The Obama Administration’s inability to galvanize NATO into a forceful and unified response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a sobering reminder of how far U.S. global standing has slipped, and how little willingness there is in Washington these days to shape the U.S. security environment. Official presidential visits and speeches aside, America’s apparent reticence to act decisively to protect its interests along Eurasia’s periphery is baffling, especially when one considers that a decade ago many foreign leaders were grumbling about the emergence of a North American “hyperpuissance” while the U.S. commentariat opined about various and sundry “unipolar moments” and plans to restructure entire regions of the globe.
Since this past winter the United States and its NATO allies have been thrust, willy-nilly, into a contest with Russia over the future of Eastern Europe and the stability of Eurasia. More than half a year into the Ukrainian crisis, with Crimea annexed and war raging in the eastern provinces, the Western response has substituted public condemnations and expressions of moral outrage for urgently needed decisive action to shore up NATO’s northeastern flank in Poland and the Baltics, to strengthen the Ukrainian military, and to assist in the consolidation of the new Kiev government. The small, ad hoc additions to the U.S. presence in northern and central Europe have been symbolically important but have fallen well short of the needed permanent U.S. military deployments in Central Europe. In this race against the clock, Putin has become the favorite, thanks to the Obama Administration’s reticence to go far beyond sanctions, diplomacy, and rhetorical support. The White House seems to miss the critical importance of the unfolding crisis for NATO’s overall relationship with Russia and for U.S. security interests writ large.
There are two fundamental objectives that today define Russia’s foreign policy, both of which run directly counter to America’s and NATO’s interests. The first is Russia’s determination to foster a new strategic perimeter in Eastern Europe and to exclude meaningful Western influence there—in effect the return of a Russian sphere of influence in Europe that will allow for privileged economic and military access. The second is Russia’s determination to stop the United States from building NATO’s northeastern flank into an area of effective deterrence, specifically by blocking U.S. military deployments in Poland and the Baltic States, and by killing the U.S. and NATO missile defense project. If successful, both goals would undercut America’s ability to develop an effective response to any future Russian moves against other post-Soviet states. Already today these two elements have become a divisive internal issue for the Alliance. Furthermore, any concessions on U.S. military deployments in Central Europe or on the future of missile defense—real or perceived—will inevitably drive a wedge between Central and Western Europe, in the process undercutting NATO’s already strained solidarity on how to respond to the war in Ukraine. The stakes could not be higher, and for these reasons Moscow sees this as a brass knuckles fight to the finish; Russia’s adjustments to its Ukraine policy are tactical sleights-of-hand rather than real concessions. The Obama Administration has not yet rallied NATO around this point of view—assuming, that is, it sees things this way in the first place.
Much of the Western analysis on Russia since the Cold War has glommed onto the idea that Russia is a supplicant, collapsing superpower. Western thinkers have been dismissive of its military, and at times they have even questioned Russia’s long-term viability as a state. Bewilderingly, even in the Vladimir Putin era, the West has typically portrayed Russia as an increasingly marginal player, notwithstanding Putin’s military modernization programs and his oft-stated determination to return Russia to a competitive position in world politics. Even today the United States and key NATO members continue to assume that Russia can’t back up its power claims, all evidence in Crimea and eastern Ukraine to the contrary.
Time and again Washington has been presented with compelling evidence of Putin’s commitment to build alliances that would counterbalance the United States and the European Union. Putin’s Eurasian Union idea, though dismissed by Western observers as a flawed construct, has become a tool to expand Russia’s influence and counter its competitors, especially the European Union. Described at one point by Hillary Clinton quite bluntly as a “move to re-Sovietize the region,” the Eurasian Union concept has been Putin’s fundamental geopolitical project—one which calls for a new U.S. policy toward Russia.
There is a certain symmetry to Russia’s attempts to juxtapose itself to other aggregations, especially the European Union. Having gauged correctly that the West is much weaker now than it has been at any time since the end of the Cold War and that there is no further interest in EU enlargement, Russia’s efforts to push for reintegration have progressed—unevenly perhaps, but also unrelentingly. The security component of the policy design is Russia’s development of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
For Putin, Europe remains the centerpiece of his power game (Asia, while important, is still a side-show). This fact became clear with the Zapad/Ladoga 2009 Russian joint military maneuvers with Belarus, which targeted NATO’s northeastern flank. The exercises were again repeated in 2013 and then followed up with other recent exercises in 2014, which included Iskander missile drills.
