ANALYSIS
Putin’s
real long game
The
world order we know is already over, and Russia is moving fast to
grab the advantage. Can Trump figure out the new war in time to win
it?
By MOLLY K.
MCKEW 1/1/17, 6:29 PM CET Updated 1/1/17, 8:49 PM CET
A little over a year
ago, on a pleasant late fall evening, I was sitting on my front porch
with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter. He was
smoking a cigarette while we watched southeast D.C. hipsters bustle
by and talked about “the war” — the big war, being waged by
Russia against all of us, which from this porch felt very far away. I
can’t remember what prompted it — some discussion of whether the
government in Kiev was doing something that would piss off the EU —
but he took a long drag off his cigarette and said, offhand: “Russia.
The EU. It’s all just more Molotov-Ribbentrop shit.”
His casual reference
to the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing Eastern Europe before World War II
was meant as a reminder that Ukraine must decide its future for
itself, rather than let it be negotiated between great powers. But it
haunted me, this idea that modern revolutionaries no longer felt some
special affinity with the West. Was it the belief in collective
defense that was weakening, or the underlying certitude that Western
values would prevail?
Months later, on a
different porch thousands of miles away, an Estonian filmmaker
casually explained to me that he was buying a boat to get his family
out when the Russians came, so he could focus on the resistance. In
between were a hundred other exchanges — with Balts and Ukrainians,
Georgians and Moldovans — that answered my question and exposed the
new reality on the Russian frontier: the belief that, ultimately,
everyone would be left to fend for themselves. Increasingly, people
in Russia’s sphere of influence were deciding that the values that
were supposed to bind the West together could no longer hold. That
the world order Americans depend on had already come apart.
The
outgoing White House is so far responding to 21st century hybrid
information warfare with last century’s diplomatic toolkit.
From Moscow,
Vladimir Putin has seized the momentum of this unraveling, exacting
critical damage to the underpinnings of the liberal world order in a
shockingly short time. As he builds a new system to replace the one
we know, attempts by America and its allies to repair the damage have
been limited and slow. Even this week, as Barack Obama tries to
confront Russia’s open and unprecedented interference in our
political process, the outgoing White House is so far responding to
21st century hybrid information warfare with last century’s
diplomatic toolkit: the expulsion of spies, targeted sanctions,
potential asset seizure. The incoming administration, while promising
a new approach, has betrayed a similar lack of vision. Their promised
attempt at another “reset” with Russia is a rehash of a policy
that has utterly failed the past two American administrations.
What both
administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war,
whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but
it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values,
our democracy and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability
to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince
us to make decisions against our own best interests.
Those on the Russian
frontier, like my friends from Ukraine and Estonia, have already seen
the Kremlin’s new toolkit at work. The most visible example may be
“green men,” the unlabeled Russian-backed forces that suddenly
popped up to seize the Crimean peninsula and occupy eastern Ukraine.
But the wider battle is more subtle, a war of subversion rather than
domination. The recent interference in the American elections means
that these shadow tactics have now been deployed — with surprising
effectiveness — not just against American allies, but against
America itself. And the only way forward for America and the West is
to embrace the spirit of the age that Putin has created, plow through
the chaos and focus on building what comes next.
President-elect
Trump has characteristics that can aid him in defining what comes
next. He is, first and foremost, a rule-breaker, not quantifiable by
metrics we know. In a time of inconceivable change, that can be an
incredible asset. He comes across as a straight talker, and he can be
blunt with the American people about the threats we face. He is a man
of many narratives, and can find a way to sell these decisions to the
American people. He believes in strength, and knows hard power is
necessary.
So far, Trump seems
far more likely than any of his predecessors to accelerate, rather
than resist, the unwinding of the postwar order. And that could be a
very bad — or an unexpectedly good — thing. So far, he has chosen
to act as if the West no longer matters, seemingly blind to the
danger that Putin’s Russia presents to American security and
American society. The question ahead of us is whether Trump will aid
the Kremlin’s goals with his anti-globalist, anti-NATO rhetoric —
or whether he’ll clearly see the end of the old order, grasp the
nature of the war we are in, and have the vision and the
confrontational spirit to win it.
* * *
To understand the
shift underway in the world, and to stop being outmaneuvered, we
first need to see the Russian state for what it really is.
Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. This freed the
Russian security state from its last constraints. In 1991, there were
around 800,000 official KGB agents in Russia. They spent a decade
reorganizing themselves into the newly minted FSB, expanding and
absorbing other instruments of power, including criminal networks,
other security services, economic interests and parts of the
political elite. They rejected the liberal, democratic Russia that
President Boris Yeltsin was trying to build.
