Unfortunately, it didn’t, and now former Soviet republics with a Russian minority—which is most of them—must now wonder what parts of their country the Kremlino Win Cold War 2.0
To beat Vladimir Putin, we're going to have to be a little more like him.
By JOHN R. SCHINDLER
March 25, 2014
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By JOHN R. SCHINDLER March 25, 2014
The last two weeks have witnessed the upending of the European order and the close of the post-Cold War era. With his invasion of Crimea and the instant absorption of the strategic peninsula, Vladimir Putin has shown that he will not play by the West’s rules. The “end of history” is at an end—we’re now seeing the onset of Cold War 2.0
What’s on the Kremlin’s mind was made clear by Putin’s fire-breathing speech to the Duma announcing the annexation of Crimea, which blended retrograde Russian nationalism with a generous helping of messianism on behalf of his fellow Slavs, alongside the KGB-speak that Putin is so fond of. If you enjoy mystical references to Orthodox saints of two millennia past accompanied by warnings about a Western fifth column and “national traitors,” this was the speech for you.
Putin confirmed the worst fears of Ukrainians who think they should have their own country. But his ambitions go well beyond Ukraine: By explicitly linking Russian ethnicity with membership in the Russian Federation, Putin has challenged the post-Soviet order writ large.
For years, I studied Russia as a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, and at times I feel like I’m seeing history in reverse. The Kremlin is a fiercely revisionist power, seeking to change the status quo by various forms of force. This will soon involve NATO members in the Baltics directly, as well as Poland and Romania indirectly. Longstanding Russian acumen in what I term Special War, an amalgam of espionage, subversion and terrorism by spies and special operatives, is already known to Russia’s neighbors and can be expected to increase.
In truth, Putin set Russia on a course for Cold War 2.0 as far back as 2007, and perhaps earlier; Western counterintelligence noted major upswings in aggressive Russian espionage and subversion against NATO members as far back as 2006.The brief Georgia war of August 2008, which made clear that the Kremlin was perfectly comfortable with using force in the post-Soviet space, ought to have served as a bigger wake-up call for the West.
Unfortunately, it didn’t, and now former Soviet republics with a Russian minority—which is most of them—must now wonder what parts of their country the Kremlin may wish to unilaterally seize in the future. Statements from Crimea’s new rulersthat the Tatar population will need to be relocated—considering that Stalin deported them in toto in 1944, killing nearly half in the process—speak volumes about the Kremlin’s mentality.
There is ample Soviet nostalgia on display, combined with a crude nationalism that ought to worry all Europeans. After all, issues of ethnicity and borders led directly to both World Wars. Central and Eastern Europe believed such questions had been settled—by Josef Stalin, let us remember—in 1945 and ought not be reopened.
Where revisiting this leads was made painfully clear in the Balkans in the 1990s. Yet Putin has now done the same in the far bigger post-Soviet space, with implications that are deeply troubling. That Russia, a patchwork of nearly 200 nationalities, not all of them deeply pro-Kremlin, ultimately has far more to lose than Ukraine from redrawing borders based on ethnicity seems not to have occurred to anyone in the Kremlin.
Since the annexation of Crimea, Russian intelligence has reportedly been employing its playbook in eastern and southern Ukraine, using spies and operatives to stir up trouble among ethnic Russians and lay the groundwork for a future invasion by “self-defense militias” backed by Russian troops. It’s not yet clear that these techniques will get Putin what he wants, but there is always the option of overt invasion by the Russian military, which must be judged a serious possibility.
If Russia goes down that road, the stoic passivity we have witnessed by besieged Ukrainian troops in Crimea will end and Moscow will have a major war on its hands—indeed the biggest European conflict since 1945. Moves by the Russian military into central Ukraine would generate stiff resistance that could last years, particularly since the brutal Stalinist methods of mass repression that were needed to pacify Ukraine in the late 1940s are off the table for even Putin in 2014. In the unlikely event that Russian forces move into western Ukraine, past Kyiv and toward Poland, it would be difficult to see how NATO could avoid becoming involved.
