In his prescient 2015 book Winter is Coming, Russian democracy activist and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin had already become the world’s greatest threat. “Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are (despite the latter’s name) stateless and without the vast resources and weapons of mass destruction Putin has at his fingertips,” he observed.
While many academics and analysts root Putin’s current aggression against Ukraine in NATO enlargement and disrespect to Moscow upon the Soviet Union’s demise, Kasparov harbors no such illusions. The United States and Western Europe guaranteed that Russia would remain dominant over the successor states of the Soviet Union by allowing Russia alone among former Soviet states to keep its nuclear arsenal. Simultaneously, President Bill Clinton reduced U.S. military forces in Europe. Not only were there no reparations paid to the Central and East European states decimated by decades of Soviet domination and occupation, but Washington and the West also rewarded its former adversary with both loan guarantees and investment by Western multinationals. Until just months before the Russian invasion, naive policymakers and their cheerleaders in Washington acquiesced to Europe’s willingness to become dependent on Russian gas.
The idea that NATO enlargement was the original sin ignores the obvious elephant in the room: Putin has launched three invasions of neighboring states in less than 15 years, once against Georgia and twice against Ukraine. That he has not pushed into the Baltics is the best evidence that NATO’s deterrence mission works. This does not mean the West did not make mistakes. While historians blame the post-World War I Versailles treaty and the massive reparations it demanded from Germany for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the outbreak of World War II just two decades later, post-Cold War generosity was just as counterproductive.
For too long, the West ignored how World War II ended: Following Germany’s defeat, there was a wholesale purge of Nazi Party leaders. A similar purification enabled Japan’s rebirth. That there was no corollary purge of Soviet Communist Party members essentially meant that Russia could not truly put its Soviet past behind. As a condition of its loan guarantees and aid, the international community should have demanded senior Communist Party members and KGB apparatchiks leave the post-Cold War political sphere. This may have disqualified some good people swept into a bureaucracy of evil, just as it might have in Germany and Japan after World War II.
Still, their sacrifice would have provided a net benefit to broader society. That the West eradicated bureaucracies of repression enabled the liberal order to establish itself in West Germany, former Vichy-controlled areas of France, and other areas dominated by the Nazis and their Quislings.
This does not make President Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff call for regime change wise but, when Putin ultimately falls or dies, it is crucial the West not learn the wrong lessons from Russia’s current aggression. To treat Moscow with kid gloves and haughtily to deny freedom and liberty to those who seek it because of geography or Russian irredentism is to guarantee future war. Russia’s rehabilitation must depend on the complete purge from government service of those staffing Putin’s bureaucracy of destruction.
It is essential that, when the smoke clears, Western intellectuals put freedom first and do not, through a misreading of history, condemn Russia’s neighbors to repeat it.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
