Tag: United States
Letting Russia know the score, better late than never
President Biden has said many times that the US (and by implication NATO) will not intervene in Russia’s war against Ukraine. But what if Russia uses chemical weapons? What if Russia attacks Poland, on grounds it is helping the Ukrainians to kill Russians? If Kyiv looks as if it will fall and mass murder will ensue? What if Putin unleashes against Ukrainians the Stalinist violence he has promised against dissenters in his own population?
There are circumstances under which NATO would find it difficult to stay aloof. What kind of intervention would be appropriate?
Limited interventions have limited effectiveness
The inclination will be to limited intervention calculated to send a stern message. If chemical weapons are used, expect the US to target the launch site with cruise missiles. The Russians know that is what they should expect, so no one will be on duty at that launch site when the time comes. The same will be likely for a limited attack on a Polish facility. NATO will respond to the miscreant, hoping that a broader war can be avoided.
NATO may not respond at all if Kyiv is about to fall or repression becomes draconian, but if it does the approach will be the same. It will likely be enough to punish the perpetrators but not so much as to cause a wider war.
Putin knows this. He will be tempted to push the envelop as far as NATO allows. The Russian army is pulverizing Mariupol and Kharkiv because the response so far has been negligible. Limited interventions will have limited effectiveness.
NATO could take a different approach
The Alliance doesn’t have to behave that way. A wider war would be catastrophic for Putin too. He can barely sustain the effort in Ukraine. The Russians are shipping heavy armor from Siberia, 3000 miles away, to a war they expected would be over two weeks ago. Opening another front would strain the Russian army to the breaking point.
One NATO option is a massive air intervention calculated to destroy as much of the Russian attacking force in Ukraine as possible. The Alliance has the resources needed to secure the air space and bombard the Russian forces while the Ukrainians act in concert on the ground. Such an attack would likely require destruction of air defenses and combat aircraft inside Russia and Belarus. Hence a wider war. But it would inflict a devastating defeat on Moscow, even as it continues to deal with the consequences of Western sanctions.
A precedent we should not want to set
Russia knows NATO could do this. It is unconcerned because of the frequent declarations the Alliance won’t intervene unless one of its members is attacked. Those declarations aim to avoid escalation and the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Russia is getting a pass because it has nuclear weapons.
This is a precedent we should not want to set. Giving a pass for aggression because a state has nuclear weapons is an enormous incentive to obtain nuclear weapons. Iran won’t fail to notice. Nor will North Korea.
Pyongyang has already benefitted from the deterrence its nuclear weapons afford, even though it has not yet indulged in aggression. Why else does the world tolerate its threats against its neighbors and persistent violation of restrictions on its missile program? That tolerance also helps to keep Kim Jong-un in power. Not only Iran but also Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries will have noticed that.
Send a different signal
This week’s NATO Summit is an opportunity to send a different signal, without committing the Alliance to war. The Russians have been floating negotiating proposals that amount to Ukrainian defeat. The Alliance could make clear that it will not accept as permanent any outcome in Ukraine that leaves Russian troops within its internationally recognized territory. Or any outcome that permanently prevents Ukraine from aligning as it wants.
It also could amp up its message about Alliance capabilities, as Eliot Cohen has suggested:
They [American officials] need to say, and say repeatedly, that a Russian war with NATO would only consummate the destruction that the Russian military is suffering at this very moment.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/ukraine-united-states-nato/627052/
Last week the Americans decided to send an additional $1 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. Better late than never. The same applies to making the Russians think about whether they might trigger a war with NATO that they are bound to lose. Let them know the score.
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Stevenson’s army, March 20
– WaPo says the war is headed to stalemate.
– NYT reports administration debates over escalation.
– Kori Schake analyzes Russian incompetence.
– WSJ believes house arrest for Russian intelligence head.
– WSJnotes Russian dependence on imports.
– NYT hears from academics on dangers to US democracy.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Stevenson’s army, March 16
– Pew shows US support for Ukraine.
