Winter is Coming (3 page)

It is very dangerous to believe that the fall of a symbol is the same as the end of what that symbol represented, but the temptation to do so is nearly irresistible. People have a strong affinity for symbols and narratives of all kinds, especially when they look like the happy ending of a long and dark fairy tale. The Berlin Wall was a literal and figurative division of the world into good and evil, light and darkness. When ecstatic Germans poured across the fortified border and took hammers to the hated Wall, it was easy to believe that evil itself had been defeated.

Celebration was warranted, of course. Hundreds of millions of people were waking from a totalitarian nightmare that had lasted for decades. The “Evil Empire” had fallen. A span of over sixty-seven hundred kilometers—a quarter of the globe, reaching from the Chukotka Peninsula in the Russian Far East to Berlin— escaped from Communist repression and economic blight to the bright hope of democracy and free markets nearly overnight. It was a glorious, unforgettable moment.

There were also more practical reasons to celebrate. The existential threat of nuclear war was lifted. Three generations had grown up with duck-and-cover drills and dinner table talk of “mutually assured destruction.” Countless billions of dollars had been invested in military measures and countermeasures that were now going to become redundant. The resulting “peace dividend” was going to lead to a new era of prosperity, or so the widely accepted storyline went.

I have written about what I call “the gravity of past success” in chess. Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Meanwhile, the loser knows that he made a mistake, that something went wrong, and he will work hard to improve for next time. The happy winner often assumes he won simply because he is great. Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake. It takes tremendous discipline to overcome this tendency and to learn lessons from a victory.

The natural response, the human response, in the aftermath of winning the Cold War was to embrace the former enemy. Clinton and Yeltsin hugged and laughed. The European Union and NATO welcomed the former Soviet Bloc nations with open arms and invested billions of dollars to aid the newcomers. When it came to economic and political reform, the sticks of isolation and containment were dropped in favor of a purely carrot-based Western policy. The EU and other institutions offered the newly free countries incentives to join as full partners if minimum conditions of political transparency and economic reforms were met. This principle of engagement was a great success in Eastern Europe, despite the bumpy road for many.

But this expansive method was also applied in places where the forces of oppression had not been rooted out. Countries where Soviet-style repression had merely been renamed were invited into the club with few demands, and little reciprocity. The prevailing attitude in the West was “It’s okay, they will come around eventually. Democracy has won, the bad guys are on the wrong side of history. We just have to keep engaging with them and wait.” But the proverbial forces of history do not win wars on their own. And experience has shown that you can often do just fine being on the wrong side of history if you are on the right side of a pipeline.

In hindsight it is amazing how quickly the lessons of the Cold War victory were forgotten and abandoned. At the moment of greatest ascendancy of the forces of freedom and democracy in history, the West stopped pressing the advantage. With overwhelming military, economic, and moral power on its side, the West changed strategies entirely.

In today’s era of globalization and false equivalence it can be hard for many of us to recall that most Cold War leaders had seen true evil up close during World War II. They had no illusions about what dictators were capable of if given the chance. They had witnessed existential threats with their own eyes and seen the horrors of the concentration camps. They also knew that nuclear weapons could be used in war; for generations that followed, that thought was almost literally inconceivable. It is a shame that today Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin have become caricatures, as if they are mythological beasts representing an ancient evil vanquished long ago.

But evil does not die, just as history does not end. Like a weed, evil can be cut back but never entirely uprooted. It waits for its chance to spread through the cracks in our vigilance. It can take root in the fertile soil of our complacency, or even the rocky rubble of the fallen Berlin Wall.

Communism did not disappear when the Wall came down. Nearly 1.5 billion human beings still live in Communist dictatorships today, and another billion and a half live in unfree states of different stripes, including, of course, much of the former Soviet Union. The desire of men to exploit and to rule over others by diktat, and by force, did not disappear when the Wall fell. What did disappear—or, at least, what faded dramatically—was the willingness of the free world to take a firm stand in support of the oppressed.

This shift is understandable, as it represented the public’s desire to end decades of tension and standoffs. Bill Clinton, who took office in 1992, was the first baby boomer president, and he epitomized the mindset that it was time to move beyond the harsh Manichean worldview of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the dragon’s teeth were growing. Belorussian dictator Lukashenko began his lifetime tenure in 1994. His Central Asian dictator colleagues, Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Karimov of Uzbekistan, have been in power for over a quarter century. It is no coincidence that two of the countries from the former Soviet Union with the greatest potential to break free of Russia’s dire gravitational pull, Georgia and Ukraine, have both been attacked by Russia and partially occupied.

It is true these thugs and autocrats do not represent a threat to the global order anywhere near that posed by the Soviet Union, despite Putin’s attempts to cobble together a “USSR-lite” via trade agreements, intimidation, and puppet leaders. Beyond its military capability, the USSR was a threat because it aggressively propounded a toxic ideology, Communism, which was capable of spreading far beyond its borders. Until recently, Putin has felt capable of looting Russia and consolidating power without resorting to anything resembling ideology. “Let’s steal together” has been his ruling elite’s only motto, using government power to move money into the pockets of those wielding that power. But as the economic situation in Russia has deteriorated, Putin has been obliged to turn to the later chapters in the dictator’s handbook to find new ways to justify his role as the supreme leader.

Since 2013, the Kremlin and its various mouthpieces have accompanied the latest crackdowns on gays and the media with overtly fascist rhetoric about “un-Russian” behavior, treason, and betrayal of the nation. Some of these speeches, including a few of Putin’s own, so closely resemble those of Nazi leaders in the 1930s that they seem only to change the word “fatherland” to “motherland.” But as Hitler knew, you eventually run out of internal enemies and have to look abroad. The demonization of the United States in state-run media had been going on for a decade, but it wasn’t enough.

