The Russian leader has gotten the world he wished for—and it’s threatening to crush him.
Like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin is a whiner who thinks the world is unfair to him. He thinks Russia automatically deserves great power status – despite its relative weakness.
What Putin doesn't see, or chooses not to see, is that the power of the Soviet Union was not as great as it looked. Those Mercator projection maps covered up a lot of deficiencies – even to many insiders like Putin who failed to notice the rot.
For decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against the world that the United States built after the Cold War. In his account, an international order run by a single power would hinder Russia and produce needless conflict, especially when that power was as self-serving and duplicitous as America. Now Donald Trump is dismantling the order that Putin had so long abhorred, and a new multipolar world is emerging in its place. Putin had thought he could rise to the top of such a system, in which raw economic and military might outweigh diplomacy and alliances. But he was mistaken: The norms and institutions of the postwar order actually masked Russia’s vulnerabilities. Putin has gotten the world he wished for—and it’s threatening to crush him.
Nukes and satellites made it look like the USSR was the equal of the US on the surface. But underneath the glitz was a rather poor country. The Soviets had a lower standard of living than the Eastern European countries it controlled from 1945 to 1989.
Moscow had assumed that its immense nuclear arsenal, unparalleled natural resources, and extensive territory in the heart of Eurasia would keep Russia competitive with China and the United States. But these assets have been unable to slow its rapid decline. Russia’s economy is at best one-quarter the size of China’s and America’s, and the gap is growing. Meanwhile, it risks becoming an afterthought in the race for technological supremacy in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing. The country’s economy and technology base are even slowly losing ground to India’s.
A fifth of all rural Russians still do not have indoor plumbing. Now you know why Russian troops were looting toilets from Ukraine. Russia's wealth has been going to an incompetent military, corrupt oligarchs, and into the pockets of Putin and his cronies.
Putin, a onetime lieutenant-colonel in the Soviet secret police (KGB), may indeed have kompromat on Donald Trump. But Trump is still a loose cannon who does what he can get away with – sometimes to Putin's disadvantage.
Moscow is at the mercy of an American president who circumvents traditional channels of power and obliterates the constraints that once regulated their use. For example, Trump could attempt to use his recently constituted Board of Peace to bypass the United Nations Security Council—and Russia’s veto—and muscle through his preferred policy in the Middle East, eroding Moscow’s influence in the region. Thanks to decisions by both Trump and Putin, moreover, the two powers no longer have any functional arms-control agreements. Without these, Trump could choose to accelerate his “Golden Dome” missile-defense program, which Russia fears could undermine its own nuclear deterrence.
Trump is causing European countries to cooperate more with each other. And horrifyingly for Putin, this has led to Europe strengthening its own defense capabilities.
As U.S. security assurances wane, European countries are developing their hard-power capabilities. Germany has committed 100 billion euros to modernize its military, and Poland is building up its armed forces with a goal of amassing 300,000 troops. Putin has long wanted to split the U.S. and Europe. But he might soon find that the continent—which collectively dwarfs Russia in population and wealth—poses a significant challenge even if it doesn’t belong to a U.S.-dominated alliance.
It's not like Russia has that great a military in the first place. February 24th is the 4th anniversary of Putin's "3-day special operation" in Ukraine. He seems to be way behind schedule.
Ukraine did not have the weaponry during the first few months of the invasion it has now. But after Russia's 2014 illegal takeover of Crimea, Ukraine reorganized its military along the lines of NATO; Ukrainian troops occasionally took part in joint training exercises in NATO countries in Europe. Because of this they were able to avoid annihilation and even made Russia withdraw from much of the north and northeast which it had initially occupied. Ukraine showed the world that the Russian Army is overrated shit.
If Putin had done absolutely nothing after taking power, Russia would probably be better off today.
In those rare moments of personal honesty with himself, Putin may wistfully daydream about the good old days before he decided to become a hybrid of Joseph Stalin and Peter the Great. Putin is not returning Russia to its imagined glory days of the Soviet Union but to the time of Russia's embarrassing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.
Shortly before becoming president in 2000, Putin issued a manifesto explaining how Russia could keep from falling into the second or third rank of world powers. He insisted that America’s global leadership was holding Moscow back. In reality, he didn’t know how good he had it.