Imagine you are Vladimir Putin. Your mother is a hard-working, ordinary Russian gal who survived the horrific siege of Leningrad, an ordeal that took the life of your older brother via starvation and disease before you were even born. Your father is a bonafide hero who served in early submarines and was then seriously wounded in 1942. You were born ten years later, and grew up during the height of post-World War II Soviet power, analogue to a working class baby boomer in the US, forged in the crucible of the looming Cold War.
From an early age you excel, both as a young athlete and serious student, steeped in Soviet ideology at home and in primary school, surrounded by the healing wreckage of a legendary hometown and the legends of those who witnessed its destruction and salvation. You develop a powerful boyhood interest in martial arts and the USSR’s version of James Bond movies, where the bad guys are Nazis, Western fat cats, and Americans, and the good guys are folks like your mom and dad, your neighbors, soldiers and sailors and the KGB, all the way up to Josef Stalin. You easily qualify for college under this system and graduate with a law degree from Leningrad University in 1975 with a minor in foreign studies and languages, specifically, German. Your very first real job fresh out of college at the tender age of 23 is with the counter-intel division of the KGB. Ten years later, you have realized that boyhood dream: you are a covert agent in East Germany doing secret agent stuff. And then, well-versed in espionage and right at the beginning of what looks like a long, productive career, everything starts falling apart.
That’s when it gets really interesting.
Imagine you are Vladimir Putin at this time. You have a rock-solid past but a scary, uncertain future. And now you have to admit to yourself, while furtively shredding secret documents and burning fake IDs to keep them out of victorious western hands, that you saw this possibility. You’ve spent your whole life acquiring and honing a very unusual skill set. Through thorough data collection and sober analysis, your job has been to identify the leverage points in western capitalist democracies, Europe and the U.S., and then exploit them with the sole goal of weakening those opponents. But it has to have crossed your mind over the years, as communism crumbled around you, and through the filter of all that well-earned expertise and special access, that your own system had widening fault lines too. That sooner or later they might open up and swallow everything you counted on. If you weren’t cynical before the Berlin Wall fell, you certainly are now. You are by nature a competitor, so far a winner, and losing the Cold War has to smart for a fierce cold warrior like yourself.
But by a quirk of fate you are in the right place at exactly the right time with exactly the right set of skills. Over the next decade you get elevated to head of what-was-formerly called the KGB. From there you springboard to head honcho of what’s left of the old Soviet Union, only now it’s a much smaller region, where the economy is in chaos and the GDP is flirting with third-world levels.
If you’re Vladimir Putin, what do you do? You’ve seen Soviet style communism crash and burn, you’ve heard about and seen the horrors of German fascism since your were a toddler, and you’re all too aware of the flaws in democratic capitalism. You have learned to play the media in free countries, you understand the lure of easy money dangled before western industrialists. Might you think maybe, just maybe, there’s a better way, a more stable way, a way to Make Russia Great Again that uses the strengths of capitalism and communism and nationalism and all those other isms, without the problems inherent in each of them—and as a necessary byproduct, also makes you the wealthiest human being in history?
First, you consolidate power. Internally, that means eliminating or weakening any political opposition, it means strangling any media that doesn’t pay ball by hook or by crook, and rewarding those who do, it means staying in charge anyway necessary. Externally, if there’s one thing you’ve learned from studying rich, decadent Americans all those Cold War years, it’s that money equals power. So you employ your secret contacts and espionage skills, your knowledge of what state organizations have potential and which are hollowed out worthless relics, and you use your intimate knowledge of capitalism and its weaknesses, to acquire huge companies for next to nothing. You end up owning the largest ones, including the energy giant Rosfnet, and it turns out Russia has quite a bit of oil and gas yet to be produced. Money in the ground becomes money in your many bank accounts. Pretty soon, you are among the richest people on Earth, and you’re the only such mogul on the planet backed up by a quasi-personal arsenal of several thousand nuclear weapons deliverable in minutes to any corner of the globe. But there’s more, lots more.
Petro-geologists estimate there are more than 35 billion barrels of oil in the Eastern Prinovozemelsky region alone. Prinovozemelsky itself is part of a vast, energy-rich region rife with fossil fuels. And it’s not just oil or gas, either. Siberia is rich in coal and all kinds of metals too, like iron, gold, copper, silver, and rare earths used widely in electronics. It’s not entirely clear exactly how much treasure is hidden below the frozen tundra and icy, coastal seas. Outside of Antarctica, Siberia is about the last really huge, under-developed region left on Earth. But it’s more than enough to make you, Vladimir Putin a trillionaire.
Imagine yourself in this position, the world’s first trillionaire in waiting, and the only obstacle you face is manipulating western democracies into at least not stopping you—and ideally, helping you. For starters, to maximize more production in a reasonably short period of time, you need western know-how, the kind of extraction technology, expert manpower, and other resources that only a premier outfit like Exxon-Mobil would have. You could also use western capital, both to lower your own risk and to spread the profit (and thus create support outside of Moscow). And of course you’ll need dependable, free access to global commodity markets on which to sell the commodities. That’s because as long as the sanctions enacted during your various schemes to conquer and hold nearby territories like Crimea and the Ukraine are in place, you can’t get any of that.
If the sanctions could be lifted, the reserves developed, and the oil and gas sold, you could quite quickly become the undisputed richest human being in all of history by an order of magnitude. That’s a worthy goal in itself, and one that affords you the pleasure of smashing the same countries that beat you and yours in the Cold War. Imagine the endless possibilities: right now OPEC only accepts U.S. dollars for their oil, which means buyers the world over have to maintain large dollar reserves helping to support our currency.
But you, as Vladimir Putin, could put an end to that, or at least weaken it, all the while playing the commodity markets with the benefit of ultra-inside info with no pesky SEC to worry about, and that’s just one small example. With the click of a mouse or the wave of a hand, you would be able to throw Europe and/or the U.S. into an economic tailspin that would make the 2008 financial collapse pale in comparison. Given some finesse and a little luck, you might manipulate the throngs of Trump-supporting idiots already afflicting U.S. politics and their Western European analogues into starting an armed insurgency or a full-on civil war. That would leave Russia as the premier nuclear super power in the world, and you, at its head for life, as the most powerful person to ever live.
Weaken the US and Europe, go after the EU, hobble the US State Department, foster allies in those governments with money and praise, handicap western intel services, and most of all, get those sanctions lifted. It’s not hard to understand, really, it all makes sense. You just just have imagine you are Vladimir Putin.