Preventing Putin

There is an "Amerocentric" view of foreign policy that inhabits American political thinking and comes in two different strains.  The liberal strain looks on the problems of the world and connects them to harmful acts past and present committed by America; for instance, Iran's government is repressive today because the United States government played a role in overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.  This attitude can be summarized simply as, "Other countries do bad things because America has done and continues to do bad things."  The conservative strain looks on the problems of the world and connects them to American inaction and hesitancy; for instance, Kim Jong-un is a threat to the world because the US has not been forceful enough with North Korea.  This attitude can be summarized simply as, "Other countries do bad things because America hasn't acted with sufficient strength to make them behave."  What connects the two strains is the position of the United States: both viewpoints assume that anything that happens anywhere in the world has something to do with America.  I don't think that's REALLY true -- other countries are independent actors who have their own unique objectives and fears.  While they are certainly affected by America given the political and military strength of the United States and the connected nature of the global economy, American decision making is also affected by the actions and attitudes of other countries.  Still, there is a seductive quality about Amerocentrism; it suggests that the world could be different and could be better than it is today if only the United States had acted differently.  To a limited extent, I think that really is true.  With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to consider if the United States through its foreign policy really could have prevented the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What got me thinking along these lines was an article I read which quoted Senator Corker as essentially blaming President Obama for the Crimean crisis because Obama had backed down from attacking Syria after evidence emerged of Bashar al-Assad's forces having used chemical weapons against Syrian rebels.  Russian president Vladimir Putin of course ended up brokering a deal in which Syria agreed to turn over its chemical weapons for destruction to prevent the US from directly entering the war.  Seemingly, this worked out well for everyone apart from the Syrians rebels: the United States achieved its goal of preventing chemical weapons from being used in the Syrian conflict while avoiding having to commit forces to yet another conflict in the Middle East, Syria avoided a direct US military intervention, and Russia played the unusual role of peacemaker and scored diplomatic points.  According to Corker, however, this willingness to shy away from military force even after verbal threats had been made to dissuade Assad from using chemical weapons made Obama seem weak in Putin's eyes, emboldening Putin to attack Ukraine with no fears of an effective response.  Of course, all this begs the question as to whether or not Putin would have invaded Ukraine had the US been more forceful in Syria.  Personally, I don't think it would have made a difference.  Intervening in a small country like Syria is far less risky than fighting any type of war against a major power.  Any leader would have been extremely reluctant to go to war with Russia over Ukraine simply because Russia has a large and powerful military, not to mention nuclear weapons.  Putin is well aware of this, and his calculations probably would not have changed even if the US had attacked Syria.  Additionally, Putin has now wasted all of the diplomatic capital he earned by brokering the Syrian deal -- he and Russia will simply be viewed as expansionists for decades to come, particularly by Russia's direct neighbors.  I doubt the United States expected Russia to be so willing to injure its position on the world stage so quickly after a triumph; indeed, I suspect the Obama administration felt that a Russian diplomatic "win" would if anything encourage Russia towards a more active but peaceable diplomatic role in the world.  While that view proved not be correct, I think it COULD have been had Russia had different leadership...it was not inherently unreasonable.  Another point I would add is that President Obama WAS willing to intervene, albeit a little gingerly, in Libya, so Russia could hardly have assumed there was a 0% chance of an American military response because Obama was so adamantly opposed to entering new conflicts.  Syria or no Syria, Putin knew the likelihood of American military involvement was low because of Russian military strength.

President Obama could also have been accused of emboldening Moscow by backing away from the proposed missile defense shield President Bush had agreed to help build in Poland and the Czech Republic.  Ostensibly, the whole thing was about protecting Europe from Iranian missiles, but it doesn't take a hardened realist to see that it could also be used to protect Europe against Russian missiles if needed as well.  Obama backed away from the deal in no small part due to continued Russian objections.  Seemingly, the US gambled that a more conciliatory attitude towards Russia would build trust and help relations.  It's hard to argue that now.  Although it would be naive to not recognize that defensive weapons can also be useful in an offensive war, the US never had any compelling reason to make it any easier for Russia to strike Europe militarily.  Given that it is now clear that Russia is on an expansionistic course, I consider this to be one of President Obama's largest foreign policy blunders.  However, for now Russia has just attacked Ukraine, and it has done so by pouring in troops rather than missiles.  Missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic would not have protected Ukraine per se, though had Obama not wavered I think Russia might have been more reluctant to invade.

