Will Crimea Light The Fire In The Russian Belly To Expand Their Nation Again?

If You Give a Putin a Crimea…

Casey Report By Dan Steinhart

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is a fine piece of children’s’ literature.

A little boy offers a cookie to a mouse, who then promptly asks for a glass of milk to wash the cookie down. The mouse continues asking for things: a straw to the drink the milk, a mirror to make sure he hasn’t gotten a milk mustache, and clippers to fix his hair that he noticed was too long when he looked in the mirror.

That pattern continues until the story comes full circle and the mouse requests another cookie—the moral being that as long as the boy is willing to give, the mouse is all too happy to take.

As any parent of a young child will attest, giving in to someone’s demands with hopes of appeasing them rarely achieves the desired result. The most famous historical example of this, of course, is the West’s appeasement of Hitler leading up to World War II—specifically, when Britain and its future allies kowtowed to Hitler’s demand to annex the Sudetenland.

As belligerents always do, Hitler had a justification for invading the Sudetenland: three million ethnic Germans lived there. Not a surprising rationale, given that Hitler’s murderous worldview stemmed from the notion that a person’s heritage was the most crucial part of his being. Germans good, Jews bad. Aryans good, Poles bad. So by annexing the land beneath those ethnic Germans, Hitler was merely restoring unity to his beloved Aryan race. After all, the Sudetenland was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As an aside, I wonder what the Nazis would have done with me back then. German is my dominant heritage, and I look the part of an Aryan: 6’1” with blonde hair and blue eyes. But I converted to Judaism last year just before getting married. I imagine Hitler would categorize me as a traitor… I’m thankful that I’ll never know for sure.

Anyway, weary from the previous world war, the soon-to-be allies refused to oppose Hitler militarily and so conceded the Sudetenland to him. The Sudetenland was part of Czechoslovakia, but not just any old part. It contained most of the country’s important stuff—66% of its coal, 70% of its iron and steel, and 70% of its electrical power. As a result, Czechoslovakia’s loss of the Sudetenland effectively neutered its military and economy. And we know what happened from there.

As Putin tightens his grip on Crimea, it’s instructive to remember this bit of history. Putin is no Hitler, and he’s also no mouse—although he only stands at a slight 5’5”, which somehow makes him seem a bit less menacing, and also makes his shirtless escapades even funnier, at least to me.

But Putin’s actions do share some striking similarities with Germany’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland:

• Putin’s justification for his takeover of Crimea is that the region’s population is 60% ethnic Russian. (If that’s all it takes, certain parts of Brooklyn should be on high alert as the next potential targets.)
• Crimea was once part of the Soviet Union and of Russia.
• Eastern Ukraine, including Crimea, contains the bulk of the country’s natural resources and is wealthier than the western part. Crimea is also Russia’s only warm-water port on the Black Sea. In other words, most of the good stuff is in eastern Ukraine, where Russia is focusing its efforts.
• Europe and the US offered zero resistance to Putin’s maneuver.

My comparing Putin’s actions to Hitler’s isn’t meant to be a Reductio ad Hitlerum, nor am I trying to paint Russia as the bad guy or the US as the good guy in this conflict. That would be a gross oversimplification or, depending on your perspective, downright backwards.

The parallels are important, though, because Hitler’s gambit set off a nightmarish chain of events leading to World War II. So the real question is: Is Russia’s takeover of Crimea the end of Putin’s plan or the beginning? Neville Chamberlain and his allies made a grave error in assuming that Hitler would stop once he got the Sudetenland. Most of the world assumes the same about Putin.

But what if most of the world is wrong? Territorial expansion certainly fits with Russia’s history—it didn’t become the world’s largest country by accident. During its Tsardom era, Russia grew at a blistering pace of almost 140,000 square miles per decade from 1550 to 1700. That’s the equivalent of adding a Montana every decade for 15 straight decades.

Only in the last 60 years or so has Russia backed off its imperial ambitions. Might Crimea be the spark that reignites them?