The two nations represent two very different, but equally real, challenges. The challenge Russia presents is mostly military. The only thing they have in relative abundance is raw military power. It is limited in its range and scope to pretty much bordering areas, but it is very powerful in the short term and capable of focusing a lot of force locally, enough to probably overwhelm most of its neighbors in the very short term. Long term it does not have the economic base or international pull to be an existential or strategic threat to non-neighboring countries, though conceivably if left unchecked it could I guess snowball its way to such power. Unlikely, but in the short term it is still a loose cannon.
China represents a much more nuanced and long-term, as well as strategic, challenge. It is less capable of deploying overwhelming military power at a specific point, though partly that is due to geography and the comparative difficulty of massing air and naval forces compared to ground forces. What it has in spades though is economic clout. Not only does it have an economy much more robust than that of Russia, it has its tendrils in every other economy on the planet, and is deeply entrenched in the global economic system. Whether this is a threat or an opportunity depends I guess on how one looks at it. If you are pessimistic, then yes, China is far more threatening in the long term than Russia. If you take a more balanced view, though, China’s comparative strength actually makes it a less threatening force, as there are many ways for China to achieve its national goals besides using force, a path that while not out of the question (as with Taiwan perhaps) is inherently costly, risky, and potentially counter-productive.
Russia has much less to lose and far fewer options, so in that sense, especially if you border them, they are more dangerous. The degree to which Russia poses a threat to the USA and its interests is a different question, one that depends a lot on how one views those interests.
Honestly, I worry .ore about Taiwan then Ukraine right now.
Ukraine could be a bloody war, but with the support of the EU, I don’t see Russia Prevailing.
I don’t see that as the case for Taiwan, which is seeing a building of Chinese Troops on their borders.
Enidigm
1801
Russia’s Siberian holdings are Gogolian dystopia of crumbling buildings and dwindling dispirited population adrift on the taiga, where northern Manchuria is filled with state-directed metropolises full of light and money and tens of millions.
China is more nuanced in that what China wants is not land but land filled with Han Chinese. I never knew until recently about the “Willow Palisade” but it was built by the Manchurian Qing basically to keep all the Han Chinese out of Manchuria after they moved south, and that it quickly fell into disrepair and 200 years later the Han were immigrating in parts of Manchuria in large numbers to the point where today the Manchurian ethnicity and the Manchurian language are basically extinct, so it seemed like the Manchurians knew what was coming when they built it. What Russia and China dispute is the Amur river basin, because basically some of those “Stroganoff” kind of Russian adventurers led a party down the Amur river seizing Chinese forts along the way in violation of longstanding Chinese - Imperial Russian treaties. There’s pretty much nothing stopping China from seizing the Amur from Russia today except nuclear weapons.
Russia is a paper tiger, while China is like a Han avalanche of immutably viscous lava. Russian power is the power of the politics of the void or absence, of governing the interstitial emptiness that nobody important wants to bother with. Even here, Russian power is just the power of having the will to break windows among shopkeepers, and even the bully’s shabby coat and worn shoes work well enough to do that.
abrandt
1802
I think this is some extreme deflection from how responsible for Trump millions of American voters who possess plenty of agency were. Trump was going to do well regardless of what Russia did, don’t forget that.
I do love your prose. Good analysis too.
antlers
1804
I think this (long) thread is a clear-eyed statement of Putin’s aims, both operationally and politically, in Ukraine:
Given that, it’s hard to see how he doesn’t get what he wants. Proposed sanctions seem minor compared to his aims.
Timex
1805
While this is true, I think that it’s very much NOT true that Trump won his election on his own. He definitely did not.
A big part of Trump’s popularity stemmed from Russian disinformation campaigns.
Again, Russia ACTUALLY broke our democracy… not in some theoretical sense, but they actually managed to affect a change, which had real, tangible results in the world. I do not believe that Trump would have been elected without Russia’s assistance. Even if we ignore the actual disinformation campaign run during the election cycle, there’s still the fact that Russia has clearly been grooming Trump for a long freaking time, and essentially funding him.
Whether or not the scale of their involvement is as high as you portray it, I have to agree with you that Russia’s actions in the political sphere have had some serious negative effects on us. I’d go as far as to say that their cyber and political capabilities worry me far more than their conventional military power. The latter poses very little direct threat to us, though perhaps far more to those poor schmucks with a border with Russia. The former though has serious disruptive potential, if not more.
I’d hate to live in a country so xenophobic, it would turn down a visa for Nobel Laurette, because they were from a Muslim country. Oh wait I do, thanks in large part to Putin’s work to make his stooge Donald Trump president,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/stem-give-biden-credit-his-efforts-repair-national-reputation-that-trump-trashed/
I think the Mueller report, will be the definitive work on the Russia’s interference in the election for many years. I"m not going as far as @Timex and saying, without Putin Trump wouldn’t be president, but it is important to remember that the Mueller report didn’t rule out the possibility. I personally, think it is more likely than not. What I’m sure of is that, even if Trump wasn’t taking orders from Putin, no Russian agent, could have done more damage to the US reputation and our democracy than Donald J Trump.
Russia’s cyber capabilities extend far beyond its borders, and while I understand China’s long-term strategic threat, nothing China has done or likely will do in the next 10 years is as damaging as what Russia has done in the last 5 years.