So, if we decide not to blame Obama for this mess, perhaps we can blame President Bush.  After all, he was president when Russia fought a war with Georgia; there was no US military intervention in that conflict, either.  Undoubtedly, Russia's successful war with Georgia enhanced its military morale and played a role in Russia's current willingness to commit its forces in Ukraine.  Could, then, the Ukraine crisis have been prevented by a forceful response to the attack on Georgia?  Here we have a situation where there is no good scenario.  The world is reluctant to engage Russia militarily now because Russia is a great (and a nuclear) power.  The world was equally reluctant to engage Russia in 2008 because Russia was a great (and a nuclear) power then too.  Fighting World War III in 2008 would, if successful, have indeed prevented Russia from invading another country in 2014 in all probability, but at tremendous cost.  Short of war, could Russia have been so punished that it would not invade Ukraine?  That's a more interesting question and I don't know the answer to it.  Perhaps President Bush and the rest of the world did let Putin get off too lightly.  The Georgian situation was very different, though, in that the Georgian military did make a move to recapture South Ossetia, a separatist region backed by Russia.  It's impossible to find a single virtuous actor in the whole conflict.  The Ossetians and Abkhaz have treated Georgians abominably in the breakway areas, the Georgians have failed to respect the Abkhaz and the Ossetians' rights to self-determination, and the Russians have played the whole situation to their own advantage time and time again.  From what I've read, I think there is something to the notion that Russia goaded Georgia into an attack through repeated provocations and pretty much planned the whole thing exactly as it unfolded.  Be that as it may, Russia had some justification for going to war -- Georgia may have been manipulated, but it still acted foolishly and aggressively.  Under the circumstances, it's not surprising Russia was not more isolated as a result of its military action in Georgia.     

There's one other reason to tweak Bush: the Iraq war.  What does that have to do with Russia or Ukraine?  Perhaps more than one would expect.  What really stands out to me as being unusual is the complete lack of casus belli in the Ukraine conflict.  In retrospect, we can see the war in Iraq was also waged without a real casus belli -- the promised weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration warned the world about never materialized in Iraq.  Thus, there doesn't seem to have been any immediate reason to strike at Iraq when we did.  Admittedly, the concept of casus belli exists in our minds -- Saddam Hussein's past invasions and massacres were perhaps in and of themselves reasons for deposing him, and it makes no sense to have a "statute of limitations" for mass murder -- but the United States and its allies did not claim to be attacking Iraq because of Hussein's past misdeeds.  A clear and present danger was claimed...falsely.  For domestic consumption, Russia is currently claiming that it needs to "defend" Russians (really Russian-speaking Ukrainians) in Crimea and perhaps in eastern Ukraine as well.  The problem is there are no dead Russians in the streets of Sevastopol, no Russians being rounded up into camps, and in general no signs of persecution or abuse of Russians.  Crimea is already autonomous, and Russian speakers are in fact the majority in Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine rather than a persecuted minority.  What needs to be defended then?  Russia has pointed to legislative efforts to make Ukrainian the only official language of the country.  The trouble is this effort failed -- nutty legislation gets proposed and then rejected all over the world all the time.  Russia has also claimed that fascists have taken over Ukraine and evidently want to hurt the inherently non-Fascistic Russian residents of Ukraine.  This plays well with how Russians view Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who opposed the Soviets and showed a willingness to work with the Nazis against their common enemy for a time.  Bandera, though, was really just a nationalist -- he was as uninterested in being ruled by the Nazis as he was in being ruled by the Soviets, and he ended up a prisoner in Germany.  To me, Bandera is reminiscent of Dabrowski and the other Poles who fought for Napoleon in the hopes that it would lead to an independent Poland as well as Aung San who was willing to collaborate with the Japanese to throw the British out of Burma (like Bandera, Aung San's nationalism made him ultimately turn against his former sponsors).  In all these cases, nationalists were willing to collaborate with evil to further their nationalistic aims.  That's certainly not praiseworthy, but the notion of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" remains a cornerstone of modern foreign relations so it's hardly surprising behavior.  In truth, the new government in Ukraine is diverse and I can't see how it could be called fascist in any serious sense.  There is much concern over the Ukrainian nationalist party Svoboda having fascist leanings, but it doesn't control the government.  I can remember well how much alarm the Russian "ultra-nationalist" Vladimir Zhirinovsky used to inspire in the United States.  Despite playing a prominent role in Russian politics for many years, neither he nor his party have ever taken over the country.  There's no reason to assume Svoboda will ever be able to take control over Ukraine -- at any rate, they certainly aren't running the country now.  Russia has no reasonable pretext for acting as it has in Ukraine.  In a sense, the US did establish a precedence for this in Iraq, and those countries that did oppose the Iraq invasion did so rather ineffectively, making it seem that major powers can get away with invading smaller countries for any reason they want.  Putin no doubt expects the world's response to his invasion to be equally as weak and ineffective. 

In conclusion, I doubt that the United States could have prevented Russia from invading Ukraine by doing any ONE thing.  However, I think the invasion might not have happened had the US not invaded Iraq but had punished Russia more severely for its actions in Georgia, had stayed the course with regards to missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, and had ignored Russian overtures in Syria (I would suggest that perhaps the US could have brokered its own deal with Syria without Russian involvement as an alternative to going to war).  It's this chain of events -- the Iraq War making it seem that great powers can get away with anything combined with American weakness in response to Russian expressions of strength -- that has helped get us where we are today.  Unlike the Amerocentric thinkers, however, I don't think the story ends there.  Other countries have been too complacent as well...Putin's war machine is partly funded from the coffers of a fossil fuel hungry Europe after all.  And perhaps there's no greater culprit overall than the failure of the international system that I mentioned in my previous post.  Great powers simply can get away with too much in the current geopolitical environment.  That's dangerous and has a tendency to lead to more and more war.  If Putin isn't stopped in Ukraine, I wonder where he will be stopped...and who else will be tempted to follow in his footsteps.