Imagens : OVOODOCORVO
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A
doutrina Trump-Putin
Trump
é sensível a este novo statu quo e minimiza as ambições russas,
porque não quer saber das várias partes do mundo em que lhe é
indiferente serem os russos a mandar.
JOSÉ PACHECO
PEREIRA
24 de Dezembro de
2016, 7:01
Está-se a definir,
embora ainda de forma muito embrionária e imprecisa, uma doutrina
Trump-Putin, sem precedente na geopolítica depois da Segunda Guerra
Mundial. Na verdade, a afirmação anterior podia ter algumas
nuances, porque houve momentos em que doutrinas semelhantes se
esboçaram, em particular na França, com De Gaulle e com o
consistente e contínuo antiamericanismo dos gaullistas pós-De
Gaulle. Mas os tempos são diferentes e uma coisa é a França, outra
os EUA.
Trump, mesmo que
seja difícil encontrar uma linha coerente na sua actuação, tem
nesta matéria mantido uma constância de posições que podem variar
no alcance e na urgência, mas que marcam uma ruptura com toda a
política externa americana desde a Guerra Fria e mesmo no pós-Guerra
Fria. Estas posições são alicerçadas nas opiniões pessoais de
Trump, e na migração para o campo de Estado e da política,
nacional e internacional, da única experiência que ele tem, a dos
negócios e das empresas. Podemos considerar que é pouco e perigoso,
mas é o que é e não penso que vá mudar facilmente, até porque
ele é um homem com uma alta noção de si próprio, um “convencido”,
e como esses defeitos não foram óbices para ter a presidência,
dificilmente mudará de estilo. Ele é um ”convencido”,
convencido de que tem razão, e como, contra tudo e contra todos,
obteve todos os sucessos que pretendia, não tem nenhuma pressão
interior para mudar e não dá muito valor aos conselhos que não
venham dos seus fiéis.
De que é que Trump
está convencido? De que a política externa americana face à Rússia
tem sido desnecessariamente hostil, e que deve haver uma inversão
significativa dessa hostilidade. De que os EUA arcam sob os seus
ombros os custos de proteger múltiplas nações e áreas do mundo
que bem podiam cuidar da sua defesa, mesmo que isso implique adquirir
uma capacidade nuclear. De que a NATO é uma organização caduca e,
no limite, desnecessária. De que as sucessivas intervenções
americanas e europeias no Iraque, na Líbia, na Síria foram
monumentais desastres, pouco preparados e pensados, sem medir as
consequências, eliminando personagens como Khadafi, ou Saddam, e
tentando eliminar Assad, que, mesmo que sejam bad boys, garantiam e
garantem uma estabilidade regional cuja perturbação deu origem ao
ISIS e ao caos no Iraque, na Líbia e na Síria. De que o único
verdadeiro inimigo dos EUA nos dias de hoje é o ISIS, e, em menor
grau, o Irão e a China, enquanto a Coreia do Norte devia ser posta
na ordem pela China, com os EUA a fazer enormes pressões para que
isso aconteça. Há alguns subprodutos destas “opiniões” e
algumas contradições, como, por exemplo, a posição face a Cuba,
mas é o que Trump pensa, e o que ele pensa é o que vai tentar
fazer.
A primeira
observação é que há muitas coisas em que Trump tem razão: os
aliados dos EUA recusaram, de há muitos anos a esta parte, o chamado
“burden sharing”, que implicava maior comparticipação em
despesas que eram para a sua própria defesa; e poucas coisas têm
sido mais erráticas, caóticas e inconsistentes do que a política
face ao Iraque, Afeganistão e, principalmente, Líbia e Síria. A
Ucrânia é outro exemplo, de uma política falhada com consequências
permanentes na divisão do país e na anexação da Crimeia, que já
todos tomam como adquirida.