At the center of Russia’s relations with NATO and the European Union is its determination to prevent any further enlargement in the East, with an ancillary goal of eventually reversing the current momentum favoring the West. The immediate objectives for Putin are to lock in a status quo in Eastern Europe and then to reverse the West’s gains. Russia has already brought Belarus into the new arrangement and is now battling piecemeal for Ukraine. Hence, Russia’s efforts to block what it sees as Western interventionism in its near-abroad or in the Middle East, as well as its opposition to “regime change” as a pathway to the reordering of the international system, are likely to grow stronger. Russia will continue to work with China to oppose the United States and the European Union, as it still considers China’s rise a long -term concern, while Moscow’s primary preoccupation is to realign and reassert power in Eastern Europe. In short, Russia is determined today to block the inflow of Western influence in Eastern Europe and to replace it with its own.
These fundamentals seem not to have registered very well in Washington. There is little evidence that the Obama Administration appreciates the global implications of Russia’s resurgence. While the Bush Administration was admittedly too eager to resort to military power, Obama’s national security policy is marked by its apparent continued reluctance to antagonize Russia. This has hobbled allied decisions on NATO’s response to Ukraine. Add to this Europe’s own appalling lack of cohesion in answering Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and it’s safe to say that Russia has the upper hand for now. Time and time again, the European Union has revealed its unwillingness to protect the tenuous balance in Eastern Europe, allowing its individual business interests to disguise its several policies as cautious and judicious policymaking. This Western disarray continues to embolden Russia to move further still. And the escalating violence in Ukraine’s eastern regions has put paid to highfalutin pronouncements out of Berlin, Paris, or London about what 21st century politics ought to be like, and why Russia’s behavior ought to merit our disdain.
Moscow’s perception that the Obama Administration bungled the crisis in Syria, along with the overall weakening of America’s position in the Middle East, has had a particularly corrosive impact on U.S. relations with Russia. There is a sense in Moscow that the West’s momentum, symbolized by NATO’s enlargement into Central Europe and the Baltics, has disappeared under President Obama. While it’s still too soon to say that the momentum has shifted in Moscow’s direction, Russia seems poised to regain the initiative on geostrategic issues in the region to a degree unprecedented since 1989. Here the misjudgments of the Obama Administration, including its notorious first-term “reset” with Russia, contributed to the problem. And the 2012 reelection of Vladimir Putin as President all but guarantees that Russia’s foreign policy course has been set well into the 2020s.
The United States and NATO today need to make a decision. They need to determine to what extent Russia will figure directly into their strategic calculations and military planning in Europe, and how much they should invest in reassuring Central Europe. At stake is NATO’s credibility, which is critical to the future of Transatlantic relations. In this sense, the ongoing crisis in Ukraine has become a pivotal moment for U.S. relations with Europe and for the future of NATO. The Obama Administration needs to recognize that the devolving security environment in Eastern Europe calls for a restructuring of NATO deployments and a new Russia strategy.
The tragedy of Ukraine and the return of History to Eurasia are overwhelmingly the products of Putin’s design, but we also have to recognize them as byproducts of America’s inactivity. In the past six years, in crisis after crisis, the Obama Administration has allowed the foreign and security policy of the most powerful democracy on earth to lapse into a predominantly reactive mode. There is no doubt that President Obama inherited from the Bush Administration a series of tough crises, both domestic and foreign. But the passivity and strategic drought of the Obama years have taken a deepening toll on America’s global position. The voids that emerged in the Middle East, and most importantly in Asia and Europe, are now rapidly being filled by a slew of policy entrepreneurs—state and non-state alike—who are challenging the vital interests of America and its allies.
As Washington meanders through round after round of negotiations over sanctions and counter-sanctions lobbying in Europe and the United States, the long-term viability of the Western alliance suffers. The United States needs to rally its European allies around the two steps this crisis calls for: 1) reassurance and deterrence for the frontier allies along the northeastern flank, and 2) long-term support for Ukraine to contain Russia’s neo-imperial project.