"The U.S. and Russia are fighting about missile defense when they should be settling differences."
Pitting a former KGB agent against a former community organizer and seeing what happens in Syria.
By Stephen M. Walt October 9, 2015
Who’s the better grand strategist: Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin?
That’s not quite the right question, of course, because both leaders depend to some degree on intelligence reports and advice from trusted advisors and not just their own judgment. Accordingly, any assessment of their relative performance is to some degree an evaluation not just of the individual leaders but also their respective foreign-policy brain trusts. Still, the buck does stop at the top, and Russia’s recent move into Syria has a lot of people wondering if the Kremlin has outflanked, outwitted, and outgunned the White House once again.
Is this really true? Has the crafty former KGB officer done a number on the former law professor and community organizer? And what does this latest turn of events tell us about each country’s ability to formulate and implement an effective foreign policy?
One way to address this question is to take a broader look at how each country has fared over the past seven years or so. Putin’s record looked pretty good for awhile: The Russian economy grew rapidly through 2012 (due to high oil and commodity prices), it gained entry into the World Trade Organization, and the so-called “reset” restored a degree of cordiality to the strained relationship between Washington and Moscow. But Putin’s overall record since looks much less impressive: The Russian economy is now in a serious recession, while America’s is chugging along reasonably well. And consider this: Russia’s 2014 GDP was less than $2 trillion, so over the past six years the US economy grew by an amount larger than Russia’s entire economy. The U.S. economy is also far more diverse and resilient.
Equally important, the United States hasn’t lost any key allies over the past seven years and its relations with a number of countries (e.g., India, Vietnam, etc.) have improved significantly. Russia and China are cooperating a bit more but are hardly close allies while the Ukraine crisis has damaged relations with Europe significantly and gotten Russia suspended from the G-8. The United States just signed a massive trade deal with an array of Asian partners, whereas Putin’s efforts to build a “Eurasian Economic Union .. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/armenia/2014-12-26/eurasian-disunion ” have been mostly stillborn .. http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/16858/putin-s-eurasian-union-doomed-to-irrelevance-by-china-s-silk-road . And the fact that Putin felt compelled to bail out the Assad regime in Syria tells us that its overall position in the Middle East is tenuous.
By contrast, and despite some recent frictions, the United States still has close ties with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, and the UAE, and its acrimonious relationship with long-time adversary Iran is somewhat better. Bottom line: You’d much rather be playing America’s hand, and any fair-minded assessment has to give Obama and his team some grudging credit for continuing to build useful relationships abroad and for avoiding the costly quagmires that George W. Bush and the neocons plunged into with panicky and ignorant abandon.
-- And yet, it is hard to escape the impression that Putin has been playing his weak hand better than Obama has played his strong one. --
And yet, it is hard to escape the impression that Putin has been playing his weak hand better than Obama has played his strong one. These perceptions arise in part because Obama inherited several foreign-policy debacles, and it’s hard to abandon a bunch of failed projects without being accused of retreating. Obama’s main mistake was not going far enough to liquidate the unsound positions bequeathed by his predecessor: He should have gotten out of Afghanistan faster and never done regime change in Libya at all. By contrast, Putin looks successful at first glance because Russia is playing a more active role than it did back when it was largely prostrate. Given where Russia was in 1995 or even 2000, there was nowhere to go but up.
But Putin has also done one thing right: He has pursued simple objectives that were fairly easy to achieve and that played to Russia’s modest strengths. In Ukraine, he had one overriding goal: to prevent that country from moving closer to the EU, eventually becoming a full member, and then joining NATO. He wasn’t interested in trying to reincorporate all of Ukraine or turn it into a clone of Russia, and the “frozen conflict” that now exists there is sufficient to achieve his core goal. This essentially negative objective was not that hard to accomplish because Ukraine was corrupt, internally divided, and right next door to Russia. These features made it easy for Putin to use a modest degree of force and hard for anyone else to respond without starting a cycle of escalation they could not win.
Putin’s goals in Syria are equally simple, realistic, and aligned with Russia’s limited means. He wants to preserve the Assad regime as a meaningful political entity so that it remains an avenue of Russian influence and a part of any future political settlement. He’s not trying to conquer Syria, restore the Alawites to full control over the entire country, defeat the Islamic State, or eliminate all Iranian influence. And he’s certainly not pursuing some sort of quixotic dream of building democracy there. A limited deployment of Russian airpower and a handful of “volunteers” may suffice to keep Assad from being defeated, especially if the United States and others eventually adopt a more realistic approach to the conflict as well.