O desastre sírio,
numa guerra civil fomentada pelos americanos, franceses e ingleses,
convencidos de que derrubavam Assad sem consequências, um dos raros
aliados russos na região, é um dos maiores erros da política
externa das potências ocidentais. Os grupos anti-Assad que apoiavam
eram uma mescla perigosas de fracções, e o vazio do poder na Síria
e no Iraque permitiu o aparecimento do ISIS. Criaram assim uma
oportunidade valiosa para os russos, que se sentiram legitimados para
enviar a aviação, a marinha e tropas para apoiar Assad. Se os EUA,
franceses e ingleses, se sentiam com direito, sem mandato da ONU, de
participar na guerra civil síria, por que razão os russos não
podiam fazer o mesmo? Não custa perceber, para usar uma analogia à
Trump, que os russos vissem a tentativa de derrube de Assad, seu
aliado, como o equivalente para os EUA, de haver uma guerrilha
pró-russa na Ária Saudita, aliado americano.
Na prática, o que
Trump fez, com aquela mistura de genuinidade, inexperiência e
ignorância, a que se soma alguma intuição, foi interiorizar como
suas todas as reservas e críticas russas à política americana da
Administração Obama e do Departamento de Estado Clinton, e, ao
fazê-lo, num contexto de clara vontade de aproximação a Putin,
muda de facto a visão do mundo.
Para os russos, e
para Putin, é uma oportunidade de ouro na sua política externa mais
agressiva, que já tinha tido resultados na Ucrânia e na Crimeia, e
no passado na Geórgia e na Tchetchénia, embora neste último caso
dentro do território da Federação Russa. Os objectivos
geopolíticos russos não são novos, em bom rigor datam do império
czarista, foram adaptados pelos bolcheviques, em particular por
Staline, e sofreram consideráveis recuos com o fim da URSS, e a
aparição de um mundo unipolar. O significado da ascensão de Putin
a nível interno tem muito que ver com essa retomada simbólica e
real do poder russo como potência que se mede com todas as outras, a
começar pelos EUA. Trump é sensível a este novo statu quo e
minimiza as ambições russas, porque não quer saber das várias
partes do mundo em que lhe é indiferente serem os russos a mandar.
Há um claro recuo do intervencionismo americano, com o retorno do
proteccionismo económico, a que se associa uma concepção punitiva
das intervenções americanas a fazer, sem qualquer intenção de
partilha de espaços e influências. Metem-se connosco, levam forte e
feio, mas feito o castigo, as nações e os povos envolvidos que se
amanhem no seu destino. Aí está uma política que deixa aos russos
uma geopolítica estratégica de mais alcance e aos EUA acções de
carácter táctico, tanto mais que o que interessa a Trump é que a
fortaleza americana não deixe sair empregos, fábricas, recursos, e
não deixe entrar inimigos, a começar pelos muçulmanos. Putin vive
bem com esta política, que lhe dá mãos livres num entendimento com
o “amigo” Trump na partilha de recursos, e nada mais. Putin tem
uma política externa, Trump não tem, nem quer ter, e quando a tiver
será pactuada com Putin.
As vítimas desta
doutrina Trump-Putin, se se materializar como tudo indica, são os
aliados dos EUA, a começar pelos europeus que fazem parte da NATO,
mas também os asiáticos e árabes. Para os países bálticos, ou os
países do antigo Pacto de Varsóvia, cuja “geografia” os coloca
perigosamente perto da Rússia, o caso da Crimeia e da Ucrânia são
muito preocupantes. Para o Japão ou a Coreia do Sul, Trump aponta a
nuclearização, um enorme risco numa região do mundo onde há uma
nação verdadeiramente perigosa, a Coreia do Norte, e a China, uma
potência emergente que nunca permitirá sem retaliação as
brincadeiras irresponsáveis de abandonar a política de “uma só
China” reconhecendo Taiwan.
Trump tem todos os
defeitos que já apontámos e aparece agora a brincar com as armas
nucleares no Twitter, a doença infantil dos homens maduros, mas sabe
o que quer e, acima de tudo, o que não quer. Mesmo que não faça um
décimo do que ameaça fazer, basta isso para consolidar um ponto sem
retorno da política mundial, e se há homem que é capaz de explorar
isso, é Putin. Num certo sentido são parecidos: Putin retratado
como macho russo a andar a cavalo, em cima do gelo, a mergulhar, a
caçar ursos; Trump apanhando-as pela “pussy”, vivendo entre
ornatos de falso ouro, e aquelas cadeiras e móveis que a gente
jurava que ninguém comprava, mas compra. Só que há uma enorme
diferença, Trump é habilidoso e esperto, Putin é inteligente e
frio. E Putin tem um mapa por detrás, com muita história dentro.
