Putin’s Betting the West Will Break — It’s Up to Us to Prove Him Wrong

Why Putin’s Betting That Hardship, Inflation, and Apathy Will Break the West — And Why He Might Be Right

It’s not looking good. The war in Ukraine is now entering a worst case scenario. Having failed in his initial assault, Putin now appears bent on turning Ukraine into Syria — using heavy weaponry against civilians, razing neighborhoods, reducing much of the country to rubble.

Amidst all this, it’s easy to think — as many of our pundits do in the West — that Putin is just “unhinged” or a “madman.” They have been wrong so far, and are wrong again. It’s more chilling to understand that Putin has a line of thought all his own. He is making a bet. And it remains to be seen whether or not that bet will win. That bet isn’t just about Ukraine — it never has been. It began a decade or more ago, with the Russian destabilisation of the West, which culminated in Trump and Brexit. Putin didn’t install an American President and split Britain from the EU and NATO for nothing.

His line of thinking is deep, devilish, and clever.

Putin’s big bet is about three things. He is betting on inflation, apathy, and indifference. He is betting they break us. And soon enough, we stop caring. Our unity and resolve is gone. And we give up.

Let me explain my reading of Putin’s intentions to you.

Why isn’t Putin backing down? The reason is very simple. He is betting that we in the West will break. Long before all this is over.

Putin does not regard us as a very formidable enemy. He considers us laughable. Even now. Despite the weight of the sanctions, the swiftness of the way Russia’s been turned into a pariah state, Putin is still not very worried about us. Why not? He is betting that it can all be reversed.

Putin does not regard us as a very formidable enemy because he sees as morally degenerate and easily corrupted. I hate to tell you this, but he is not wrong. Putin observes us closely. He knows, in many ways, better than we know ourselves.

What am I talking about? Let me give you three examples of just why Putin think of us in the West as morally degenerate and easily corrupted. The first is Syria. Together with Assad, Putin destroyed a nation in the most horrific ways — chemical attacks on civilians, neighbourhoods blown up by cluster bombs. The West did little to nothing to stop it — and then made its own little war on Syria’s bereft rivers of refugees, rejecting them, abusing them.

What would you think if you were Putin? You’d laugh. At us. For being that weak. Note how we didn’t try him for war crimes then. We didn’t level sanctions. How Syrian refugees weren’t welcomed with open arms. So of course Putin, emboldened, began his real war — the one for control of Europe.

My second example is Trump and Brexit. Putin thinks of us as easily corrupted because the sad truth is that we are. Russian money seduced America and Britain into a malign, corrupt embrace. It looked the other way while Russian oligarchs bought huge mansions in Chelsea and Mayfair, penthouses in Manhattan — but meanwhile, the average person, citizen, was struggling with basics like healthcare, education, childcare, and money. Our establishments turned a blind eye to all that — letting demagogues arise, which scapegoated others for the woes of the average person, Europeans in Britain, Mexicans and Latinos and Jews in America. Think for a moment of how Hillary’s emails were literally hacked by Russian military intelligence — and America’s entire establishment, from the then FBI to the New York Times…fell for it and discredited her.

The truth is that Putin is probably astonished by how easy we were to corrupt.

Let me give you one final example. Covid. You won’t like this one, but nevertheless, it’s true. Going against the advice of every good medical professional and scientist, the West has simply dropped Covid precautions. It is quite happy to sacrificed the old, young, ill, immunocompromised, to Covid. Those people are at serious risk, and many are afraid to leave the house. All this, just so that people who think “freedom” is not having to wear a mask in public — not, say, not being shelled to death in your home — are happy.

Covid taught Putin that we don’t have the stomach for a long fight. Just two years in, we…gave up. We declared the war over, before it really was. Because it was too much for us to take, the loss of “freedoms” like going to the bar or gym…never mind the deeper freedom of public health.

Putin observes all this closely. He watches us like a hawk. Like I said, in many ways, he knows us better than we know ourselves. He bets what he does based on these observations. And he does not regard as a very formidable enemy for all these reasons. From the neglect and abandonment of the average person while inequality soared, while oligarchs took over our most regal Western neighbourhoods, to Covid, to letting horror unfold Syria and then rejecting its starving, beaten, miserable masses…Putin has observed all that, and concluded that we are morally degenerate and easily corrupted.

