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Time to Resurrect Pilsudski's Promethean Project? [1]

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Date: 2023-12-28  

Following the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904, exiled anti-Russian Polish revolutionary Jozef Pilsudski traveled to Tokyo with a bold proposal — in exchange for diplomatic and/or covert military assistance from Japan, he was offering to lead the Polish nation in a guerrilla war against Russian imperial rule so as to divert Russian resources from their struggle against Japan’s own imperial ambitions:

Poland's strength and importance among the constituent parts of the Russian state embolden us to set ourselves the political goal of breaking up the Russian state into its main constituents and emancipating the countries that have been forcibly incorporated into that empire. We regard this not only as the fulfilment of our country's cultural strivings for independent existence, but also as a guarantee of that existence, since a Russia divested of her conquests will be sufficiently weakened that she will cease to be a formidable and dangerous neighbor.[6]

While Japan perhaps shortsightedly declined Pilsudski’s offer of active collaboration during that war, he soon had another and much larger stage to promulgate his geopolitical vision in the wake of WW1, when he emerged as the leader of a newly independent Polish state that he hoped would lead to a revived and expanded Polish-Lithuanian federation of recently liberated nations that he called his Intermarium concept.

Stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic and Black Seas in the south, Pilsudski envisioned this proposed federation as a partnership of equals in which all nationalities and religions would be treated with toleration and respect, and which would be strong enough to stand as a bullwork against a future revival of Russian or German imperialism.

Unfortunately, his vision of an Eastern European condominium quickly faltered in the face of long entrenched national rivalries, with the new Polish state involved in a series of border disputes with nearly all its new neighbors, including his own native Lithuania, and an existential battle for national survival in its 1920 war against Lenin’s Bolshevik regime in Russia.

Indeed, as an ironic sidenote Poland probably had the power to administer a coup de grace to the Red Army at the height of the White counteroffensives in 1919 during the Russian Civil War, but Pilsudski refused to align Poland with the Whites since he saw the reestablishment of a revived Russian Empire as an even graver threat to Poland’s newfound independence than that obviously posed by Lenin’s regime.

Fast forward a century to the current war of Russian aggression against Ukraine. Up to now, the West by and large has not seen this war as an existential threat to its own future survival — unlike Ukraine of course. The “strategy” so far seems to be giving Ukraine enough financial and military support to keep Russia from fully conquering the country, but not so much as to let them actually push the Russian Army out of all their territory — primarily from a fear of potential nuclear escalation it would seem.

Unfortunately, while the West may not see itself at war with Putin’s Russia, Putin has made it abundantly clear that he sees himself and his version of Russia as fundamentally in opposition to the West and the current international order. Putin’s latest threat to sever diplomatic relations with any country agreeing to turn over frozen Russian assets to Ukraine (not to mention other unspecified “consequences”), and his repeated fulminations about marching on Moldova, the Baltic States, Poland, and even Finland after extinguishing Ukraine’s independent existence might merit a reevaluation of just how the West should be confronting this form of hybrid war now.

Perhaps it's time to really take the gloves off and take a page from Pilsudski’s Promethean Project to see what other portions of the Russian “Federation” might be happier to be out from under Moscow’s heavy-handed thumb? Putin keeps insisting that the greatest geopolitical “tragedy” of the 20th century was the breakup of the USSR in 1991 — I would submit that the greatest threat to the current international order is the continued existence of Russian Imperialism.

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