Scotten
1808
I keep hearing some “never before used” sanctions that would be crazy rough but I’ll believe it when I see it. Cutting them off from the SWIFT system would be the most painful but I do not know if the US would weaponize that.
abrandt
1810
I absolutely agree with this. Russia is no threat to the US or Western Europe via conventional military means, but they absolutely have an array of cyber weapons they can attack us with. I just take issue with the language Timex is using that Russia somehow forced us to elect Trump. No, they tricked an embarrassingly large number of people into voting for Trump. Very bad, but ultimately we are the ones who shot ourselves in the foot regardless of Putin whispering in our ear about how good it would be for us to pull that trigger because Hillary’s e-mails.
Timex
1811
I absolutely agree.
I’m not afraid of some kind of red dawn scenario. I’m not even afraid of direct cyber attacks on our critical systems.
I’m most concerned with the continuation of what we’ve already seen… Russia’s ability to break the minds of a serious subset of westerners with their modern propaganda techniques.
It’s not only wrecked havok in America, it’s had widespread effects in seemingly every western country. Russia has managed to undermine the very idea of liberal democratic government in the west, and that is the single gravest threat to us right now (at least in my opinion).
One thing that’s important in this regard, is that I’m not talking about Trump’s ham fisted buffoonery, where shit was almost random because of his inability to execute anything.
Russia set out with exactly this goal, of undermining the public perception of democracy in the west … And they freaking managed to pull it off. They actually executed a plan, and it fucking worked. That is crazy. That’s probably one of, if not the, biggest victories any of our adversaries have pulled off in ages.
I’ve been thinking to myself about Putin and Russia over the last month, that his longevity in power is kind of a cognitive trap for us outsiders. For a long time Putin has been the thinking man’s autocrat. His image is that of a guy who might be evil, but also intelligent, rational, well-informed and psychologically stable. But as true as that might have been over 20 years ago, we maybe ought to recognise that things change over time even when the name stays the same.
Putin is now in his seventies. He has enabled the complete corruption of Russian government through cronyism and and bribery. He has demonstrated that the price of opposition can be death, whenever it particularly gets on his nerves. How much genuinely good advice do we think he’s getting from his ministers these days? How much unvarnished truth is he getting from intelligence agencies run by his cronies? How much, at this point, has the Russian government started believing its own propaganda?
If it became known amongst the governing elite that Putin thought that the Ukrainian army was weak and fragile, and that their government was fragile and likely to surrender under severe pressure. Do we trust his military and intelligence advisers not to tell him what they think he wants to hear?
I’ve been pondering this also. Putin had a reputation for playing a bad hand well. Evil, in the Walter White, Gus Fring way, not the Idi Amin, Kim Jung family. I suppose the Crimea invasion may have helped him at home but hurt him a lot internationally.
Why the hell threaten to invade Ukraine in the dead of winter. Why not start the build-up in April for May invasion? It is not like the Russian are better prepared to find a winter war than the Ukrainians.
Everyone knows, you have lower attack factors in winter, and supply is bitch.
Dejin
1814
Winter does make it harder for Europe to respond though, because that’s when they are most aware of their need for Russian natural gas.
Meanwhile, we get results of agreements on cybersecurity between Putin and Biden in Geneva last year. Russian intelligence came down hard on hacker groups. REvil group was arrested earlier this month and now its Infraud Organization.
One Russian political analyst I like to read has a hobby of finding out cases of Russia quietly doing whatever European or US organizations ask of it. Whenever the European Court of Human Rights asks Russia to change some laws or compensate some unjustly persecuted person there’s a loud media campaign about how Russia will never submit to commands, but then it’s done anyway in one way or another.
NPR mentioned that in Spring, the fields become to muddy to support heavy armor and support vehicles, and that only when it’s frosted over can vehicles traverse the terrain.
Here is a similar piece by CNN
Fascinating. Not that surprising though, I suppose. I imagine there are at least two Russias, the official might as well be Party line Russia, and the “we’d like to be part of the modern world and enjoy a bit of affluence and stability” Russia. Probably other variations as well. It would not be much of a stretch for the right hand to not know what the left hand was doing. In some ways, it’s an extension of how the USSR ran too.
It reminds me of Jungian analysis of Germans back in his day. He called it a kind of teenage nation that feels like it deserves more and begs for recognition. This was pre-WW1, mind you. Russians are very much concerned about their international image, and I think it’s one of those things that is the same in simple people and elites. Love all the movies with Russian bad guys if it’s cool bad guys. Better to be hated than forgotten, that kind of thing.
https://declarator.org/blog/61/
Here’s a fun map from 2019. There’s a list of property that Russian government officials declared in their tax declarations. You can imagine a lot of stuff is not on this list for a variety of reasons. Ex-USSR countries are in the lead and sometimes it’s for an innocuous reason like the current owner could inherit it. But look at the EU! Montenegro, Spain, Bulgaria. Don’t let anyone tell you Russian elites are not of European culture!
The only daughter of tough guy Lavrov, Russian minister of foreign affairs, lives and works in USA. The author of laws against gay propaganda sent her son to Oxford and now he lives in Belgium. It’s a very, very common story. If a child is not interesting to work in the government they go live in some Western country.
