Vladimir Putin reacted promptly to the news of Donald Trump’s COVID-19 infection, wishing him well. It may be a mere diplomatic nicety, but Putin certainly hadn’t done it with such alacrity when Boris Johnson similarly fell ill, waiting more than a week, until the UK prime minister was rushed to the hospital.
Indeed, Putin has particular reasons to be concerned about Trump’s well-being.
I recently had a discussion with a prominent American financial industry executive about the Russian economy. He contended that Russians are now better off than they ever were under communism, pointing to the availability of consumer goods, much higher car ownership rates, and the plethora of various food products available in every store, even outside major cities.
This may well be true, even though incomes in Putin’s Russia are distributed extremely unequally and the fact that they can now travel abroad and freely access information shows many Russians that they are doing poorly compared to nearly every other country in Europe. Worse, people in China and other parts of Asia, including even India, have seen their standard of living improve by a far greater margin than in Russia.
As to whether Putin’s economy is stronger than Leonid Brezhnev’s, it is still an open question. Putin’s economy is more efficient because it is plugged into the global economic system. Russian companies use imported advanced technology and resource producers sell oil, gas, and other natural resources on international markets for real money — which allows Russia to buy imports.
In Soviet times, on the other hand, natural resources were used to produce machines to mine more natural resources to produce more machines, etc. Or else they were sold at subsidized prices to foreign client states in order to buy loyalty. Either way, they were wasted.
However, the Soviet Union was an autarchy. It was highly inefficient but it still produced almost everything it needed at home — and could rely on its satellites for slightly better quality products.
But which economy is weaker is beside the point. The Soviet Union was backward technologically and so is Putin’s Russia. The Soviet Union failed as a military superpower in the 1960s and 1970s, when the high-tech revolution was just getting started; now Putin is trying to throw Russia’s weight around at a time when technological progress is running full steam—and it happens almost entirely outside Russia’s borders. This is a recipe for an ignominious defeat.
Remember the Moon Race? That was when the technology gap first started to open up. Despite throwing all of its resources into sending a man on the moon, the USSR just could not do it.
Then came the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. Despite their massive numerical advantage and the element of surprise Soviet clients in the region were soundly beaten. Their armies’ Soviet-supplied weapons proved no match for Israel’s. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat then made peace with Israel, and that was when Soviet influence in the Middle East started to wane.
Over the past several years Putin has been expanding Russia’s military presence around the globe, projecting its power further and further afield. Whatever its original motivation, his imperial expansionism has now acquired a logic and pull of its own.
For a while, things went rather well. Close to home, the Donbas remained a bleeding wound in Ukraine’s side and the country’s westward push was slowed, if not yet reversed. In the Middle East, Washington had no stomach for another failed nation-building project, and so Moscow, in a loose alliance with Tehran, was able to keep Asad in charge in Syria and make advances into Libya.
But the situation has changed—ever so little for now but with the potential for a dangerous snowball effect. First, Turkey inflicted some humiliating defeats on Russia’s regional allies. More to the point, it demonstrated the weakness of Russian weaponry.
This is starting to have consequences: look at the current Azeri attack on Nagorno-Karabakh.
Baku wouldn’t have moved without support from Ankara and Turkey wouldn’t have risk a direct Russian involvement in the conflict if it wasn’t confident that the equipment it supplied to its Azeri client was far superior to what Armenians got from Russia.
This change in the balance of power in the Middle East, North Africa and now the Caucasus is taking place without active American involvement. America’s Deep State is truly deep, and some policies meant to contain Russia continue even if the Trump Administration—or rather Donald Trump himself—has stubbornly refrained from confronting Russia in any way. On the contrary, Trump has gone out of his way to show deference to the Russian strongman.
There has been too much evidence of Trump’s involvement with Russia and Russian money not to draw an obvious conclusion. Russia is probably mostly the source of more than $400 million of Trump’s personal debt that is coming due—as revealed in the latest publication by the “failing New York Times.” True, I have written before that whatever hold Putin has on Trump will likely be loosened if Trump wins a second term and will become free of all constraints — including financial ones or fear of any kompromat Putin might have on him.
But a victory by the Democrat Joe Biden would be far worse for Putin. The Democrats are itching to conduct a real Trump-Russia investigation, without Robert Mueller’s pussyfooting or William Barr’s helpful spinning. They are also eager to punish Russia for electing Trump in 2016 and to repair the rift created by Trump in the Atlantic Alliance.
All of that would be bad under normal conditions and could spell an economic and political disaster in an environment when Putin’s expansionist policy has started to suffer reverses. An aggrieved and aggressive America has plenty of places around the globe where it could cause headaches for Putin — from Georgia and Moldova to the Caucasus and the Middle East, not to mention the obvious one, Ukraine.
Last week’s shambolic presidential debate promised the best outcome for Putin in the US presidential election. Trump continued to trail in opinion polls, and his performance wasn’t going to win him any new followers. A weaker Trump would need Putin’s assistance all the more.
At the same time, Trump did play to his base, preparing them for a drawn-out and possibly violent fight well past Jan. 20, 2021. That would mean at least a paralysis for the next administration, and at most some form of a new civil war.
And now this. An ailing Trump, who moreover has infected his loyal supporters on Capitol Hill, would be useless. As the Russian proverb goes, when misfortune comes, keep opening your gate.
