If the mid-August summit in Alaska between the United States and the Russian Federation over the war in Ukraine reveals anything, it made clear that President Donald Trump and his allies face a prolonged confrontation with Moscow, no matter how the current conflict is resolved.
Russia displayed no signs of scaling down its Ukrainian war at the Anchorage meeting.
The war in Ukraine is one flashpoint between the two superpowers.
But it isn’t hard to envision others as the Kremlin asserts itself.
Even if Russia has suffered one million casualties, of whom some 200,000 were killed since the start of its full-scale invasion in February of 2022, the Federation remains truculent.
In fact, Vladimir Putin looks to other fronts to keep the diplomatic pot stirred up with hybrid warfare tactics of provocations, sabotage, cyberattacks, and propaganda in the Baltic and Arctic regions.
In one technique, Russian ships have dragged anchor chains over deep-sea pipelines to cut off the flow of natural gas or digital data.
These tactics damage undersea cables but fall short of igniting open warfare with Russia’s neighbors, such as Poland, Germany, Finland, and other countries.
They do point to future hostilities in the High North.
Some North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials, in fact, anticipate fresh military conflicts within Russia in five years, when they foresee a recovered and prepared Russia readying for other armed conflicts to establish dominance in the Arctic Circle.
Russia’s Motives: Old and New
Putin’s aims encompass not only a restoration of Ukraine to Russian sovereignty but also a return of Russia to its rightful place among the great powers as during the Cold War.
To Putin, the Soviet Union’s 1991 disintegration constituted a geopolitical catastrophe.
Thus, the Kremlin leader has striven to reestablish its global standing.
For Putin, a peace settlement in Ukraine must contribute to his objectives.
Even if he signed on to a peace agreement, there is no certainty that he, or the next Russian ruler, would honor it.
Why History Matters
What Americans must realize is that the West’s war is not just against Putin but also against Russian history and its impact on Russian thinking.
Aggressive wars to gain territory are embedded in the country’s history.
Expansionism, imperialism, and absolutism are at the core of Russian identity for multiple centuries. The country’s tsars played a significant role in establishing an imperial structure.
Moscow mostly expanded eastward through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean and southward into the Caucasus.
Russia grew by a staggering average of 14,000 square miles each year from 1550 to 1700, as estimated by eminent historian Richard Pipes.
Afterwards, the boundaries continued to expand despite wars, internal political upheavals, and assignations of tsars during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Iconic figures like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great pushed Russia’s imperial enlargement while modernizing and westernizing its institutions.
In the course of World War II and beyond, Russia’s expansive machine rolled on into Eastern Europe to occupy and control it through local communist parties, backed up by the Red Army. This Soviet communist edifice lasted for over four decades until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
The roots of Putin’s outlook and that of his oligarchs lie within centuries of Russian conquest, annexation, and occupation of neighboring lands.
These predatory instincts lie deep within the Russian hierarchy’s genetic code.
The Kremlin’s territorial augmentation made Russia the world’s largest nation.
For comparison, the United States is the third-largest nation-state in terms of area — approximately 57.5% of the size of Russia.
Moscow’s vast landmass, fossil fuels, and mineral resources contribute to its natural defenses and industrialization.
No outside power has ever invaded and held modern Russia, in spite of costly attempts by Sweden’s Charles XII, France’s Napoleon, or Germany’s Hitler in a span of over 200 years.
These historical and geographic endowments bestow a sense of providential destiny on its rulers from tsars, to commissars, and now to dictators.
Many Americans believe and hope that peace in Ukraine will retore the ante-bellum status quo which prevailed in the beleaguered country and the East European region as a whole.
This wishful thinking is understandable but unlikely.
The post-Cold War tranquility has been shattered not just by the Ukrainian war but by the geopolitical transformation that is marked by the return of the Russian and Chinese empires to the world stage.
The “re-rise” of Russia, along with the rapid rise of China as a global hegemon, doom any possibility for a world free of global crises, and perhaps even a major wars among the three global superpowers — the United States, Russia, and China.
What’s to Be Done?
Given Russia’s immense size and predilection for military invasion of nearby states what can the United States do for defense?
The Pentagon must continue its conventional military and nuclear armaments buildup as a means to defer Russian aggression.
As during the Cold War, Moscow recognized U.S. military power acted as a deterrent to its truculence.
Moreover, the Pentagon must also demand its fellow NATO members and other close partners step up their re-armament programs in the face of Moscow’s belligerence in the Baltic and Arctic regions as well as Eastern Europe.
New arms, including missile defenses, are a big part of U.S. future security.
A major component of America’s proposed missile defense posture is the Golden Dome homeland shield being built by the Trump administration.
The planned bulwark is to be made up of a multi-layered defensive system, which is intended to detect and destroy in flight various aerial projectiles, including hypersonic, ballistic, and cruise missiles.
The Kremlin leadership too often rattles their nuclear saber to be dismissed as inconsequential threats.
Deterrence and defense against a nuclear attack are of utmost importance.
The Pentagon also must reckon with the Chinese Communist Party as a front-rank adversary. The possibility of a war with the People’s Republic of China over its desire to regain jurisdiction over the island of Taiwan is of genuine concern.
Together, Russia and China — which have grown closer to each other against the United States over the past decade — pose a heightened threats for the foreseeable future.
Both are ruled by iron-fisted autocracies.
And they share the goal of eroding U.S. global influence and prestige.
Their anti-U.S. alliance differs from the Soviet-America bipolar standoff of the Cold War, making Washington’s policy toward the two superpowers a greater challenge than it faced after World War II in the containment of the Soviet Union alone.
It may take years, even decades, of exertion until the United States can strip off its armor in the event Russia and China become more harmonious powers.
Thomas H Henriksen is a Senior Fellow, emeritus at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
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