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On
stage, Putin celebrates a good year
At
his annual press conference in Moscow, the Russian president had a
certain spring in his step.
By ANNA
NEMTSOVA 12/23/16, 9:15 PM CET Updated 12/23/16, 9:38 PM CET
MOSCOW — Every
year, the Kremlin puts on the Vladimir Putin show, the annual press
conference at the end of December.
But on Friday, the
Russian president had a certain spring in his step.
Certainly, it’s
been a good year for Putin. From the military support of President
Bashar al-Assad that has helped bring the rebels in Syria to their
knees to the advance of more Russia-friendly forces in Europe and
America, Putin’s influence has grown by leaps and bounds.
As at conferences
past, the journalists had dressed up in bright colors and carried
banners and signs to catch the president’s attention. A blond woman
held a sign depicting Putin as Superman against a blue sky.
And, as usual, it
was a long-winded affair, with any uncomfortable questions about
Syria, Ukraine, hacking or political freedom waved off the table like
bread crumbs after a glorious feast.
Did Russian hackers
help Donald Trump get elected? “We constantly forget about the main
thing,” Putin said. “The main thing, to my mind, is the
information the hackers provided.” As a result of “true
information,” the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee
quit, he said, adding that Washington should stop searching for
guilty parties abroad. “You need to learn how to lose gracefully,”
he said.
* * *
If Washington is
abuzz with conversations about Putin, the talk of Moscow these days
is the deteriorating relations with the outgoing American
administration. This week, the scuttlebutt had it that, with one
month left before U.S. President Barack Obama leaves the White House,
the Kremlin and Washington have stopped communicating. “There is
nobody left in the U.S. administration to communicate with, except
for maybe John Kerry,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political
analyst, said Thursday.
Markov also took aim
at reports that malicious software used in the DNC hack is similar to
software used against the Ukrainian military, further bolstering the
case for Russian involvement.
“The CIA, who help
terrorists in Ukraine and Syria, now blame our military
intelligence…for helping Trump win — this is nonsense,” Markov
said. He has previously denied allegations of Russian interference in
the election, but has said “maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks.”
Before the press
conference, Russian state channels broadcast Defense Minister Sergei
Shoigu’s report to Putin that nearly 100,000 people, including
9,000 militants, had left Aleppo, aided by a large contingent of
Russian soldiers.
During the press
conference, Putin seized on the report. “I don’t know if this
will sound immodest, but without our participation, it wouldn’t
have been possible,” Putin said. ”This is the biggest — I want
to stress this — the biggest international humanitarian action in
our modern world,” he said, neglecting to address reports that
Russian military is targeting civilians in Aleppo. Instead, he
praised the leadership of Iran, Syria and Turkey — Russia’s new
strategic partners — and promised to continue working with them in
“that popular format.”
Ukraine is clearly
still a sore subject. “I hope and I am confident that sooner or
later we’ll have normalization of our relationships with Ukraine,”
Putin said, looking anything but certain.
A reporter from Kiev
asked Putin to free two Ukrainians from prison — the journalist
Roman Suschenko and the film director Oleh Sentsov.
Suschenko was
arrested in October and sentenced to 11 years in prison on charges of
spying. The Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform, which employs Suschenko,
has condemned the arrest. Sentsov, meanwhile, has been sentenced by a
Russian court to 20 years in prison on charges of terrorism.
The questioner
launched into a long speech on the subject of Ukraine, finishing up
with this question: “Do you understand, that even if you ever
retire, Ukrainians will always see Russians as occupiers?”
“Ukraine should be
concerned about its own troops being seen as occupiers,” Putin
said, dismissively.
Putin also took a
swipe at the European Union, for, in his view, helping spark the
conflict in Ukraine in 2014.
