – he’s just fixing another “goddamned problem”.

The replacement of governors with people from his coterie of hangers-on isn’t going to be seen as much of a signal; they all serve more or less at his pleasure anyway, and if any make a stink (they won’t, it’s …unhealthy) I’d imagine there are already ample volumes of leakable evidence of their corruption or selfishness.  Again, he’s just trying to fix the roof and Russians will recognize he needs a crew up there that he can trust.

More substantially meaningful here to American interests is the historical (apparent) rapprochement between Russia and Turkey.  They’ve been enemies with directly-conflicting interests since, well, forever.  I’ll say that again: these two nations have been in direct competition for at least FOUR CENTURIES and the US (as the standard-bearer for Western diplomacy) has managed to let them discover interests that may bring them into alignment.  That is a diplomatic failure (for us) of colossal proportions. If he can pull it off, Putin could turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake and win essentially unfettered control of Istanbul and the Bosperus.  That would be triumphal in the history of Russia, probably comparable (in US manifest-destiny terms) to Canada just dissolving and joining the US.

Here’s my $0.02 guess: the editor's mystification over ‘what was traded here’ between Russia and Turkey will become apparent perhaps as soon as the next 3-6 months.  Russians are chess-players; They certainly don’t have the ridiculously short attention span of American observers.  They don’t have 2-year congressional election cycles to satisfy, or 4-year re-elections to run.  They can seriously plan for 10-year results or even longer. 

What I expect is that Putin is trading his participation in Syria for breaking Turkey out of the west’s orbit, obligingly along the fissure created by the Turkish putsch.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ‘revolt’ was stage-managed by Russian agents (bonus points for them if they could convince Turkey/the world that they were Americans) directly for that purpose.

My guess is that could have been the point of the seemingly-pointless Russian military effort to prop up Assad from the start.  (That may be crediting Putin with too much prescience; more likely he was pushing a knight or rook out into the board as bait for what would opportunistically develop, but always in the knowledge that it really wasn’t there for function, but as a very-tradable sacrifice.)
I don’t even think which way the Russians and Turks jump matters all that much – whether Russia joins the fight against ISIS and abandons Assad, or whether Turkey pulls out of the fight against ISIS and (by negative act) ends up supporting Assad* - what matters to Putin and in the long game would be that Russia and Turkey would be working in parallel.
*I think the latter is less likely, given the personal enmity between Erdogan and Assad.  The former seems much more multi-valuable in terms of disarming criticism and undermining suspicion in the west.


The first hint will be the closure of US operations in Incirlik (the big US base in Turkey).  If that happens, I’d take that my prediction is likely happening.  (I just googled Incirlik to make sure I spelled it right and look what came up: http://sputniknews.com/military/20160816/1044330202/turkey-russia-incirlik.html “Turkey could provide its Incirlik airbase for the Russian Aerospace Forces jets in the anti-terrorist campaign in Syria, member of Russia’s upper house of parliament Igor Morozov said Tuesday”).  Well.

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