Biden’s Colossal Misreading of Putin’s Motivations in Ukraine
Putin is following the Russian “grand narrative” of war.
by Francis P. Sempa
March 22, 2022, 10:41 PM
The prolific British historian Niall Ferguson, writing in Bloomberg News, concludes that the Biden administration “is making a colossal mistake thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan.” If this in fact is the administration’s policy — and Ferguson relies on apparently well-sourced New York Times stories by David Sanger and unnamed senior administration officials — then Ferguson is right. It is a colossal mistake and a misreading of Russian history.
According to Ferguson, the Biden administration envisions Putin’s regime collapsing if the war in Ukraine drags on without Russia achieving victory. New reports have portrayed the Russian invasion as a quagmire — a sort of rerun of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And while Ukrainians suffer, so the argument goes, Russians are suffering, too — both soldiers as a result of the Ukrainian resistance and civilians as a result of Western economic sanctions. Revolution is in the air. And there is some historical justification for the notion that an inconclusive war can lead to revolution — the Russo-Japanese War led to a revolution in Russia in 1905, and the colossal losses and shortages caused by the First World War led to the Romanov dynasty’s collapse in March 1917.
But there is another side to Russian history — one that glories in the heroic fighting of its brave soldiers and civilians in the face of hardship and the drudgery and horror of war. In 2017, Gregory Carleton, a professor of Russian Studies at Tufts University, wrote a book that Biden administration policymakers should read: Russia: The Story of War. Carleton’s book provides a cultural history of what he calls Russia’s “civic religion” and a “grand narrative of war” that goes back to Russia’s experience of war — against the Mongols in the 13th through 15th centuries, during the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, and against Napoleon and Hitler.
Russia’s grand narrative of war — which is partly myth — includes references to invasions, stout resistance, self-reliance, and incredible self-sacrifice. And the most evocative of these historical experiences are the Battle of Borodino against Napoleon’s Grand Armée in 1812 and the Battle of Brest against the German Army in 1941.
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https://spectator.org/biden-putin-war-ukraine/
