(Bloomberg Opinion) -- One of President Joe Biden's most fist-pumping lines in his State of the Union address was his brash promise to go after “the Russian oligarchs,” as he called them. “We're joining with European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets,” he said. Then, wagging his finger, he addressed them directly: “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”
It's the perfect Bidenist blend of common-sense populist politics and good old-fashioned American patriotism. And it's been followed up with real policy muscle. Still, the question lingers: Isn't this supposed to be about Ukraine?
The precipitating event for the global outpouring of anti-Russian sentiment was Russia's outrageous and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, which has already killed, wounded and displaced millions. It is that which has mobilized the world against the country and Russian President Vladimir Putin, leading to broad sanctions and the widespread provision of arms to Ukraine, including by traditionally neutral states such as Sweden and Finland.
Yachtless billionaires are not the most sympathetic victims of this war. But they are a curious one. And the West's focus on them may be distracting it from formulating a more realistic strategy for defeating Putin and restoring Ukraine.
It's not just that the logic is not well-thought-out. Who counts as Russian? If someone “bilked” the “violent” Putin regime out of billions, as Biden said the oligarchs did, couldn't that be considered a good thing? If Putin withdraws his forces, will Biden give them their yachts back? What about the German government, which last week impounded Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov's superyacht, the world's largest?
And if the justification for seizing the oligarchs' luxury apartments and private jets is that they reflect “ill-gotten gains,” then why weren't they taken away months, years or even a decade ago? In fact, under Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin, a somewhat different group of oligarchs — many later purged by Putin himself, and many of whom were financiers of anti-Putin activities in the West — got their ill-gotten gains from the botched privatization of Soviet assets.
The premise of this anti-oligarch campaign is that Putin's regime is fundamentally illegitimate — and therefore the West is not obligated to respect the property rights of Russians, at least rich ones.
It is, admittedly, an appealing position. Putin is, in fact, a bad guy and a bad actor on both the domestic and global stages. But going after the oligarchs makes sense as part of a total war against his regime. And the strategy the West has chosen is a limited effort to get Russia to cease its invasion of Ukraine. Remember that even before it invaded Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea, a move that most of the rest of the world never formally recognized but also didn't object to all that strenuously.
Biden also has to watch the political dynamics. While many liberals think all Republicans have become Russian catspaws, in reality most Republican members of Congress disagree with former President Donald Trump and oppose Putin's invasion. Even better, from their perspective, to the extent that a tough-on-Russia stance leads to higher food and energy prices, so much the better: They know Biden will take the blame. That Republican applause at the State of the Union may have been genuine.
Already, more voices in the U.S. and Europe — from former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt to Lawfare Editor in Chief and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Benjamin Wittes — are calling for the West to adopt an explicit or implicit policy of regime change.
That idea is bolstered by the sense in many quarters that Putin's hold on the country is tenuous. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul says he is “confident in predicting that Putin's evil invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of the end of Putin's dictatorship and Putinism in Russia.” The Economist pronounces: “It seems ever clearer that the Russian elite is appalled — and impoverished — by his paranoid adventurism. The worse his plans go in Ukraine, the sooner cracks will start to appear in his regime and the more the Russian people will take to the streets.”
This may all be wishful thinking.
It is certainly possible that, bolstered by Western munitions and supplies, the Ukrainians will defeat the Russian army. And there is ample precedent (1905, 1917) for military defeat leading to domestic turmoil in Russia. But it's also quite possible that, knowing this, Putin will pulverize Ukrainian cities the way he leveled Grozny. The courage of the Ukrainian people has inspired the world, but it was brutal Russian repression, not a lack of fighting spirit among the Chechens, that put an end to the war in Chechnya.
Destroying the village to save it would make a mockery of Putin's alleged belief in the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people. But nationalist politics often admits of such contradictions. And the idea that seizing superyachts — or sanctioning central banks — will lead Russians to overthrow their government flies in the face of history. From Cuba to Iran to North Korea to Venezuela, the idea of bringing about regime change via the 21st century equivalent of embargo and blockade tactics is the dream that refuses to die.
My one Russian friend — not an oligarch but a normal middle-class person — has had her previously high confidence in Putin's statecraft shattered. At the same time, she is angry at the hypocritical West that's wiping out her savings to uphold a principle of sovereignty that the U.S. did not respect with regard to Iraq or Serbia.
If NATO wanted to ensure a decisive military victory for Ukraine, of course, it could. Russia's struggles to establish clear air superiority over Ukraine indicate that the U.S. probably does have the capacity to establish a no-fly zone or even bomb Russia's slow-moving columns. The Kremlin probably wouldn't respond to that with a nuclear attack on the U.S., because it knows that Americans would retaliate in kind and everyone would die. But of course the Russians thought the West would never dare deploy a severe sanctions package in the first place.
And unless you're willing to roll the dice on nuclear Armageddon (I am not), you have to admit that Putin stands a very good chance of winning this war and staying in power.
All of which is to say: The best way to save Ukraine is to make clear that compromise is still on the table and offer Russia some off-ramps. Maybe Europe and America could even promise to give the oligarchs back their superyachts.
Related at Bloomberg Opinion:
- You Can't Just Take a Russian Oligarch's London Townhouse: Chris Hughes
- Putin's Wealth May Be Unreachable, But Russia's Isn't: Timothy O'Brien
- Ukraine's Oligarchs Joust, Putin Laughs: Leonid Bershidsky
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. A co-founder and former columnist for Vox, he is also the author, most recently, of "One Billion Americans."
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