To stay safe Europe
needed Russia, he argued.
And what to expect
for next year? Will relations with the U.S. get better once Donald
Trump is sworn in as U.S. president? Putin expected as much, he said,
“because it’s impossible to get worse.”
Anna Nemtsova is a
correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast based in Moscow. Her
work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of
Higher Education, Foreign Policy, nbcnews.com, Al Jazeera, Marie
Claire and the Guardian.
Authors:
Anna Nemtsova
The
Russian Question
Moscow
may no longer be a superpower, but its revanchist politics are
unsettling the international order. How should Donald Trump deal with
Vladimir Putin?
BY NIALL FERGUSON
DECEMBER 23, 2016
From the mid-19th
century until the mid-20th, the “German Question” was the
biggest and hardest
question of geopolitics. The German Question, to put it simply, was
whether or not a unification of German speakers under one rule would
create a dangerously powerful state at the center of Europe. The
answer to that question was decided in the end, as Otto von Bismarck
had foreseen, by blood and iron. Two vast, catastrophic wars brought
violence and destruction to the whole of Europe and finally left
Germany defeated and divided. By the time of its reunification in
1990, demographic decline and cultural change had defanged Berlin
sufficiently that the threat of a united Germany has receded. Germany
still predominates over the European Union because of its size and
economic strength. But it is no menace.
The same cannot be
said of Russia, which has become more aggressive even as its economic
significance has diminished. The biggest and hardest question of
21st-century geopolitics may prove to be: What do we do about Moscow?
Like the German
Question, the new Russian Question is a function of the country’s
Mittellage (“central situation”). Germany’s location was
central in European terms. At its height, the German Reich extended
from Koblenz to Königsberg, from the banks of the Rhine to the
beaches of the Baltic. Russia today is central in global terms. It
was the only one of the great European empires that extended into
Asia over land rather than sea. The Soviet Union died an astoundingly
peaceful death 25 years ago this month. Yet the Russian Federation
still extends from Kaliningrad — as Königsberg has been known
since its annexation by Russia in 1945 — all the way to
Vladivostok, 4,500 miles and 10 time zones away.
In the 19th century,
the tension between Russia’s westward-looking metropolises and its
vast Asian hinterland furnished novelists and playwrights with
wonderfully rich material. Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky could
debate which direction Russia should take, but no one doubted the
existence of the West-East dilemma. Nor was it a purely geographical
phenomenon. The institution of serfdom meant that until the 1860s —
and in practice long after that — a Russian gentleman only had to
take a ride through his estates to leave Europe far behind.
But Russia’s
West-East dilemma today is fast becoming the central problem of
international politics, not literature. On one side lies a China that
long ago surpassed Russia in economic as well as demographic terms
and increasingly aspires to military preeminence in Asia. On the
other side of Russia lies a Europe that, for all its prosperity, has
become politically introverted and excessively reliant on the United
States for its defense.
In his most recent
book, World Order, Henry Kissinger contrasted four evolving and
incompatible conceptions of international order: American, European,
Chinese, and Islamic. Russia’s place in this scheme of things is
ambiguous. “From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances
have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily
consistent,” Kissinger wrote. Russia is “a uniquely ‘Eurasian’
power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in
either.” It has learned its geopolitics “from the hard school of
the steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources
on an open terrain with few fixed borders.”
Russia, it might be
inferred, is the power least interested in world order. President
Vladimir Putin would no doubt deny that. He would argue that the best
basis for order would be for the great powers mutually to respect
their spheres of influence and domestic political differences. On the
other hand, Russia is clearly the power most ready to exploit the new
tools of cyberwarfare that Kissinger warned presciently about in
2014:
The pervasiveness of
networked communications in the social, financial, industrial, and
military sectors has … revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing
most rules and regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of
many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the state of
nature about which philosophers have speculated and the escape from
which, according to [Thomas] Hobbes, provided the motivating force
for creating a political order.… [A]symmetry and a kind of
congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber
powers both in diplomacy and in strategy.… Absent articulation of
some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the
inner dynamics of the system.
