The Aftermath of War
Or, are we better than we used to be or not?
Dylan Combellick wrote two pieces yesterday about the possible aftermath of the Ukrainian war. I read both with eagerness, as he is very informative and knows a lot as a past military analyst.
But I don’t always agree with his political conclusions, and this is a good example. Now, understand, I’m not an expert at politics, and I never even played one on TV. But I’ve been watching both US and world political goings on for decades, and I do think I’ve got a pretty good grasp on things.
Most of what he wrote I agreed with. Where I don’t is his ideas about handling Russia after the war. He wants to “leave them alone” — isolate them and force them to go it alone. Allow the other federations to also go their own ways, too.
I did comment on his two articles, and he responded, but a comment isn’t the ideal place to make a longer more accurate response, so here we are.
He contended that:
We did try to rebuild Russia in the 1990s and it failed for precisely the reasons I just outlined. I don’t think we should try again.
My answer is this:
In fact, we simply allowed our corporations to move into Russia (with their active agreement) to just sell their stuff. Few of them actually attempted to build factories there, the idea was to do business there. Our government (nor the UN or any other international entity) did not create any programs intended to either expand Russian industrial capacity or make any changes at all to their governmental structures. By selling our own stuff there, we monopolized their consumer markets, preventing them from doing that themselves.
Worse, the corruption endemic in Russian culture from the past still remained, and we did nothing to change that. Yeltsin & Co. tried to do democracy, but that corruption just messed things up, and Putin’s Authoritarian buddies managed to take over. Simplified, of course, but that’s essentially what happened.
As he also mentioned, the Marshall Plan worked because both Germany and Japan unconditionally surrendered.
True.
So, what is stopping us, as an international community, from making Russia do that after they fail in Ukraine?
Look, as I’ve mentioned numerous times before, and Dylan has illustrated magnificently almost every day, the Ukrainians have virtually destroyed the Russian military with world help. It’s not finished yet, but it will be, and when it is, the current Russian “government” is going to be replaced essentially by someone else with similar ideals and goals as Putin had. What the level of violence will be — well, who knows?
In other words, nothing will change.
You can isolate them all you wish, cause their society to collapse into itself for the lack of international help, but all that’s going to do is create anger and resentment among the Russian people. It will NOT cause them to magically transform themselves into a modern technological society.
The ONLY way we can do that is to repeat the Marshall Plan with the right changes to suit Russian society and economy.
Dylan also said in that respect:
The Marshall plan built new structures on a solid foundation of a functioning German society. Russia does not have any cultural memory of a functioning society, it has no foundation upon which we can build these structures. That is something that only the Russians can develop and cannot be imposed from the outside as we tried to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Except, as I argued in a response, Germany also had a similarly poor past with democracy. Japan had none!
Yet, since the entire German governmental structure was destroyed, we had the opportunity to change it by replacing that structure with more democratically organized entities with the right rules. Heck, in Japan we actually allowed them to keep their monarchy! And one can argue that they recovered as quickly and easily as Germany, even with a much different style of culture than we were attempting to introduce them to. At the least the Germans had past exposure to western culture. But their past with democracy was limited to the Weimar Republic, basically, and that was marred badly by their loss in WWI, with the resulting economic chaos, culminating with Nazi interference and violence.
But again, in spite of that, they recovered.
Dylan and others have noted Russia’s nukes.
I don’t disagree that they represent a chance of being used. But I would argue that in the collapse of their current government, those at the top in other structures such as the military, below Putin, are going to be very busy surviving, and since they know the West has a definitive MAD response policy of just responding in kind and with a much stronger response, I fully doubt that they’ll chance it. Their military folks know ours knows where they are and are likely to hide out — thus they understand that their likelihood of survival would be next to nothing. Neither would Putin’s. They don’t HAVE to care about their country or their people, they care about themselves. They’ll be too busy running for their freedom and their lives.
My point is that the world community must get together and consider a plan. One that is specific to Russia.
It needs to involve the destruction of all Russian past governmental organizations — even the destruction of the Kremlin if necessary. Why? Well, what makes you think they’d stop their psychological operations against the world? If that “isolation” didn’t involve disconnecting them from the Internet, well, they’ll just keep on keeping on. If we isolate THAT, they’ll just send their operatives to European countries to use THEIR internet. The entire goals of that group has always been to distract the world from Russian operatives trying to achieve Russian goals. Mainly because, as I’ve noted before, they know they’re not militarily strong enough to achieve their empirical goals with a military, so other means must be used.
Hence psyops. The ONLY way to stop that is to destroy the organizations that do that task, and that requires the higher structures to be destroyed also.
Russian government must be replaced by the West by force. Just as we did after WWII. Nothing else will work, and what better time to do that than when Russia is crippled militarily by having just lost a war? After all, that’s how we fixed both Germany and Japan.
I know it won’t be fast or easy. My wife is German, and I still have a photo from her family taken in 1956 of her as a four year old, standing in the street in front of her parents’ guesthouse, with the house behind her across that street still bombed out. In ruins, over ten years after the war ended.
The Russian people won’t care that much at first about what governmental structure is in place. They’ll care about surviving. If we can guarantee that their past governments’ activities that resulted in their menfolk dying are ended, they’ll concentrate on living. Then it’ll be up to us to make that easier than in the past. To end the corruption — and more importantly, the structures and culture that made it necessary.
Frankly, so many of them are at the bottom of what anyone might call survival level living, just damn near anything would be better.
We CAN do it. We MUST do it.
But leaving them alone to fester and stew themselves into anger and resentment will never change their culture.
Never.