So here he is, making his Big Bet. What is his Big Bet? That he can take something like half of Europe. Zelensky told the West other day, and his own people, in stark terms, pleading: “He will march all the way to the gates of Berlin. Please, understand this.”

But who is listening? Anyone much? Already, you can see a certain fatigue setting in. Americans are going back to their infantile culture of superhero movies and Kanye scandals. Brits are going back to pretending they’re fighting Putin…while deliberately slowing sanctions so that oligarchs can shift their money in safety. You can literally observe what Putin has, if you look closely.

Let me now come back to my thesis, if you like. Putin’s big bet is about three things. He is betting on inflation, apathy, and forgetting. That together, those three factors break us in the West. Let’s take each of those one by one, starting with the last one.

What do I mean by “forgetting”? What Putin’s plan is goes something like this. He’s in it for the long haul — levelling Ukraine should tell you that alone. Next come the other former Soviet states — Latvia, Estonia, and so on. Then comes half of Poland.

Putin is betting that after a year or two or three of all this — war, total war, serious and horrific war — he comes back to the table. He then institutes “talks.” He declares he’s ready for a ceasefire. He signs some agreement with us — a weary, broken, apathetic West. And then things go back to normal.

He isn’t prosecuted as a war criminal. Western businesses breathe a sigh of relief, and do business with Russia again. Oligarchs move their assets back into Western banks, or have them unfrozen. The curtain that’s fallen now is lifted. And everything goes back to the way it was.

That would be a major victory for Putin. He’s betting that he can put the Russian people through two, three, five years of pain — and they’ll take it. Because Russians are better than us, and for them suffering is virtue — that’s the belief of his favourite philosophers, and it’s a very Russian way to think. Meanwhile, we in the West will slowly split and break. We’ll forget about the unity and resolve of this moment — just the way when Covid began, we sang about how “we were in it together,” and now, we happily let grandma and Aunt Nancy who has cancer take the serious risk of dying.

Putin is betting that the West will forget — just as it did with Covid, Iraq, Syria. How it gave up on its own most central values, of peace, tolerance, justice, and acceptance. And that its selfishness and narcissism will prevail.

Why is he making that bet? That brings me to my next two factors. Inflation and apathy.

The costs of this war for us are going to be severe and stark for us in the West. Not in terms of guns and bombs, really. We still, in the West, don’t understand at all how the global economy — our global economy — really works.

It isn’t just that it’s “dependent on Russian oil and gas.” That severely understates the problem. Who is China’s largest supplier of electricity, oil, gas, coal, steel, iron, more or less? Russia is. What does that mean? All the stuff you take for granted — all of it — is made from Russian natural resources. Your iPad and iPhone? Made with Russian electricity. Your TV? Made with Russian oil. All that cheap plastic stuff you buy from Amazon — go ahead, think of the last five things you bought. A broom? A hard drive? A dog toy? All made of Russian oil.

Our entire lives in the West are basically centred around China transforming Russian oil, coal, electricity, iron, and steel, into our everyday household goods. Every last plastic thing you buy from China is made of Russian oil. Every last computerised device, from a TV to a computer, that’s made in China is made of Russian electricity and coal and steel.

The West still does not really understand those global economics at all. It imagines that an embargo on Russian energy will do the job. But the problem is not really about how much Russian energy we buy directly. It’s about China transforming Russian resources into the stuff of our everyday life — all of it, more or less. Go ahead and tell me the last ten things you bought that weren’t made in China. Now you see the scale of the problem.

The prices of all of those things are going to rise — not just energy prices. And as they rise, Putin is betting that Westerners, infantilized, unused to suffering, will turn on their politicians. Why should we save Eastern Europe, spoiled Westerners will say, when it’s costing us our own artificially cheap made-in-China standard of living? All the things I buy on Amazon suddenly cost 40% more! I can’t believe it! I can’t even afford a bigger TV this year. My God! What about my video games and my Marvel movies! Forget this war — I want my stuff back!!