– NYT reports burst of centrism in Congress.
– Biden signs bill with more aid.
– WSJ reports more aid planned.
– NYT says US military wants more operations in Kenya.
Just in time for our intelligence topic in class, an old but still relevant report on how Congress handles classified information.
Yesterday Charlie also distributed this:
Prof. Cohen has a new piece in Atlantic that criticizes US policy and comments on Ukraine.The most important paragraphs are these:
The American fear of escalation has been a repeated note throughout this conflict. But to the extent American leaders express that sentiment, or spread such notions to receptive reporters, they make matters worse, giving the Russians a psychological edge. The Russians can (and do) threaten to ratchet things up, knowing that the West will respond with increased anxiety rather than reciprocal menace. We have yet to see, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin telling the world what a wretched hand the Russians are playing militarily, and how superior ours is—a message he is particularly fit to deliver.
As for the nuclear question: We should not signal to the Russians that they have a trump card they can always play to stop us from doing pretty much anything. Nuclear weapons are why the United States should refrain from attacking Russia directly, not why it should fear fighting Russians in a country they invaded. Only a few years ago, the United States Air Force killed Russian Wagner mercenaries by the hundreds in Syria; American and Russian pilots tangled in the skies over Korea and possibly Vietnam. Nuclear deterrence cuts both ways, and the Russian leadership knows it. Vladimir Putin and those around him are ill-informed but not mad, and the use of nuclear weapons would threaten their very survival.
I disagree. Maybe we make the Russians feel better if we say we won’t fight a nuclear war with them, but we shouldn’t ever fight such a war. The entire world will be a more dangerous place if anyone ever uses another nuclear weapon in anger. So we should say it because it’s true and it’s right. And while our policy is sympathetic but not locked in to no first use, Russian policy is openly “escalate to deescalate.”
Eliot Cohen thinks the Russians won’t mind if we kill their people outside Russia’s borders. We would and we do. But we have tolerated sanctuaries, as painful and frustrating as they are, for geostrategic reasons. We didn’t want Russians or Chinese to fight us in Vietnam, or a nuclear-armed Pakistan to retaliate against attacks on the Taliban and its allies there.
Does this mean that we are telling the Russians that they have a trump card they can always play to stop us from doing pretty much anything? Not at all. We are telling them that we will NOT do pretty much anything to prevent their conquest of Ukraine. We will do many things, including providing weapons that Ukrainians will deploy in their own country to fight the Russians. But we will consciously limit our direct involvement because that is in our interests.
Nuclear weapons force all combatants to be especially careful. We should not be killing Russians anywhere in a deliberate and sustained policy. We have important security and humanitarian interests in Ukraine, but no vital national interest.Yes, Nuclear deterrence cuts both ways. It should deter both of us from climbing the escalation ladder for less than existential reasons.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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A bad 1995 idea that is worse now
An invitation to meet with Croatian officials this week has prompted me to think once more about the Bosnian Croats. I dealt extensively with them between November 1994 and June 1996 as the State Department Special Envory for the Bosnian Federation. The Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims in American usage, but many prefer Bosniaks because it lacks religious connotation) had made their peace by then. My role was to help them implement its provisions for creating a joint Federation. In parallel, the Croat Defense Council (HVO) and the Bosnian Army (ABiH) were fighting the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), supported by Serbia. That continued until November 1995, when the war ended with the Dayton accords.
The Bosnian Croats were uninterested in a “third entity”
The Bosnian Croats were a force to be reckoned with in 1995. The Croatian Army, fresh from victories earlier in 1995, backed the HVO to the hilt. That was a major factor in the successful HVO/ABiH summer offensive against the VRS inside Bosnia. Croatia controlled the Adriatic coast, through which arms shipments to the Bosnian Army had to pass (in violation of a UN arms embargo). So when we got to Dayton, the Bosnian Croats were in excellent negotiating position.
