Putin's Mirror

The news following the beginning of the war in Ukraine seems to have it that Vladimir Putin is a mystery and difficult to understand. But it seems to me that he is just reflecting the west's own actions back at it. We could call this "Putin's Mirror".

Russia has been accused of interfering in U.S. presidential elections. But after the end of the First World War the U.S. and the western Allies sent military forces into Russia to try to stop Communism. Of course when the effort didn't succeed it got the relationship off to a bad start.

Putin has invaded Ukraine, almost completely against world opinion, for such stated reasons as "denazification" and the possibility that it might join NATO. There is also a completely unverified story about the U.S. operating a bioweapons lab in Ukraine. But this is a mirror image of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, also almost completely against world opinion, to rid the country of Saddam Hussein because he was supposedly harboring terrorists and producing the fabled "weapons of mass destruction".

Some have questioned whether Putin is completely rational. But this is a reflection of 1984 when Ronald Reagan said that he had signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union and "We begin bombing in five minutes". It turned out that Reagan was only joking, but there was a microphone nearby that Reagan thought was turned off but was actually turned on. That was how the world heard about Reagan's dangerous "joke". But I am sure what really happened, after the Strategic Defence Initiative was introduced, was to make the Soviets think he was a little bit irrational, and might actually start a war.

Reagan's boasting about the Strategic Defence Initiative, and how much it cost, is reflected in Putin's boasting about his "unstoppable hypersonic weapons".

The price of oil was very low in the late 1980s. This was very difficult for the Soviet Union, which depended on income from it's oil exports. It is widely believed that OPEC, which was made up mainly of Moslem nations, cooperated with the west to pump a lot of oil out of the ground, which greatly dropped the price. Although the Soviet Union was a major oil exporter it didn't join OPEC. This is often considered to be, as much as anything, what brought the Soviet Union down. Now Putin has invaded Ukraine, knowing that it will greatly increase the cost of fuel as well as food in the west.