Jeff Stacey has a new piece at Foreign Affairs that is basically a re-skinned version of his post at the Duck of Minerva. It should come as little surprise that I don’t find either piece particularly persuasive.
Overall, I agree with Jeff’s basic assessment of Russian moves as destabilizing. In Syria, where Moscow seeks to save the Assad regime, Russian intervention in a country that the US and its allies are already mounting military operations carries with it significant risks. Also, as Jeff writes:
Indeed, Russia has been playing a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with allied planes and ships across Eurasia for many months now. Among other things, it has been both flying in the flight paths of Western commercial and military aircraft and using ships and submarines to intermittently sail into Western countries’ territorial waters. In addition, Russia has staged a series of large-scale military exercises just across the border of Poland and several Baltic states, and its intelligence service actually seized an Estonian agent during last year’s NATO Summit and held him for several days.
I see this ‘muscle flexing’ as a mixture of ham-handed coercive diplomacy and reversion to Cold War great-power repertoires. It would obviously be better for everyone if Moscow stopped, insofar as they increase the risk of military and diplomatic incidents. But, as I noted a few days ago, these efforts have generally backfired.
Unfortunately, in the second part of the piece takes a wrong turn. Jeff engages in arguments reminiscent of what Jack Snyder describes as the myth of the “paper tiger“: the idea that an adversary is an “innate aggressor” who will nonetheless “bow to forceful resistance.” Thus, Jeff argues that:
By not confronting Putin and Russia sufficiently over its illegal invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the United States and its Western allies effectively gave Putin a green light to project force in other geostrategic hot spots.
When Putin stared down the West and the West blinked, the West lost its credibility and, with it, its ability to deter further Russian bad behavior. Most Western security experts, focused on the conflict over Ukraine itself, ignored the wider strategic ramifications.
Of course, Jeff never indicates what would have counted as ‘not blinking.’ This is pretty typical of such arguments about how lack of sufficient US resolve empowers Russia. It is easy to criticize US policy for weakness, but hard to supply plausible policy alternatives. Here, Jeff deserves some real credit, though. His Foreign Affairs piece may not provide much in the way of concrete counterfactuals, but he has been making recommendations for some time—and here at the Duck of Minerva.
It turns out, though, that most of Jeff’s proposals involve tinkering at the margins: tougher sanctions more quickly, a military exercise in Poland, more aerial military patrols, and so forth. We can certainly have a thoughtful debate about the celerity and magnitude of American pressure on Russia over Ukraine. But it strains credulity to believe that these kinds of actions would have led Putin to fear US punishment for intervening on behalf of a beleaguered client in the Middle East. You have to believe that, on the one hand, Moscow’s policies are highly elastic with respect to American displays of resolve and, on the other, that Moscow presents a very serious threat to American security.
The only major change that I can find in Jeff’s proposals? Supplying lethal aid to Ukraine. Putting aside the inherent wisdom (or lack thereof) of such a policy, this highlights the incoherence of the “paper tiger” narrative. It requires us to believe that supplying lethal aid to Ukraine would have somehow convinced Putin not to intervene in Syria. That is, to send military force to a conflict in which Washington and its allies already supply lethal aid to the opponents of Russia’s client and are actively deploying military force. If Putin isn’t worried about the risks there, why would he have backed down in a country he see as much more important to Russian security?*
In truth, it seems much more likely that the kind of “forceful response” necessary to deter Russia from its intervention in the Ukraine would’ve involved unacceptable risks for the United States and its allies: red lines backed by the threat of military escalation of one kind or another.
Moreover, why should we believe that more aggressive confrontation of Russia would reduce, rather than increase, the probability of Russian belligerence? I don’t think it particularly difficult to make the case that current Russian belligerence is rooted in Moscow’s conclusion that Washington has no interest in extending Russia its putatively “deserved” great-power perquisites. It isn’t at all clear that more confrontation wouldn’t breed more confrontation. If you’re going to recommend escalating every conflict with Moscow, you better be damn sure that Putin really is a paper tiger.
*And whenever I hear these kinds of arguments I can’t help thinking about the Russia-Georgia War of 2008. The US supplied significant lethal aid to Tbilisi; the Russians simply destroyed it all.
Note: I’ve significantly modified this post since it was originally published.
The “paper tiger” belief would explain (my earlier point about) why Stacey thinks deterrence can compensate for an unwillingness to really intervene in Ukraine/Syria—just pretend you will intervene, and Russia will back down: “Since the West is unlikely to intervene in the conflict directly, deterrence is even more vital for the United States to establish and maintain.” And even though “Russia has a stronger set of interests in Syria” than does the US, Russia would have nonetheless believed the US was willing to fight in Syria, absent “the failure to force Putin’s hand over Ukraine that emboldened him.”