Dick Holbrooke did not make it easy. He refused to meet at Dayton with Kresimir Zubak, the President of the Federation. But still the Bosnian Croats got an excellent deal. Zubak asked for and got a tripartite presidency (Croat/Serb/Bosniak) despite the relatively small percentage of Croats in Bosnia even before the war. They were 17.38% in the then most recent (1991) census. They are now fewer: 15.43% in 2013.
Dayton gave them one-third of what the Bosnians call “the state” in addition to their half of the Federation, which became 51% of the territory. They also held, like the Bosniaks and Serbs, various constitutionally established vetoes. A Bosnian Croat became Foreign Minister in the state government. There were lots of other goodies along the way. No wonder no Bosnian Croat at that time asked for what is now known as “the third entity,” that is a Croat sub-state like Republika Srpska.
Now things are different
That has changed. Despite favorable election rules and constitutional provisions, the ethnic nationalist Croats have not been adept. The country has even dared elect an anti-nationalist Croat to the presidency, thrice. So the Croat nationalist leader, Dragan Covic, has conducted a major campaign to change the rules in his own favor. This despite several court decisions to the contrary.
Covic does this in collaboration with Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik. Russian President Putin encourages them, both because he is an ethnic nationalist like them and because it causes the US and EU heartburn. Covic gets a lot of face time with weak-kneed Western diplomats desperately seeking to make progress on electoral reform.
That effort has failed, but the Croat/Serb campaign continues. Both leaderships feel threatened. They fear a civic Bosnia. Each person would then have one vote. Ethnic nationalist institutions and vetoes would be reduced or eliminated. Dodik and Covic denounce this option as leading to an Islamic state. Bosnia now has a slight Bosniak (Muslim in their terms) numerical majority.
No one should be fooled
The real threat is different. Strengthening ethnic division in Bosnia, which is what the nationalist Croats and Serbs advocate, would lead to the formation of an Islamic state. The third entity implies two others, one of which would necessarily be Muslim. It would be land-locked and barely viable. Most Bosniaks don’t want that. They are too fractious to achieve it anyway. Only Croat success in getting a third entity could make it happen.
Franjo Tudjman, the war-time father of independent Croatia, understood this. He was no liberal democrat. He collaborated despite his ethnic nationalist politics with formation of the Federation and its role in post-war Bosnia. The reason: preventing the emergence of three entities. Somehow Zagreb has forgotten that an Islamic state next door would not necessarily be a good neighbor. Too many Americans and Europeans have forgotten it too. So I hear lots of third entity talk, either explicit or implicit, especially from Croatians as well as Bosnian Croats.
It was a bad idea in 1995. We in the State Department worried then that it would become a platform for Iranian-supported terrorism in Europe, because Tehran was providing ample support to the Bosnian Army. Sunni Islamists didn’t teach us about terrorism in the US until 2001. A democratic Bosnia has no need of ethnically defined sub-national entitites. If a third entity was a bad idea in 1995, it is a worse idea now, including for Croatians and Bosnian Croats.
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Irredentism is not limited to Russia
I am pleased to publish this piece, which I co-authored with SAIS colleague Sinisa Vukovic:
One of us has been critical of US State Department praise for President Vucic of Serbia. Some American diplomats are accepting the notion that he is genuinely pro-European and concerned only with the welfare of Serbs in neighboring countries. That is a mistake, especially in the midst of the Ukraine war. His reasoning about Serbia’s responsibilities and relations with its neighbors bears a distinct resemblance to Vladimir Putin’s justifications for aggression:
– Protection of ethnic kin, based on the assumption that the President of Russia or Serbia is responsible to defend Russians or Serbs wherever they live.
– Exaggeration of the threats Russians/Serbs face in other countries and calls for preventive action, including interference in the internal politics of neighboring countries.
– Use of gross disinformation to exaggerate urgency, while attributing the reports to others so as to maintain plausible deniability.
– Exploitation of the Orthodox Church to claim ethnic unity in the face of alleged religious persecution.
