As Crimea is being severed from Ukraine, and as signs mount that eastern Ukraine may be next on Vladimir Putin’s menu, the crisis is now about more than Western efforts to preserve the independence and sovereignty of 45 million people. Russia’s intervention in Crimea has transformed the crisis in Ukraine into a test of U.S. ability to foster consensus in NATO, the premier Transatlantic security organization, which is now called on to respond to the threat of war in a neighboring country. The overall tenor of U.S. security relations with Europe is also at stake. And finally, with China watching closely, there is the larger question of whether a weak NATO response in Europe will accelerate irredentism and revanchism in Asia and elsewhere. Simply put, Ukraine is the most serious challenge to the international order since Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Russia’s military action in Crimea brought with it the specter of state-on-state violence at Europe’s doorstep. And so from day one of Russia’s military pressure on Ukraine expectations have been growing that the Obama Administration would lead NATO in a robust, coherent, and unequivocal response to the crisis, to deter violence, reassure the allies, and, ultimately if need be, to be ready to respond with contingencies to what may in short order become a shooting war in Ukraine. There is still time, but to succeed the United States also needs a fresh political track in its relations with Russia: a four-step “recovery program” to right its priorities and guide the Transatlantic response.
Ukraine is an unfolding story, and there has already been enough speculation and scenario-building to staff several panels at a dozen major conferences. But one thing is clear: Regardless of how events ultimately unfold, and at what pace, the crisis has presented the Obama Administration with two stark possibilities. Either it succeeds in leading NATO in developing a series of credible deterrent and defensive options, in the process reassuring the most exposed members of the alliance in Central Europe and the Baltics and building alliance-wide consensus, or it fails this test, and the centrifugal pressures that have been building up inside Europe in recent years accelerate, raising the risk of NATO devolving into an ossified bureaucratic structure with declining military utility and increasing political irrelevance. The stakes could not be higher.
Initially the administration fumbled on NATO, with the first NAC meeting failing to generate the momentum needed to get both the policy and planning processes going. It took pressure from Europe, especially Poland, to put Article IV on the agenda and to start focusing on contingencies and reassurance. This is an unfolding process and the jury is still out as to the final outcome. However, the U.S. decision to suspend mil-mil cooperation with Russia, the increase in NATO’s Baltic air policing, starting with six additional U.S. F-15s and a tanker, and more U.S. training with Poland’s air force, including the provision of 12 additional U.S. F-16 aircraft and 300 personnel, have all been welcome developments. The ongoing discussion of additional steps will be key, as it will set the tone for building reassurance among the allies as a necessary step to any further planning down the line, while making sure NATO decisions do not escalate tensions in Ukraine itself. These steps are largely symbolic, but they are at least a start. Planning and ongoing consultations, including with EUCOM, should follow. What is now needed most is a parallel and public articulation of a new U.S. Russia policy design. We must move away from the pattern that has been in place since President Obama took office in 2009.
Today in Ukraine we are paying a steep price for the persistent misconception of how Putin’s Russia functions, what its strategic objectives are, and how much it is willing to wager to achieve them. So let me be blunt: We are watching a consistent and hard-nosed Russian neo-imperial strategy aimed at restoring its historical sphere of privileged influence in Eastern Europe and other areas of the post-Soviet space. This policy has been repeatedly communicated through public speeches and in private by Vladimir Putin and his government, through words and deeds from the 2007 Munich speech through the 2008 war against Georgia to today’s action to intimidate or if need be dismember Ukraine.
In reorienting U.S. Russia policy, it will not be enough to bury once and for all the notorious “reset” button. Putin has been emboldened by a series of concessions and policy fumbles by the White House, from unilateral concessions on the Bush-era missile shield and the subsequent cancellation of the EPAA Phase IV, to missteps on Syria and a willingness to let Russia in effect break the Iranian sanctions regime through its oil deal with Tehran in exchange for its participation in the five-plus-one preliminary negotiations. The first step to recovery is to admit that one has a problem, and to make the resolution: No more.
Equally important to the effectiveness of NATO’s response today is the need to narrow the distance between the United States and Europe. The gap has begun to grow in the wake of President Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” which communicated to NATO allies in no uncertain terms that U.S. priorities were shifting away from Europe. This implicit message could not have come at a worse time for U.S.-European relations. Hence, even when the Obama Administration launched important initiatives, such as NATO’s new Strategic Concept and contingency planning for Central Europe and the Baltics, these failed to offset the deepening perception in Europe that America was withdrawing and that Transatlantic relations no longer enjoyed serious attention at the White House. And so step two to recovery: Re-prioritize NATO and Transatlantic security relations.
Next, the United States needs to restore clarity to its interactions with Russia. The Obama foreign policy in its normative insistence on what is appropriate and what is not by 21st-century standards has been increasingly unintelligible to America’s foes and confusing to our friends when geopolitical realities assert themselves, giving the impression that the United States is weak and indecisive. Norms are important, but if not backed by power they are unlikely to have much impact. For powers like Russia and China, Barack Obama’s postmodern, neo-Wilsonian argument appears to be either an exercise in wishful thinking or, increasingly, a symptom of America’s decline. That is a wrong and ultimately dangerous assumption—more a product of policy perception than a hard power calculus. Still, more than anything this policy Gestalt may damage NATO, for how can the West’s premier security organization adapt to the concept of an international order that seems to have relegated power relations to what the President and members of his cabinet have repeatedly, and with considerable disdain, described as “Cold War-era thinking.” Whether we like it or not, we must recognize that we will not win a geopolitical game with normative arguments. So step three: Stop, delink, and understand that your adversary is playing a hard power game. Abandon the facile “Cold War” analogies, and recognize that power realities are today as relevant as they were back then, even as the ideological competition from that era has vanished.
NATO remains the key alliance, whose strength is vital to both U.S. and European security, and it needs to be preserved and properly resourced. Admittedly, Europe has never been in a strong position to lecture the United States on how to deal with hard security challenges from Russia or elsewhere, nor itself able to prioritize national defense. But truth be told, the United States should rethink its defense budget cuts as it tries to stare Putin down. Step four: Stop pretending that we can protect our interests without investing resources in our defense. For Europe and increasingly of late for the United States, that simply means rebuilding the dangerously weakened military foundations of our mutual security.
I believe once these four rudimentary steps are put on the agenda and implemented, a lot of the present-day confusion will abate, and both the United States and Europe will be in a much stronger position to help Ukraine through dangerous times and deter Russia from taking aggressive steps deeper into Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, or elsewhere in the region. Let us set aside the breathless rhetoric about a retrograde Putin not getting the 21st-century foreign policy paradigm, and the persistent media pabulum about a “new Cold War.” The simple reality that has defined the current crisis is the return of Russia’s core geostrategic interests against the perception of a retreating America.
A Russian parliamentarian in Moscow remarked the other day in response to yet another Western warning: “They talk and talk, and then they will stop.” Will the Obama Administration recognize that we have a Russia problem, and take the steps to prove that man wrong? I’m holding my breath.