That said, it’s evident that Moscow prefers easy conquest and would likely avoid any moves that could trigger a genuine war with NATO. Putin has become a gambler but not yet a fool. However, his nationalist attack on the post-Cold War European order is bound to evoke memories of Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. Like Hitler, Putin has reestablished the pride of a defeated people, brought them out of economic disaster, rebuilt the military and revitalized ethno-nationalism while humiliating the hated victors of the last war. This is a heady brew, so Putin’s current high popularity numbers among average Russians ought not surprise, but the Kremlin’s vision of a Russian Lebensraum transcending current borders ought to alarm to anyone invested in European peace and stability.
Whether or not Putin invades mainland Ukraine, NATO must understand that the Kremlin has decided to begin a new Cold War by attacking the settlement of the last one. Further Western denial—like we saw after the invasion of Georgia—will only encourage more Russian adventurism, with all the attendant risks of wider conflict and major war. While the George W. Bush administration bears its share of the blame here, there is no denying that the Obama White House has repeatedly fumbled the ball with Russia. The famed “reset” was a fine idea if Dmitry Medvedev were actually running Russia, which he certainly was not. Moreover, this White House’s mishandling of Syria, essentially outsourcing U.S. policy to Moscow, only encouraged more hardball from Putin, as was predictable to those who understand this Kremlin.
All the same, I have never had much sympathy for neoconservative critiques of Putin’s Russia, which too often have counseled needless hostility and willful disregard for legitimate Russian interests in Moscow’s “near abroad,” as well as unwise emphasis on missile defense, seen by the Kremlin as a threat. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western powers, including the United States, were indeed too casually dismissive of Russian concerns—the Balkan wars of the 1990s being a major case in point—and Moscow has now gotten its revenge, repaid with interest, in Ukraine.
Nevertheless, it is time to dispense with Putin’s propaganda that NATO is “really” responsible for his seizure of Crimea. Moscow has legitimate interests in Russians outside its borders, but that does not give the Kremlin the right to redraw boundaries by force. Nor has it ever been clear why Russian fears of NATO are any more politically or morally compelling than, say, Ukraine’s fears of Russia.
Now we must face facts and get tough with Moscow by making clear that the West will brook no further aggression. It’s surely significant that Putin could have taken over Crimea in a considerably subtler manner than he chose to, preferring rough, KGB-inspired methods aimed at humiliating his enemies. Sanctions against oligarchs are a necessary part of the West’s answer to Moscow, but we ought not think that financial instruments alone will deter Putin from more bad behavior. We also need to dispense with the unreality-based wishful thinking about power that has become endemic among American policymakers of both parties, and only seems to be getting worse. It turns out that unfashionable 19th-century methods are still brutally effective in 2014.
While it can assumed that Russia does not actually want war with the West, we must urgently readdress NATO’s conventional war-fighting capabilities, which have eroded seriously in recent years. Despite harsh warnings from top U.S. officials, nearly all NATO members continue to underfund defense below the ostensibly required 2 percent of GDP. That won’t deter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, and it may be time for the Atlantic alliance to review membership criteria based on commitments to collective defense. Only states willing to sincerely support the alliance should be admitted to NATO.
That said, there is ample American blame too. For the last dozen years, Washington, D.C., has evaluated NATO members based on willingness to contribute to our losing war in Afghanistan, resulting in vast funds and energy consumed by counterinsurgency programs that have limited utility in conventional conflict. NATO must reinvigorate old-school heavy forces designed to fight in Europe without delay. Poland has shown the way by spending adequately on defense and announcing last fall a new national security strategy devoted to defending its own territory, not out-of-area operations like Afghanistan. Not surprisingly given their history, the Poles understood what was on Putin’s mind before most of NATO.
