The mother of all analogies, of course, is the Hitler analogy. No less an authority than former secretary of state (and possible future presidential candidate) Hillary Clinton has reportedly likened the Russian president’s excuse for invading Ukraine — the “defense” of ethnic Russians — to Hitler’s claim that he needed to protect ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia.
Superficially plausible though the Hitler-Putin comparison may be, just how precisely does it fit?
In
some respects, alarmingly so. As young men, both Hitler and Putin
zealously served their countries on the front lines of international
conflict, one as a German soldier on the Western Front in World War I,
the other as a Soviet KGB officer in East Germany during the Cold War.
Each was cast adrift when the empire upon which he had staked his future collapsed. In “Mein Kampf,”
Hitler wrote that “everything went black before my eyes” when he heard
of Germany’s capitulation in 1918; his heart filled with “hatred for the
originators of this dastardly crime.” Putin has recalled the dramatic
moment when he felt obliged to hide his Soviet Communist Party
membership card in a desk drawer; he has said that the collapse of the
Soviet Union was “a genuine tragedy” for the Russian people.
Each
considered his nation no more culpable than any other for the global
conflict that precipitated its downfall — its humiliation therefore not
only undeserved but also inexplicable, except as the product of
weakness, betrayal and conspiracy. For each man, post-imperial chaos in
their respective countries bred profound contempt for Western-style
freedom and democracy.
For both, agreements codifying their
respective countries’ defeats — the Treaty of Versailles for Hitler,
NATO’s eastward expansion for Putin — represented not international law
but victor’s justice, which trampled legitimate national interests and
stranded millions of their respective ethnic brethren in new nations
that outside powers had set up, hypocritically, in the name of
self-determination.
Having attained power in their respective
societies, Hitler and Putin both set their sights on economic and
military renewal and on reversing their respective nations’ unjust
humiliation, by force if necessary.
The latter co-opted some
former Soviet republics and militarily occupied others, just as Hitler
marched the Wehrmacht into the Rhineland in 1936, took Czechoslovakia in
1938 — and, well, you get the idea.
It’s at this point, however,
that the analogy begins to break down. Whereas Hitler was an ideologue
and a charismatic movement leader, Putin is an opportunist, a political
mafioso who schemed his way to power and clings to it for its own sake.
Immense as his sense of Russian grievance, or his hostility toward Muslims or gays,
may be, Putin is not driven by the kind of all-encompassing racism that
led Hitler to perpetrate the Holocaust, or by anything like the crazed
notion of Lebensraum that motivated Hitler’s attempted conquests in the
East.
Even his proposed Eurasian Union
is not a sweeping ideological concept like Nazism or communism. His
designs are aggressive but, in terms of Russian history and geography,
traditional. They probably do not extend beyond the “near abroad.”
Hitler (and, to some extent, Stalin) had ambitions in the West as well.
Unlike
Hitler, Putin must temper his adventurism with due regard for a West
that, however war-weary, fractious and self-absorbed it may be, is still
powerful enough to cripple his economy — and still headed by a United
States that possesses a nuclear deterrent and is formally committed to
defend its NATO allies. (Of course, unlike Hitler, Putin has nukes,
too.)
In short, Putin’s capabilities and intentions, in the
context of the power arrayed against him, make him more capable of
rational calculation and more containable than Hitler — but still plenty
dangerous.
At the moment, Western leaders are reportedly contemplating a diplomatic “off-ramp”
for Putin in Ukraine, with which he could end his invasion without
losing face. Putin’s price would probably be Western acquiescence in his
continued influence over Ukraine, especially its strategic Crimean
Peninsula, with or without directly occupying it.
If such a deal
did restore Ukraine as a buffer state and proved acceptable over the
long term to NATO, Russia and Ukrainians, perhaps it would bring peace
in our time, unlike the Western powers’ ill-fated sacrifice of
Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938.
The nightmare scenario, though,
is that recent events have permanently destabilized Ukraine and that
the resulting shock waves will slowly radiate to the Baltic states,
former Soviet republics with large Russian minorities. As NATO members,
they enjoy a guarantee of Western help against external aggression — as Poland did in 1939.
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