Air Force General Paul Selva, in his confirmation hearing on Tuesday to be vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became the latest military official to describe Russia as the greatest threat facing the United States. “Russia possesses the conventional and nuclear capability to be an existential threat to this nation should they choose to do so,” Selva told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Last week, during his confirmation hearing to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford told lawmakers, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia. And if you look at their behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming.” The day before that, the secretary of the U.S. Air Force, Deborah James, in an interview after a series of visits and meetings with US allies across Europe, said, “I do consider Russia to be the biggest threat.”
Their view apparently is not shared by the non-military types in the Obama administration. Speaking through a spokesman, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry publicly rejected their assessment of Russia last Friday. “Certainly we have disagreements with Russia and its activities within the region, but we don’t view it as an existential threat,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. White House spokesman Josh Earnest chimed in as well, noting that Dunford’s assessment reflected “his own view and doesn’t necessarily reflect the … consensus analysis of the president’s national security team.”
Which side is right? Let’s look at the facts.
Not since World War II has Europe faced a graver crisis as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and should Russian aggression spread to a neighboring NATO Member State, the United States would be confronted for the first time with Article 5 implications and the possibility of war with Russia. The invasion of Ukraine was not a one-off either. Russian invaded Georgia in 2008, launched a cyber-attack against Estonia in 2007, has cut off energy and trade to neighbors numerous times, and threatened to come to the defense of ethnic Russians in nearby countries.
Beyond its immediate neighborhood, Putin has provided vital military and diplomatic support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, making Russian complicit in the slaughter of more than 220,000 Syrians and the displacement of more than 7 million. In April, Putin reopened a deal that would deliver sophisticated S-300 missiles to Iran and has unhelpfully called for lifting the conventional arms embargo on Iran.
Putin and other top Russian officials have been irresponsibly engaged in nuclear weapons saber-rattling against the West. As General Selva noted, Russia remains the one country with nuclear weapons capability that could cause massive damage to the U.S. Russian officials recently threatened Denmark if it allowed missile defense installations on its territory and repeatedly and dangerously buzz the territory of NATO member states and other countries with overflights (often with the plane’s transponders turned off) and submarines; an accident is bound to happen sooner or later.
Making matters worse, the Putin regime’s greatest export is corruption—and to be clear we import it in the West. But Kremlin officials and their business cronies use our open systems to invest their ill-gotten gains in real estate, ownership stakes in corporations, and bribery. As the investigation and criminal charges brought in the recent FIFA scandal reveal, we have the means to go after this vulnerability in our own countries while sending a clear message to Moscow that such activity will not go unchallenged.
Finally, Putin’s regime is kleptocratic and repressive on the one hand and insecure and paranoid on the other—a dangerous combination. It is engaged in the worst crackdown on human rights in many decades in Russia, which raises questions about why it needs to do so if Putin is so popular, as surveys claim. The regime attaches no value to human life. Perceived opponents of the regime are demonized, poisoned, even killed. Putin created a monster in Chechnya in Ramzan Kadyrov, whose dangerous reach extends well beyond the North Caucasus.
Quite simply, global order is under assault from the Putin regime, challenging many of the principles for which we stand and, left unchallenged, will pose an even greater threat. And yet as reflected in Kerry’s and Earnest’s comments, as well as Kerry’s ill-advised trip to Sochi in May to meet with Putin, parts of the Obama administration, as well as many Europeans, either delude themselves into thinking Putin still is a man with whom we can do business or understate the gravity of the Putin challenge. President Obama has essentially contracted out responsibility for resolving the Russia crisis to the Europeans, and in particular German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This marks an abdication of American leadership that must be reversed.
The President and his Secretary of State should listen to the military: we should stop seeing Putin as anything other than a paranoid, authoritarian leader who oversees one of the most corrupt regimes in the world; he is not going to change his stripes. Because our values and those of the Putin regime are so diametrically opposed, at the end of the day we share very few interests with Russia. Putin’s number one goal is to stay in power, and to justify his authoritarian ways he fabricates the notion that the United States, democracy, NATO, the European Union, and the West more broadly are threats to Russia’s survival.
It is important to bear in mind that the West had no interest in picking a fight with Russia and turned to sanctions over Ukraine reluctantly and in response to major Russian aggression. But our misreading of the threat posed by Putin’s Russia over the years has been costly. It is time to listen to the military’s views and develop a coherent and clear strategy on how to deal with the threat Putin poses.
