Should We Fear Russia?

2 The Russia Challenge

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has put Russia at the top of the list of security challenges and threats to the United States, ahead of China, Iran, North Korea and ISIL.[10] So, what is Russia’s challenge to the West?

Vladimir Putin’s long leadership is essentially about two things: first, to keep Russia in one piece and, second, to return it to the ranks of the world’s great powers. By the mid-2010s the first mission looked accomplished, with the country not merely united under the imperial presidency but with the president’s personal popularity – or public acquiescence in him – standing at well above 80 percent. As for the second, in the Ukraine conflict Russia shook off the constraints imposed on it by the post-Cold War system; and, through its direct military intervention and parallel diplomatic activity in Syria, Russia has suddenly become indispensable in the issues of war and peace in one of the world’s most turbulent regions – the Middle East. If there is a strategy behind the Kremlin’s actions, here is its main objective.

In the past decade and a half, Russia’s self-image has changed considerably. Putin and his entourage still view the country as European in origin, a successor to the Eastern Christian Byzantine tradition, but they see it primarily as fully sovereign – on a par with the rest of Europe, rather than an associate of the EU. A continent-size country, uniting Slavic, Turkic and scores of other ethnic elements, a home to four religions legally deemed indigenous – Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – Russia appears to these individuals a distinct geopolitical, economic and cultural unit, a potential center of attraction for neighbors in Eurasia, and a partner to those in the non-West advocating a multipolar world order.

In geopolitical and geostrategic terms, the Kremlin posits Russia as a great power with a global reach. It rejects as ludicrous or malicious any attempts to put Russia into a category of regional powers. Geography is the Kremlin’s major asset: a country which borders directly on Norway and North Korea – as well as on America, China and Japan – and whose reach extends from the icy Arctic to the approaches to the Middle East and Afghanistan, cannot easily be boxed in. Russia’s modest economic and demographic weight, the Kremlin argues, does not tell the whole story: the country has immense potential for growth and its demographics are improving. What is more important is the fact that Russia, alongside the United States and China, is at the moment one of the world’s only three major independent military powers.

Russian official views on the global order traditionally favor great-power concert as the best means of managing the international system. Russia’s Alexander I was one of the key players at the Vienna Congress of 1815, which ushered in the Concert of Europe and the Holy Alliance; thereafter, he and his successor Nicholas I were the dominant figures in Central and Eastern Europe. Joseph Stalin, in the company of US presidents and UK prime ministers at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam in 1943–5, laid the foundation of the post-World War II global order, which divided Europe and the world. On the other hand, Mikhail Gorbachev tried but utterly failed to keep the Soviet Union intact and in play as a power center in the post-Cold War world, and Boris Yeltsin nearly accepted US leadership. Hence, Putin’s mission to restore Russia’s rightful place on the global scene.

Such elevation, however, cannot be achieved with the post-Cold War global order intact. The place Russia is seeking is that of a co-decision-maker, a country that co-writes the rules, watches over their application, and implements sanctions as necessary. Moscow’s ideal is the pentarchy of the United Nations Security Council as a global concert, with Russia as its permanent, veto-wielding member. In fact, the implications of Russia’s international “restoration” include checking US supremacy by subjecting the US itself to the authority of the UNSC. Russians can accept US pre-eminence, but not dominance.

Russia’s ambitions, however, are not always backed up by the realities of power. Throughout its history, it has had to press hard, and often fight, in order to be recognized. It has learned to compensate for its deficiencies in military power, economic development and cultural standard. To succeed, it relied on quantity to offset quality, resorted to centralization and mobilization, displayed the temerity of punching way above its weight, demonstrated boldness and swiftness of action, and leaned on its time-tested capacity to pay a very high price to achieve its important goals.

After a period of good luck at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the form of ever rising oil prices, Russia was hit by their collapse, compounded by the structural problems of its own economy, the corrupt and stifling politico-economic system, and, on top of it all, the sanctions imposed upon Russia as a result of the Ukraine crisis. These are all massive challenges which put in question the capacity of the current ruling elite to hold the country together and lead it onto a path of economic development. A failure to respond adequately to those challenges will have dire consequences for the sustainability of the entire system and the stability of the country itself.

It is truly an irony of history that the United States should be overtly challenged by a party such as today’s Russia – a country whose GDP is a small fraction of America’s, whose share in the global trade is a mere 1 percent, and even whose defense budget is a tenth of the Pentagon’s. To most educated Americans, Russia is the day before yesterday’s news, a country on the long and irreversible trajectory of decline. It is a third- or fourth-tier actor in a remote corner of the globe, with a contemptible leadership mired in corruption, which can be a nuisance at best.

