With Russia’s incursions into Ukraine becoming more aggressive, there has been a lot of chatter about whether or not the U.S. government should arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. Defense Secretary Nominee Ash Carter has signaled his openness to such a move. Ivo Daalder, Strobe Talbott, Steven Pifer, and collaborators have issued a call for such support. There has been push back from Sean Kay and Jeremy Shapiro, other establishment foreign policy types. (With Talbott, Shapiro, and other folks from Brookings weighing in on opposing sides, there has been interesting discussion of this being an internal food fight there).
What are their arguments? How can we adjudicate who is right? In other words, what kinds of empirical and theoretical arguments can we draw on to assess these differences in judgment?
Advocates for arming Ukraine suggest that this move is necessary to raise the cost calculus facing Putin and suggest that Putin’s efforts to hide/obscure casualties from the Russian public suggests a cost sensitivity. Given the immense financial losses associated with the sanctions, advocates imply there is a special sensitivity to military deaths.
All of this suggests a familiar rational calculus model that we might be familiar with in political science circles. Surely, there is a point at which these combined costs of sanctions and casualties will become manifest to Putin that his supporters will demand a change in policy, a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Ukraine.
It appears that the Obama Administration’s current hope is that the threat of defensive weapons for Ukraine will encourage Putin to reconsider the recent escalation:
The Obama administration’s hope is that its widely reported deliberations over whether to send defensive weapons to Ukraine and about additional economic sanctions will induce Russia to agree to a halt in the fighting and, ultimately, to a political agreement within the framework of the Minsk accord.
Opponents for their part worry that this escalatory cycle will only make a cornered Putin lash out more. This is after all in Russia’s backyard, considered to be part of their traditional sphere of influence and not a peripheral area distant from the home country. This would be, in political science parlance, voluntarily chain-ganging the U.S. and West to Ukraine, potentially leading to an escalatory cycle, particularly if Ukraine ends up badly playing its hand in a proxy fight.
Jeremy Shapiro writes:
In any case, Ukraine is a unique situation, both for the Russians and for the United States. It is culturally and geographically supremely important to the Russians and yet for the United States it has no intrinsic geopolitical importance and is not a treaty ally. The Russians would be foolish to judge U.S. credibility in responding to provocations in areas of greater importance to the United States on the basis of its non-military response to Ukraine. And there is no evidence that they are that foolish.
Talbott and Pifer’s reply this criticism is that without more decisive action by the West to raise the stakes for Putin that he might not stop at Ukraine:
Part of the calculation is based on concern that the Kremlin, if it believes that its hybrid warfare tactics in Ukraine have worked, will be tempted to try them elsewhere. Jeremy writes that Ukraine is a unique case and suggests that we need not worry. Perhaps, but we see reasons for concern, especially as Russia violates a host of its commitments going back to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, conducts provocative military exercises all around NATO, kidnaps an Estonian security officer, and loudly proclaims a right to “protect” ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, regardless of their location or citizenship—or whether they wish to be “protected.”
Others like Sean Kay worry that the signal sent by sending lethal weapons to Ukraine will encourage Putin to escalate the conflict rather than back down, particularly in the window between when the policy is announced and when the arms arrive:
These tactical responses to Putin’s reckless behavior are well-intended, but risk producing dangerous outcomes for the United States while doing little to change the situation in Ukraine. It would take time to adequately equip and train Ukrainian armed forces in an impactful way – even with relatively modest items like counter-battery radars and anti-tank missiles. Advancing weapons into Ukraine is precisely the kind of evidence that Putin wrongly says justifies his illegal actions. There is every reason to believe that Russia would respond not with negotiation, but perhaps with more, and even deadlier, war.
Europeans may be especially worried about an escalating active conflict at the doorstep. As Tim Boersma, also at Brookings argues, the move could threaten transatlantic unity at a critical moment:
We are talking about a possible full-fledged war on Europe’s very doorstep. Many Americans seem awfully cavalier about risking that war in somebody else’s house. The authors of this report do not appear to have discussed their proposals with any European national officials outside NATO or even seriously considered European views on the subject. The rather stiff reaction of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the idea implies that that may have been a mistake. The French defense minister dismissed the idea of sending lethal weapons too.
It is hard to navigate these different perspectives, because advocates of sending lethal force include people who know a lot about the region and Putin. Maybe there is something about the recommended items (UAVs, radar systems, comm’s systems, humvees, anti-armor missiles) would diminish the likelihood of escalation, but the mere announcement rather than the substance may be more important in triggering a reaction from Putin.
