May 31, 2023

May 30, 2023: Paper Tiger, No Joseph Stalin, A Vassal State

 

The Russian hordes have long lived rent free in the fevered imagination of the West.  It was the spectre of the Russian hordes overrunning the Balkans that led to the Crimean conflict in the mid Nineteenth Century.  It was the promise of the Russian hordes overrunning Germany and Austria in the ‘Great War’ of the early Twentieth Century upon which France and Britain placed their hopes despite the wretched Russian performance just a few years earlier in the Russo-Japanese conflict.  No one, in Moscow nor in the capitals of Europe learned the lessons of that conflict. In 1904-05,  Russia and Japan had gone to war.  It took 8 months to get the Russian fleet from the Baltic to the Pacific to engage the Japanese, a year during which Europe envisioned a quick Russian conquest.  It didn’t happen.  The Japanese crushed the Russian fleet forcing the intervention of Theodore Roosevelt to negotiate an end to the conflict.  No one cared to recall the weakness demonstrated by this conflict, instead the heads of state and their diplomatic subalterns held that Russian intervention in Eastern Europe 1914 would prove decisive.  For the first two years or so perhaps the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers held the conflict in the balance but, alas, in 1917 Revolution came to Russia and the military campaign in Eastern Europe collapsed. 

 World War II presented a quite different experience, although some 30 million Russians died during the conflict.  Nevertheless, it was the Russians who won that war, in no small part to the ruthless determination of the leadership in Moscow.  The Russian Army today is not the Russian Army of the 1940’s; and Vladimir Putin is no Joseph Stalin.

 Stalin and his Commissars would never have allowed the existence of ‘oligarchs’ much less allow them, beginning under Yeltsin’s corrupt regime, to abscond with half the nation’s wealth and spirit it away to foreign destinations like London real estate, Italy and Southern France, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland as well as, most famously, tRUMP Tower and golf courses.

 Much has been said of late that the Gross Domestic Product of the Russian Federation is less than that of Italy. (1)   This is true.  What hasn’t been mentioned is that the Gross Domestic Product of the Russian Federation is less than that of New York City.(2) 

 That’s right.  New York City has greater economic resources than the entire Russian Federation.  Compared to the United States, China, and the European Union, the entire Russian economy stands as a puny afterthought, hardly strong enough to finance a modern military posture, much less project it around the world. 

 The Russian army of today has proven to be a mere shadow of its former self.  This is in no small measure to the ‘dead souls’, that occupy the Russian ranks.  I’m speaking here of paper armies, populated by fictitious soldiers who are sent their pay which in due course lines the pockets of the military brass and the oligarchs that constitute their version of the military-industrial complex.  Tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, aircraft, and other military hardware not maintained even though billions of Rubles were appropriated and spent for their maintenance. For instance, tires that should have long since been replaced rotting on axels so that when pressed into service cannot travel any great distance.  Today the ‘mighty’ Russian army relies upon savage mercenaries like the Wagner Group to bolster its waning prowess, much as the Americans came to rely upon Blackwater and other soldiers of fortune in our foreign misadventures. These are the hallmarks of graft, of incompetence, of rot, and an unwillingness of the people to defend what has clearly become indefensible.  

 But the awful truth is that Putin has revealed to the world that Russia is a paper tiger. He is the head of a military force that has demonstrated itself to be no more powerful than a third-rate military power.  Shorn of nuclear capability, weapons that cannot reasonably be used without massive retaliation, Russia is fast becoming a vassal state.

 As the war in Ukraine drags on, the emerging choice the Kremlin will face is this:  will it choose to become the vassal state of the West, principally the NATO powers, or will it opt to become a client state of China.  It will have no other choice, for it does not possess the technology, nor the economy to become an independent world power. 

 Putin, of course, is hell-bent on reconstituting the “Russian Empire” as it existed after the Second World War. This is not possible. 

 It is Putin’s pipe dream, a dangerous hallucination that has led to serious miscalculations.  Ukraine, as Afghanistan and Syria is ample demonstration. Instead of demonstrating to the world the prowess of a great nation, the Kremlin must now go begging, hat in hand, to the least disagreeable patron it can find. This is the legacy of Vladimir Putin and his blood-sucking oligarchs.

 An’  President Biden, he jus’ laugh and laugh

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1.     See List of countries by GDP (nominal) - Wikipedia. Citing data published by the IMF, World Bank and U.N., the Russian GDP is listed at a bit over two trillion dollars annually.  2,062,649,000,000 to be precise.

2.     See Economy of New York City - Wikipedia which lists the GDP of New York City as 2.1 trillion U.S dollars.

 


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