– Abuse of linguistic identity to claim that anyone who speaks Russian/Serbian is protected by Moscow/Belgrade.
These and other examples indicate that Vucic, like Putin, rejects civic identities and the notion that sovereignty stops at a state’s borders.
Vucic has moved definitively away from liberal democracy and back towards repressive ethnonationalism. The press is not free in Serbia and dissent is increasingly perilous. Vucic has befriended Vladimir Putin, refused to align with EU sanctions on Russia, and even now is allowing Air Serbia to double service Moscow. Vucic claims to support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as he must because of Serbia’s claims to Kosovo, but he is doing little to support Kyiv.
Like Putin, who advocates a “Russian world,” Vucic has also attached himself to people who believe in creating a broader ethnonationalist polity than the territory Serbia currently occupies, the “Serbian world.” He habitually refers to his own role vis-a-vis “Serbs” (Serbi) not Serbians or citizens of Serbia (Srbijanci).
Here is some of the evidence for Vucic’s irredentist ambitions:
Serbian world
September 26, 2020, (then) Minister of Defense Aleksandar Vulin started talking it up:
Vucic must create the Serbian world. Belgrade must gather in itself and around itself all Serbs, and the President of Serbia is the President of all Serbs.
(Vučić treba da stvara srpski svet. Beograd mora da u sebi i oko sebe okupi sve Srbe, a predsjednik Srbije je predsjednik svih Srba)
On April 9, 2021, Vulin specified:
Current geopolitical circumstances do not favor the idea of unification of all areas where Serbs live, but this will inevitably happen in ten, twenty or fifty years…wherever they live, in Serbia, Montenegro, Republika Srpska. What we need is the situation where the care for all Serbs, wherever they live, is managed from one center, and that is Belgrade, and I see nothing controversial about it.
During his party convention, July 18, 2021, Vulin explained the rationale behind Serbian world:
The people that has experienced genocide in Jasenovac, that has experienced Oluja [the Croatian military Operation Storm in 1995], and the March pogrom [in 2004 in Kosovo] does not have the right to surrender its fate to the hands of others, that others decide about the future of their children. People whose experience postulates that when it does not have its own soldier, its own police officer, its own judge, it does not have the rights…Serbia needs to have an army that can defend Serbia and Serbs wherever they live.
Effectively, he is calling for protection of Serbs by creation of Greater Serbia, the idea that drove Slobodan Milosevic to war at least four times.
On the same day Vucic reacted:
The official state policy is that Serbia’s state borders are inviolable, and we do not care about others’ borders. We have to protect our own, and unequivocally demonstrate what is our policy.
No doubt having gotten an earful from Western diplomats, Vucic backed off a bit the next September:
In that notion [Serbian world] there is nothing threatening, nothing that would endanger anyone else… it does not talk about borders or anything else, and besides, it is not part of the official state policies.
But it is
It is state policy and Vucic must know it. The National Security Strategy of the Republic of Serbia, that the Parliament adopted in December 2019, is centered around the following premise:
Protection of sovereignty and territorial integrity, military neutrality, safeguard of Serbian people outside of the Republic of Serbia’s borders, European integration, and efficient rule of law
(očuvanje suverenosti i teritorijalne celovitosti, vojna neutralnost, briga o srpskom narodu van granica Republike Srbije, evropske integracije i efikasna pravna država)
Regarding the safeguard of Serbian people living outside of Serbia’s borders, the Strategy specifies it “is an existential matter for the survival of the Republic of Serbia.”
It’s dangerous to Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo
The same Strategy also exclaims:
Preservation of Republika Srpska is one of the foreign policy priorities of the Republic of Serbia
(“Očuvanje Republike Srpske jedan je od spoljnopolitičkih prioriteta Republike Srbije”)
To explain what is meant by this, Vulin (again as MoD) stated in May 2019:
Republika Srpska has always been a priority of the Government and the President of the Republic of Serbia. Republika Srpska may not have its own army, but Serbian people heve their own army.