That crisis has
already arrived. As I write, the burning question of American
politics is how far the Russian government was successful in its
efforts to influence the outcome of November’s presidential
election. That Russia tried to do this is no longer in serious
dispute. Russian hackers successfully accessed the emails of the
Democratic National Committee. WikiLeaks acted as the conduit. The
resulting email dumps and leaks probably reinforced voters’
negative views of Hillary Clinton. Given Donald Trump’s narrow
margin of victory in key swing states, one might claim that this was
decisive — though no more or less decisive than all the other
factors that made up the minds of crucial voters in an election where
“everything mattered.” President Barack Obama now says that “when
any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our
elections … we need to take action” and that “we will.”
What remains
debatable is how far the Trump campaign was aware that it was
receiving assistance from Moscow. If so, was there some hidden quid
pro quo? Writing in Slate back in July, Franklin Foer argued that
Putin has “a plan for destroying the West—and that plan looks a
lot like Donald Trump.” In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum
called Trump a “Manchurian candidate.” The evidence for such
claims is circumstantial at best. When he hired Paul Manafort as his
campaign manager, Trump can hardly have been unaware of Manafort’s
work for Kremlin crony Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt Ukrainian
president between 2010 and 2014. Another former Trump campaign
advisor with questionably close ties to Moscow was Carter Page, a
vocal defender of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Proponents of the
conspiracy theory also cite Trump’s description of NATO as
“obsolete” and “expensive,” his desire to make a “great
deal” with Putin if elected, and his repeated refusal to accept
that Russia was behind the cybercampaign against his opponent — a
campaign that he himself incited, if only jokingly, back in July.
Yet this controversy
is generating more heat than light. First, there is nothing new about
Russian attempts to influence Western elections: Such “psychological
operations” were conducted by intelligence agencies on both sides
of the Cold War. New technology has perhaps made them easier to
conduct and more effective, but they remain (unlike, say, biological
warfare) within the pale of international law. Second, in an election
characterized by a general lack of restraint, Trump may simply have
exploited an unlooked for but not unwelcome advantage. If another
foreign government had supplied a liberal website with embarrassing
emails hacked from Republican accounts, would the Clinton campaign
have averted its gaze? Third, nothing Trump has said during the
election binds him to be Putin’s confederate, as he made clear to
Bill O’Reilly on Fox News in April. “I think I would possibly
have a good relationship [with Putin],” Trump said. “I don’t
know.… I have no idea, Bill. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.”
The real question we
need to ask is why the Russian government was so eager to influence
the election in Trump’s favor. The answer to that question is not
as obvious as might be thought. It is that Russia urgently — one
might even say desperately — needed a friendlier president than
Clinton would have been. Moscow’s meddling in American politics
reflects not its strength, nor its strategic sophistication, but its
weakness and dependence on Cold War tactics such as psy-ops.
A new era, but what
era?
It did not have to
be this way. Twenty-five years ago, the dissolution of the Soviet
Union marked not only the end of the Cold War but also the beginning
of what should have been a golden era of friendly relations between
Russia and the West. With enthusiasm, it seemed, Russians embraced
both capitalism and democracy. To an extent that was startling,
Russian cities became Westernized. Empty shelves and po-faced
propaganda gave way to abundance and dazzling advertisements.
Contrary to the
fears of some, there was a new world order after 1991. The world
became a markedly more peaceful place as the flows of money and arms
that had turned so many regional disputes into proxy wars dried up.
American economists rushed to advise Russian politicians. American
multinationals hurried to invest.
Go back a quarter
century to 1991 and imagine three more or less equally plausible
futures. First, imagine that the coup by hard-liners in August of
that year had been more competently executed and that the Soviet
Union had been preserved. Second, imagine a much more violent
dissolution of the Soviet system in which ethnic and regional
tensions escalated much further, producing the kind of
“super-Yugoslavia” Kissinger has occasionally warned about.
Finally, imagine a happily-ever-after history, in which Russia’s
economy thrived on the basis of capitalism and globalization, growing
at Asian rates.
