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I would be cautious of narratives and extrapolation. Should we ignore Russia’s success and excellent planning in Ukraine 2014, in Georgia (or its more Stalinesque bloodbaths in Syria and Chechnya)?

The most recent invasion of Ukraine was an ill-conceived decapitation strike. Russia actually thought its fifth columnists would deliver more cities bloodlessly (like Kherson was) and the Spesnatz would take out the Zelensky government. Western intelligence, AWACS and battlefield surveillance, Ukrainian fortitude and bravery and mostly Putin’s miscalculation made this a spectacular failure. The invasion force, outside of Donbas, was structured as an occupation and municipal governance force, not one meant to take land cm by cm against entrenched opposition, and Putin’s paranoia prevented even the alleged occupation forces from properly planning and training.

Putin now controls only the most strategic (to Russia) bits of Ukraine- a southern land bridge and a bit more of the Donbas than it had before. With the addition of a few hundred thousand troops and defensive lines built for depth, it will become much more difficult for Ukraine to dislodge these forces. The amount of artillery (ex Himars, MLRS) that NATO has donated is largely irrelevant along a front this large (Ukraine has thousands of artillery pieces, including captured Russian ones, while NATO has sent dozens). HIMARS and MLRS are vital but the missiles/rockets are in short supply and are being used judiciously. Ukraine and the US love the narrative about US weaponry…..because Ukraine wants and needs more and it makes the US/NATO donors look good. Let’s remember the fighting is being done by people risking their lives.

Ukraine is a basket case with an economy reliant on charity. That is not the case with the Russian economy (though as each year passes it may go backwards in time by a decade).

Putin has unleashed chaos within Russia and for Russia with this invasion, but its overall strategy is a simple one of regional hegemony and control, not chaos. Russia’s ties to the Middle East and Iran are much stronger than the EU’s, who should really be the power trying to influence and stabilize this region. Meanwhile, Putin is still very influential in the ex-CIS and has intervened in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Azerbaijan/Armenia successfully in the past year.

This conflict has revealed that (ex-nukes) Putin is no real military threat to NATO, and he has proved he can live alongside chastened but suspicious neighbors like Georgia. Meanwhile, his ties to Asia are deepening (necessarily) as a result of the conflict.

We don’t “need” Russia perhaps, but let’s not underestimate the role that its hegemonic power had in stabilizing the CIS which would certainly have descended into Syrian style sectarian civil war otherwise.

Russia’s future role is unknown and probably many years in the future - after Putin and probably his nationalistic successor. We shall see

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Typo mate, just helping out offering some free Sub-editor services 😀

Before the war, its military was believed to be the world’s third most powerful on the planet

You only need either ‘worlds’ or ‘on the planet’ not both

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Nov 12, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

A well-researched piece. Who could forget that 30 drone hobbyists on bicycles stopped a 40-mile convoy of Russian tanks, troops, and assorted military vehicles. A Russian tank costs more than $3 million. What do you suppose 30 drones and 30 bicycles cost?

Keep up the great work.

JVG

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"A crumbling, aggressive, dysfunctional petrostate cannot be a balancing force in the world." - Wonderful words. Could start any text about Saudia, Iraq, Qatar, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, C.A.R. ... - petrostates tend to be dysfunctional (they can afford it for a while); crumbling and aggressiveness come as part of the parcel. - So who expects them to be a balancing force? Yep, some do. So? Next an analyse about aliens attacking? ;) I agree with most points, ofc.. Just: India for most of the time sees PAKISTAN (armed by USofA) as a much more acute threat than China. Pakistan, whose secret service build the Taliban and hid Osama bin Laden after 9/11 for years. The might of America is "balanced", indeed - balanced by the stupidity of its gov. agencies.

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Nov 11, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

a perpetually weak russia becomes a 'pay what you like' resource pantry for china. (even with covid darwinism, the manpower will be unmatched, and china would have to undergo some similar inefficient\kleptocratic incompetence to realistically weaken)

not even sure war reparations could supersede claims china would make on the resources.

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Nov 11, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

This is pretty brutal but necessary to say. Putin found a low-cost way to buttress Russia’s international sway in the 2010’s. He was successful, but only because of the problems he caused/contributed to (Georgia, Syria, Crimea, Brexit, Trump). In Putin’s multipolar world Russia would tread water as the rest of the world burned.

The problem with that strategy is Putin didn’t have a good grasp of Russia’s limits, since there was never meaningful pushback on each reach either from within or without. Like cryptobros over-leveraging themselves in the good times, he never understood how close he really was to the floor the whole time.

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I agree that Russia is remarkably weak. Its economy has been weak and fading since the 1970s, if not longer. Its demographics have been in decline (if not collapse) since the 1980s, if not longer. It nevertheless maintained a large army, with modern equipment - often less advanced than American equipment, but nevertheless competitive. The large, poorly trained, indifferently led Soviet military showed its weaknesses in the 1980s in Afghanistan - but I suppose the US military did the same thing, in the same place, in the 00s.