(“Republika Srpska je uvek prioritet politike Vlade i predsednika Republike Srbije. Republika Srpska nema svoju vojsku, ali srpski narod ima svoju vojsku.”)
This is essentially a pledge to intervene militarily in Bosnia if the RS is threatened, something Milosevic declined to do.
Vucic agrees:
We are one people, as President Milorad Dodik said. There is no such thing as Croatian Serbs or Bosnian Serbs. My father is not a Bosnian Serb, he is a Serb. He may be from Bosnia, but he is not any other Serb but only a Serb.
The threat to intervene is not only against Bosnia. Responding to Montenegrin President Djukanovic’s accusations that Serbia is expansionist, Vucic stated:
Djukanovic should know that I will always defend Serbs, and I will always defend Serbia. I have not alternative, but my own country and my own people
On Kosovo, the risk is even clearer: Vucic mobilized the Serbian army when Kosovo insisted on implementation of an agreement concerning cross-boundary/border recognition of license plates (!).
Serbia is serious
I take Serbia seriously. Its vast re-armament (with Russian and Chinese as well as Western weapons) serves its national security purposes, which are clearly not limited to the current territory of Serbia. No one watching Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine should fail to recognize the risks in the Balkans.
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Lament of the Ukrainians won’t stop soon
We all needed that. But the reality is grim. Over 2 million Ukrainians are now refugees. Many more are internally displaced. Russia has expanded and intensified its attacks in western Ukraine. They are also pounding Kharkiv in the northeast and Mariupol in the south, having already captured Kherson. Only a determined stand at Mykolaiv is preventing an assault on Odesa. The Russians all but surround Kyiv:
Courage v criminality
The Ukrainians have proven courageous, agile, and stalwart. The Russian army has demonstrated clumsy logistical incompetence. It has also targeted civilian areas, proving its criminal intent. But no one should be fooled. If this goes on much longer, Russia will occupy a destroyed country whose population will mount a ferocious resistance against brutality.
NATO defanged
NATO is standing by, reluctant to intervene because doing so might trigger a wider war as well as escalation between the US and Russia. Alliance members have been sending massive war supplies to Ukraine, which is why the Russians are attacking military bases and airfields in the west. They are the reception areas for foreign assistance. Attacks there make a lot more strategic sense from the Russian perspective than pulverizing Ukraine’s cities.
I imagine there are circumstances in which NATO might intervene. Russian use of chemical weapons could trigger a cruise missile attack on whoever launches them. But such interventioins would be carefully limited and calculated not to generate escalation.
The future Russian occupation
Russia’s war against Ukraine looks a lot like its second war againsts Chechnya, when Putin gained credits for obliterating Grozny. But the post-war occupation isn’t going to be as generous. In Chechnya, Moscow rebuilt and installed a puppet government that rules with an iron fist. In Ukraine, Moscow will need to skip the rebuilding. Western sanctions will guarantee that it doesn’t have the money. The insurgency will require the puppet government to crack down even harder than in Chechnya. So even if the war ends soon, Ukrainians will not be able to return home. It will be unsafe for years, if not decades, to come.
Moscow has biten off more than it can chew
Russia is itself in bad shape and deteriorating. It has biten off more than it can chew. But there is no telling when Russians will decide they’ve had enough of Vladimir Putin and his delusional gang. Certainly the courageous protests so far don’t reach the rule of thumb for successful popular mobilizations: 3.5% of the population. But there are definitely courageous Russians speaking truth to power:
None of the oligarchs or the inner circle of former KGBers appears ready and willing to do what many of them must know would benefit most Russians. But we may not know they were willing until they do it.
Even then, the challenges for Ukraine will be gigantic. Russia should pay hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations for a war of aggression. It won’t be willing or able. The West will do its part, but the scale of reconstruction requirements will be daunting, even if Russia were to withdraw today. The lament of the Ukrainians won’t stop soon. They may not even be permitted to sing Verdi’s version for Hebrews for much longer:
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