Following the 1999
Moscow apartment bombings that the FSB almost certainly planned,
former FSB director Vladimir Putin was installed as president. We
should not ignore the significance of these events. An internal
operation planned by the security services killed hundreds of Russian
citizens. It was used as the pretext to relaunch a bloody,
devastating internal war led by emergent strongman Putin. Tens of
thousands of Chechen civilians and fighters and Russian conscripts
died. The narrative was controlled to make the enemy clear and Putin
victorious. This information environment forced a specific political
objective: Yeltsin resigned and handed power to Putin on New Year’s
Eve 1999.
No
reset can be successful, regardless the personality driving it,
because Putin’s Russia requires the United States of America as its
enemy.
From beginning to
end, the operation took three months. This is how the Russian
security state shook off the controls of political councils or
representative democracy. This is how it thinks and how it acts —
then, and now. Blood or war might be required, but controlling
information and the national response to that information is what
matters. Many Russians, scarred by the unrelenting economic, social
and security hardship of the 1990s, welcomed the rise of the security
state, and still widely support it, even as it has hollowed out the
Russian economy and civic institutions. Today, as a result, Russia is
little more than a ghastly hybrid of an overblown police state and a
criminal network with an economy the size of Italy — and the
world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
Even Russian policy
hands, raised on the Western understanding of traditional power
dynamics, find the implications of this hard to understand. This
Russia does not aspire to be like us, or to make itself stronger than
we are. Rather, its leaders want the West — and specifically NATO
and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we are as
broken as they perceive themselves to be. No reset can be successful,
regardless the personality driving it, because Putin’s Russia
requires the United States of America as its enemy.
We can only confront
this by fully understanding how the Kremlin sees the world. Its
worldview and objectives are made abundantly clear in speeches,
op-eds, official policy and national strategy documents, journal
articles, interviews, and, in some cases, fiction writing of Russian
officials and ideologues. We should understand several things from
this material.
First, it is a war.
A thing to be won, decisively — not a thing to be negotiated or
bargained. It’s all one war: Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, the Baltics,
Georgia. It’s what Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s ‘gray cardinal’
and lead propagandist, dubbed “non-linear war” in his science
fiction story “Without Sky,” in 2014.
Second, it’s all
one war machine. Military, technological, information, diplomatic,
economic, cultural, criminal and other tools are all controlled by
the state and deployed toward one set of strategic objectives. This
is the Gerasimov doctrine, penned by Valery Gerasimov, the Russian
chief of the general staff, in 2013. Political warfare is meant to
achieve specific political outcomes favorable to the Kremlin: it is
preferred to physical conflict because it is cheap and easy. The
Kremlin has many notches in its belt in this category, some of which
have been attributed, many likely not. It’s a mistake to see this
campaign in the traditional terms of political alliances: rarely has
the goal been to install overtly pro-Russian governments. Far more
often, the goal is simply to replace Western-style democratic regimes
with illiberal, populist, or nationalist ones.
The
truth is that fighting a new Cold War would be in America’s
interest.
Third, information
warfare is not about creating an alternate truth, but eroding our
basic ability to distinguish truth at all. It is not “propaganda”
as we’ve come to think of it, but the less obvious techniques known
in Russia as “active measures” and “reflexive control.” Both
are designed to make us, the targets, act against our own best
interests.
Fourth, the
diplomatic side of this non-linear war isn’t a foreign policy aimed
at building a new pro-Russian bloc, Instead, it’s what the Kremlin
calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy, undermining the strength
of Western institutions by coalescing alternate — ideally temporary
and limited — centers of power. Rather than a stable world order
undergirded by the U.S. and its allies, the goal is an unstable new
world order of “all against all.” The Kremlin has tried to
accelerate this process by both inflaming crises that overwhelm the
Western response (for example, the migration crisis in Europe, and
the war in eastern Ukraine) and by showing superiority in ‘solving’
crises the West could not (for example, bombing Syria into
submission, regardless of the cost, to show Russia can impose
stability in the Middle East when the West cannot).
This leads to the
final point: hard power matters. Russia maintains the second most
powerful military in the world and spends more than 5 percent of its
weakened GDP on defense. Russia used military force to invade and
occupy Georgian territory in 2008 to disrupt the expansion of NATO,
and in 2013 in Ukraine to disrupt the expansion of the EU. They have
invested heavily in military reform, new generations of hardware and
weapons, and expansive special operations training, much of which
debuted in the wars in Ukraine and Syria. There is no denying that
Russia is willing to back up its rhetoric and policy with deployed
force, and that the rest of the world notices.