Russia could have
been deep-frozen. It could have disintegrated. It could have boomed.
No one in 1991 knew which of these futures we would get. In fact, we
got none of them. Russia has retained the democratic institutions
that were established after 1991, but the rule of law has not taken
root, and, under Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian nationalist form of
government has established itself that is notably ruthless in its
suppression of opposition and criticism. Despite centrifugal forces,
most obviously in the Caucasus, the Russian Federation has held
together. However, the economy has performed much less well than
might have been hoped. Between 1992 and 2016, the real compound
annual growth rate of Russian per capita GDP has been 1.5 percent.
Compare that with equivalent figures for India (5.1 percent) and
China (8.9 percent).
Today, the Russian
economy accounts for just over 3 percent of global output, according
to the International Monetary Fund’s estimates based on purchasing
power parity. The U.S. share is 16 percent. The Chinese share is 18
percent. Calculated on a current dollar basis, Russia’s GDP is less
than 7 percent of America’s. The British economy is twice the size
of Russia’s.
Moreover, the
reliance of the Russian economy on exported fossil fuels — as well
as other primary products — is shocking. Nearly two-thirds of
Russian exports are petroleum (63 percent), according the Observatory
of Economic Complexity. Russia’s relative economic weakness has
been compounded by the steep decline in oil, gas, and other commodity
prices since 2014 and by U.S. and EU sanctions imposed after the
Russian invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea that same year.
Is Putin to blame?
Who is to blame for
the recent steep deterioration in relations between Russia and the
United States? When, in fact, did it begin? Four years ago, Barack
Obama ridiculed Mitt Romney for characterizing Russia as America’s
“No. 1 geopolitical foe.” To this day, Obama’s view remains
that Russia is weak, not strong. As he told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey
Goldberg in March, “[Putin is] constantly interested in being seen
as our peer and as working with us, because he’s not completely
stupid. He understands that Russia’s overall position in the world
is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or
is trying to prop up [Bashar al-] Assad doesn’t suddenly make him a
player.” He went even further in his end-of-year press conference,
calling Russia “a smaller country … a weaker country” that does
not “produce anything that anybody wants to buy.”
Yet this is a very
different tone from the one the Obama administration took back in
March 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her
Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, symbolically pressed a “reset”
button. (Appropriately, as it turned out, the Russian translation on
the button was misspelled by the State Department so that it read
“overcharged.”) Nor was the reset a complete failure. A year
later, the United States and Russia reached an agreement to reduce
their stockpiles of nuclear weapons (the so-called New START deal).
One answer to the
question of what went wrong is simply Putin himself. Having made my
own contribution to the “blame Putin” literature, I am not about
to exonerate the Russian president. I vividly remember the tone he
adopted in a speech I heard at the 2007 Munich Security Conference,
where he gave (as I wrote at the time) “a striking impersonation of
Michael Corleone in The Godfather—the embodiment of implicit
menace.”
Nevertheless, it is
important to remember what exactly Putin said on that occasion. In
remarks that seemed mainly directed at the Europeans in the room, he
warned that a “unipolar world” — meaning one dominated by the
United States — would prove “pernicious not only for all those
within this system but also for the sovereign itself.” America’s
“hyper use of force,” Putin said, was “plunging the world into
an abyss of permanent conflicts.” Speaking at a time when neither
Iraq nor Afghanistan seemed especially good advertisements for U.S.
military intervention, those words had a certain force, especially in
German ears.
Nearly 10 years
later, even Putin’s most splenetic critics would be well-advised to
reflect for a moment on our own part in the deterioration of
relations between Washington and Moscow. The Russian view that the
fault lies partly with Western overreach deserves to be taken more
seriously than it generally is.
Putin and President
George W. Bush speak during a conference at Putin's summer retreat in
Sochi, Russia, on Apr. 6, 2008. (Photo by ARTYOM
KOROTAYEV/Epsilon/Getty Images)
Is the West to
blame?
If I look back on
what I thought and wrote during the administration of George W. Bush,
I would say that I underestimated the extent to which the expansion
of both NATO and the European Union was antagonizing the Russians.
