I have no idea if Putin will launch a ground invasion of Ukraine. I am not certain he knows. I could certainly see a formal annexation of territories in Donetsk already under effective Russian control. Maybe he invades, maybe he doesn't.
But Josh Marshall is right, in that Putin has made a disastrous miscalculation when it comes to NATO. He presumed he could fracture the coalition, maybe through the sort of ongoing fuckery that he has perpetrated in the West for the past five years or more. All of Putin's actions have served to reinvigorate and revivify NATO at exactly the time he was trying to get the US out of Europe.
It also might serve to give a boost to Joe Biden. If Putin invades, then it shows why having a Putin stooge like Trump in the White House is a bad thing. If he doesn't invade, then Biden "wins" and looks "presidential."
Obviously, the current loser is Ukraine, even if Putin doesn't invade, as they have and will be living under the threat of invasion for a long time. But Russia isn't "winning" this one, because it was a fight they did not need to have. Ukraine was not poised to join NATO, and it was not poised to join the EU. This looks to be a serious "own goal" that we typically do see from closed decision making regimens in autocracies.
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