Make no mistake about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s straight out of the playbook.
The playbook from the late 1930s, the playbook of Adolf Hitler.
The only difference is that Putin says nothing about lebensraum — living space. If there’s one thing Russia has plenty of, it’s living space.
But Putin has said numerous times that the great tragedy of his lifetime was the breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union and that his goal is to re-establish Greater Russia as a world power.
And just as Hitler took step after step — in Austria, Czechoslovakia and ultimately Poland — and bet each time that war-weary England and France would choose appeasement over war, Putin has taken similar steps in the Crimea and parts of Ukraine.
The irony in prewar Europe was that England and France together were stronger militarily than Germany, but their leaders did not have the will to fight. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain summed it up very well.
After Munich in 1938:
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
It’s difficult to know if Hitler attacking Poland finally gave England and France something to care about or if they realized Hitler was never going to stop, no matter what he promised.
Even then, Chamberlain contacted Hitler and told him if he withdrew from Poland, they could pretend it had never happened.
Hitler must have found that amusing.
For most of the last decade, Putin has been picking away at surrounding countries reassembling the old USSR. If his invasion of Ukraine succeeds and is allowed to stand, the Baltic republics — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — would likely be next on his agenda.
Then, who knows?
Poland?
Germany?
Brighton Beach?
One place in the world that would appear to be safe from Putin is Mar-a-Lago, where the Russian authoritarian’s best friend lives. If there is any sort of silver lining in this particular cloud, it might be that Republicans would realize how disastrous it would be to allow Donald Trump anywhere near the levers of power again.
Who knows? Maybe we’ll even get some of the Trumpanzees who have been saying they trust Russia more than they trust Democrats to realize how silly that is.
Then again, that may be the proverbial bridge too far.