By contrast, U.S. goals toward both of these conflicts have been a combination of wishful thinking and strategic contradictions. In Ukraine, a familiar alliance of neocon fantasists (e.g., Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland) and liberal internationalists convinced themselves that the EU Accession Agreement was a purely benign act whose virtues and alleged neutrality no one could possibly misconstrue. As a result, they were completely blindsided when Moscow kept using the realpolitik playbook and saw the whole matter very differently. (There was an element of hypocrisy and blindness here, too; Russia was simply acting the same way the United States has long acted when dealing with the Western Hemisphere, but somehow U.S. officials managed to ignore the clear warnings that Moscow had given.) Moreover, the core Western objective — creating a well-functioning democratic Ukrainian state — was a laudable but hugely demanding task from the very beginning, whereas Putin’s far more limited goal — keeping Ukraine out of NATO — was comparatively easy.
Needless to say, U.S. policy in Syria has been even more muddled. Since the uprising first began, Washington has been vainly trying to achieve a series of difficult and incompatible goals. It says, “Assad must go,” but it doesn’t want any jihadi groups (i.e., the only people who are really fighting Assad) to replace him. It wants to “degrade and destroy ISIS,” but it also wants to make sure anti-Islamic State groups like al-Nusra Front don’t succeed. It is relying on Kurdish fighters to help deal with the Islamic State, but it wants Turkey to help, too, and Turkey opposes any steps that might stoke the fires of Kurdish nationalism. So the United States has been searching in vain for “politically correct” Syrian rebels — those ever-elusive “moderates” — and it has yet to find more than a handful. And apart from wanting Assad gone, the long-term U.S. vision for Syria’s future was never clear. Given all this muddled direction, is it any wonder Putin’s actions look bold and decisive while Obama’s seem confused?
This difference is partly structural: Because Russia is much weaker than the United States (and destined to grow even weaker over time), it has to play its remaining cards carefully and pursue only vital objectives that are achievable at modest cost. The United States has vastly more resources to throw at global problems, and its favorable geopolitical position allows it to avoid most of the repercussions of its mistakes. Add to that the tendency of both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists to believe that spreading the gospel of “freedom” around the world is necessary, easy to do, and won’t generate unintended consequences or serious resistance, and you have a recipe for an overly ambitious yet under-resourced set of policy initiatives. Needless to say, this is the perfect recipe for recurring failure.
In other words, Putin looks more successful because his goals are commensurate with his limited resources. He likes to complain about American hegemony, but you don’t hear him making highfalutin speeches about how it is Russia’s destiny to exert “leadership” over the entire planet. America’s power and core geographic security allow its leaders to set ambitious goals, but actually achieving most of them isn’t essential to U.S. security or prosperity. Sometimes U.S. diplomacy succeeds in spite of ourselves (e.g., the Iran nuclear deal, TPP, etc.), but often it drags us into conflicts and complications that we can neither win nor walk away from.
So who’s the better strategist? On one side, Obama does have an underlying sense of realism and understands that U.S. interests in many places are limited. He also grasps that our capacity to dictate outcomes is equally constrained, especially when it involves complicated matters of social engineering in divided societies very different from our own. In other words: Nation-building is expensive, goddamn hard, and for the most part unnecessary. But he has to lead a foreign-policy establishment that is addicted to “global leadership” — if only to keep giving itself something to do — and he faces an opposition party that derides any form of “inaction,” even when its proposed alternatives are “mumbo-jumbo .. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/vladimir-putin-quagmire-syria-214389 .”
Putin, by contrast, has done a better job of matching his goals to the resources he has available, which is one of the hallmarks of a good strategist. His failing is that it’s all short-term and essentially defensive; he is fighting a series of rearguard actions designed to prevent Russia’s global position from deteriorating further, instead of pursuing a program that might enhance Russia’s power and status over the longer term.
So let’s call it a tie. The real losers, alas, are the unfortunate people in Ukraine, Syria, and several other places.
U.S. launches long-awaited European missile defense shield
By Ryan Browne, CNN Updated 2246 GMT (0646 HKT) May 12, 2016
VIDEO
Story highlights
The defensive missile system has been criticized strongly by Russia
The system is to be turned over to NATO command
(CNN)The U.S. launched a new ground-based missile defense system in Romania Thursday, sparking fresh tensions with Russia, which quickly blasted the system as a threat to its security.
The system, to be operated by NATO, is getting up and running nearly a decade after the U.S. first announced plans to do so, only to encounter pushback from Russia. The U.S. has long insisted that the shield is directed against rogue states like Iran and not intended to target Moscow's missiles, but Russian officials have slammed the move as an "attempt to destroy the strategic balance" in Europe.
