NATO Archives - Russia Unlocked

What put Putin on a collision course with the West?

When Yeltsin and his circle of aides and oligarchs picked Vladimir Putin as his crown prince, Putin looked like a perfect man for building bridges between Russia and the West.

One of considerations (probably not the main one, though) on the part of oligarchs who put Putin on the throne in 1999, was his image of a “KGB liberal”.

“KGB liberal”

Putin came into politics as a fixer for the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg. He worked superbly with Western investors in the city. He spent some time in Europe. He was a known Germanofil, and built a decent international business network in the 1990s. He had never been known for xenophobia, or anti-Semitism. Besides, KGB traditionally had an image of people who know how to see eye-to-eye with Western bourgeois guys, when necessary.

Londongrad

Therefore, his explicit mandate included finding a way to get Western recognition for Russian oligarchical fortunes, irrespective of their provenance (Project Londongrad). Oligarchs held in the 1990s their part of the bargain, preventing Communists from re-taking power and aligning with the West on global issues. Now, they wanted the West to acknowledge their effort. They required an equal place at the G-8 table of global power.

Let’s be friends!

This is where Putin’s inquiry about the NATO membership in 2000 came from, as well as several hints from his aides at joining the EU. This is also why he was the first to call Bush and offered him help after 9/11. This is also why he agreed to the NATO military logistics bases not only in the Central Asia, but also in Ulyanovsk in Russia (“American military boots trampling the Russian soil!” was the line from our radical nationalists at the time).

Cold shoulder

Then, the following happened:

NATO accepted the Baltics as new members
USA withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treat and revealed an intent of deploying new ABM systems in Central Europe
USA invaded Iraq, in spite of Putin’s vehement objections
Pro-Western Rose revolution happened in Georgia in 2003
Orange Revolution happened in Ukraine in 2005 and prevented a pro-Russian president from taking office
Oil price skyrocketed and filled the Russian state budget to a degree unprecedented in our history, see the graph below

From which Putin made the following conclusions:

Slow decay

It doesn’t pay to be nice with the US and NATO
The US and NATO try to find a way to get rid of him
He needs to set up a watertight perimeter preventing outside forces from “color revolutions” against him
Everything is happening because no one cared to formalize the terms of the Soviet surrender in 1991. The good news is that it opens for renegotiating the outcome of the Cold war!
Russia has money to stand up against the West and push forward a revision of the Cold war’s outcome.
The West must accept a New Yalta deal with Putin—not in exchange for some new favors from Putin, but as a compensation for Russia’s past favors in 1990–2005.

Graph: Global oil price 1970-2014 (USD/barrel)

What would a war between the US and Russia look like today, after the first strike nuclear exchanges?

With the Mutual assured destruction capacity still present on both sides, the likelihood of all-out nuclear strike from either side is rather small. Whatever propaganda on either side is saying, there are hardly any issues between Russia and the US/NATO that can’t be sorted out in a considerably less costly way, through negotiations or conventional proxy conflicts.

But if against odds, Black Swans arrive and the nuclear option comes to the table, we’ll most likely see a carefully scaled conflict. The first shots would be delivering tactical nuclear munitions, in order to measure the public and military response from the other side.

Right now, the most likely area for such an exchange seems to be the Baltic Sea nations and Ukraine. The rationale for that might be Putin testing NATO’s resolve to invoke Article 5 in the face of an imminent threat of nuclear escalation. “Is President Trump willing to sacrifice Pittsburgh for Pärnu?” Most likely, Trump and the Germans would stand down, NATO would collapse, and the prospect of global nuclear war would blow over.

How did WW2 contribute to the fall of the Soviet Union?

After the war, despite all the efforts, the USSR never managed to regain this level of strategic advantage over the West.

As a result of WW2, the Soviet Union lost the military supremacy we had built up on the eve of the war against Germany:

After the war, despite all the efforts, we have never since managed to regain this level of strategic advantage over the West.

As a result of WW2, the traditional American isolationism ended. The US took global leadership in preserving the new world order. The old Leninist strategy of “let them fight each other for us to pick the spoils” would no longer work. The USSR faced NATO, a global coalition of democratic countries possessing an economic and military muscle that we, in the long run, could not match. It was now the turn for our new Chinese friends to push for a nuclear US vs. USSR showdown in the hope of picking up the spoils in the after-war rubble.

History gave the USSR no new chance of running over Western Europe. Eventually, the Cold War bankrupted us.

What would a war between NATO and Russia look like after the first nuclear strike?

A war between NATO and Russia.

With the capacity for Mutually Assured Destruction still present on both sides, the likelihood of an all-out nuclear strike from either side is rather small. Whatever propaganda on either side is saying, there are hardly any issues between Russia and the US/NATO that can’t be sorted out in a considerably less costly way, through negotiations or conventional proxy conflicts.

But if, against odds, Black Swans arrive and the nuclear option comes to table, we’ll most likely see a carefully scaled conflict. The first shots would be delivering tactical nuclear munitions, in order to measure public and military response from the other side.

Right now, the most likely area for such an exchange seems to be the Baltic Sea nations and the Ukraine. The rationale for that might be Putin testing NATO’s resolve to invoke Article 5 in the face of the imminent threat of nuclear escalation. “Is President Trump willing to sacrifice Pittsburgh for Pärnu?” Most likely, Trump and the Germans would stand down, NATO would collapse, and the prospect of global nuclear war would blow over.