Strategersky?

I think Putin screwed the pooch by portraying a docile and disarming West as his enemy. But the West has to make Putin pay the price for it to be a serious mistake. If we let Russia defeat Ukraine by depriving Ukraine of the means to fight, in fifty years Putin's strategic error could instead look far-sighted.

Indeed:

As far as the history of Russia is concerned, I think he will be remembered as someone who made the Russian state much weaker, because I think he's made, already more than 10 years ago, a profound strategic mistake, which was to choose to have the West as an enemy. That was a choice he made, and choosing to have the West as an enemy means choosing to have China as a patron. And I think having China as a patron is a much weaker situation for Russia than trying to be between China and the West.

So I think he'll be remembered as someone who made a basic strategic mistake.

I've been droning on about this for a long time:

Will Russia at some point realize that they risk a two-front war with their pointless confrontation with NATO that lacks the ability and interest in attacking Russia? Will Russia realize that having European Russia as a secure rear area is the smart thing to have with a rising China in their east?

NATO was dwindling in power even as it had a false dawn of post-Soviet collapse expansion as worried former Soviet colonies sought refuge in NATO after the USSR lost the Cold War and shed its former imperial territories:

Remember, in addition to the general decline in Western defense spending, America's military became "unbalanced" with a long focus on fighting insurgents and terrorists, leaving it unprepared for conventional warfare.

In addition, readiness outside of those forces sent to fight in the Obama administration declined with the 2009 planning assumption that America faced no threat of war with a peer or near-peer in the next ten years medium term:

We assume no enemies will match us in the medium term. This is undoubtedly correct. But this also sounds too much like we're instituting the British Ten Year Rule from 1919.

It was a perfectly reasonable rule when adopted by the British government in 1919, which stated the British would not face a war in the next ten years. The rule was formally abolished 13 years later, in 1932. But defense spending did not rebound from its post-1919 collapse, and when war broke out in 1939, the British only barely proved they'd done enough to withstand the German offensive in the opening of the war.

Good grief, if Putin had just kept his mouth shut and his army at home, NATO would have continued to disarm. In a few years of the trend continuing, the fierce warriors of Montenegro could have conquered Germany.

Questions of whether NATO should be abandoned were rampant throughout the West. The EU salivates over the prospect.

At some level the Russian leaders understood there was no NATO threat because Russia decided to pretend NATO was a threat in order to conceal their appeasement of China. And a lot of pretending was required:

And for years after the Cold War, NATO expansion east was in name only. NATO did not add forces to new NATO members and NATO didn't build up the logistics infrastructure to sustain a defense of those new members, let alone to attack Russia from there. And NATO didn't even have war plans to defend new members. Russia changed all that with its serial aggression against Ukraine.

Really, you can't simultaneously argue that NATO provoked Russian aggression and that it is perfectly natural for Russia to want buffer territory in the west. Would Russia have attacked west if NATO never admitted former Soviet-controlled territory, or not?

But as time passed, NATO finally began to notice it still had a Moscow threat from the east. All those Russian threats that Putin believed were cost-free because NATO couldn't invade Russia began to add up in price. 

I noted the price of this pointless hostility toward the West and asked why no advisor was willing to tell Putin he was effing up royally:

Russia has alienated the West which was not a military threat to Russia by pointless threats to the West given weight by Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, even though the West was willing to help Russia upgrade their defense industry until 2014; while China stole and then surpassed Russian military technology and production methods.

And recall that China has dormant claims on Russian Far Eastern territory with a treaty keeping those claims dormant up for cancellation in 2021.

Putin isn't brilliant. He is weakening Russia's economy, failing to arrest the decline of Russia's defense industries, alienating potential allies, and strengthening potential enemies all for the "glory" of Abhkazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, parts of the Donbas, and bases in Assad's Syria.

And he's not that impressive riding a horse bare-chested, truth be told.

Chimps with nukes.

What Western plot could be as effective at wrecking Russia than Putin himself? Seriously, why isn't there a conspiracy theory floating around Russia on that possibility? 

And over time with frequent restatements of the threat, Putin may have believed his own BS--or interpreted the natural but still anemic Western reaction as proof he must have been right all along!

I suspect his pact with China was to buy time to recover strength to cope with China. And that with the latest extension agreed to on the eve of Russia's mobilization to invade Ukraine, Putin believed he had a slightly postponed deadline to settle the NATO "threat" and pivot to Asia, much as America has since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Hell, on the eve of war the situation was so uncertain that I wondered if Putin was trying to get a diplomatic settlement with the West in order to pivot east before his deadline extension with China ran out.

And here we are with Russia failing to get a necessary short and glorious war to regain Ukraine, intimidate and ultimately break apart NATO; impress China; wow his people with the luck to live during his reign; and create the strategic situation to reinforce the Far East and make it less likely China will pounce on Russia as China's power rises.

Instead, Putin exposed the reality of the Russian military to China. Oopsky.

Will the naturally paranoid Russian leadership that knows it is one whiff of suspicion ahead of a fatal fall out of a two-story window decide that Putin is making a basic strategic mistake rather than deliberately trying to destroy Russia?

NOTE: The image was made from DALL-E.

NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.

NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.