heard her and marathon
and all prehuman history
and finally The UN"
So wrote E.E. Cummings back in 1956, speaking of the cries to heaven of another embattled Eastern European nation that was putting up a courageous resistance to Russian (or, in that case, Soviet) aggression. Back then it was Hungary; but today, it seems that the cries of Ukraine have been at least as far-reaching, since just this afternoon the UN Security Council voted over three abstentions to hold an emergency session of the General Assembly in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine—only the 11th such meeting that has occurred in history.
Thus, four days into Putin's war, I think it's safe to say that whatever the Russian president thinks he is achieving with all this, it is not a propaganda victory. Not only did he invade a sovereign and much smaller and weaker nation utterly without justice or provocation; he also didn't even do it particularly well. His forces have been stymied, at least for a time, by an unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance, and as a result, even the moral numbskulls who only know how to worship power are now turning on him. "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek."
Why has this invasion gone so poorly for Putin, both on the hearts-and-minds side and on the field of battle? Much discussion in the months leading up to the war focused on the idea that NATO and the Western powers ought to offer Putin a "golden bridge" so that he could back out with honor. The idea (related to a concept that appears in Sun Tzu, but the title of which actually comes from a quote attributed to Scipio in a 4th-century Latin treatise), was that Putin had gone out on a limb, and just needed one small thing to claim as a victory so that he could turn aside from the brink.
Comparatively less attention, however, was paid to a closely-related strategic concept—that of bridge burning. The idea behind a "golden bridge" is that one ought not to box one's enemy in with no possible exit, because if you do, they will become desperate and fight courageously to the last soldier. By the same logic, in his classic book on strategy, Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling suggests that a party to a conflict can willfully deprive themselves of exits, so as to eliminate the temptation to retreat, and commit themselves irrevocably to a ferocious struggle.
Whatever the West should or shouldn't have done earlier this year, Putin clearly wasn't considering fully what it would mean to face a Ukrainian resistance that deliberately deprived itself of exits. The United States, to be sure, offered the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a way out. They promised safe passage if he chose to leave the country. But Zelensky very publicly and repeatedly committed himself to staying put no matter what. In doing so, he deprived himself of the possibility of a graceful exit.
The result of this strategic choice on the part of the Ukrainian leadership—as well as the fact that they are quite literally surrounded by Russian forces, with nary a "golden bridge" in sight—means that Putin has put his adversaries in a much stronger position than himself. Their backs are against the wall. They have nothing to lose and everything to win. And so, with Claude McKay, they say:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, [...]
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Putin himself has none of that desperation. He can call this off at any time. He has endless golden bridges available to him, in whatever direction he should choose to turn; whereas he has left the Ukrainians very few.
This, perhaps, will go down in history as his greatest strategic blunder. He thought that he would succeed through overwhelming force. But he wasn't counting on the difference it makes to be fighting people who are committed to the struggle until the bitter end. Putin has only his pride at stake. The Ukrainian people have infinitely more, and he has left them with few opportunities to accept a compromise where they get to at least keep some of it. He, not they, chose to make this an all-or-nothing struggle.
And so the Ukrainian fight also vindicates what Marshall Ganz wrote about the story of David and Goliath. The reason the Davids of the world are sometimes able to win is not that they succeed in spite of their weakness; it is that they succeed because of it. The obvious advantage that their more powerful adversary enjoys invites complacency; whereas, for the Davids, necessity becomes the mother of invention.
Plainly, then, it is Putin, not NATO, who should have brushed up on his Sun Tzu in the months leading up to this war. As quoted in Schelling, citing the passage that is often compared to the Roman concept of the "golden bridge," the Chinese general's advice goes as follows: "do not press a desperate foe too hard."
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