It may be possible for the United States and the Western allies to influence what happens next in Russia, but there is no possible way for us to control it.
Like Noah and Rich, I’ve seen enough, and studied enough Russian history, to be inclined to a large dollop of caution both about what exactly is happening in Russia right now, and about what we should want to see happening. Every possible source of information is unreliable. Hardly anybody saw these particular turns of events coming — either the rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin or what now appears to be its end.
Is it over? The potential abrupt collapse of Vladimir Putin’s regime would of course be a natural and entirely just cause for celebration — Putin richly deserves the fate that greeted Nicolae Ceaușescu — but Russian history teaches us that as likely as not, if that still happens, he will ultimately be replaced by something worse . . . and that getting from Point A to Point B could involve some wrenching and extremely perilous instability. Another lesson: Win or lose for Putin, Russian history reminds us that the ongoing events are of the sort that are not only impossible to determine with certainty while they are happening; historians will likely be disputing for the next century what happened.
None of that is likely to prevent a lot of efforts within the United States to spike the football and claim vindication, some of which is already happening even while nobody knows where this is headed:
- Hawkish supporters of aid to Ukraine will argue that they were right that the war against Russia was winnable, and not an illusion created by Ukrainian propaganda.
- Dovish opponents of aid to Ukraine will argue that this proves their case that prolonging the war would lead to far more dangerous instability.
- Biden partisans will claim that this shows the wisdom of his Ukraine policy, that the United States is better off for the war having happened, and that we got a bargain for the dollars we spent helping Ukraine, which ended up possibly collapsing the hostile Russian regime.
- Biden’s Republican critics will argue that he led us down a far more dangerous path. Trump, for example, will argue that the war would never have happened on his watch, while DeSantis (who initially predicted that it would be a fiasco for Russia that might bring down Putin) will claim vindication for his view that Russia by 2023 was severely degraded and no longer a formidable military force.
They may all have a point, but we’re pretty far from being able to assess the situation in a way that even tells us what happened, let alone who the winners and losers are, let alone who deserves the credit. One thing I’m reasonably sure of: It may be possible for the United States and the Western allies to influence what happens next in Russia, but there is no possible way for us to control it, and we’ve ended up regretting every past effort to do so. Woodrow Wilson sent American troops into Russia to try to affect the course of the Russian Revolution; he accomplished nothing other than the opposite of his declaration in the Fourteen Points that “the treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.” In the end of that period, the West sold out Ukraine to the Soviet empire. The United States had mostly warm relations with Russia, often amounting to a de facto alliance, between 1776 and 1917; that changed after the intervention, which Russian propaganda has used against us ever since. While current events certainly counsel for continued aid to Ukraine (at least in the short run), any effort to influence the course of events inside Russia should be non-public and focused very narrowly on avoiding nuclear proliferation.