Losing and Lasting
In numerous autocratic countries, catastrophic losses have often had little effect on the leader’s hold on office. In Egypt, for example, autocrat Gamal Abdel Nasser suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Yet he stayed in power and was still in office when he died of a heart attack three years later. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not only survived the disastrous eight-year war he started against Iran in 1980 but also the devastating 1991 Gulf War, in which his invading forces were pushed out of Kuwait by U.S. and allied forces in a mere 100 hours.
At the time of the defeat, it was not uncommon to hear predictions such as the one made in The New York Times by a U.S. foreign service officer and Middle East specialist who asserted that Saddam “has been defeated and humiliated and will soon be dead at the hands of his own people unless some unlikely country gives him refuge.” To the contrary, the Iraqi despot would remain in office for another 12 years until he was forcibly deposed in the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. Something similar happened with Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, who survived in office for 14 years after the failure in 2005 of his war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which resulted in the independence of South Sudan.
Even in democracies, in which it might be expected that leaders will be punished for their records at the ballot box, politicians have often gotten away with embarrassing military defeats. Take the United States. In 1982, Ronald Reagan sent troops to help police the Lebanon civil war, grandly declaring that “in an age of nuclear challenge and economic interdependence, such conflicts are a threat to all the people of the world, not just to the Middle East itself.” But the following year, after a terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks there killed 241 U.S. service members, Reagan pulled the U.S. forces out. Nonetheless, in 1984, voters reelected him in a landslide after a campaign in which the debacle was scarcely mentioned. Something similar happened for President Bill Clinton a decade later, after U.S. forces suffered a devastating setback in Somalia in which dozens of U.S. soldiers were killed in a firefight. The subsequent withdrawal had little discernible effect on Clinton’s political fortunes.
An even greater debacle was Vietnam, a war in which tens of thousands of Americans died and that led in 1975 to a decisive triumph for international communism, the United States’ central enemy for decades. Yet in the following year’s presidential campaign, the defeat came up only when President Gerald Ford mentioned it as a point in his favor. When he came into office, he said, the country was “still deeply involved in the problems of Vietnam,” but now it was “at peace.” In the end, Ford lost the election, but the outcome was largely determined by other issues such as inflation, Watergate, and the president’s pardon of Richard Nixon. The opposition Democrats never found it to their advantage to bring it up, and the election result had little or nothing to do with the fact that the greatest foreign policy debacle in American history had taken place on the incumbent’s watch.
More recently, the U.S. fiasco in Afghanistan has similarly been taken in stride and has had scant effect on President Joe Biden. Although his approval ratings have been low, there is little evidence that this slumping popularity is substantially due to the disastrous defeat of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul at the hands of the Taliban. In fact, the failed war was hardly mentioned in the U.S. midterm elections a year later, and to the degree that it was, the complaint was not about the outcome itself but about how ineptly the humiliating withdrawal from the country was managed.
Russia’s Bleeding Bear
To understand how these examples might bear on Russia’s war in Ukraine, however, one need look no further than Russia’s own history. Going back to the beginning of the twentieth century, it might be noted that Tsar Nicholas II survived a terrible debacle in Russia’s war with Japan in 1904–5. And dictator Joseph Stalin did not fare any worse in his own disastrous war against Finland in 1939–40. As far as Putin is concerned, however, two more recent episodes seem particularly relevant.
The first concerns the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in 1979. The war was launched, ostensibly, to preserve the Brezhnev Doctrine, a central principle of Soviet ideology: once a country had become communist, it could not be allowed to revert. At the time, the hopelessly incompetent communist government in Afghanistan that had taken over the year before was foundering, and under assurances from the Soviet military that it could solve the problem in a matter of days, Soviet troops invaded and soon became embedded in a lengthy and costly civil war. At the time, Mikhail Gorbachev was a junior member of the Communist Party body that approved the invasion, but later, as leader, he came to consider the war a “bleeding wound” and in 1988 ordered the Afghan withdrawal. Though the war may have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the decision to withdraw and accept defeat was widely accepted and played little or no role in Gorbachev’s loss of office three years later.
The most pertinent parallel with Putin’s adventure in Ukraine may be the Chechen war of 1994–96. Worried about a secession movement in Chechnya, one that might be copied by other entities in the Russian Federation, Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent in troops under assurances from his military that it could rapidly regain control of the region. Instead, Russian forces suffered thousands of casualties and performed about as well against a determined resistance as they have in 2022 in Ukraine. As the Chechen war turned into a disaster, Yeltsin desperately worked out an agreement for withdrawal under which Chechnya might eventually have been able to formally secede. These humiliating events played out during Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign, yet he was reelected.
