Vladimir Putin, the Latest of the Failed IrredentistsIn response to Putin’s irredentist schemes, the surreal Left has alternately appeased him and angrily denounced the critics of their appeasement.
By Victor Davis Hanson
March 6, 2022
Irredentism—the romance of reclaiming “unredeemed” old lands—is a symptom of messianic presidents and premiers, and national paranoia and insecurity. Leaders demagogue about the recovery of ancient territories that previously had weakened the nation’s imperial grandeur and power.
Supposedly long-scattered and oppressed peoples with common linguistic, religious, and cultural affinities are recombined—usually by violently overthrowing their contemporary governments and forcing them into a new ethnic super state. Yet irredentism is often a one-way street. Supposedly homeless expatriates—the Greeks of Constantinople, Italians in Malta, Germans in the Sudetenland, Serbs in Bosnia, and Russians in Ukraine—are said to be even more zealous nationalists than their kindred in the motherland. But just as often the territory to be reunited in a grand imperial scheme can be more reluctant than the would-be uniter.
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A Woke West?Putin is history’s most recent and first nuclear irredentist. He believes any group of Russian speakers anywhere, or former residents of imperial Russia or the Soviet Union, or Russian orthodox worshipers, all belong to Putin’s new Russian Empire. Even if Russian speakers are independent or happy as minorities in other countries, Putin has a grandiose plan toforce them into his new mother Russia.
Only that way can a huge new Russia of 270-300 million people, with a vast area comparable to the old Soviet Union, become again a player on the superpower stage to rival China and the United States.
In Putin’s mind, he has already forced Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine back into the Russian fold. Many of the old Soviet Republics are already his de facto satellites or puppets. If he can get back all of Ukraine, the crown jewel of the old Soviet Union and Mother Russia—41 million people, 230,000 square miles of territory, the best farmland in Europe, rich in oil and minerals—Putin feels he would achieve his irredentist goal. The remaining few lost Russian territories then will either be easily absorbed, or their puppet governments will obey Russian orders. Then, he believes, the former Warsaw Pact nations, in terror, will supposedly shed their NATO alliance or at least become no-fly-zones.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/06/vladimir-putin-the-latest-of-the-failed-irredentists/
