The unfolding Ukrainian crisis has not only awakened the West to the realities of resurgent Russian power, but also exposed the extent of the strategic drift on national security policy in the United States. While the focus has rightly been on the unfolding drama in Donetsk, the Obama Administration has yet to address the threat of Russian revisionism destabilizing Eurasia, which may again become a breeding ground for great power conflict. The consequences may well reach beyond the deepening turmoil in the Middle East or the impeding power shift in Asia.
It was perhaps understandable that the nature of American policy in response to Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe was merely reactive in the early phases of the crisis, but that policy now urgently needs to yield to a larger strategic redesign. There should be three core elements to this redesign: an investment in deterrence and reassurance in the region; restoration of Transatlantic security relations to their central place in U.S. national security strategy; and a reversal of America’s baseline 2015 defense budget, coupled with a renewed commitment to working with Europe to reverse the trend of de facto demilitarization of NATO.
The first and long overdue step is the easiest and most straightforward: The United States and Europe need to provide real military assistance to the government in Kiev so as to offer a modicum of deterrence and raise significantly the price of Russia’s neo-imperial drive. An ancillary development here should be an increase in U.S. military deployments along NATO’s northeastern flank, whether by pre-positioning equipment or putting American boots on the ground. The current policy of increased U.S. air power rotational deployments in Poland and the Baltics is symbolically significant but doesn’t rise to the standards of the long-term strategic realignment that is really needed.
Second, the time between now and the upcoming NATO summit should be dedicated to developing a “Strategy for Eurasia” as the new grand bargain linking the vital national interests of the United States and its European allies. The projected deliverables that were mooted in Brussels before the Ukrainian crisis simply need to be set aside in order to shift the focus of the Alliance to its fundamental task going forward: restoring the centrality of Transatlantic security relations for both the United States and Europe, with the aim of stabilizing Eurasia as part of a global NATO strategy.
Finally, the United States must lead by example and generate a consensus on defense spending. The projected cuts in the Obama Administration’s defense budget would render the United States incapable of projecting power into critical global spots in the face of concurrent crises. This is especially true given the urgent need to recapitalize the U.S. Navy, for even the most capable ship cannot be in two places at the same time. Most of all, the United States must send a clear message to Europe reaffirming its commitment to our mutual security, but only on the condition that Europe reverses the trend towards de facto disarmament.
For decades U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican, understood the importance of the Eurasian heartland for American security and global stability. In the past six years the Obama Administration’s preoccupation with the Asia pivot, turmoil in the Middle East, and the White House’s understandable determination to wind down 12 years of conflict have shifted the strategic debate in the United States. It’s time to recall Mackinder’s dictum about the centrality of Eastern Europe to the distribution of global power. While some may dismiss such claims as reductive, 19th-century thinking, there is apparently at least one world leader who begs to differ. Vladimir Putin’s push to restore Russia’s neo-imperial prerogative in Eastern Europe is firmly rooted in strategic thought that pre-dates Mackinder’s theory. No matter how much postmodernists pooh-pooh the notion, Russian troops and tanks in Crimea and Spetsnaz support for pro-Russian militants in Donetsk should at least give the Western commentariat pause.
To be fair, the current predicament cannot be laid squarely at the doorstep of the current Administration. The post-9/11 recalibration of U.S. policy by the George W. Bush Administration inherent in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) has pushed our strategic thinking away from the fundamentals of the national security consensus that had defined American policy objectives since the end of the Second World War. The restructuring of the U.S. military that accompanied the GWOT, and then COIN, was accelerated by the crushing budgetary impact of the Great Recession of 2008. Projected cuts in U.S. defense spending would leave the United States with an increasingly unbalanced capabilities-to-commitments ratio, with shortfalls in U.S. naval power in particular making it impossible in the coming years to cover key requirements. Likewise, the shrinking of the Army and the Marine Corps has been placed in sharp relief by the rising Russian challenge in Europe. But cuts are ultimately secondary to the overall misjudgments of the last decade on the key strategic pressure points on the horizon.
Russia’s creeping invasion of East Europe along the borderlines of the European continental peninsula has not only redefined the strategic calculus on the Continent but is also about to trigger instability in Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan. The broken national security consensus in the United States today, manifest in the Administration’s oscillating drift over Russia’s resurgence, may translate into an inability to provide leadership in Europe. Our reactive policy may ultimately incapacitate NATO’s response to the crisis. Worse still, there are rising voices in Washington and Europe claiming that NATO enlargement is somehow responsible for the confrontation with Russia.
As things stand, Washington’s inability to see beyond the current shifting tactics risks impairing United States’ commitment to maintaining the Eurasian balance of power. The meandering reaction of Western powers to Moscow’s upending of the territorial settlement in Eastern Europe, with possible further inroads in the region and elsewhere, has emboldened Russia’s commitment to its neo-imperial project. The conflicting messages emanating from various Western capitals, amounting to tough rhetoric unmatched by action, must give way to strategic realignment led by the United States.
Nothing will bring more instability to Eurasia than the retreat of U.S. power. If Ukraine, instead of marking America’s recommitment to the Transatlantic relationship, signals the failure of U.S. power in Europe, the hollowed-out NATO alliance would leave Eurasia with no alternative but to return to balancing by individual states. In an age of budget deficits and sluggish growth this may be politically unpalatable, but today there are no alternatives to U.S. engagement. Without a vibrant U.S.-led NATO alliance, the European Union’s CSDP will be exposed as a talking shop unable to bridge the divergent regional security optics of its members.
The Obama Administration has a decision to make about how it will address the growing threat of war in Eastern Europe, with long-term ripple effects shooting across Eurasia. After an era of resets and pivots, it is time for the U.S. policy elite on both sides of the political spectrum to revisit the fundamentals of American national security strategy, and commit to a NATO-based strategy for stabilizing Eurasia.