It seems that the attempt to invade Ukraine will result in disappointment for Russia. What does this mean for Putin? Could the defeat of the Russian army cause it to lose power through a coup or revolution? Or will he keep his seat?
Russia's invasion attempt against Ukraine continues to encounter problems. Western analysts are almost certain that Russia will be defeated.
John Mueller, who teaches in political science at Ohio State University, argues that a possible Russian defeat in Ukraine may not necessarily mean Putin's loss of power, considering political leaders who have suffered military failures in the past in his article for Foreign Affairs.
We share some highlights of the article:
“Whatever the outcome, Putin's war with Ukraine will be judged by history as a fiasco. Moscow's goals include preventing Ukraine's integration with NATO and the West; establish a subordinate regime in Kiev; to prevent the spread of Ukrainian nationalists, namely “neo-Nazis” in Putin's words; reduce hatred towards Russia in Ukraine; to somehow re-establish the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire under Kremlin domination; smashing the West; To increase the prestige and influence of Russia in the region and in the world; destroying or at least weakening democracy; Increasing the use of the Russian language in Ukraine while enabling Ukrainians to identify more closely with Russia and Russianness; and to show the skill and splendor of the Russian army.
Instead, Ukraine has moved closer to the West, building a strong national identity armed with increasingly advanced weapons, as Russia, which has lost enormous amounts of blood and paid the price, has become an ever weaker, lonelier and more hated country. From this perspective, Putin's invasion attempt has already proven to be a largely counterproductive failure.
For many commentators, this disastrous trajectory shows that Putin's days are numbered. They argue that leaders who have suffered terrible defeats on the battlefield are unlikely to stay in power for long. For example, in the early 1970s, Pakistani leader Yahya Khan and ten years later Argentine junta leader Leopoldo Galtieri were forced to resign after humiliating military failures. Therefore, it is thought that Putin's invasion of Ukraine will likely lead to its downfall.
However, it may be too early to reach such a conclusion. While there is reason to question whether Putin will remain in power for long, history shows us that the odds of Putin surviving are much better than is generally thought.
Losing and surviving
Disastrous defeats in most autocratic countries had little effect on the leader's stay in power. In Egypt, for example, autocrat Gamal Abdel Nasser suffered a humiliating defeat the Israel in the 1967 war. Yet he survived and was still in power when he died of a heart attack three years later. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not only managed to stay in power after the disastrous eight-year war he launched against Iran in 1980, but also survived the crushing 1991 Gulf War, in which the occupying forces were driven out of Kuwait by US and allied forces in just 100 hours. The Iraqi despot would remain in power for another 12 years until he was forcibly overthrown in the 2003 US-led invasion.
Even in democracies where leaders could be expected to be punished at the ballot box for their mistakes, politicians often got away with embarrassing military defeats.
Let's take the United States. Ronald Reagan had sent troops in 1982 to help contain the civil war in Lebanon. The following year, however, Reagan withdrew US troops from Lebanon after the bombing of a US Marine Corps barracks killed 241 US soldiers. Still, voters overwhelmingly re-elected him in 1984 after an election campaign that made no mention of that fiasco.
An even greater fiasco was the Vietnam war, which killed tens of thousands of Americans and in 1975 led to a decisive victory over communism, the main enemy of the United States for decades. But in the following year's presidential campaign, this defeat only came to light when President Gerald Ford made it a point in his favour. He said that when he took office, the country was "still dealing with Vietnam issues" but now "at peace". Ultimately, Ford lost the election, but other issues largely determined the outcome of the election, such as inflation, the Watergate scandal, and the President's pardon of Richard Nixon. The opposition Democrats never raised the issue, and the election results had little to do with the fact that the biggest foreign policy debacle in American history took place under the auspices of the government.
More recently, the US fiasco in Afghanistan has similarly been slowed down and has had little effect on President Joe Biden. While mission approval levels are low, there is little evidence that this decline was largely due to the disastrous defeat of the US-backed government in Kabul against the Taliban. In fact, this war, which ended in failure in the US midterm elections a year later, was never mentioned, and when it was mentioned, the complaints were more about the inept management of the withdrawal from Afghanistan rather than the failure itself.
