Welcome, if you must, to the Russian Weimar

HISTORICAL analogies are imperfect at best and misleading at worst, but they do convey at the least a rough sense of patterns that survive over time. So it is in the case of Russia's war with Ukraine. The invasion suggests continuities derived from the recent past.

In an essay published in The Washington Quarterly shortly before Dec 25, 1991, when the Soviet Union's hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, the American strategist Andrew C Goldberg outlined 3 illustrative scenarios of the post-Soviet future.

The first scenario was that of the "Soviet Weimar". That was a reference to Weimar Germany, existing in the 1920s and the 1930s, which had regained a degree of revisionist importance in global affairs after its defeat in World War I. (The Nazi ascendancy that led to the next and definitive German defeat in World War II would come later.)

The historical analogy between Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union, both in imperial decline, lay in their common disaffection with the Anglo-American status quo.

Goldberg's second scenario was that of a reunified Germany reverting to the ways of Hitler's Third Reich because of the Soviet Union's terminal weakness. A revived Third Reich would possess the advantage, not available to its historical predecessors, of lying at the heart of an economically integrated Europe that would be dependent on it critically.

Goldberg's third warning scenario was that of a "Byzantine" order in which the collapse of the Soviet Union would create large successor states and alliances holding political values alien to those of the West and enjoying sufficient military capability to threaten the United States itself eventually.

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Clearly, unified Germany's incorporation into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and the European Union (EU) has removed the Third Reich scenario. Also, European affairs are hardly Byzantine today because of the inclusive ambit of Nato and the EU.

That leaves Goldberg's first scenario intact. The appearance of the Russian Weimar as the successor to the Soviet Union in European history is apparent in the assertion made by Dmitri Trenin that Russia is challenging the US-dominated order because it has seen "its own vital security interests challenged by US-friendly forces in Ukraine".

Trenin is a veteran Soviet/Russian military officer with a doctorate from the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences who directs the Carnegie Moscow Centre. He argued as early as in 2014 that Moscow would not back off from confrontation any more than Washington would accept a Russian sphere of influence in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eurasia.

"The United States will also refuse to treat Russia as an equal... The relationship has become essentially adversarial, as in the days of the US-Soviet Cold War or, more to the point, the Russo-British Great Game," Trenin observed.

Moscow's current reversals in its war with Kyiv should not lead others to mock Russia's reality as a great power in this century, any more than Germany's twice-thwarted bid for world power in the last century has prevented it from achieving a formidable presence in European and global affairs today. A Weimar Russia, should it occur, would signal a warning that global affairs, like goods in a supermarket, have a sell-by date.

Why is Russia a possible Weimar and not a nascent Third Reich? It is because Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a recreation of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

Chancellor Hitler's eugenic imperialism was based on the global colonisation of land on which to populate a superior Aryan race by exterminating so-called biological inferiors such as Jews. President Putin's goals, although ambitious, are modest by comparison. He wants to preserve the ethnic identity of Russians as a world people in a globalised West which he blames for having corroded Russia's traditional values and for having hollowed out the economic and military will of Russians to preserve the greatness of their past.

Much as the Weimar Republic struggled fruitlessly to ensure the dignity of the German people after their political humiliation and economic impoverishment at the Treaty of Versailles, the Russian Federation is committed to the preservation of the international credibility of the Russian people following their marginalisation since the end of the Cold War.

In both cases, there is no question of throwing other peoples out of history. The challenge is to reinsert one's own people into others' history. However, as the war in Ukraine might well show yet again, history is littered with the debris of unintended consequences.

Much as Kaiser Wilhelm II's failed overreach produced the international contraction of Weimar Germany and created the conditions for the rise of Chancellor Hitler, President Putin's invasion of Ukraine recalls the warnings of former American National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1994 that a strong Ukraine would prevent the rise of a new Russian empire.

Empires begin in the near neighbourhood, which is absorbed into an insatiably expanding periphery that stops only when it is met by the might of a contrarian power. Nato's visceral opposition to the territorial expansion of Russia is rooted in the timeless dynamics of great-power politics in which Russia's advances would undermine Nato's preponderance.

Russia stands today at the Weimar moment in its history. Russians and everyone else would suffer if a xenophobic leader were to succeed Putin with blazing promises of national recovery from the embers of a lost Ukraine war.

The sooner the war ends without shrill demands for regime change in Moscow, and the sooner that Russia understands that it has entered an international dead end, the safer the world will be from a replay of recent European history.

A Russian Weimar is preferable to a Russian Third Reich any time.

The writer is a Singapore journalist; he can be reached at asad@sph.com.sg