The Wall Street Journal’s Sunday edition of January 9 features an opinion piece by John Bolton, the former U.S. national security advisor and ambassador to the United Nations (under the Donald Trump and George W. Bush administrations, respectively) with the characteristically less-than-nuanced title of Is the Crisis in Kazakhstan the Rebirth of the Soviet Union? As though the bluntness (and absurdity) of the title weren’t enough, and to match prescription to diagnosis, the subtitle The West needs to be firm as Putin seeks to expand Moscow’s control over neighboring states was appended.

Bolton’s lead paragraph plays with the notion – not his own he hastens to explain – that the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization deployment to the troubled Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan with what he labels “peacekeeping forces” (his quotes) is a defeat for the government of Vladimir Putin. The logic of the assertion, if logic it is, is that Russian “troop deployments near Ukraine’s border were failing,” though failing in which objective or mission isn’t indicated, and that “new popular uprisings could topple autocrats in other former Soviet republics.” Bolton doesn’t make a convincing argument that there’s any connection between the two claims; that is, not one that is readily discernible. But somehow the two phenomena have thwarted “the Russian president’s strategic calculations.”

As students for generations have been asked by composition teachers in similar cases, what is your point? Your thesis statement?

The manner in which Bolton appears to connect the Kremlin’s alleged failed policy vis-à-vis Ukraine and the current situation in Kazakhstan by claiming that in some way not immediately obvious the deployment of no more than 2,500 troops from six members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization is intended to warn the U.S. and NATO against “action regarding Ukraine or other countries caught in the gray zone between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastern borders and Russia’s western ones.”

As NATO has incorporated fourteen new members in Eastern Europe since its jubilee year of 1999 and three more on its border and one near it in 2020 as Enhanced Opportunities Partners (Ukraine, Finland and Georgia in the first category and Sweden in the second), Bolton’s gray zone between what NATO calls its Eastern Flank (the Bucharest 9 countries of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) with its aforementioned Enhanced Opportunities Partners and Russia, the only “gray zone” separating NATO’s eastern borders and Russia’s western flank is Belarus, which the Boltons of the world are also working to pull into the Western orbit.

Not surprisingly, Bolton slights the State Department of Antony Blinken for not being resolute, intransigent, pugnacious, insolent, aggressive enough; as though Blinken hasn’t issued denunciations against Russia as abusive and threatening as any American secretary of state has ever done. Though never enough for the mustachioed carpet knight.

For him a small-scale military mission with no combat component is proof of Russia’s “strategy to re-establish Russian hegemony within the borders of the former U.S.S.R.,” for which nefarious design “Kazakhstan’s troubles afford him [Putin] significant possibilities.” Perhaps Mr. Bolton has watched the 1959 British comedy The Mouse That Roared more than was good for his grasp of international relations.

He doesn’t neglect to demonstrate his point, such as it is, by including “Russian operations” in Nagorno-Karabakh and Moldova. In the first case Putin’s unwillingness to employ the Collective Security Treaty Organization in defense of member Armenia in 2020 (when a Russian military helicopter was shot down and crew members killed over the nation by non-member Azerbaijan) and again last May when Azerbaijan invaded Armenia’s Syunik province seems to contradict Bolton’s assertion.

With the second case, Moldova, he was obliquely alluding to the fact that Russia has 1,500 troops in Transnistria, in a mission that has been in effect for over thirty years. The existence of an unresolved territorial dispute with Transnistria and the presence of Russian peacekeepers – all 1,500 of them – are what have kept Moldova out of NATO to date. Bolton desires to see those two obstacles eliminated as expeditiously as possible.

It is not Russia but the U.S. and Brussels that are rebuilding the Soviet Union: as the Eastern Flank of NATO, much as after the 2004 NATO summit in Istanbul, which admitted an unprecedented seven new members, six formerly in the Warsaw Pact and three of them former Soviet republics, then President George W. Bush quipped that the Warsaw Pact has become NATO. And in fact it has.

But Bolton doesn’t see that map but one which depicts “the reintegration of the independent states into Russia’s empire.” The Kazakh model could be repeated in Belarus, he warns, and after all Belarus belongs to the EU and NATO and no one else. In addition, it appears that the prospect of a coup in Ukraine appalls him, because in such an eventuality, such a ploy to enlarge the Russian empire, “a new pro-Russian government in Ukraine could readily invite CSTO forces.” Coups to bring Ukraine into NATO are perfectly acceptable, in fact praiseworthy; all others are threats to the security of the Western world.

Closing his piece, he refers to impending talks between the U.S., NATO and Russia, and admonishes weak-willed Western leaders, contemporary Chamberlains and Daladiers: “Especially now given CSTO’s Kazakhstan deployment, however, America and NATO must not give an inch to Mr. Putin’s demands, particularly to his insistence that NATO commit not to enlarge further.”

Curious he would use the very word inch in reference to NATO expansion. Failure to confront Russia over other former Soviet territories, and Finland and Sweden too he implies, could culminate in a nightmare in which “historians may mark the Kazakh crisis as the point where the Soviet Union rose from its ashes.”

2,500 troops in Kazakhstan.

Horace: Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. The mountains are in labor, a ridiculous mouse will be born. A mouse that roars. At least to Bolton.