Vladimir putin

By now, my colleagues in the media may have convinced you that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a “transformative” event, a challenge by a reactionary dictator to the “liberal international order,” if not an end to one historical epoch and the beginning of a new one. The world has turned upside down, nothing will again be the same, blah, blah, blah. When millennials make such apocalyptic observations, I can understand. Like Founding Father Thomas Paine, they assume that each day marks the “birthday of a new world.” But what about baby boomers like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who were in high school in 1956 during the so-called Hungarian Revolution, which was very much like what is happening in Ukraine today?

Last October, Vladimir Putin aired a speech to the Russian nation chiding the United States for its moral decay. He observed an America “blotting out whole pages” of its history, pursuing “reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities,” and renouncing time-honored values in an effort at “public renewal.” “It’s their right, but we are asking them to steer clear of our home,” he warned. “We have a different viewpoint.” This iteration of family values and conservative critique went barely noticed by the American press at the time.

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine does not appear to be going well, and the Russian economy is about to experience the full force of Western sanctions. American social media is already in a celebratory mood. But caution is in order — it’s never smart to underestimate your opponent. Putin was expecting sanctions, and he and his war planners could not have discounted Ukrainian resistance, even if they underestimated its intensity. Maybe they did expect the invasion to be a cakewalk and are taken aback by how difficult it’s proved to be in just these first few days. But as of now the invasion still seems to be on its timetable, and its military objectives are achievable. Russians are surrounding Kyiv.

“Nuclear war is part of our strategic culture. Yes, we would start one if our homeland, our way of life, was threatened, absolutely. Why wouldn't we?” That’s what a retired Russian diplomat told me on the sidelines of a track-two dialogue between US, Russian and Chinese experts back in 2012. And to be honest, for several years, I didn’t believe him. I took his comments as bragging, atomic machismo, if you will. The context of the conversation was a response to a question to my Russian colleague on the subject of Moscow’s nuclear weapons doctrine and thinking. Russia for several years has believed in the concept of escalating nuclear tensions to deescalate tensions, or what defense scholars call “escalate to deescalate.

As the Ukraine situation heats up, you can already picture the insider account Vice President Kamala Harris will publish one day in her 2025 bestseller Thirty-One Days in February. But then, as any survivor of the Cuban Missile Crisis is bound to tell President Joe Biden, “I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, and you, Joe Biden, are no Jack Kennedy.” One of the clichés if not the myths about the Cuban Missile Crisis was that President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were playing chicken and Khrushchev “blinked." Under threat of potential nuclear war, he then decided to withdraw the Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba. We now know that what really happened was more complicated than the initial reports made it appear.