And there is the rub. All of this comes down to a theory of how one individual will respond to these overtures (Putin) and what goes in to his decision-making calculus.
As Dan Drezner argued in his comment on Jessica Weeks’ new book Dictators at War and Peace, authoritarian Russia is governed by a personalist strongman who may not be sensitive to the traditional kinds of costs calculations that we might imagine because he ultimately does not depend upon a wider selectorate of support. There is no Putin coalition. There is Putin, and that’s why sanctions are taking a long time to have an effect:
The trouble with Russia is that despite report after report after report that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine has been an economic disaster, this will not deter continued Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin’s cost-benefit analysis calculations look very different from everyone else’s. Indeed, as Russia’s economy goes south and the Great Chinese Hope fails to materialize, Putin is likely to lash out even further. The West had better get prepared now for that eventuality.
Here, Sean Kay reminded readers that Putin is much more motivated to defend interests in the region and that additional outside support for Ukraine will only encourage Putin’s paranoid sense of foreign antagonism:
Military escalation at this time would entangle America in a conflict adjacent to a declining, paranoid, and nuclear-armed Russia. What Russia has done in eastern Ukraine is unacceptable and the Russian people will eventually look back and wonder what their “leadership” was thinking.
What’s needed from this perspective is the long view on Russia’s interests and how badly it has played its hand. As Dan Nexon noted in a post earlier last year, democratization in Ukraine is seen as close to an existential threat to Russia: “The loss of influence in a territory core to Russia’s strategic interests and its
great-power status.”
This still begs the question whether the scope of his ambitions stop at Ukraine’s border, but I wonder if, with oil prices as they are and Russia’s economy expected to contract by 5% this year, would a President Putin would or could embark on a quest beyond Ukraine?
James Fearon’s now classic article on rationalist explanations for war suggested two possible reasons why states would go to war even though there is a plausible diplomatic solution that would be less costly than war:
Second, essentially two mechanisms, or causal logics, explain why rationally led states are sometimes unable to locate or agree on such a bargain: (1) the combination of private information about resolve or capability and incentives to misrepresent these, and (2) states’ inability, in specific circumstances, to commit to uphold a deal.
In the first instance, I think we now have a better appreciation of Putin’s resolve in a way that might not have been apparent early on, which might help explain why Russia reacted to outside efforts to support Ukraine’s democratization. The second argument may be relevant here because the West has no way of knowing if Putin’s ambitions will be sated if Ukraine is Finlandized or worse.
However, from a structural perspective, I think Nexon’s argument is still on point. Russia is not a rising power on the move but a declining state with limited options. Time is not on their side:
For all the ways that the United States and the European Union blundered into the current crisis, it is Moscow that now worries that it has overplayed its hand. Even if the end result of its gamble is a pliant regime in Kiev, the global balance of power will emerge completely unaltered. Indeed, Moscow is no longer a global power capable of threatening key American interests. The reset’s failure is Russia’s problem, not Washington’s.
Should arms profiteers dictate media coverage and policy initiatives ? This worked so well in a list of ‘failed states’ where the US decided to ‘protect its interests’. https://21stcenturywire.com/2015/01/30/ukraine-admits-there-are-no-russian-troops-fighting-against-us/
Opit, you need to examine your news sources if you believe that Russian troops and material are not involved in Ukraine. And, if you read my post, you can see that I’m ambivalent about arming Ukraine.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_112193.htm
https://www.amnesty.org/en/news/ukraine-mounting-evidence-war-crimes-and-russian-involvement-2014-09-05
https://www.rferl.org/content/russian-military-insignia-donetsk/26808445.html
I keep hearing this trope that Russia is a “declining state.” Seems like it pretty well bottomed out in the 1990s. Demographics have leveled off there and economic growth is much better than in the past. I’m not saying that it is necessarily a “rising power” but rather that it is basically neither rising nor declining. Plus, if Russia draws closer to a rising China, then this would constitute a new pole in the international system. I’m simply disputing this “declining power” thesis. I see no evidence for it.
Jake, here is one data point from the IMF data with GDP (figure 1) as a share of the world total in purchasing power terms. China is rising, Russia has declined from historic highs, remained flat in recent years with the commodity price and oil price boom and looks to drift a bit lower. So, how do you want to score it? Could look at GDP (figure 2) which has remained flat, but others have pulled even further ahead, suggesting a decline in relative terms, no?
