WORLD WAR III BEGAN BACK IN 2008

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain called out Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia an “act of war” and said the West would regret it if we did not stand with Georgia against this act. When Putin declared he was acting to protect the Russian ethnic minority from the majority of Georgians, McCain compared that with Hitler’s initial aggressions during the 1930s, in which he said he was acting to “protect” ethnic Germans in the Rhineland and reunited them with in 1936, when he took Austria in March 1938 through “Anschluss,” and with his :last territorial demand in Europe,” to protect the Germans in the Sudetenland that fall. His reason for invading Poland in 1939 was the “mistreatment” of ethnic Germans in western Poland, a region that had been part of Imperial Germany before 1918.

Most people ignored McCain’s call for the West to stand up to Russia as the delusions of an unregenerate Cold Warrior. People, yours truly included, laughed at Mitt Romney when he said in 2012 that our greatest geopolitical threat was still Russia.

As it now turns out, most of us were very wrong; John McCain was right, and so was Mittens.

Vladimir Putin sort of snuck up on the world. But information about his past certainly shows the potential for what he has become.

There are many rumors that when he was a KGB agent based in East Germany in the late 70s-early 80s, that his job was to work with the Baader-Meinhoff Gang. For those who have forgotten, or are perhaps too young to know, or just weren’t paying attention at the time, the Baader-Meinhoff gang was an ultra-left development of 1960s German “New Left” radicalism, much like our Weatherman Underground. They believed in armed struggle, and eventually became a criminal gang that excused their crimes by claiming they were “advancing the cause” of the revolution. Bank robbery, robbery of drug dealers, kidnapping for profit, contract murder, they did it all and were very disruptive of West German society. Of course the KGB would have supported them for all the trouble and disruption they caused, and a junior KGB agent with a good command of German and English would have fit the bill of what was needed as a “coordinator.”

Then Putin showed up as a deputy mayor of Leningrad after the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s said to have worked with local Russian organized criminals (the “Russian Mafia”) to “clean up” the city of all the disorganized crime that was rampant at the time. This is where he first developed his reputation as a “problem solver.”

In the late 1990s, when he was a deputy to Boris Yeltsin, he is said to have been behind the “false flag” bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere, which was allegedly the work of “Chechen terrorists” and created great fear in the country because several hundred people were killed in these “attacks.” Yeltsin put Putin in charge of the Russian response, which became the Chechen War, Putin’s first foray into international criminal behavior, which was sold to the Russian public as a campaign against “terrorists” to protect Russian society, and also to protect ethnic Russians who were being “persecuted” in Chechnya. It also allowed Putin to establish himself as a “protector” of Russia, which led to his replacing Yeltsin as the leader of Russia, something no one at the time had predicted would happen.

There were actually two Chechen Wars: in the first, the “rot” in the Red Army since the fall of the USSR was exposed and the Chechens basically won. Then, once Putin was in charge, there was a second war that is better known, with its major event being the near-total destruction of the Chechen capital of Grozny by the Russian Army in a particularly brutal campaign of urban warfare.

This was then followed in 2008 by a Russian attack on Georgia, the event that caught John McCain’s eye and his warning of the danger if the West did not confront Putin. Russia ended up taking 20 percent of the land area of Georgia as a result of the war, and since then Georgia has not demonstrated much desire to act independently.

One thing that needs to be understood is that - going back to the original expansion of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, then Catherine the Great, and later under Stalin - Russian control of non-Russian states and territories has been accomplished through colonization of the new territories by ethnic Russians. This accomplished several goals - Russians emigrated to new territories where they would be the ones receiving special treatment and were considered superior to the “native” population, which was a good pressure relief in Russian society for people who might have become “malcontents” if they were forced to remain where they originated from, in the social class they were born into, with the potential “malcontents” becoming Imperial supporters.

When the Russian Empire broke up in 1991, these ethnic Russians - who had been resented if not outright hated by the original inhabitants - found their status reduced when the laws giving them special dispensations were changed in the newly-independent states. For many of them, “loss of status” was equivalent to “persecution” for being Russians, and this could be picked up by the new Russian nationalist right. It was a situation similar to that of post-World War I Germany, in which parts of the previous German Empire ended up in Poland and Czechoslovakia as the old borders were restored with the fall of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. This was what Hitler campaigned on with “Ein Reich,” “Ein Volk,” “Ein Führer” (“one country,” “one people,” “one leader”).

Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it can be seen that World War II in Europe really began with Hitler’s steps to implement that political campaign, beginning with the re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, followed by Anschluss with Austria and the Czechoslovak cession of the Sudetenland in 1938; the Polish campaign that resulted in Britain and France finally taking up arms to protect Poland began as another Nazi effort to “protect” ethnic Germans now in western Poland.

This is what Putin has done since the Chechen War in 1999. And, like Hitler, he managed his expansions, his “protection” of Russians, without incurring serious opposition from the West until now, with his invasion of Ukraine, which is the functional equivalent of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.

The question is, will the world of 2022 descend into the kind of madness that came on September 1, 1939?

There is one major difference between then and now: Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons.

Already, Putin has threatened any country that stands in opposition to his move into Ukraine with “results you cannot imagine in your entire history,” an allusion to nuclear war. This past weekend, citing the Western opposition to his invasion, he publicly placed his strategic nuclear forces on heightened alert status. Suddenly, the great fear of the old Cold War is dusted off and presented anew.

What kept the Cold War cold for 40-plus years was the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD): if you launch an attack, we launch an attack, and nobody wins with everything destroyed.

That worked so long as there were rational actors on both sides.

We didn’t go to war over the Berlin Crisis in 1961, because the Soviets built the Berlin Wall, and we allowed them to do so; thus the Soviet concerns over East Germans having an easy way of escaping to the West by merely walking into West Berlin. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy resolved it by cutting a deal with Krushchev to (secretly) remove the US Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles from their bases in Turkey and Italy, in return for the Soviets dismantling their ballistic missile bases in Cuba, adding in a secret assurance that the United States would not invade Cuba. The concerns of both sides were met, and the world continued on after 13 of the scariest days I can remember in my life.

The question in 2022 is, are there rational actors on both sides today?

Vladmir Putin has often told the story of himself as a young boy in Leningrad, chasing a rat until he cornered it, at which point the rat turned on him with such ferocity that he ran from it. In his memoirs, he stated that was when he learned how one avoids being cornered. He has put the lesson to use more than once during his rise to the top of Russian power.

Does the lesson of the 10 year old boy hold today when Putin finds himself “cornered” by international isolation as a result of his invasion of Ukraine?

Similar to Hitler, Putin is using a sense of massive historical grievance, combined with a veneer of protecting Russians, with a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries, to fuel his territorial ambitions.

Fiona Hill recently did an interview with Politico about this. She pointed out the following:

First, Putin has already used a nuclear weapon when Russian agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium; polonium was spread all around London at every spot Litvenenko man visited before he died a horrible death.

Second, there has already been use of a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, In Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, the entire city was contaminated and a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, died because the assassins stored the Novichk in a perfume bottle they discarded in a charity donation box where Sturgess and her partner found it. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. Then there was the poisoning of Alexander Navalny.

As Hill put it, “So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.”

The one thing that happens in all wars is, things no one expected to happen will happen. This war is not going to be settled until some way is found to deal effectively with Russia. And it’s going to have to be done without touching off the events that lead to “The Day After.” I suggest if you have forgotten that movie, or never saw it, that you track it down and watch it. It scared the shit out of Reagan, to the point he came away from watching it with the conviction that he had to find a way to end the Cold War and step back from the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

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