Alliance members must follow the Polish lead and bear more of the burden of their own defense before asking Americans to pay more. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t: The Pentagon is down to just two U.S. Army Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) in Europe; that seems low given the rising Russian threat, but the answer to NATO’s problems cannot be huge peacetime American presence in Europe. While frontline alliance members are already clamoring for more U.S. troops, that need can be best answered by flexible basing arrangement that would allow the United States to move forces into theater swiftly, not by large garrisons. That said, news that declining budgets may soon require the U.S. Army to cut half of its forty-five active BCTs is music to Russian ears and must be rethought.
Just as important is winning in Special War. We must understand Russia’s acumen in espionage and subversion, and how serious a threat this constitutes, especially to NATO frontline states. It’s time to get serious about counterintelligence as a strategic, not just tactical, problem. Since 9/11, counterintelligence, never a very high priority in U.S. intelligence, has been back-burnered, with dreadful consequences. The Snowden disaster, easily the worse intelligence compromise in U.S. history, has been a game-changer for NATO, not least because Edward Snowden stole not just intelligence documents but military plans as well, which must be assumed now to be in the hands of the Russians. (See, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s story on how U.S. intelligence was blind about the Kremlin’s move into Crimea.) There can be little doubt that some of Putin’s willingness to take on the West directly now can be attributed to the Snowden debacle, which has given Moscow a major edge in the SpyWar, at least for now. Although it will take years for Western intelligence to repair the damage, we must fix security lapses as soon as possible. There’s no point in taking on the Russians in Special War if NATO cannot keep secrets in the first place.
We must also confront the reality of Kremlin sympathizers and propagandists in the West. During the last Cold War, such sentiments were found mostly on the hard left, and some of them remain active today—never mind that it’s difficult to see why any progressive would back an openly reactionary place like Putin’s Russia. But now Moscow has sympathizers on the hard right, too. Out of Congress, Ron Paul seems to find positive traits in Russia that are odd for a staunch libertarian, while Pat Buchanan’s affection for Putin and his regime is obvious. It’s an open secret that Russian intelligence backs people on the far right as well as the far left in Europe, and we would be naïve to think this isn’t happening elsewhere. Additionally, some Western journalists can kindly be called “useful idiots,” to use the proper Cold War term, while others may be Russian agents, as happened during the Soviet era. Journalists-cum-activists who castigate Western intelligence while refusing to discuss Russian misconduct ought to be viewed skeptically.
The good news is that it’s likely that this new Cold War will end like the last, more or less peacefully with Russian internal collapse. Moscow’s longstanding ability to achieve tactical brilliance amid strategic stupidity will eventually prove its undoing as Putin’s reopening of the Pandora’s Box of nationalism causes his own country vast troubles. Yet the West will only prevail without major war if NATO relearns conventional deterrence while blunting Russian abilities in clandestine conflict, which is a kind of war all the same. Squeamishness will result in needless Russian victories.
That said, we must not take for granted our ultimate victory. It is easy to wax overconfident about Russia’s deep economic, social and demographic troubles; it is wiser to remember that much Western reporting on such matters is hardly more accurate than RT depictions of America as a country about to collapse in debt, drug use, unemployment and interracial violence. Putin leads a state with serious problems, but oil and gas revenues give him a healthy margin for error; meanwhile, his ability to cause mayhem in the post-Soviet space and beyond is real and rising.
The West will prevail in this Cold War too because Putin’s corruption-laden model for Russia is unsustainable in the long run. In terms of population and per capita GDP, Russia is more or less Mexico with nuclear weapons. We are not headed for a bipolar world again, but a multipolar one where Russia can be a dangerous spoiler. But NATO, with American leadership, needs to wake up. This time we must ensure that Russians are well aware that they lost—so they will come to terms with the Kremlin’s crimes, including against its own people, over the last hundred years. That alone will ensure this dreadful cycle does not repeat itself yet again.
John R. Schindler is professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College and a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer. The views expressed here are his own.
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