Russia losing blood
However, one need look no further than Russia's own history to understand how these examples might be reflected in Russia's war in Ukraine. If we go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, Tsar II. We can state that Nikolay survived after the fiasco in the war between Russia and Japan in 1904-5. Dictator Joseph Stalin likewise remained in power after the disastrous war against Finland in 1939-40. When it comes to Putin, these two recent events stand out in particular.
The first of these concerns the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in 1979. The war was ostensibly waged to preserve one of the core tenets of Soviet ideology, the Brezhnev Doctrine: once a country became communist, it could not be allowed to return. At that time, the incompetent communist government that had seized power in Afghanistan a year earlier was on the verge of collapse, and after the Soviet military's assurances that it could solve the problem in a matter of days, Soviet troops invaded the country, and it was soon bogged down in a long and costly civil war. Mikhail Gorbachev was at the time a junior member of the Communist Party administration, which approved the invasion, but when he later took over the country he came to see the war as a "bleeding wound" and ordered a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988.
The best parallel to Putin's Ukraine adventure might be the 1994-96 Chechnya war. Concerned that the separatist movement in Chechnya would spread to other regions in the Russian Federation, Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent troops to the region upon his assurance that his army could quickly regain control of the region. Instead, Russian forces suffered thousands of casualties and, in the face of determined resistance, performed as badly as they did in Ukraine in 2022. As the war in Chechnya turned into a disaster, Yeltsin desperately worked on a withdrawal agreement from which Chechnya could finally be formally independent. These embarrassing events took place during Yeltsin's 1996 reelection campaign, but Yeltsin was re-elected anyway.
Putin can stand it
Of course, not all leaders escaped the consequences of costly mistakes. In recent years, there have been many politicians, autocrat or not, who plunged their country into an international fiasco and then lost their seat. Alongside autocrats such as Yahya Khan and Galtieri, British Prime Minister Tony Blair also lost power due to his role in the 2003 Iraq war. There have also been cases where US administrations suffered the consequences of their military failures. President Jimmy Carter's failed military attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980 certainly contributed to his defeat in that year's election.
But history in general provides many examples of politicians who have survived military defeats, especially in autocracies. This survivability is due to the fact that autocrats like Putin who embark on risky foreign adventures tend to do so after they have already consolidated their power and can undermine the efforts of those who try to overthrow them when things go wrong, and have large and effective security institutions filled with people whose fates depend on them. may be a result of their tendency. These leaders may have a better chance of staying in power if no viable substitutes appear on hold. In addition,
For now, past experience shows that there is a serious possibility that Putin will remain in power during any resolution to the war in Ukraine and will continue to do so afterwards. It also shows that Putin can suppress the tendency to escalate the war disastrously. This will have implications for the US and its partners.
First, it is not clear whether concessions to salvage his reputation are necessary for Putin to step back from the fiasco and withdraw from Ukraine. In fact, if Putin needs an excuse, he can cling more firmly to the basic justifications he put forward at the start of the war and which, oddly enough, are widely accepted in Russia.
Comparing the situation in Ukraine with the situation that led to the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Putin argued that the attack he launched aimed to prevent NATO from establishing a military presence in Ukraine and attacking Russia from there. Of course, these justifications are fictitious, but they can be turned into a victory claim that can easily be embraced by the war-weary Russians, both among the people and among the elites.
Secondly, NATO can encourage Putin's fantasy of making this fiasco look like a victory, with a few inexpensive gestures, if it is to get Russia to withdraw. These include making a formal commitment to non-aggression, postponing Ukraine's already protracted NATO membership due to corruption and other flaws for perhaps 25 years, and creating a secure but officially neutral Ukraine in the region, similar to the method used for Austria in the 1950s. can be considered a broad search for a solution.
But if the West instead continues to base its calculations on the expectation that Putin's power is in jeopardy and that serious concessions may need to be made to a helpless, defeat-fearing Kremlin to prevent the Russian leader from escalating the war catastrophically, the ultimate goal is to quickly and successfully fight the war. could undermine efforts to reach its end.”
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