Russia Evaporates

We think of the collapse of the Soviet Union as history. A 30-year-ago event. It’s not. The process is ongoing and the core of the old Soviet Union, Russia, is still imploding, with massive geopolitical consequences that no one in our leadership is thinking about.

Let’s do it for them.

The post-Soviet rot began when war broke out in 1992 between Armenia and Azerbaijan over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Muslim and Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan on Russia’s southern border. This was only months after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Russia and several western powers brokered a shaky peace in 1994.

The Nagorno-Karabakh mess was quickly followed in 1992 by a war in Georgia—which borders Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan—in which the Abkhaz tried to separate from Georgia, a struggle that predated the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1993, Moscow engineered a peace, which lasted until 2008 when Vladimir Putin threw this region into chaos by starting the South Ossetian War with Georgia.

But, the same year as the temporary peace in Georgia, a sixteen-year long civil war exploded in Chechnya, a Muslim enclave inside Russia. This conflict was so grave and insoluble that Putin, who came to power in 2000, had to accept Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, as de facto ruler of Chechnya.

Today, Chechnya is independent in all but name. So long as Kadyrov says nice things about Putin the Small, he can do whatever he wants. He’s even had people assassinated in Moscow. In July, he had Mamikhan Umarov murdered in Austria.

A crisis hit Dagestan in 1999, right before Putin came to power. Chechen rebels invaded to turn the place into an Islamic country. The Russian military pushed them out.

So, by the time he took over the Kremlin, the exploding instability on Russia’s borders, and even with Russia itself—Chechnya—should have taught Putin something. But, like Dumb Don, he seems unable to make sense of the obvious.

In August 2008, Putin decided to further destabilize his southern borders by starting the South Ossetian War, splitting Abkhazia off from Georgia and making it a semi-autonomous state.

Putin added to this stupidity in 2014 by invading the Ukraine, alienating a people who should have been his natural allies and destabilizing the Black Sea fronting Turkey on its southern shores and raising age-old Russian questions about the control of the Bosphorus and access to the Mediterranean.

All the while, as Publius long ago pointed out, Putin should have been working like crazy to secure access for Russian goods and services to the European Union with its 550 million middle class consumers. Then cut a major trade deal with the United States. Had he done so he could have eliminated Russian reliance on hydrocarbons—a declining market—and assured Russia’s future in advanced products for advanced markets. Destabilizing Russia’s borders would have had no purpose and held no interest.

The result: Russia's GDP ranks with Brazil. The U.S. is 14X bigger and China is 10X bigger. Worse, Russia's GDP per capita ranks it 61st in the world, roughly where Argentina is, 16% of the U.S.

Perhaps Putin’s most costly miscalculation was Syria, far from Russia in a part of the world of no strategic or market value for Russia. He did everything possible to reduce that country to rubble, oversee the deaths of 400,000 of is people and earn the everlasting hatred of millions of others. At the same time ensuring, as always, that Russia’s economy is in no position to rebuild Syria into the showcase it has to be for Putin to show the world, and Russia, Russian success. We figured this out years ago. See Publius’ Putin the Small Stumbles in Syria from October 2016.

Vladimir The Fool's stumbles are now a head-over-heels tumble.

In September this year, under Recep Erdogan, the Turks, Russia’s traditional enemy, reignited the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to further Turkish influence in the old Soviet states with Turkic ethnicity.

Turkish influence now stretches unchecked from Libya in the Mediterranean to Central Asia, across what has long been known as ”the soft underbelly” of Europe and Russia. As Publius said would happen in Managing Russia’s Implosion four and a half years ago, Putin is now powerless to do anything. The Russian Rot continues, but at a faster pace. NATO, of which Turkey is a member, has also failed to restrain Erdogan.

In July, Putin made the mistake of jailing Sergei Furgal, the governor of Khabarovsk in Russia’s far east. The place exploded in anti-Putin protest the likes of which have never been seen in Russia. Putin is now so weak that he cannot stop this.

In August, Belarus, the strategic space between Russia and the EU, dissolved into chaos when its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, tried to fix his re-election against the will of the people. But Putin has nothing to offer to support Lukashenko. Indeed, anything he does short of supporting the Belarus opposition and getting rid of Lukashenko will further destabilize his borders.

In the same month, in an unforced error, Putin tried to assassinate his only credible opponent, Alexei Navalny. Navalny lived and is more credible than ever.

This month, an old Soviet, Kyrgyzstan, exploded. But, note, Kyrgyzstan borders on the world’s top superpower, China, “The Center of Everything” in English. What can Putin do?

Today, Russia is dependent on selling hydrocarbons—oil and gas—to The Center at ever-lower prices. So Putin must bow to Xi Jinping at The Center but not appear to be doing so.

During this long cycle of weakening his borders, refusing to exploit global markets for his people and relying ever-more on The Center, Putin went on a strange trip of trying to destabilize as many top markets as he could. He scored a big “victory” with Brexit, which is permanently wrecking his must-have EU market. See Publius’ Brexit: Vladimir Putin Wins Big from July, 2016

Putin did everything possible to get Dumb Don elected. See Publius’ The Hacksident of the United States from four years ago. But, he didn’t use his power to get access to the U.S. for Russian business. So, what was the point? Simply, he needs Don to counter The Center’s fast-growing global position.

But things are not working as planned.

The EU is turning tough on Putin because leaders there are not blind to his fast-diminishing status. And, in spite of Putin’s best efforts, American voters may turn against Dumb Don whose handling of the Covid19 Crisis—and everything else—has proven spectacularly inept.

What is astonishing is that Putin has never managed to turn his total control of Dumb Don into even a small advantage. No matter how diminished the U.S. has become on the world stage, Putin the Small gets ever smaller.

Recep Erdogan has shown just how small the Small One is. Turkey will now control outcomes in Nagorno-Karabakh right on Russia’s border. Stalin must be rolling in his grave.

One of Dumb Don’s most spectacular failures was his inability to profit from Publius’ conclusions about Putin the Small. Because of his intellectual deficiencies, the Dumb Dude cannot understand a word of what Publius writes and likely does not know that Russia is collapsing, let alone what this means for the U.S. and how he (and we) could profit from it.

For Americans, the big question is, does Biden get any of this. Obama certainly did and played Putin like a Strad in Syria with results that are still cutting into Russia’s ever-weaker finances and global reputation.

Here is the key to understanding what is next: how easy it has been for Erdogan to show Putin reduced to the next Tsar Peter III is not lost on Xi Jinping.

Watch Xi carefully.

Update December 11, 2020

Losing Dumb Don is a massive setback for Putin the Small. Even with his Hacksident in power, he was unable to make the big break into U.S. markets that Russian business so badly needs. This will go down as one of the most remarkable failures in Russian history.

Update December 27, 2020

Having failed to take advantage of his successful Trump Hacksidency, Putin is preparing the next stage in Russia's withdrawal from global markets: firming control inside Russia so that Russians will not have the skills to sell outside the country. A great story by Robyn Dixon in the Washington Post today shows how systematic Putin will be in enforcing his retreat. The consequences will be irreversible.

Update January 8, 2021

In a massive setback for Vladimir the Small, Russian security operations launched the Solar Winds hack, the damage from which is growing bigger every day. This hack has, for decades to come, eliminated any trust that anyone could have in Russian goods and services. "Made in Russia" is no longer an option. That Putin allowed this to happen when he so desperately needs market share Europe and the U.S., the combined economies of which are 10X Russia's, is a staggering failure of management.