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Andrew A. MichtaCountering Putin’s PushRussia’s challenge to the West has been building for a
long time, and has reached a crescendo with the crisis in Ukraine. The window
is closing, but there is still time to act and tip the balance. Geopolitics has returned to the periphery of the Old
World with a vengeance, upending Brussels’ well-scrubbed public agendas.
Clearly, the depth of the Ukrainian crisis has caught politicians and analysts
unawares, for not long ago, during the storied Vilnius Summit of the EU Eastern
Partnership, all seemed on track for the EU to sign an association agreement
with Ukraine. Though some in the West doubted the Ukrainian government’s
sincerity prior to Vilnius, nobody in power seemed to give a second thought to
the likely scope of Russian pressure and the decisiveness of the Ukraine
government’s pro-Russian shift. Europe’s politicians were also not prepared for
the public outcry in Maidan square in Kiev after President Yanukovych scuttled
the EU agreement, in the process inking a $15 billion dollar deal with Moscow. And there are deeper issues at stake than the fate of
Ukraine alone. Russia has been coming back into NATO’s strategic field
for several years now, determined to reassert its ability to shape the
post-Soviet sphere. The crisis in Ukraine is a defining moment for the
future of Eastern Europe, and indirectly for NATO’s Nordic/Baltic/Central
European periphery. It does not fit into the mold of the “color
revolutions,” nor will its greatest impact be whether it succeeds in making
Ukraine’s shaky democracy gel. At its core, Ukraine is a Russian story—a geopolitical
test of Moscow’s ability to shape its immediate security environment at will by
resorting directly to economic and political pressure, with threats and bribes
in full view of the United States and Europe. It has been Vladimir
Putin’s gamble to link the outcome in Ukraine to Russia’s willingness to
cooperate with the United States on nuclear arms control, Iran, or Syria so as
to restore the traditional pattern of Russian leverage in its relations with
the West. Simply put, today in Ukraine Russia has laid out its sphere of
influence openly and unapologetically, demanding that “external meddling” and
support for the opposition cease immediately. In that sense Ukraine is a
transformative moment, whose outcome will impact many trouble spots around the
globe, and will reset—this time for real—the tenor of Russia’s relations with
the United States. Nobody can safely predict how the Ukrainian drama will
play itself out. The country has been caught in a vortex of unfolding
change in Europe against the backdrop of a global power shift. The last
five years have witnessed a decline in U.S. influence in key regions of the
globe, most poignantly in Asia Pacific, where U.S. allies have been directly
challenged by the geostrategic and military assertiveness of China. In
the Middle East, the original policy of the Obama Administration, manifest in
the President’s 2009 Cairo speech, has yielded to increasingly ad hoc crisis
management efforts, as America’s ability to shape the environment there has
been constrained by its withdrawal from Iraq and its policy gyrations towards
Egypt. America’s failed “reset” with Moscow and bungled
response to Syria have persuaded the Kremlin that the United States has become
a leveraged power, looking to reduce its commitments without a larger strategic
design. In Russia the so-called “pivot” to Asia has been interpreted as
another symptom of U.S. retrenchment, and in Central Europe as a portent of
America’s disengagement. Responding to internal pressure in 2010, NATO
drafted the New Strategic Context and put in place contingency planning for the
defense of the region—a positive decision by the Obama Administration. However,
the limited nature of America’s involvement in recent Steadfast Jazz exercises
in Poland, with only 250 U.S. Army troops participating, has sent an ambiguous
political message about its longer-term commitment. Russia, for its part, has thrown its support behind
the Eurasian Union project, and showed little interest in cooperating with the
West. A Eurasian Union that includes Ukraine, should Moscow succeed in
forcing it in, would enhance Russia’s position vis-à-vis the European
Union, and serve as a hedge against China. The security component of
Putin’s policy design is the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) at present with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. While some might think this is opportunism on Putin’s
part—and one should never undermine Russia’s ability to gauge power balances at
the most basic level and grasp an advantage—the realignment underway over
Ukraine is by design rather than by accident. In effect since 2007 Russia
has firmly articulated what could be called a “privileged interest” in the
Caucasus, similarly asserting its right to shape the near abroad in the
European post-Soviet area. In a speech he gave in Munich that year
Vladimir Putin put the West on notice that Russia would confront it directly on
NATO enlargement and missile defense. Moscow would no longer cooperate
with the West outside narrowly defined transactional relations where Russia’s
interest was clear, such as in counterterrorism intelligence sharing. The Russian-Georgian war of 2008 should have served as
a wakeup call for the United States and Europe that Russia was determined to
press its claim with military force if needed. Western response has been
tepid at best since then. It looked on as Russia shut off Ukraine’s gas supply
in 2009, and it stayed mum during the Zapad/Ladoga joint anti-NATO exercises in
2009, and then again in 2013. Most recently, the West failed to respond when
Moscow used its economic leverage to bring Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine to
heel, in blatant contravention of WTO rules. And then there is the case of
Russia’s testing a new ground-launched cruise missile, in violation of the 1987
medium-range ballistic missiles treaty with the United States: still no
official protest from the White House. Russia’s room to maneuver politically in Ukraine and
elsewhere in the post-Soviet “near abroad” has been aided by shifts in defense
spending that are rapidly reordering the geostrategic landscape both in Asia
and in Europe, expanding Russia’s power to shape its security environment. In
Asia, China’s defense budget rose 10.7 percent, officially up to $114 billion
for the year, with a rate of growth averaging 9.7% between 2003 and 2012,
though Defense Department estimates put it at close to twice the official
figure. Russia has firmly taken the third spot after the United States and
China, with a 16% defense spending increase in 2012 and a 26% increase in
2013. The current ten-year $700 billion military modernization program
Russia has put in place, taken in the context of the de facto demilitarization
of Europe, has already shifted the balance of power along NATO’s
periphery. Ukraine is caught in that vortex. The window for the West to act in Ukraine is closing,
but there is still time. Whatever plan is chosen will require the clear
engagement of the United States in close cooperation with its key allies in
Europe. This means a visit by the Secretary of State to Kiev to engage at
the senior level with the Ukrainian government, and to send a message that
alternatives are available, if conditional, to pave the way for early
elections. The West needs
to offer Ukraine a program of direct economic assistance, not unlike the
Marshall Plan after World War II. Such a Program for Ukraine would offer
the Ukrainians assistance in exchange for conditionality, but give hope and
present a clear, if for now still remote, path to membership in the European
Union. Most importantly, a workable response would require assurances
from the current government and Ukraine’s president of an orderly transition,
with guaranteed safeguards in exchange for accepting early monitored elections. At one level Ukraine is most obviously and intensely
about the future of 46 million people who are fed up with the corruption and
the pro-Russian drift of the regime. At another it is about the security of the
Nordic/Baltic/Central European region, which is fast being transformed into
NATO’s new frontier. And yet at another level it is about a resurgent
Russia’s return to great power politics, a nation bent on re-asserting its
claims to the post-Soviet “near abroad,” notwithstanding the problems it faces
at home. There is a lesson here both for the United States and
Europe. Despite their best efforts to look away it is only a matter of
time before the changing northeastern frontier of Europe will force itself into
NATO’s debate on strategy. Today the current sloshing under the post-Cold
War power balance bears the name of Ukraine; a year ago it was called Belarus;
next time it may be Georgia. Perhaps it is ironic that today’s post-modern
Europe is getting a lesson in geopolitics. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky:
You may not be interested in Russia, but Russia is interested in you. February 5,
2014 http://www.the-american-interest.com/
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