So every time there is a recession in one country they become a “declining power?” I agree that Russia will likely skid lower because of sanctions and whatnot. But yes, it depends on how you look at it. Russia today is in far better shape than in the late 1990s. And if it forms a sort of condominium with China (I admit the jury is still out on this), isn’t it part of a rising power bloc? As you will see I simply feel that certain things like this are trotted out as if they are not debatable because I do think there is a PC narrative that if you don’t look at everything in Russia through jaundiced eyes you are will be called out for violating orthodoxy.
I agree that Russia is probably in better shape than after its economy bottomed out after the fall of communism, but it didn’t use the commodity boom to diversify the economy (70% of export revenue came from oil and gas in 2012 – https://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=RS). I think the slide is a longer one dating back to even before the end of Communism with a recent uptick and recovery because of high commodity prices. It’s observed in other metrics like life expectancy of men. That shows a similar process of decline and stabilization.
Overall, I’m very disappointed by the academic discourse on Russia in this crisis. I understand that, with the moral argument being on the side of Ukraine, people are loathe to say anything that could be regarded as apologetic regarding Russia, but the academic discourse is very groupthink-ish and little better than what you read on WaPo or any other journalistic outlet, just with some IR theory sprinkled in. The image is very simplistic. Apparently Putin and Putin alone is all there is to this crisis. So the debate is all about trying to get inside that inscrutable Putin’s head and what he’s thinking. Have we learned nothing from the last 60 years of realist thought on systems, structures, the corporate agency of the state that we’ve retreated into the “devil theory of war.” If Polity IV is to be believed, Russia is no less democratic now than in was during much of the Yeltsin years. Russians also have the Internet and access to foreign media. Public opinion does matter in Russia and they aren’t all dupes. I think the obsessive “Putinology” is an interesting sociological phenomenon in its own right. He’s sort of the “evildoer” that gives a little something for everyone. Neoconservatives can love to hate him because he’s testing America’s virility and commitment to its values. Liberals and left wingers (let’s face it, most of academia) can love to hate him because of his retrogressive stances on gay rights, his overweening machismo, etc. etc. etc. Putin denunciations take on an aura of ritual. That’s all fine and good for Beltway chatter and coffee table conversation. But, I expect more analytical heft from the academy. Not saying morality and personal denunciations have no place in academia or that we’re all perfectly objective, but without some attempt to put the conflict in historical relief or an attempt at a broader understanding of the causal forces at work, there is little difference between our work and punditry.
Jake, if you read my post, it’s fairly ambivalent about whether supporting Ukraine with weapons is wise, with some evidence brought to be bear from the academy, Drezner, Weeks, Fearon, and Kay, some of it issue-specific and others based on regime type and crisis bargaining. Based on your argument, you are reinforcing the notion that there is a wider group of forces and opinion that likely will have influence on Putin. This would support the argument by Talbott and others that increasing the costs through arms shipments to Ukraine would have an effect, which I don’t think is the point you were trying to make. I also am not persuaded that there is a coalition of people who can weigh in on Putin, either elites or the public. What evidence do you have to support that view?
First off, I do want to say that I’m not speaking to anyone in particular in my previous comments. This I think is a problem with the discourse in general. I do think that the public in Russia does matter. The problem is, the public is largely on Putin’s side. So, I guess we can’t test that proposition (that the public doesn’t matter) until it is clear that the public is not behind him. If you look at the Levada polls (probably the best and most accurate polling outfit in Russia) almost 85% of the people approve of Putin (https://www.levada.ru/eng/). The problem with Talbott and others’ argument is not that they are wrong in general that public opinion matters, it’s that they do not consider the effect that the decision for the US to arm Ukraine will have on that public opinion. The US arming Ukraine changes the nature of the conflict from a thinly veiled covert action in a hybrid civil/interstate war into a US-Russia proxy war on Russia’s border. Changing the nature of that conflict, I believe, is likely to blunt any impact that additional casualties will have on public opinion. Plus, it runs the risk of expanding the conflict.