Figures of comparison, however, do not tell the whole story. Among the countries of the world, Russia has a unique quality: its ruling elite and its people strongly reject domination of the international system by any one power. And Russians are ready to push back when they see their own interests in danger, despite the long odds. Unlike the Chinese, the Russians are anything but incremental in their approach to world hegemons: they are bona fide in-your-face people.

In 2014, the Russians may have jumped the gun, and faced the consequences, but Russia’s rebellion against the post-Cold War order does not run against the current global trend. If anything, the Russians have found themselves ahead of the curve, but not too much. The quarter-century period of amicable relations among all the major powers, guaranteed by US near-hegemony in the system, a sort of Pax Americana, is over. China and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are becoming increasingly active in their respective neighborhoods. Major power relations are again becoming an issue, and their movements will reshape the global order.

In Eastern Europe, the United States has had to live since 2014 with a status quo which it does not accept. Washington has failed to make its rules stick and walked back from the assurances of Ukraine’s territorial integrity contained in the 1994 Budapest memorandum, which the United States signed alongside Britain and Russia. Few people in the world believe that Russia will hand Crimea back to Ukraine. Donbass remains an issue, where Moscow keeps insisting on a compromise political solution which Kiev resists. The result is another frozen conflict. The United States has no leverage to make Russia back down under pressure. Even though overall US power clearly dwarfs that of Russia, the stakes for Moscow in Ukraine are so much higher than Washington’s, and the Kremlin is prepared to go to much greater lengths. If push comes to shove, Americans would hardly send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine. As a result, the “balance of will” in the former Soviet Union is not in America’s favor.

In response to the Russian challenge, the United States has been able to consolidate allies and reinvent NATO for the mission for which it had been originally designed. However, what one is witnessing is not exactly the Cold War revisited. Most Americans do not see Russia as a threat. Thus, a new commitment to the defense of Europe is, to many, an unnecessary distraction from more important issues, such as the fight against ISIL. Sensing this, America’s new allies in Eastern and Central Europe fear that the United States will leave them in the lurch and deal with Russia behind their backs. The Baltic States and even Poland are worried that Russia will attack and occupy them, with the United States unable to protect their allies and unwilling to risk a nuclear exchange with Russia for the sake of Eastern Europeans.

As a result, the demand for a US presence on the ground in Europe’s east will be greater, but so will be the risks for the United States itself, in a situation which few Americans will find existential. The downing by Turkey, a NATO member, of a Russian warplane in Syria in 2015 is a case in point. An incident like this could have been much more dangerous over the Baltic or the Black Sea. For the time being, the United States has decided to rotate a brigade-size force in Eastern Europe to create a quasi-permanent military presence in the area, but this may anger the Russians more than reassure the Balts and the Poles.

In the Middle East, Russia reinserted itself into the region dominated for a quarter-century solely by the US. In doing this, Moscow broke the informal American monopoly on the legitimate use of force – and, so far, has got away with it. At minimum, Russia’s intervention carried the risk of inadvertent collision between US and Russian aircraft, but it also opened the possibility in Syria of a US–Russian war by proxy. Even when those risks were initially managed, Russia’s proactive diplomacy exploited the effect of its military engagement and returned Moscow as a player in the Middle East, hardly a welcome development for the United States. As already noted, this brought the Kremlin closer to its goal of reclaiming great-power status beyond the former Soviet space.

As the United States chose to work with Russia to produce a political settlement in Syria, it effectively played along with Moscow’s ambitions. Ever since John Kerry’s first visit as secretary of state to the Kremlin in May 2013, Vladimir Putin was suggesting something like a Dayton-à-deux solution in Syria, with Moscow and Washington as its two co-sponsors. At that point, this was unacceptable to the United States. Putin, however, deftly used Barack Obama’s reluctance to bomb Damascus after the chemical attack to offer a plan of Syria’s chemical disarmament as an alternative to US military strikes. Despite many doubts, the plan worked, with the US and Russia leading an international effort that, amid the civil war there, rid Syria of chemical weapons.

In 2015, the Russian military intervention, coupled with Europe’s influx of a million migrants, many from Syria, pushed the United States to probe the Russian Dayton formula. The Vienna/Geneva process has been exceedingly difficult, partly because even a US–Russian accord does not guarantee success without the endorsement of regional players, above all Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yet, even without the agreement, the very image of Russia and the United States presiding over the newest peace process in the Middle East helps to confer on Russia the status it covets. Such duopoly creates uncertainty among some of Washington’s allies and partners that the US is dealing with Russia over their heads.

While the “little Eurasia” of the former Soviet republics is unlikely to coalesce in the form of a new USSR or the historical Russian Empire, a Greater Eurasia is emerging, driven by China’s march westward and Russia’s coincidental turn to the east. Gone are the days at the turn of the century when the United States could claim to be the dominant power in Eurasia. For the first time since the empire of Genghis Khan, the great continent of Eurasia – from the Western Pacific to the Eastern Atlantic – is being integrated thanks to the dynamics coming primarily from Asia. This has the potential of changing all of Eurasia beyond recognition.