Certain decisions
still seem to me defensible. Given their experiences in the middle of
the 20th century, the Poles and the Czechs deserved both the security
afforded by NATO membership (from 1999, when they joined along with
Hungary) and the economic opportunities offered by EU membership
(from 2004). Yet the U.S. decision in March 2007 to build an
anti-ballistic missile defense site in Poland along with a radar
station in the Czech Republic seems, with hindsight, more
questionable, as does the subsequent decision to deploy 10 two-stage
missile interceptors and a battery of MIM-104 Patriot missiles in
Poland. Though notionally intended to detect and counter Iranian
missiles, these installations were bound to be regarded by the
Russians as directed at them. The subsequent deployment of Iskander
short-range missiles to Kaliningrad was a predictable retaliation.
A similar act of
retaliation followed in 2008 when, with encouragement from some EU
states, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. In
response, Russia recognized rebels in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and
invaded those parts of Georgia. From a Russian perspective, this was
no different from what the West had done in Kosovo.
The biggest
miscalculation, however, was the willingness of the Bush
administration to consider Ukraine for NATO membership and the later
backing by the Obama administration of EU efforts to offer Ukraine an
association agreement. I well remember the giddy mood at a
pro-European conference in Yalta in September 2013, when Western
representatives almost unanimously exhorted Ukraine to follow the
Polish path. Not nearly enough consideration was given to the very
different way Russia regards Ukraine nor to the obvious West-East
divisions within Ukraine itself. This was despite an explicit warning
from Putin’s aide Sergei Glazyev, who attended the conference, that
signing the EU association agreement would lead to “political and
social unrest,” a dramatic decline in living standards, and
“chaos.”
This is not in any
way to legitimize the Russian actions of 2014, which were in clear
violation of international law and agreements. It is to criticize
successive administrations for paying too little heed to Russia’s
sensitivities and likely reactions.
“I don’t really
even need George Kennan right now,” President Obama told the New
Yorker’s David Remnick in early 2014. The very opposite was true.
He and his predecessor badly needed advisors who understood Russia as
well as Kennan did. As Kissinger has often remarked, history is to
nations what character is to people. In recent years, American
policymakers have tended to forget that and then to wax indignant
when other states act in ways that a knowledge of history might have
enabled them to anticipate. No country, it might be said, has had its
character more conditioned by its history than Russia. It was foolish
to expect Russians to view with equanimity the departure into the
Western sphere of influence of the heartland of medieval Russia, the
breadbasket of the tsarist empire, the setting for Mikhail Bulgakov’s
The White Guard, the crime scene of Joseph Stalin’s man-made
famine, and the main target of Adolf Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.
One might have
thought the events of 2014 would have taught U.S. policymakers a
lesson. Yet the Obama administration has persisted in misreading
Russia. It was arguably a mistake to leave Germany and France to
handle the Ukraine crisis, when more direct U.S. involvement might
have made the Minsk agreements effective. It was certainly a
disastrous blunder to give Putin an admission ticket into the Syrian
conflict by leaving to him the (partial) removal of Bashar al-Assad’s
chemical weapons. One of Kissinger’s lasting achievements in the
early 1970s was to squeeze the Soviets out of the Middle East. The
Obama administration has undone that, with dire consequences. We see
in Aleppo the Russian military for what it is: a master of the
mid-20th-century tactic of winning victories through the
indiscriminate bombing of cities.
What price peace?
Yet I remain to be
convinced that the correct response to these errors of American
policy is to swing from underestimating Russia to overestimating it.
Such an approach has the potential to be just another variation on
the theme of misunderstanding.
It is not difficult
to infer what Putin would like to get in any “great deal” between
himself and Trump. Item No. 1 would be a lifting of sanctions. Item
No. 2 would be an end to the war in Syria on Russia’s terms —
which would include the preservation of Assad in power for at least
some “decent interval.” Item No. 3 would be a de facto
recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and some
constitutional change designed to render the government in Kiev
impotent by giving the country’s eastern Donbass region a permanent
pro-Russian veto power.
