On the menu today: Another batch of S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems might be headed to Ukraine if the U.S. and Slovakia can work out the details; the little-known man who would take over if Vladimir Putin were killed or incapacitated; and why, no matter how the Russian invasion of Ukraine shakes out, Russia is likely to remain hostile and threatening to the West for a long, long time. Finally, some much-needed lighter thoughts on one popular pop-culture vision of the future.
Why Eastern Europe Is Likely to Have Tense Borders for Generations
Yesterday, U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin and Slovakian defense minister Jaroslav Nad’ held a joint press conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Nad’ made it sound as if his country was open to transferring Slovakia’s leftover Russian jets to Ukraine: “We also talked about the fact that we have some heritage here in the form of old Russian or Soviet defense systems such as S-3 missile system or MiG-29 fighter jets. We were discussing various options of how to fill in this gap and we decided not to use MiG-29s anymore. We should receive F-16 sometimes in 2024.”
Don’t get too excited; according to the 2022 World Air Forces directory, Slovakia has ten active MiG-29s.
And new jets to replace any that get transferred don’t just quickly roll off an assembly line. Building an F-35 takes anywhere from 41,000 man-hours to 60,000 man-hours. Back in 1989, it took 45,000 man-hours to build an F-16C fighter jet. The good news is that the more jets get built, the faster the process moves.
The Biden administration remains particularly unenthused about transferring the MiGs to Ukraine and continues to argue that they wouldn’t make much difference. Yesterday, Austin said that, “The rockets, are actually cruise missiles that you mentioned, that were fired from aerial platforms, I think you know that those were fired from actually inside of Russia, so a no-fly zone would not have prevented that activity.”
But Nad’ also made it sound as if those S-300 air-defense systems could get transferred — as long as Slovakia gets U.S.-made replacements:
We’ve been in discussion with United States, with Ukraine, and also with other allies on possibility to deploy or to send or to give S-300 system to Ukrainians. And we are willing to do so. We’re willing to do so immediately when we have a proper replacement. The only strategic air defense system that we have in Slovakia is S-300 system.
So, what would happen immediately when we decided to give it to Ukrainians is that we actually create a gap, a security gap in NATO. So, you know, and I’m, first of all, I’m the Defense Minister of Slovakia. My first responsibility is to take on or to do everything I am capable of to guarantee defense and security of our people in our territory.
So yes, we’ve been in discussion, we are in discussion, there are no further comments to make as of now. But yes, should there be a situation that we have a proper replacement or that we have a capability guaranteed for a certain period of time, then we would be willing to discuss the future of S-300 system.
During the Cold War, Warsaw Pact countries and the eastern European countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union — Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia — got all or almost all of their weapons from Russian manufacturers. Some gradually transitioned over to other weapon systems over the past three decades, but because it takes time to train pilots how to fly new planes and teach soldiers how to use new weapons systems, most of those countries kept at least some of those Russian systems and bought new ones from Russia.
Ukraine is now learning a hard lesson about what happens when your military’s major weapons and equipment come from the same country that may want to conquer you someday.
Three NATO countries still have MiG-29s — Poland’s 23, Bulgaria’s eleven, and Slovakia’s ten (all figures from the 2022 World Air Forces directory). We must wonder how much good those MiGs will do for Poland, Bulgaria, or Slovakia now. Those NATO countries have good reason to no longer do business with Russian companies — but those planes and systems will need spare parts and upgrades. And fighter jets aren’t like Legos — you can’t just shoehorn General Dynamics parts into Mikoyan-made jets.
(It is easy to scoff that these NATO members are shortsighted for partially depending on Russian manufacturers to keep their militaries supplied, but a lot of countries get a lot of weapons from Russia. In fact, the country that exported the most ammunition to the U.S. in 2020 was . . . Russia. More than 765 million “units,” defined as cartridges, shells with or without projectile, and their parts. The Biden administration barred the import of Russian ammunition in August 2021 — exacerbating the existing shortages of ammunition for consumer use.)
Even if Russia declared a ceasefire tomorrow — and that is not likely to happen — Eastern European countries in and outside of NATO have good reason to build up their militaries.
