Russia's invasion of Ukraine has the same sad echoes of an earlier invasion - and the outcome is likely to be the same, too
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One of them wants to be everyone’s friend, the other is emerging as no one’s.
And yet: One yearns for a romantic past of domestic accord and accommodation, the other yearns for a past of superpower supremacy.
One of them cannot bury his impulse to reach out and hug, the other cannot suppress his impulse to mobilize and mug.
And yet: One of them is bewildered by the domestic rancor his initiatives have prompted, the other is bewildered that the world doesn’t embrace his historical theories.
One of them is the product of an open political system rewarding the exhortations of the extrovert, the other is the product of a closed political system rewarding the intrigues of the introvert.
More: Biden levels sanctions on Russia for beginning an invasion of Ukraine
And yet: One of them has endured through defeat and disappointment over decades, the other has endured into his third decade of power.
One of them is the heir of a tradition rooted in the tactile political techniques of Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, the other is the modern incarnation of the repressive political techniques of V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
And yet: One of them is a prisoner of Cold War verities, the other wants to restore the precarious balance of the Cold War.
Above all, one, with the temperament of the Irish, sees the world as an excerpt from William Butler Yeats; for decades, as Yeats put it, “lingered awhile and said/Polite meaningless words”; and now is confronting an era where the globe’s “worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” The other, bred in the world’s first communist nation, sees the world as an excerpt from the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who recognized that “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin personify the complications and contradictions of the 21st century, burdened by the post-World War II past, where the passionate intensity of the one is defining the new world of modern monsters for the other.
Here are the questions of the hour: What does Putin want? Can the aggressiveness that prompted him to mount what he called Thursday “a special military operation” now be regarded as past — or prelude to something even greater? What will the next week of global tension bring after the past week of Winter Olympic competition?
In all of this, Putin is the catalyst, Biden merely the reactor.
No one, for good reason, quotes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain during international crises, but his remarks of April 4, 1940, a month before Adolph Hitler sent troops barreling into Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, are valuable for the ironic meaning they hold today. Speaking in Westminster, he said, “Whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete — however, one thing is certain — he missed the bus.”
In a way, Putin missed a bus as well. The bus that he missed was the chance to achieve one of his principal goals — to appear to the world as Biden’s equal and to restore Russia to its place as the antipode to America — by engaging in the summit meeting that the newly minted diplomatic impresario French President Emmanuel Macron thought he had arranged.
“He wants the world’s attention,” the University of Toronto historian Margaret MacMillan and the author of the 2020 volume War: How Conflict Shaped Us, told me hours before it became clear that Putin favored aggression over negotiation and rendered the notion of a summit moot. “He has people coming to him, flying to see him. He’s already achieved a great deal. He’s regretted bitterly the disappearance of the Soviet Union.”
Then she added the critical insight that is the navigational North Star of this moment in history: “Putin isn’t capable of seeing that you can have security with friendly relations but instead prefers fraught relations.”
Perhaps Putin recognized the twin perils of a meeting with Biden would have been the impulse toward reconciliation that these events—“a parley at the summit,” in the characterization of Winston Churchill, who invented the term in 1950 at another moment of tension between Russia and the West — tend to produce, plus the need to reconcile his actions (mobilization at the frontiers of Ukraine) with his words (assurances that he wasn’t planning military action).
“You can’t lie overtly and do the opposite the next day without paying a real price,” said Jeremy Kinsman, a former Canadian ambassador to Moscow. “A leader of a democracy couldn’t survive doing that, and an autocrat couldn’t survive doing that in the international community. This isn’t middle school.”
From the viewpoint of both Putin and Biden, one truth — and truths have been the first casualty of nearly every political issue of the new era, at home and abroad — prevails, and it has a middle-school simplicity: Biden never was going to send American military forces into battle in Ukraine, just as Dwight Eisenhower never was going to send American fighters into Hungary during the Soviet invasion of that Eastern European nation and amid conservative rhetoric of freeing the “captive nations” beyond the Iron Curtain of the newly formed Warsaw Pact.
“There was no pressure, in short, save for the amorphous one of world public opinion that Eisenhower could bring to bear on the Soviets in Hungary,” the historian Stephen Ambrose wrote in his 1984 biography of the 34th president. “He knew it, had known it all along, which made all the four years of Republican talk about ‘liberation’ so essentially hypocritical.”
So Biden, in his terrible face-off with Putin, was left with the tools of moral suasion (passionate but essentially powerless) and sanctions (strong in global marketplaces but in diplomacy more a sign of weakness than strength).
Hungary shares 85 miles of borderlands — and multiple geopolitical factors — with Ukraine. In the 1956 episode, Nikita Khrushchev held the whip hand and Eisenhower held few cards, “It was established,” William Colby, then a junior CIA officer and a future director of the agency, wrote years afterwards, “that the United States, while firmly committed to the containment of the Soviets, was not going to liberate any of the areas within that sphere.”
So it can be said again, three-quarters of a century later.
David M. Shribman is former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Email dshribman@post-gazette.com. Twitter: @ShribmanPG
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Opinion: Russia's invasion of Ukraine echoes of an earlier invasion