That’s what Putin thinks. And the sad truth is that he might not be wrong. The West has become accustomed to an artificially cheap way of life, that inflates standards of living higher than they should be. The truth is that our entire way of life — Russian resources transformed by what’s barely a step above slave labour in China — is morally wrong and ethically dubious and most of all a false economy. It can be taken from us in the blink of an eye, and now it’s about to be. Inflating our living standards artificially by exploiting China to transform Russian resources into artificially cheap things was never a good idea.

Putin has control over all of that, more or less. The idea that China will remove him is a fiction. China is scared, precisely because Russia is its largest supplier of resources. If it tries to remove Putin, and fails, then its entire economy collapses, more or less overnight. Would you want to risk that? Neither does Xi.

Putin knows all that. That is why he is betting on inflation and apathy to break us. He’s betting that as the costs of everything from TVs to energy to cars rises, the average Westerner will turn furiously on their politicians and leaders. They will demand their “old lives” back — the ones of inflated living standards based on China’s barely-not-slave-labour transforming Russian resources into everything from household gadgets to heating. The unity and resolve of this moment will dissipate like dew in the desert heat, as turmoil and anger rock the West. Just like with Covid, people will retreat back to little bubbles of individualism and narcissism — forgetting any larger sense of public good. In Covid’s case, that public good was public health — in this case, it will be the security of the West.

What difference will a distant war make to the average Westerner, when their artificially comfortable lives begin to suddenly wither and fray? When interest rates rise — and Westerners, whom are mostly indebted, have to pay that much more for everything from homes to cars to credit cards to an education? When all their creature comforts cost more, and they have to go without them? That loss, to Westerners used to stability and a (shrinking) disposable income, will feel a lot like the end of the world. I can’t have my Playstation this year! I can’t afford to even go see the latest Marvel movie!

I’m exaggerating it — but only slightly — to show you the Putin sees it. Sees us. He thinks of us, again, as morally degenerate and easily corrupted. But not just our leaders. All of us. As a thing, a place, a way of life, the West. He thinks of the average Westerner as a spoiled child, who doesn’t understand his or her way of life is based on a false economy, barely-more-than-slave-labour in China turning Russia’s vast natural resources artificially cheaply into inflated living standards. And certainly doesn’t know what it is to live any other way. Who’ll turn on their leaders the second those living standards begin to fall, tremble, shake. Who can’t tolerate a few months — let alone a year or five of genuine sacrifice, for the sake of any public good, from one as small as public health, to one as large as peace.

Putin is betting on all that. That is why he is in it for the long haul. He calculates he can put the Russian people through years of pain, and they will take it. But we in the West? We’re different. We don’t know what it is to sacrifice anything for the greater good anymore. He’s betting we turn on each other. As inflation bites. As the machine we call “the economy” but don’t really understand at all begins to come undone. That we forget the unity and resolve of this moment.

He is betting that years of this? LOL — we’re completely not up to that challenge. We will break.

And as we break, after a long period of war, when he comes back to the table, our leaders will be only too happy to sign some kind of deal, agreement, treaty. He will have control of some large part of Europe. And then things will go back to “normal.”

He will jet into Washington and London as a legitimate leader, all sins forgiven. The oligarchs will moor their yachts in the Cote D’Azure once again. Russian money will flow through our banks, and our lives will again be made of Russian resources — because that is what we ourselves have demanded. Even if we are not smart enough to know it.

All will be forgotten. All will be forgiven. We in the West are too weak and degenerate and easily corrupted to see this thing through. We don’t have the appetite for a long war. We don’t value public goods like peace. We are individualists and narcissists through and through, who can’t tolerate an ounce of sacrifice, and react like spoiled children to the very idea of going without any of the comforts we have gotten too used to. We will break.

That is Putin’s bet.

Don’t just react. Don’t tell me it’s a bad bet. Understand why it might not be. Putin knows us better than we know ourselves. His bet is not some kind of fantasy. It is based on a deep understanding of our own flaws and failures, from Syria to Covid to our narcissism and greed. And it is only by understanding and overcoming those flaws and failures that we have a serious and real hope of defeating him.

Umair March 2022