Russia has a long history, and that long history features a lot of wars. A lot of Russians prefer to see their history as a long recurring pattern of them minding their own business when somebody like Napoleon or Hitler comes along and invades, eventually repelled by Russian bravery and the fact that Russia gets really, really cold in the winter. (Russian history also features invasions less known to the average Westerner, such as the 1918 intervention, Sweden in the 1700s, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1600s. . . .)
But lot of those wars involve Russian forces invading European territories to the West — the Finnish War, the November uprising, the invasion of Poland in 1939, crushing the Hungarians in 1956, invading Czechoslovakia in 1968, aggression against Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, and now the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Czars, Soviet premiers, post-Soviet Russia under Putin — different leaders, same playbook. Most Russian leaders saw Eastern Europe as its “sphere of influence,” or at minimum, a needed buffer zone between themselves and the next Napoleon or Hitler. In Putin’s mind, NATO was just another “invading” force — although NATO had that insidious technique of being a defensive alliance that Eastern European countries voluntarily wanted to join.
Putin may well have some health issues, or someone around him may recognize that he currently poses the most dire threat to the long-term security and stability of Russia. (Clearly frustrated by the setbacks in the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is sounding more and more Stalin-esque, declaring Wednesday that Russia must undergo a “self-cleaning of society” to get rid of the “bastards and traitors.”) The 69-year-old Putin no doubt expects someone to try to cut his reign short; for years, he used food tasters to avoid getting poisoned.
For one reason or another, Putin is going to die someday, but we should not expect his successor to have a dramatically different attitude toward Eastern Europe.
If Putin died tomorrow — or he became incapacitated — the current prime minister would become acting president. The current prime minster is Mikhail Mishustin, a man likely selected for that job because he has no ambition to replace Putin or a willingness to disagree with him. He spent a decade as the head of the Russian equivalent of the IRS: “As a career bureaucrat who has been in charge of Russia’s taxes for the past 10 years, Mishustin has always kept a low profile and stayed away from politics. He doesn’t belong to a political party and in rare interviews prefers to talk about innovations in tax administration.” During Putin’s cabinet meeting right before the invasion of Ukraine, Mishustin seemed uncomfortable, but did not object to anything Putin said. You almost have to feel sorry for the guy; one moment he’s running the tax-collection system, and two years later, he’s riding shotgun to a madman launching the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.
According to the Russian constitution, after the president dies, an election to replace the president should be called within 90 days. Mishustin would be eligible to run, but he doesn’t seem like a man with a burning hunger to run a nuclear-armed state that is now a global pariah and on its way to becoming an economic basket case.
Putin has no natural successor; in Russian politics, having a natural heir apparent is apparently akin to inviting betrayal and a coup. But whoever replaced Putin isn’t likely to have a dramatically different geopolitical worldview from his predecessor.
John Deni is a research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. He observed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago that, “If Mr. Putin were removed in a coup, whoever replaces him would face the same domestic political incentives and disincentives, which would likely lead to a continuation of Russia’s confrontational approach to the West.”
Deni blames it on geography:
Sitting as Russia does at the crossroads of Eurasia, its borders have for centuries been the object of rivalry and conflict with neighbors to the west, east and south. By one estimate, since 1800 Russia has experienced an invasion from its west about once every 33 years on average.
The result has been a nearly permanent sense of weakness and insecurity within Russia. That has fueled a domestic political environment in which those who pursue confrontation and opposition in foreign policy — whether czars, Politburo chairmen or presidents — tend to realize greater political success than those who favor cooperation and integration.
Russia feels vulnerable and threatened, and so they seek to avert those threats by taking a bellicose stance towards neighbors. The great irony is that no one in Eastern Europe has any interest in invading and conquering Russia. Germany was happy buying Russia’s oil and natural gas. Ukraine was happy trading with Russia. War is always a tragedy, but this one was particularly unneeded.
The only person on earth who really wanted this war was the man who had the authority to start it.
ADDENDUM: As mentioned at the tail end of yesterday’s Jolt, Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams, appeared in a cameo in the Star Trek: Discovery television show as “the president of United Earth.”