However, I think it's irrelevant to talk about whether "the world" "needs" Russian power. Russian power (or weakness) is a fact, not a "need". Some people outside Russia imagine that Russia will fulfill a role they would like to see, but Russia (under Putin or someone else) will pursue Russian interests to the extent it can.

Noah can be forgiven for incomplete understanding of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but I think there's more continuity from Brezhnev's Soviet Union to Putin's Russia than Noah sees. He correctly points out that the USSR was mostly a conservative, status quo power, but it was at least as prone to foreign adventurism as is Putin's Russia. It also sowed chaos in Africa and the Middle East, and ruthlessly exerted military power in eastern Europe. It also supported revolutionary movements in Latin America, and actively supported Viet Nam in order to weaken the US. It interfered in American and European elections through propaganda and front organizations.

The USSR never had many friends. It had satellites, occupied by the Red Army. It had clients, dependent on Soviet financial and military assistance, but these tended to kick out the Soviets when their usefulness declined. It had allies of convenience, who would support the Soviets when it didn't cost them anything, but go their own way when it suited them.

Putin's clear policy for the last 20 years has been to re-establish as much of Soviet influence as he could. He tried reforming the military to make it an effective tool for this policy. It appears that he failed. Russia's loss of influence is more due to Russia's demonstrated weakness, not to moral revulsion from other countries.

There's little to admire in Putin's Russia. Certainly, I wouldn't want to live there, or be a small neighbor attracting his attention. However, our current focus on Russia is distracting us from our main geopolitical rival/threat: China.

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Nov 11, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Good take. And a correct frame of mind in thinking about Russia going forward. I think besides the containment, there needs to be a covert plan at pushing Russia to split up. The country is too big, too artificial, too sparsely populated to function in a modern world.

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Nov 11, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Excellent analysis, an area of concern is the Russian submarine force including SSBNs, are they as bumbling and corrupt?

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Nov 11, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

The USSR also took advantage of its role as the West's bogeyman, Reagan promoting the notion of USSR military advancements, with glossy artist's renderings of laser weapons in The Soviet Military Power book, in order to get his desired military budgets, the USSR didn't have to actually advance their militarily technology as long as the world thought they were.

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Off topic, and I suppose Noah must also be bored with refuting nonsense from Oxfsm. But did he see this?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/07/super-richs-carbon-investment-emissions-equivalent-to-whole-of-france

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It might be a silly question but I have to ask - why we don't see any real footage of the combats of the Ukraine/Russia war on the mainstream media channels? We have more footage of the battles of World War I than of this war? 🤷

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I agree that Russia is no longer a superpower Noah, but I don't agree with the reasoning by which you get there: it is not because a country loses a war against a less powerful country that it is no longer a superpower.

If you replace the words "Russia" by "United States" and "Ukraine" by "Vietnam" in this article, you get a description that could have applied to the Vietnam war.

And what about the US disaster in Afghanistan?

Yet the United States is still a superpower, so what is the error of reasoning in this article?

That the loss of a war is a sufficient criterion for losing its superpower status. There are in fact many other parameters, most of which are not discussed in this article, or are mentioned just in passing.

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Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022

> And that’s OK. The multipolar world will include China, a newly united Europe, and India as poles of power to balance out the U.S.; Russia isn’t needed anymore to keep the system stable.

Europe is subservient to the U.S.

Frankly, I'd prefer if the US completely took over at this point. Now I live in the world where tech industry is largely about Silicon Valley... but I can't emigrate there... for work. As a tourist, sure, 90 days. _How is it not clear that it's blatant labor protectionism?_

Yet I can get extradited to the US if, for example, I develop open source software it doesn't like (see Tornado cash).

I assume even not respecting OFAC could be a problem soon.

Where will whistleblowers like Snowden flee now?

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This is so unfortunate. Russia could have been a counter to US imperialism if it was not a third-rate corrupt imperialist state and really wanted to build a multipolar order not dominated by superpowers.

This war has enormously damaged any claim Russia could have to being an anti-imperialist state but should not be seen in isolation. The destruction of Grozny and Aleppo and its intervention in Georgia are also examples of savagely executed regional imperialism.

A multipolar world mediated through institutions like the UN is a far better idea than Russia trying to revive imperial grandeur that its economy and corrupted military can’t support, and doing so in violation of international law.

The Russian sullen response: “Why can’t we be savage imperialists? Look what you let the US get away with.” assumes that we accept what the US has done in the past or that wrongdoing by one side justifies it by another.

Putin is increasingly looking more like Mussolini v2.0 rather than a reincarnation of Peter the Great.

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Please stop doing the "Both sides" thing. The vast majority of the "modern" Republican Party are Putin Puppets, but there are only a small number of fringe "leftists" that support Putin.

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