The West must accept
that Putin has transformed what we see as tremendous weakness into
considerable strength. If Russia were a strong economy closely linked
to the global system, it would have vulnerabilities to more
traditional diplomacy. But in the emerging world order, it is a
significant actor – and in the current Russian political landscape,
no new sanctions can overcome the defensive, insular war-economy
mentality that the Kremlin has built.
* * *
How did we reach
this point? After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western security
and political alliances expanded to fill the zone of instability left
behind. The emerging Russian security state could only define this as
the strategic advance of an enemy. The 9/11 attacks shattered Western
concepts of security and conflict and expanded NATO’s new mission
of projecting security. When Putin offered his assistance, we
effectively responded “no thanks,” thinking in particular of his
bloody, ongoing, scorched-earth war against the Chechens. We did it
for the right reasons. Nonetheless, it infuriated Putin. This was the
last moment when any real rapprochement with Putin’s Russia was
possible.
Since that time,
physical warfare has changed in ways that create a new kind of space
for Putin to intervene globally. The Obama administration has a deep
distaste for official overseas deployments of U.S. troops and the
associated political costs. ‘No new wars’ was the oft-repeated
mantra — which altered America’s toolbox for, if not the
frequency of, foreign interventions. Drone warfare was greatly
expanded, as was the reliance on special forces — a politically
easy choice due to their diverse capabilities and voluntary career
commitment to service. But the actual number of special forces
operators is exceedingly small and increasingly exhausted; soldiers
deployed in shadow wars and shadow missions have far less protection
than troops in traditional ground combat.
As the definitions
of war and peace have blurred, creating impossibly vast front lines
and impossibly vague boundaries of conflict, Putin has launched a
kind of global imperialist insurgency. The Kremlin aggressively
promotes an alternate ideological base to expand an illiberal world
order in which the rights and freedoms that most Americans feel are
essential to democracy don’t necessarily exist. It backs this up
with military, economic, cultural and diplomatic resources. Through a
combination of leveraging hard power and embracing the role of
permanent disruptor — hacker, mercenary, rule-breaker, liar, thief
— Putin works to ensure that Russia cannot be excluded from global
power.
Putin tries to
define recent history as an anomaly — where the world built with
American sweat and ingenuity and blood and sacrifice, by the society
founded on American exceptionalism, is a thing to be erased and
corrected. The Russian version of exceptionalism is not a reflection
of aspirational character, but a requirement that Russia remain
distinct and apart from the world. Until we understand this, and that
America is defined as the glavny protivnik (the “main enemy”) of
Russia, we will never speak to Putin’s Russia in a language it can
understand.
There is less and
less to stand against Putin’s campaign of destabilization. It’s
been 99 years since America began investing in European security with
blood, and sweat and gold. Two world wars and a long, cold conflict
later, we felt secure with the institutional framework of NATO and
the EU — secure in the idea that these institutions projected our
security and our interests far beyond our shores. The
post-World-War-II liberal world order and its accompanying security
architecture ushered in an unparalleled period of growth and peace
and prosperity for the U.S. and other transatlantic countries.
I spend most of my
time near the Russian frontier, and today that architecture seems
like a Kodachrome snapshot from yesteryear. We joke that we yearn for
a fight we can win with a gun, because the idea of a physical
invasion is actually preferable to the constant uncertainty of
economic, information, and political shadow warfare from the Kremlin.
Combatants in these
shadow wars bear no designations, and protections against these
methods are few. From the front lines, in the absence of the fabric
of reassurance woven from our values and principles and shared
sacrifice — and in the absence of the moral clarity of purpose
derived from “us and them” — civil society is left naked,
unarmored. Putin has dictated the mood of the unfolding era — an
era of upheaval. This past year marks the arrival of this mood in
American politics, whether Americans deny it or not. The example of
Eastern Europe suggests that without renewed vision and purpose, and
without strong alliances to amplify our defense and preserve our
legacy, America too will find itself unanchored, adrift in currents
stirred and guided by the Kremlin.
President-elect
Trump harnessed this energy of upheaval to win the American
presidency — a victory that itself was a symptom of the breakdown
of the post-World-War-II order, in which institutional trust has
eroded and unexpected outcomes have become the order of the day. Now
it is his responsibility to define what comes next — or else
explain to Americans, who want to be great again, why everything
they’ve invested in and sacrificed for over the past century was
ultimately for nothing.
As Obama did, Trump
has already made the first mistake in negotiating with the Russians:
telling them that there is anything to negotiate. Trump likes to
discuss Putin’s strengths. He should also understand that much of
it is smoke and mirrors. A renewed approach to dealing with Putin’s
Russia should begin by addressing the tactics of Russia’s new
warfare from the perspective of strength.