Abrams is a huge Star Trek fan, declaring in an interview in 2019:
I think what has been so interesting to me about The Next Generation, about Voyager, about the later iterations is that you can address those core fundamental economic and socio-economic issues but conflict remains and the challenge is how willing are we to find solutions when we think we have the answers and so what I think differentiates the later treks from the original, is that yes, it still acknowledges the Utopia that is earth, but it also notes that we still have a lot of work.
I like Star Trek, or at least some of it. I don’t need my pop-culture offerings to meet some checklist of my political, philosophical, or ideological beliefs. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the “utopia” of future humanity as envisioned by the show’s creators is not all that appealing — or at least not from the perspective of Americans in the late 20th century and early 21st century.
(I like Deep Space Nine the best in part because that show’s creative team was most willing to suggest that maybe the Federation wasn’t as perfect and always-right as creator Gene Roddenberry had originally envisioned.)
The heroic protagonists’ organization in the various Star Trek series and movies, the United Federation of Planets, is arguably not all that heroic. The Federation is allegedly a democracy, but we’ve never seen any voting, elections, candidates for office, campaigns, or any discussion of differing belief systems or disagreement about what the federation should do. (The Picard series dipped its toe in these waters, depicting a federation that, to the elderly Picard, had lost its way.) Off the top of my head, we’ve never seen protests, demonstrations, or other expressions of public disagreement with Federation government decisions. There are occasional fleeting references to a constitution, but we the audience get very little sense of who decides what, or whether there are checks and balances among branches of government.
Star Trek IV — a.k.a. “the one with the whales” — features a few scenes with a legislature-like “Federation Council,” that features members in Starfleet uniforms raising the question of how much Starfleet (the equivalent of the military) is run by civilians. (Our Congress has members in the reserves, but they don’t wear their uniforms while performing legislative duties. Some have argued that individuals should not be serving in the executive and legislative branches at the same time.)
Some of this reflects the fact that the shows have almost entirely featured characters in Starfleet, so we get little sense of what daily life is like for the average Federation citizen. We have no idea about which government powers are granted to the multi-planetary Federation and which ones are granted to the planets. We rarely see any local government at all.
The human citizens of the Federation we see have no religious beliefs; to the best of my knowledge, organized religion has died out among humanity in the Star Trek future. (By contrast, some of the alien races have elaborate and well-explored religious beliefs.) Once in a great while, the Star Trek shows and movies give glimpses of people working as reporters, and there is a “Federation News Service,” but it is hard to tell how much freedom of the press there is. As far as we can tell, in the Federation, there are no corporations, no nonprofits, no large institutions separate from the government and Starfleet. At times, life in the Federation looks a little Soviet.
(We’re explicitly told that the Federation does not use money, which just doesn’t make sense, even in a world where “replicator” technology can just create anything from thin air. This means that when Ben Sisko’s dad runs his Cajun restaurant in New Orleans, people just come in, order, and don’t pay anything? Everyone who works in Sisko’s restaurant does so just because they love doing it?)
Every other movie or so, our heroic protagonists must overcome Starfleet admirals who are incompetent, corrupt, or even evil. A major storyline in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine was the Federation making a bad peace deal that required civilians — including descendants of Native Americans! — to resettle from their longtime homes. The usually righteous and noble Captain Picard has no choice but to obey orders.
In one of the more memorable scenes from Deep Space Nine, a turncoat villainous character argues that the Federation isn’t all that different from the malevolent, all-consuming collective of the Borg:
Starships chase us through the Badlands, and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we’ve left the Federation, and that’s the one thing you can’t accept. Nobody leaves Paradise, everyone should want to be in the Federation! Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You’re only sending them replicators because one day, they can take their rightful place on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways, you’re even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You’re more insidious, you assimilate people — and they don’t even know it.
The creators behind the Star Trek series always intended the Federation to be the “good guys” — and in almost every depiction, the Federation is either good or flawed but redeemable; our heroes almost always triumph over the incompetent or corrupt admirals. But because the creators are just trying to create good television shows or movies, they never thought through much about the Federation’s system of government, and it shows.
None of this means we can’t enjoy Star Trek, but it’s not a particularly useful blueprint for how humans should change or organize our societies because it begins with an utterly unrealistic concept: “Imagine if just about every living human being agreed on values and how things should be done.”
I imagine this is why Kathryn tried to enforce the “Star Trek ban” in the Corner.