Containing Russia Old School

While it took 20 years, the West has got?Vladimir Putin’s number and is locked in now.

With its flow of “intelligence” emphasizing Mr. Putin’s military buildup and warning of an imminent attack, the U.S. seemed to imply easy access to internal Russian communications. The U.S. even seemed to be baiting the Russian leader. Actually it was piling up costs for his regime regardless of whether he decided to slink away or proceed with a self-defeating invasion.

Its intelligence made a laughingstock out of the opera of grievance Mr. Putin has been putting on, starting with his 5,000-word essay on the “historic unity” of the Russian and Ukrainian people. It told a more realistic story—of false-flag operations, phony provocations and lists of Ukrainian citizens to be hunted down and liquidated after an invasion.

You might wonder here whether the U.S. was waging information warfare or disinformation warfare, but it skillfully has played on a record the world long ago internalized. Outsiders have seen a Russian government that doesn’t mind murdering international air travelers, that murders journalists and opposition figures at home, that murdered hundreds of ordinary Russians in their beds in the never-mentioned, never-forgotten atrocity that?inaugurated?the Putin era.

Not even the Chinese, when push comes to shove, want the ignominy of siding with such a government in an?unprovoked?war.

With pretenses now having fallen away, the U.S. and its allies shouldn’t be bashful about targeting out-of-theater opportunities to increase pressure on the Kremlin. Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries have been a nuisance to French antiterrorist efforts in the Sahara. Russian deployments in northern Syria are a thorn to Turkey’s president. The U.S. Navy knows how to make life uncomfortable for Russian sub commanders. Let Mr. Putin know he can’t count on any ceiling to the Western response. The punches will never stop coming.

And if the unlikely summit with?Joe Biden?should come to pass, it shouldn’t be for the purpose of delivering any concessions, only to point out to Mr. Putin that the world knows the Ukrainian people have no desire to be part of Russia, that his claim that Kyiv threatens Moscow is ridiculous. Ukrainians want a peaceful neighbor to trade with. They don’t want to live under the thieving, murdering regime Russians live under. Let Mr. Putin know that, to the world, he is now Hitler.

The U.S. and its allies can’t stop a Putin from doing what he believes necessary for his own survival. They can only show him how badly he miscalculates. Mr. Putin’s misreading was vast to think NATO countries would somehow reconcile themselves to naked military aggression against Ukraine. His latest move recognizing the blasted, sterile “separatist” enclaves he created in eastern Ukraine only surrenders the last vestige of Russian deniability. Any inhabitants who were productive and educated long ago fled. Mr. Putin’s hysterical rhetoric about imaginary genocide is best understood in the light of the growing difficulty he will face in selling his self-defeating agenda to the Russian people.

Historians will naturally wonder what connection to draw between today’s events and the collusion folly that consumed U.S. politics for three years. Mr. Putin may have thought it showed America’s elite weak and feckless and dancing to his tune. This was another misreading. It actually showed that, to a large part of the U.S. political class, Russia had?become?a joke, a country famous for its lurid corruption and fit only to be exploited by elites like?Hillary Clinton?in their own?small-minded?power games.

If Mr. Putin had rightly understood what was going on, his calculations might well have been different.

A delicate observation also needs to be made: He saved his Ukraine depredations for the Obama and then the Biden administrations, though his expectations of Mr. Biden so far seem to have been disappointed. His biggest misreading may have been of the?events?of Feb. 7, 2018. That was the day U.S. ground and air forces in Syria destroyed an armored Russian mercenary column, killing an estimated 90 Russian citizens and 100 recruits of other nationalities, at a cost of zero injuries to U.S. service personnel.

Using established “deconfliction” procedures, the Pentagon tried to warn the column off. When the effort failed, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis later told Congress, he gave the order that the advancing group “was to be annihilated. And it was.” It was the bloodiest encounter between U.S. and Russian forces since Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918.

Mr. Putin may have thought he was testing the Trump administration. He erred. He was testing a system of government and politics and global engagement that’s bigger than one man.