The Russian–Chinese rapprochement and Beijing’s and Moscow’s reciprocal westward and eastward turns predate the Ukraine crisis, but both were given a boost by the breakdown of Russia’s relations with the West. True, there has been and will be no “geopolitical merger” as a result. An alliance between China and Russia looks unlikely, but the present bilateral relationship is much more than the “strategic partnership” it is formally dubbed. It is certainly more than a marriage of convenience. For lack of a better word, the state of relations can be described as an entente. This denotes a degree of mutual empathy and geopolitical convergence based on overlapping worldviews and a joint resentment of US global dominance.

Most Americans are relaxed about the prospects of China and Russia drawing closer together. Any alliance between Beijing and Moscow, their logic goes, would have China on top. Russia, however, will not enjoy being a junior partner to China and will seek to break away from its tight embrace. In such a scenario, only one credible option will remain open to Moscow: seek reconciliation with Washington and some form of association with the European Union. This would mean Russia’s geopolitical surrender.

This reasoning is not flawless. The situation in Eurasia can change to the disadvantage of the United States. For all their reported contempt for the Russians, the Chinese have been very considerate and careful when dealing with their northern neighbors. Since the normalization of their relations with Moscow in 1989, they have been able to achieve so much more with Russia than the West, while evoking practically no pushback from the Russians. The Chinese appreciate the value of appearances and do not humiliate the Russians publicly, whatever they might think of them in private. Beijing’s centralized control not only over policy but also over public discussion of policy protects the relationship from unnecessary provocations.

Each country is wary of coming too close to the other. China and Russia, however, can continue to consolidate and upgrade their relationship short of an alliance. In this case, more of Russia’s natural and military-technological resources would be made available to China. Strategic coordination between Moscow and Beijing would remain loose, but, in the larger scheme of things concerning the world order, Beijing and Moscow will be on the same side. The Greater Eurasia that they are constructing will not be run from a single center, but their continental entente will essentially be aimed at limiting US dominance on the edges of the continent and in the world at large.

Despite the Pentagon’s towering position in the global military field, the latter offers some advantages to Moscow. Russia remains a nuclear superpower, in an exclusive league with the United States. The nuclear deterrent is back in play in US–Russian relations, countering President Obama’s grand vision of a world less reliant on nuclear weapons. While nuclear is back, arms control is frozen and may even be on the way out. There is virtually no prospect in the foreseeable future of new US–Russian strategic arms reduction agreements. The advent of strategic non-nuclear systems and strategic defenses complicates the task of any future negotiators. The arrival of China as a major military power makes bilateral US–Russian arms control increasingly insufficient and obsolete, while any trilateral deals are technically exceedingly complex and, for the time being, politically impossible.

Outside of the nuclear field, Russia’s military, of course, is not the Pentagon’s peer. Yet, it is re-emerging as a capable force which can make a difference in a number of theaters, from the Middle East to Central Asia to the Arctic. With post-Cold War security arrangements in Europe now history, there are dangers of uncontrolled military activity along the new line of Russia–NATO confrontation in Eastern Europe. Incidents in the air and at sea, provocative war games scenarios, and troops and weapons deployments create a vast potential for miscalculation in an area which has been considered safe for twenty-five years.

Russia remains a top global exporter of arms and military technology, second only to the United States. Even in the times of current crisis, the defense industry is prioritized by the Kremlin: the requirements of confrontation are compelling, plus it is being viewed as a locomotive for Russia’s new industrialization. Russian arms deliveries to various countries, such as China, India or Iran, can and do affect local and regional balances. Russia is also well equipped in cyber warfare capabilities. These assets carry a major potential risk to the United States. At the other end of the spectrum, Russia has shown a capacity for waging “hybrid warfare,” operating just under the threshold of conventional military operations.

Russia has been the largest economy put under sanctions in recent times. In geo-economic terms, the US-orchestrated sanctions against Russia have exacerbated the process of global economic fragmentation. Russia has responded to the Western restrictions by imposing a food imports ban on the sanctioning countries, primarily members of the European Union. Traditionally strong economic relations between Russia and Ukraine have been broken. Following the spat with Ankara, Moscow initiated sanctions of its own against Turkey, until recently a major economic partner. Other countries, such as China, watching the Russian–Western economic wars are making conclusions for themselves about the ability of economic ties to provide stability to political relations. The global economic system that had been experiencing increasing strain for some time thus received a powerful blow.