"The United States' Aegis ashore system is declared certified for operations," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday at the ceremony launching the system.
"Missile defense is for defense," he added. "It does not undermine or weaken Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent."
Russia has described the U.S. anti-missile shield in Europe as a "threat" and says it is taking "protective measures" to guard against it, the country's state news agency TASS reported.
President Barack Obama scrapped the George W. Bush administration's planned bilateral deployment of a different system to Poland and the Czech Republic and has instead pursued a NATO-centric approach using alternate technology.
The system is to be turned over to NATO command and will be housed at a U.S. naval support facility in Deveselu, Romania, the site of a Romanian military base. Construction will begin on an additional anti-missile platform in Poland on Friday.
The Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System unveiled Thursday is capable of firing SM-3 defensive missiles that can "defeat incoming short and medium range enemy missiles," according to Lt. Shawn Eklund, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy.
Eklund told CNN that the facility will be manned by approximately 130 U.S. sailors. The inaugural ceremony for the new system will be attended by top U.S. and NATO military officials.
The Romania installation is the first land-based defensive missile launcher in Europe and will join other elements of the NATO defensive shield, including a command-and-control center at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, a radar installation in Turkey and four ships capable of identifying enemy missiles and firing their own SM-3s based in Rota, Spain.
The U.S. and NATO have continually stressed that the system is intended to defend Europe from Iran and its expanding arsenal. Tehran has continued to test-fire ballistic missiles following the internationally negotiated deal to limit its nuclear program.
But Russia has dismissed the justification.
"From the very outset we kept saying that in the opinion of our experts the deployment of an anti-missile defense poses a threat to Russia," Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the Tass News Agency. "The question is not whether measures will be taken or not; measures are being taken to maintain Russia's security at the necessary level."
Russia believes the missile defense system breaches a 1987 agreement it signed with the U.S.
In October, at a meeting of the meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Russia, Russian President Vladimir accused .. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50548 .. the U.S. of "lying" about a "hypothetical Iranian threat, which never existed" and called the system "an attempt to destroy the strategic balance."
At a Wednesday press conference in Romania, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Frank Rose pushed back on Putin's perspective.
"Russia has repeatedly raised concerns that U.S. and NATO missile defenses are directed against Russia and represent a threat to its strategic nuclear deterrent," he said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."
He added that the "U.S. and NATO missile defense systems are directed against ballistic missile threats outside the Euro-Atlantic area. NATO and the United States have explained this to Russia many times over the years."
Heather Conley, the director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told CNN that Russia has previously suggested that it could retaliate for the missile defense system by stationing S-300 surface-to-air missile systems in Crimea and Kaliningrad, its European enclave located between Poland and Lithuania.
Obama had previously drawn criticism .. http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/17/missile.defense.shield/index.html?eref=onion#cnnSTCText .. from politicians in the U.S. and Europe for canceling the Bush-era plan to station land-based interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic in 2009. Obama was further criticized for announcing the change on the day of the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland during World War II.
Conley said that announcement would "go down in the history of poorly timed announcements."
Obama's posture made the Poles and Czechs "very concerned" that the entire missile defense project would be abandoned by his administration, according to Conley.
But, she said, "What they wound up getting with the current system was more robust than they had anticipated."
Conley said that the Obama administration might have switched gears on the Bush plan in part because it may have been trying to "buy time in order to make the case" to Russia that the new system was not directed against them.
She referred to that period as "the heady days of the 'Russian Reset' and New START treaty," an attempt by the newly inaugurated Obama to repair relations with Russia and sign a new arms reduction treaty -- and signal that the missile defense shield wasn't a threat.
But she added, "Despite an incredible amount of consultations with Russia, the Russians never bought the argument that the system was not directed at them."
Tensions between the U.S. and Russia have increased in recent years following the Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and intervention in Eastern Ukraine.
In recent months, Russian military aircraft have flown within 50 feet of U.S. planes and ships, actions which Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, said had "the potential to unnecessarily escalate tensions between the two countries."
grrrr .. on c/p that CNN article didn't give me all the paragraph separations after the first one .. ooi, has anyone any idea why that happens .. i could think it's designed to discourage reproduction in toto, but surely not, eh .. lol ..must be some intricate tech answer????
Aside: LOL, HURRAY! AT 2pm in Sydney we're on a 10h countdown to 'silly' season being done for another calendar year .. as every hour, every minute, every micro-mini second is a new year so, as i told a health insurance broker about 2h ago i call the change of year time a new calendar year .. so it's HNCY from me .. lol .. when it's your turn .. grin .. you guys will never beat us there .. :)
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