I agree with you on that. Their theory is that increasing Russian casualties will turn Russians against Putin rather than them rally around him. Their evidence is the way he concealed the news of casualties thus far. If they are wrong about that, seems like a big gamble. I’d like to have more information about what those who understand Russia the best think is going on. I think the literature on democratic transitions and coups in comparative politics talks about how regimes fall when some group of elites sees an opportunity to break away as reformists and challenge the existing elite. But that presumes there is a coterie of decision-makers in the coalition backstopping Putin, but I don’t think there are any powerful rivals to Putin as far as we can tell so even if there were public discontent, there would need to be a transmission mechanism from them through elites to get him to change course.
DAALDER: Well, hopefully, the defensive arms that are being provided would then inflict the kind of cost on Russia that would have an impact. We know from the situation that happened last summer that the one thing Mr. Putin is most concerned about is Russian casualties. Russian soldiers who were killed were brought back in middle of the night. They were buried in unmarked graves in the middle of night in Russia. And we know from the history in Afghanistan and other places that when Russian soldiers die, then the cost and the debate in Moscow and in the rest of Russia will go up.
https://www.npr.org/2015/02/02/383346073/as-tension-grows-should-u-s-offer-lethal-aid-to-ukraine
I can’t claim to understand what is going on the Kremlin unfortunately. I wish I had some sort of inside information there. It does seem that many of the oligarchs that were powerful in the past have been successfully “neutralized.” I think that the Russian heartland is the key. We make the mistake in the West of inflating the importance of the urban liberal opposition in Russia, basically middle and upper middle class Muscovites and St. Petersburgers (not sure the suffix on that!). They have been the most vocal and pro-Western, but they are a pretty small group (same thing like with the Arab Spring, we all though Tahrir Square was a great movement, but liberal urbanites are just too small of a group to govern in these lower-middle income countries with high inequality). Ted Hopf’s research on Russia was influential for me in this realization (see Hopf 2002, especially chapter 5). Russia’s heartland is outside of Moscow and lower class, hardscrabble folks. They also appear to be Putin’s strongest base of support. I have a sense that its going to take a long time to peel these people away from the Great Russian nationalism that Putin embodies.
On Twitter, I keep asking the proponents of supplying arms to Ukraine what their plan B is if Putin doesn’t fold. Only one has supplied an answer: a war of attrition.
I’ve wondered if there is a parallel during the Cold War where the West or the US supplied weapons to local actors in the near abroad to the Soviet Union without triggering escalation between East and West. The best I could come up with was Afghanistan, which didn’t escalate into a US-Soviet conflict but the proxy war was certainly bad for Afghanistan (and ultimately terrible for the the US).
Well, the sanctions seem to have had a major impact on both the Russian populace (primarily due to the rouble’s fall and the Russian reaction of banning food imports) and the elites, whose access to Western capital has been cut off and whose corporations and other rouble assets have been hit very hardly. Yet there’s no evidence of any organized opposition to Putin’s course emerging, which simply does suggest that he’s not substantially constrained by systems, structures, or corporate agency, and can conduct this conflict on his own terms. Under these circumstances, it’s no wonder that people focus on his personal calculus above all else. Whether it’s because Russians have been “duped” into supporting a foreign policy that’s causing serious damage to their country, or because Putin is the avatar of Russian national aspirations that are genuinely more important to them than material well-being is a good question, but the outcome is the same.
Well said. I don’t think even proponents of arming Ukraine like Strobe Talbott believe there are many veto players in Russia other than Putin
This is a nicely balanced article. I find myself in-between on this one, and perhaps for the reason that I do not know how Putin will react to one option or another. In fact, it seems to me that many of the positions in the debate are premised on their own interpretation of what Putin is likely to do: for the opponents of lethal assistance, if the United States provides arms, Putin will double down and the risk of broader was will be increased; for proponents of providing arms, not confronting the Russian-supported forces in Ukraine will help pave their way to Mariupol and perhaps beyond. So far, nobody in this debate has convinced me that their interpretation of what motivates Putin should govern our actions. Yes, the moral case here is on the side of Ukraine; and, it seems to me, there are potential dangers in either direction. My hope is that Merkel will have some success in getting Putin to buy in on and not violate a new ceasefire, including an arrangement that keeps Southeast Ukraine as part of Ukraine, but with a degree of autonomy. Perhaps the most potent weapon in her bargaining bag is Russia’s SWIFT access. The only “oligarchs” left in Russia apparently are those who support Putin, and the “no weapons” advocates better hope that the potential SWIFT arrow is a real threat.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-10/ukrainians-rage-against-military-draft-were-sick-war