The Russian bear's grumbling

It sounds like an out-of-season April Fools Day joke, but Politico Magazine’s recent story, “Putin’s Plot to Get Texas to Secede,” is a serious exploration of Russian interest in helping the “Texas Nationalist Movement” move from the Big Thicket to the high-rises of Houston and Dallas.

Texas secession is of course crazy and highly unlikely now, but Russian fascination with the concept reminded me of what George Friedman, the canny founder and head of Stratfor (a leading developer of strategic foreign intelligence), noted in parts of our interview that for want of space did not make it into the March 21 issue of WORLD Magazine. Let’s pick up the Q&A from where he stressed how Russians fear attack.

But who would be dumb enough to invade Russia? In 1932 it was unthinkable that anybody would want to invade Russia, and Germany was a shambles, but in 1938 Germany had become the major military power of Europe. The Russians think things change very quickly, and you can never go wrong thinking of the worst of people. That’s conditioned by their history. They don’t trust the West. They don’t understand why the United States has any interest in the Ukraine. If the United States is simply supporting democratic values, the Russians ask, why don’t you do that somewhere else? There are a lot of places to do this, why the Ukraine?

But Russia fears aggression from the United States? Russia has a built-in principle that the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics must be its buffer zone. When the question comes up of Russian domination of the Ukraine, Americans immediately start thinking about the resurrection of the Cold War. The Russians immediately start thinking about Napoleon and Hitler. These primordial fears are not delusional.

But the United States surely is not going to invade Russia. I was talking to Russians who are very professional about this. They can put themselves in the American position and understand our position—and I of course understand that the Russians can’t let their lack of a buffer zone stand. They will not be able to succeed, but they must try. They are not stupid. They understand there is something to be feared and they are not wrong.

What’s the relevance of nuclear warheads to this standoff? Neither side is going to use nuclear weapons, but many of the forces we saw undermining the Soviet Union are now at work undermining the Russian Federation. In the short run the Russians are asserting themselves. In the longer run it is very difficult to see how they sustain themselves. Should the Russian Federation disintegrate in some way, then the question is, how secure are those nuclear weapons?

OK, how secure are they? We had to secure them once in the former Soviet Union. The United States engineered an arrangement for other states to give up weapons and the Russians to be the custodians. What do we do if Russia fragments again? The danger does not lie in Russia resorting to nuclear war. The danger lies in Russia fragmenting, and those nuclear weapons are now free.

I occasionally see articles about the dangers of EMP, the electromagnetic pulse … It’s not crazy stuff. The energy from a nuclear blast outside of the atmosphere would certainly disrupt a locality, but it would take a lot of nuclear weapons to kill the economy.

One explosion would not do it? One would not do it, and getting enough missiles to paralyze the United States is a serious challenge. I’m not a physicist, but it’s unlikely that a nuclear conspiracy will break down and lead into this.