What is hard to
understand is why the United States would want give Russia even a
fraction of all this. What exactly would Russia be giving the United
States in return for such concessions? That is the question that
Trump’s national security team needs to ask itself before he so
much as takes a courtesy call from the Kremlin.
There is no question
that the war in Syria needs to end, just as the frozen conflict in
eastern Ukraine needs resolution. But the terms of peace can and must
be very different from those that Putin has in mind. Any deal that
pacified Syria by sacrificing Ukraine would be a grave mistake.
President Obama has
been right in saying that Russia is a much weaker power than the
United States. His failure has been to exploit that American
advantage. Far from doing so, he has allowed his Russian counterpart
to play a weak hand with great tactical skill and ruthlessness. Trump
prides himself as a dealmaker. He should be able to do much better.
Here is what he should say to Putin.
First, you cannot
expect relief from sanctions until you withdraw all your armed forces
and proxies from eastern Ukraine.
Second, the
political future of Ukraine is for the Ukrainians to decide, not for
outside powers.
Third, we are
prepared to contemplate another plebiscite in Crimea, given the
somewhat questionable nature of its cession to Ukraine in the Nikita
Khrushchev era, though credible foreign representatives must monitor
the vote.
Fourth, we are also
prepared to discuss a new treaty confirming the neutral, nonaligned
status of Ukraine, similar in its design to the status of Finland in
the Cold War. Ukraine would renounce future membership of either NATO
or the EU, as well as membership of any analogous Russian-led entity
such as the Eurasian Customs Union. However, such a treaty would need
to include guarantees of Ukraine’s sovereignty and security,
comparable with the international treaty governing the status of
Belgium in 1839. And this treaty would be upheld in a way that Obama
failed to uphold the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 — by use of force
if necessary.
Fifth, in return for
these concessions, the United States expects Russia to participate
cooperatively in a special conference of the permanent members of the
U.N. Security Council to establish a new and peaceful order in North
Africa and the Middle East. The scope of this conference should not
be confined to Syria but should extend to other countries in the
region that are afflicted by civil war and terrorism, notably Iraq
and Libya. It should consider questions that have lain dormant for a
century, since the Sykes-Picot agreement drew the borders of the
modern Middle East, such as the possibility of an independent Kurdish
state.
With a bold proposal
such as this, the Trump administration would regain the initiative
not only in U.S.-Russian relations but also in international
relations more generally. Crucially, it would parry Putin’s
aspiration for a bilateral relationship, as between the superpowers
of old — a relationship to which Russia, for all its oil and
weaponry, is no longer entitled. And it would bring to bear on the
problem of Middle Eastern stability the two European powers that have
an historic interest in the region and an Asian power — China —
that has a growing reliance on Middle Eastern energy.
The Russian Question
itself can be settled another day. But by reframing the international
order on the basis of cooperation rather than deadlock in the
Security Council, the United States at least poses the question in a
new way.
The Russian Question
itself can be settled another day. But by reframing the international
order on the basis of cooperation rather than deadlock in the
Security Council, the United States at least poses the question in a
new way. Will Russia learn to cooperate with the other great powers?
Or will it continue to be the opponent of international order?
Perhaps the latter is the option it will choose. After all, an
economic system that prefers an oil price closer to $100 a barrel
than $50 benefits more than most from escalating conflict in the
Middle East and North Africa — preferably conflict that spills over
into the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.
However, if that is
the goal of Russia’s strategy, then it is hard to see for how much
longer Beijing and Moscow will be able to cooperate in the Security
Council. Beijing needs stability in oil production and low oil prices
as much as Russia needs the opposite. Because of recent tensions with
the United States, Russia has been acquiescent as the “One Belt,
One Road” program extends China’s economic influence into Central
Asia, once a Russian domain. There is potential conflict of interest
there, too.
In the end, it is
not for the United States to solve the Russian Question. That is
Russia’s challenge. But by re-establishing the Kissingerian rule —
that the United States should be closer to each of Russia and China
than they are to one another — the Trump administration could take
an important first step toward cleaning up the geopolitical mess
bequeathed it by Barack Obama.
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