When Putin’s puppet president in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled the country after the “Euromaidan” protests demanding greater European integration, Putin seized his chance. Citing the need to protect Russians in Ukraine, he first occupied and annexed Crimea and then began inciting violence via Russian-supported “rebels” in Eastern Ukraine. Soon after, despite the Kremlin’s increasingly absurd claims to the contrary, Russian troops and heavy arms turned the conflict into an actual invasion.

A war on any grounds is terrible, but Putin’s dangerous turn to ethnically based imperialism cannot be ignored. Those who say the Ukraine conflict is far away and unlikely to lead to global instability miss the clear warning Putin has given us. There is no reason to believe his announced vision of a “Greater Russia” will end with Eastern Ukraine and many reasons to believe it will not. Dictators only stop when they are stopped, and appeasing Putin with Ukraine will only stoke his appetite for more conquests.

Ukraine is just one battle the free world would like to ignore in a larger war it refuses to acknowledge even exists. But pretending you don’t have enemies does not make it true. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union are gone, but the enemies of freedom who built them are not. History does not end; it runs in cycles. The failure to defend Ukraine today is the failure of the Allies to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. The world must act now so that Poland in 2015 will not be called on to play the role of Poland in 1939.

The Cold War was won not just by military or economic superiority, but on values I, a former Soviet citizen, unironically call traditional American values, ones that the Western Bloc adopted as well. We cannot resolve the problems of globalization with the same legal and economic tools that created it. We need new, morality-based frameworks to confront the dictatorships in Russia and China now that they have so thoroughly become a part of our globalized world. We need new alliances to combat the stateless terror networks that use our technology against us. These frameworks and alliances must be based on moral principles, the only weapon the enemies of democracy cannot match. This is even more obvious when those enemies possess nuclear weapons, making a military confrontation unimaginably dangerous.

The hazy battle lines of these modern conflicts can only be addressed by bright moral lines. The free world’s enemies can be identified by their targets. They know that if liberal democracy and free market policies succeed, then they are out of business— and so they fight for their very survival. To meet these attacks we must turn our principles into policies. We must identify and understand what we are fighting for, and fighting against. We must be willing to defend our values as if our lives depended on them, because they do.

We must resist the distractions, excuses, and straw man arguments presented by dictators and thugs on one side and echoed by appeasers and cowards on the other. They talk ceaselessly of what might happen if the free world stands up to Putin or the consequences of taking direct military action against ISIS. But what they do not want to address is what will happen if insufficient action is taken, if the status quo of appeasement and engagement is allowed to continue. Avoiding a new Cold War sounds like an admirable goal, but what if we are already in one? And what of the actual war and invasion and annexation of European soil that has already happened in Ukraine? Denial is not an acceptable policy. Fretting only about what might happen when the current situation is already catastrophic is a pathetic attempt to defer tough decisions. Ignoring your cancer and arguing with the doctors who diagnosed it will not save you, no matter how much you fear treatment.

There is no way to be sure exactly what will happen if the nations of the free world, led by the United States and NATO, confront Putin in Ukraine (or, for that matter, decide to wipe ISIS off the map). What we can be sure of is that action will eventually be necessary and that it will require more resources, more sacrifices, and more lives lost for every day that goes by. Putin, like every dictator ever known before him, grows in confidence and support when he is unchallenged. Every step he can trumpet as a success to the Russian people makes it harder to remove him and more likely he will feel bold enough to take even more aggressive steps.

It is true that if America, Europe, and the rest of the world’s democracies finally realize the era of engagement is over and strike at Putin and the other thugs by cutting them off and providing overpowering support to their targets, conflicts may worsen before they can be extinguished. This view—the willingness to accept short-term sacrifice for the long-term good—requires the sort of leadership the free world has very little of today. It requires thinking beyond the next poll, the next quarterly report, and the next election. The policies of the Cold War held remarkably firm for decades, across administrations, and eventually ended in a great victory for the side of freedom. Since then, one president after another, one prime minister after another, passed the buck of human rights in Russia until Putin had enough momentum to launch a real war on European soil.

A popular straw man argument is to suggest that intervention against aggression might lead to World War III or even a nuclear holocaust. To the contrary, the only way the current crisis will continue to escalate is if Putin is not confronted with an overwhelming threat to his hold on power, which is the only thing he cares about. If Putin is allowed to go from victory to victory, wiping out any opposition at home while gaining territory and influence abroad, the risk of an all-out war increases dramatically. Adolf Hitler did not attack Poland in 1939 because the Allies stood up for Czechoslovakia; they didn’t. Hitler did not move into the Sudetenland because the world protested vigorously at his Austrian Anschluss, but because the response was so feeble. It was only after all of his early triumphs were accomplished so effortlessly, against so little opposition from the Western democracies, that he had the confidence to go too far.

Of course Putin is no Hitler; that unspeakable evil will never be matched—although those who lived through the horrors of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot may disagree. It is important, though, to remember that in 1936—and even in 1937 and 1938— Hitler was no Hitler either! The adulation of the foreign athletes and dignitaries at the Berlin Olympic Games, the unopposed ease of the Nazi army’s first steps over the post-WWI German borders, the eager capitulation of Chamberlain: these are the things that allowed Hitler to become the monster.

In terms of global influence, Russia’s industrial and military power today is no match for that wielded by Nazi Germany. But Putin has one thing Hitler never had: nuclear weapons. And he is not shy about reminding us of that fact. I forced myself to listen to Putin’s October 2014 Q&A session in Sochi twice because I couldn’t believe he was so casually praising Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s terrifying nuclear gamesmanship. But we should all listen carefully to what Putin says, because he has a track record of following through with his threats when left unchecked.