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Krugman:
Conquest Is for Losers
Putin, Neocons and the Great Illusion
More than a century has passed since Norman Angell, a British journalist and politician, published “The Great Illusion,” a treatise arguing that the age of conquest was or at least should be over. He didn’t predict an end to warfare, but he did argue that aggressive wars no longer made sense — that modern warfare impoverishes the victors as well as the vanquished.
He
was right, but it’s apparently a hard lesson to absorb. Certainly
Vladimir Putin never got the memo. And neither did our own neocons,
whose acute case of Putin envy shows that they learned nothing from the Iraq debacle.
Angell’s
case was simple: Plunder isn’t what it used to be. You can’t treat a
modern society the way ancient Rome treated a conquered province without
destroying the very wealth you’re trying to seize. And meanwhile, war
or the threat of war, by disrupting trade and financial connections,
inflicts large costs over and above the direct expense of maintaining
and deploying armies. War makes you poorer and weaker, even if you win.
The
exceptions to this dictum actually prove the rule. There are still
thugs who wage war for fun and profit, but they invariably do so in
places where exploitable raw materials are the only real source of
wealth. The gangs tearing the Central African Republic
apart are in pursuit of diamonds and poached ivory; the Islamic State
may claim that it’s bringing the new caliphate, but so far it has mostly
been grabbing oil fields.
The
point is that what works for a fourth-world warlord is just
self-destructive for a nation at America’s level — or even Russia’s.
Look at what passes for a Putin success, the seizure of Crimea: Russia
may have annexed the peninsula with almost no opposition, but what it
got from its triumph was an imploding economy
that is in no position to pay tribute, and in fact requires costly aid.
Meanwhile, foreign investment in and lending to Russia proper more or
less collapsed even before the oil price plunge turned the situation
into a full-blown financial crisis.
Which
brings us to two big questions. First, why did Mr. Putin do something
so stupid? Second, why were so many influential people in the United
States impressed by and envious of his stupidity?
The
answer to the first question is obvious if you think about Mr. Putin’s
background. Remember, he’s an ex-K.G.B. man — which is to say, he spent
his formative years as a professional thug. Violence and threats of
violence, supplemented with bribery and corruption, are what he knows.
And for years he had no incentive to learn anything else: High oil
prices made Russia rich, and like everyone who presides over a bubble,
he surely convinced himself that he was responsible for his own success.
At a guess, he didn’t realize until a few days ago that he has no idea
how to function in the 21st century.
The
answer to the second question is a bit more complicated, but let’s not
forget how we ended up invading Iraq. It wasn’t a response to 9/11, or
to evidence of a heightened threat. It was, instead, a war of choice to
demonstrate U.S. power and serve as a proof of concept for a whole
series of wars neocons were eager to fight. Remember “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”?
The
point is that there is a still-powerful political faction in America
committed to the view that conquest pays, and that in general the way to
be strong is to act tough and make other people afraid. One suspects,
by the way, that this false notion of power was why the architects of
war made torture routine — it wasn’t so much about results as about
demonstrating a willingness to do whatever it takes.
Obama is not getting enough credit for how he
handle the Ukrainian issue and this thug. The President took his queue
from a Grand Master of Neocon
dreams took a beating when the occupation of Iraq turned into a bloody
fiasco, but they didn’t learn from experience. (Who does, these days?)
And so they viewed Russian adventurism with admiration and envy. They
may have claimed to be alarmed by Russian advances, to believe that Mr.
Putin, “what you call a leader,” was playing chess
to President Obama’s marbles. But what really bothered them was that
Mr. Putin was living the life they’d always imagined for themselves.
The
truth, however, is that war really, really doesn’t pay. The Iraq
venture clearly ended up weakening the U.S. position in the world, while
costing more than $800 billion
in direct spending and much more in indirect ways. America is a true
superpower, so we can handle such losses — although one shudders to
think of what might have happened if the “real men” had been given a
chance to move on to other targets. But a financially fragile
petroeconomy like Russia doesn’t have the same ability to roll with its
mistakes.
I
have no idea what will become of the Putin regime. But Mr. Putin has
offered all of us a valuable lesson. Never mind shock and awe: In the
modern world, conquest is for losers.