The European Union was directly challenged by Moscow’s response to its support for Ukraine’s pro-Western orientation. The EU failed to appreciate the geopolitical, economic and even psychological importance of Ukraine to the Russian leadership and people and pursued its Eastern Partnership project without much thinking about its wider implications. At the crucial moment, as Ukraine’s fate was being decided, European diplomacy failed to manage a soft landing for the Yanukovych regime and the ensuing power transfer, and thus the EU was exposed as an irrelevant and – in the Kremlin’s view – an untrustworthy actor.

The Ukraine crisis that soon followed brought home to the European leaders, starting with Angela Merkel, both the harsh reality of war on the EU’s very doorstep and the possibility of an even wider conflagration affecting members of the Union itself. This caught the EU off guard: it had not been equipped to deal with geopolitical crises. This was the responsibility of NATO – i.e., the US. On the other hand, bailing out Ukraine and helping it reform itself is a mighty challenge – one which falls mainly on the European Union.

Russia meanwhile has become even more divisive for the unity of the EU and for transatlantic relations. In the wake of the downing of the Malaysian airliner over Donbass in 2014, German and other European business circles, which had traditionally seen Russia as a major opportunity, acquiesced in their governments putting politics – or, some would say, principles – before profits. At the time, this was a remarkable achievement by Europe’s politicians, given the volume of trade between the EU and Russia – about €1 billion a day in 2013. Since then, the volume of trade has halved.

However, this common stance on Russia is difficult to sustain over the long term. Different European countries have very different experiences with Russia, and very different expectations. Whereas the Baltic States and Poland are deeply worried about their former hegemon, and Sweden and Britain remain traditionally skeptical of the historical rival, France, Germany, Italy and Austria do not feel threatened and want to continue trading with Russia without constraints, while Greece and Cyprus are basically friendly. There is potential for individual countries opting out of the sanctions regime which, given the EU requirement of unanimity of decision-making on the issue, would terminate it.

So far, the Europeans have managed to stick together on Russia sanctions and to form a common front with the United States. It has been one of the major foreign policy accomplishments of the Obama administration that EU and US sanctions are essentially identical and offer no daylight to the Kremlin. Given the very light US exposure – in contrast to that of Europe – to Russian trade, US sanctions are expected to stay indefinitely, as there is no domestic constituency for removing them. If, however, the price of the EU keeping its sanctions on Russia becomes too great at some point, this would open a gap between Europeans and Americans that Moscow would welcome.

It is not only material issues that present the Europeans with challenges related to Russia. The Kremlin has adopted an ideology of conservatism or traditionalism and designated liberalism as an opponent. This, of course, does not prevent Moscow from being opportunistic when circumstances allow or demand it. Russian conservatism on such issues as the value of national sovereignty, the role of religion in society, or the importance and nature of the family, however, finds an echo in those quarters across Europe which are disillusioned with globalization and the European project. A more successful Russia and smarter Russian policy could in the future capitalize more in these areas.

Until the Ukraine crisis, Russia was pushing for some form of Euro-Russian confederacy, under the rubric of a “Greater Europe,” from Lisbon to Vladivostok. This would have been based on a marriage between Russian resources and European industry, cemented by asset swaps, cross-investments and technology transfers, and various sorts of exchanges among people. Such a Europe would certainly have been whole, and might even – depending on the level of EU–Russian policy coordination – have played a global role, but at the price of distancing itself from the United States. Many Europeans with strong Atlanticist convictions were wary of the idea, which would have not so much tied Russia to the EU as the other way around. When Vladimir Putin laid out his plans to the German political and business communities in 2010, he got a cool reception from Angela Merkel.

Meanwhile, the challenge of Russia as “Greater Europe’s” potentially dominant power has been succeeded by a different kind of challenge. Russia’s alienation from Europe has coincided with its turn to the east, all the way to the Pacific. In 2012, the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia was upgraded to become a Eurasian Economic Union. The “Greater Europe” concept was thus transformed into a binary construct composed of the EU and the EEU. In 2015, Moscow agreed to “harmonize” the EEU with Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative. The result could be a “Greater Eurasia” from Shanghai to St Petersburg. Long the east of the West, Russia could turn into the west of the East.

The ultimate challenge for the Europeans, of course, would be a Russia that breaks down and threatens to disintegrate. Should this happen – and this cannot be completely ruled out – it would create a major source of instability on Europe’s eastern fringes. The much referred to “collapse” of the Soviet Union was in fact a more or less orderly dismantlement of its huge edifice. Of all exits from an empire, Russia’s in the 1990s was one of the least bloody and most cheerful: Moscow itself was leading the process. There is no certainty, however, that a new “geopolitical catastrophe,” should it occur, would be as mild. With all these issues at the back of one’s mind, how has the West dealt recently with the Russian challenge?