Over the past century, Western democracies have faced dictatorships twice — once the Fascist regimes, another time the Communist ones. In the first case, the confrontation spiraled into a global military conflict, while in the second one this outcome was avoided through achieving superiority in economic competition and ensuring high quality of life of the Western people.
Today, the West should not count on a repeat of the second scenario. Russia is still too far from the level of military spending reached by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and the market features of its economy allow the use of many “built-in stabilizers”.
Recent trends indicate that the Russian economy has adapted to the financial and sectoral sanctions, while the possibilities for their further tightening seem insignificant. Moreover, aggressive sanctions rhetoric leads to undesirable consequences for the West itself as it provokes the buildup of political alliances in other parts of the world that advocate a revision of the “rules of the game” that were adopted after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, the backwardness and inefficiency of the Russian economy are often considered as signs of its instability, which seems to be a grave mistake in assessing the ability of Putin’s Russia to continue its hybrid standoff with the West. Yes, restrictions on the use of modern technology and intellectual capital developed by Western nations are firmly holding back Russia’s modernization, but we should not expect this to cause serious damage to its economy in the next two or three years. Most likely, the main effects will become apparent over a much longer term and will challenge not Putin’s Russia, but the country that will struggle to return to normalcy after he’s gone.