We have to accept
we’re in a war and that we have a lot to lose. We need to look at
this war differently, both geographically and strategically. For
example, it’s hard to understand Ukraine and Syria as two fronts in
the same conflict when we never evaluate them together with Moscow in
the center of the map, as Russia does. We also need a new national
security concept that adds a new strategic framework, connects all
our resources and allows us to better evaluate and respond to
Gerasimov-style warfare: We have to learn to fight their one war
machine with a unified machine of our own. This will also strengthen
and quicken decision-making on critical issues in the U.S. —
something we will also need to replicate within NATO.
Exposing how the
Kremlin’s political and information warfare works is a critical
component of this strategy, as is acting to constrain it. We must
(re)accept the notion that hard power is the guarantor of any
international system: Security is a precondition for anything
(everything) else. That the projection of our values has tracked with
and been amplified by force projection is no accident. Human freedom
requires security. NATO has been the force projection of our values.
It hasn’t just moved the theoretical line of conflict further
forward: The force multiplication and value transference has enhanced
our security. This is far cheaper, and far stronger, than trying to
do this ourselves.
It’s also
important to acknowledge that a more isolated, more nationalist
America helps Putin in his objectives even while it compromises our
own. We need to accept that America was part of, and needs to be part
of, a global system — and that this system is better, cheaper and
more powerful than any imagined alternatives. For many years, the
United States has been the steel in the framework that holds
everything together; this is what we mean by “world order” and
“security architecture,” two concepts that few politicians try to
discuss seriously with the electorate.
Taken together,
these steps would be a critical realignment to our strategic thinking
and internal operations, and would allow us to plow through this era
of upheaval with greater certainty and for greater benefit to the
American people.
* * *
In an era
increasingly cynical about American ideals, and skeptical about
intervention abroad, how can the U.S. build support for a new, more
muscular global resistance to what Russia is trying to do?
We already have one
model: the Cold War. Putin and his minions have spent the past 15
years ranting about how the West (specifically NATO) wants a new Cold
War. By doing so, they have been conditioning us to deny it, and made
us do it so continually that we have convinced ourselves it is true.
This is classic reflexive control.
The truth is that
fighting a new Cold War would be in America’s interest. Russia
teaches us a very important lesson: Losing an ideological war without
a fight will ruin you as a nation. The fight is the American way.
When we stop fighting for our ideals abroad, we stop fighting for
them at home. We won the last Cold War. We will win the next one too.
When it’s us against them, they were, and are, never going to be
the winner. But when it’s “all against all” — a “multi-polar”
world with “multi-vector” policy, a state of shifting alliances
and permanent instability — Russia, with a centrally controlled,
tiny command structure unaccountable for its actions in any way,
still has a chance for a seat at the table. They pursue the
multi-polar world not because it is right or just, but because it is
the only world in which they can continue to matter without pushing a
nuclear launch sequence.
We must understand
this, and focus now, as Putin does, on shaping the world that comes
next and defining what our place is in it. Trump has shown
willingness to re-evaluate his positions and change course — except
on issues relating to Russia, and strengthening alliances with the
Kremlin’s global illiberal allies. By doing so, he is making
himself a footnote to Putin’s chapter of history — little more
than another of Putin’s hollow men.
Trump should
understand, regardless of what the Russians did in our elections, he
already won the prize. It won’t be taken away just because he
admits the Russians intervened. Taking away the secrecy of Russian
actions — exposing whatever it was they did, to everyone — is the
only way to take away their power over the U.S. political system and
to free himself from their strings, as well. Whatever Putin’s
gambit was, Trump is the one who can make sure that Putin doesn’t
win.
Trump should set the
unpredictable course and become the champion against the most toxic,
ambitious regime of the modern world. Rebuilding American power —
based on the values of liberal democracy — is the only escape from
Putin’s corrosive vision of a world at permanent war. We need a new
united front. But we must be the center of it. It matters deeply that
the current generation of global revolutionaries and reformers, like
my Ukrainian friend, no longer see themselves as fighting for us or
our ideals.
In a strange way,
Trump could be just crazy enough — enough of a outlier and a rogue
— to expose what Putin’s Russia is and end the current cycle of
upheaval and decline. This requires non-standard thinking and
leadership — but also purpose, and commitment and values. It
requires faith — for and from the American people and American
institutions. And it requires the existence of truth.
The alternative is
accepting that our history and our nation were, in fact, not the
beginning of a better — greater — world, but the long anomaly in
a tyrannous and dark one.
Molly K. McKew
(@MollyMcKew) advises governments and political parties on foreign
policy and strategic communications. She was an adviser to Georgian
President Saakashvili’s government from 2009-2013 and to former
Moldovan Prime Minister Filat in 2014-2015.
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