Russia’s belief that the US wouldn’t resist in Syria probably had less to do with Ukraine than with red line and “Assad must go” threats, as Busby emphasizes. But while failing to punish Assad may have encouraged limited Russian maneuvers, the US could still have responded to these maneuvers if it really cared enough: reputation may have encouraged initial Russian maneuvers in Syria, but it was US unwillingness to respond to these probes, not reputation, that prompted Russian escalation.
By contrast, not helping Ukraine may have prompted Russian probes against ex-Soviet NATO states, but the US could and did respond to these probes to signal commitment to NATO–in Stacey’s words, “forcibly drawing a line against Russian incursions into these former Soviet satellites.”
That, at least, is how I read Weisiger and Yarhi-Milo, as well as Fearon’s post:
“If a prior commitment or threat implies that, the way things play out, you would have to take an action that is incredibly costly and not at all in your current interest, then, fine, take the hit and don’t do it. No one will infer that you are no longer willing to fight for anything that’s important to you. At worst you will face more challenges than you otherwise would have on some foreign policy margin.”
(https://themonkeycage.org/2013/09/credibility-is-not-everything-either-but-its-not-nothing-either/)
I agree wholeheartedly. I can’t emphasize what you said enough: “By contrast, not helping Ukraine may have prompted Russian probes against ex-Soviet NATO states, but the US could and did respond to these probes to signal commitment to NATO–in Stacey’s words, “forcibly drawing a line against Russian incursions into these former Soviet satellites.”
Ah neocons and neoliberals…who always imagine Russia is just a bigger version of Serbia, Iraq, Libya or some other weak nation that will back down or knuckle under to their whims…never imagining that Russia together with China is more than capable of raising the costs to the U.S. for supporting the Ukrainian regime to the tilt, whether it be in the form of stepped up aid to proxies, cyberwarfare, or carefully coordinated and massive dollar dumping requiring the Federal Reserve to print more money ex nihilo to soak up the half a trillion in U.S. Treasuries China no longer wants or needs.
“It turns out, though, that most of Jeff’s proposals involve tinkering at the margins: tougher sanctions more quickly, a military exercise in Poland, more aerial military patrols, and so forth. We can certainly have a thoughtful debate about the celerity and magnitude of American pressure on Russia over Ukraine. But it strains credulity to believe that these kinds of actions would have led Putin to fear US punishment for intervening on behalf of a beleaguered client in the Middle East.”
For once, we agree. None of those ‘get tough’ macho posturing steps would’ve meant the slightest thing to Putin. Eastern Ukraine was always going to matter more to the Russians than it ever would to the Americans, and no amount of blather or propaganda could change that.
Syria is all about the gas pipelines to Europe — Putin is ok with an Iranian one, the U.S. desperately wanted a Qatari one to prop up the petrodollar and push Gazprom out of Europe. But it’s not gonna happen because even if Assad steps down a Russian-Chinese-Iranian rump state stretching from Damascus to Latakia ain’t gonna let it happen. ISIS and Al-Nusra and the U.S. air campaign to ‘degrade’ ISIL achieving basically nothing over the last year and half convinced Moscow and Beijing that the U.S. doesn’t really care about ISIS. Ironically, that’s the same charge the MSM and neocon brigades are leveling at Moscow now, even though Al-Nusra, Shams and the (Turkish Muslim Brotherhood foreign legion) Army of Conquest are all much closer to Assad’s heartland, whereas ISIS is mostly in the western deserts. And the Russians just bombed Raqqa after days of ‘Russia isn’t bombing ISIS’ whining.
“You have to believe that, on the one hand, Moscow’s policies are highly elastic with respect to American displays of resolve and, on the other, that Moscow presents a very serious threat to American security.” Well we generally would say no to both counts. And the rise of The Donald would tend to confirm that most Americans including a surprisingly high number of (former?) Fox News watching Republicans could care less about Ukraine or Syria. As did the humiliating standdown of August/September 2013 when the Russians and Chinese basically said ‘um no, you’re not gonna bomb Assad on the chemical weapons attack pretext’. For which the Kiev ‘revolution’ was payback.
[sic] eastern deserts of Syria and western deserts of Iraq.
America’s foreign policy elites hate it when all their efforts to whip up frenzy over the Rooskies are coming meet a wall of ‘is there football/Dancing with the Stars on tonight?’ indifference. There’s only so much neocon hipsters like Michael D. Weiss (who doesn’t speak Russian OR Arabic BTW) can hope to achieve with their ‘friends’ in the ‘Free Syrian Army’ (really a guy in Paris or Coventry with a phone and Internet connection speaking for some dudes who run Turkey/Qatar/Saudi arms warehouses on the Turkish or Jordanian borders). The bulk of the non-ISIS forces fighting Assad ARE Al-Qaeda or allied with Al-Nusra or impose shariah law. Them’s the ugly facts.