U.S. policy misfires in dealing with Russia

We misunderstood him

Since we're facing a possible Armageddon event flowing from the Ukraine war in the coming months, this topic is timely. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a detailed analysis of US-Russia relations dating back to the start of the cold war. That is when mistakes started to be made. The analysis includes these observations and arguments:

Getting Russia right—assessing its capabilities and intentions, the long-term drivers of its policy and threat perceptions, as well as its accomplishments—is essential because the alternative of misreading them is a recipe for wasted resources, distorted national priorities, and increased risk of confrontation.

A critical examination of U.S. policy misfires in dealing with Russia and its intentions and capabilities over the past several decades is long overdue. Three factors largely account for this problem. All of them continue to affect contemporary policymakers’ approach to a deeply troubled relationship with Moscow. By unpacking the analytical assumptions that underlie these misconceptions, President Joe Biden’s administration and other important policy players will be better equipped to ensure that U.S. policy going forward is grounded in the most realistic understanding of the challenge that Russia poses and the right kinds of tools that the United States should use to contend with it.

The first factor is the lingering euphoria of the post–Cold War period. For many Western observers, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the implosion of Russian power demonstrated the permanent superiority of the United States. The perception that Russia’s decline was so deep and irreversible that it would no longer be able to resist Western initiatives made it difficult to accept Moscow’s pushback against Western policies. This was a particular problem when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pursued several rounds of enlargement in the 1990s and early 2000s under U.S. leadership. U.S. leaders ignored Russia’s objections and underestimated the lengths to which Russian counterparts were prepared to go to secure the homeland against perceived threats.

Second, American policymakers and experts have long paid too little attention to the drivers of Russia’s external behavior. Russian threat perceptions are part of an inheritance heavily shaped by geography and a history of troubled relations with other major European powers. They are compounded by the trauma of the loss of its empire, the lingering ideology of greatness, and a sense of entitlement based on its sacrifice in World War II. President Vladimir Putin stokes all of them for domestic political gain.

Third, U.S. policymakers have not fully internalized the lessons of the two biggest crises of the Cold War—the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Euromissile crisis of the early 1980s. In both cases, the Soviet Union went to great lengths to counter what its leaders perceived was a unilateral U.S. threat to the Soviet homeland that could not be tolerated. In 1962 they almost triggered a nuclear war. In 1987, they agreed to eliminate an entire class of intermediate-range nuclear weapons to secure the homeland from U.S. missiles. In both situations, U.S. missiles deployed in Europe would deny the Kremlin the advantage of strategic depth and decision time in a crisis. The lessons of those crises were ignored as anachronisms when NATO embarked on its eastward expansion on the assumption that it would no longer need to worry about, let alone maintain the necessary capabilities for the territorial defense mission. After all, Russia was permanently weakened. When Russia proved otherwise, the alliance was caught by surprise.

In another surprise for the United States and its allies, Russian foreign policy has become increasingly assertive, adversarial, and ambitious over the past decade. In the post-Soviet space, the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Africa, Russia has deployed a diverse tool kit rich in hard, soft, and gray zone power instruments to assert itself as a global power. Russian foreign policy agility and even daring have repeatedly caught the West by surprise and sparked fears of its return as a major threat to Western interests. In reality, Russian gains and tools used to accomplish Moscow’s objectives have not been all that impressive. But Russia has made up for it by capitalizing on mistakes made by the United States and its allies or moving into power vacuums left by them.

The continued tendency to dismiss Russia as a “has been” or declining power whose bark will always be worse than its bite can lead to the United States overextending itself, making unrealistic commitments, and risking a dangerous escalation with the one country that is still its nuclear peer competitor. The push to expand NATO without taking into account the possibility of Russia reemerging as a major military power was an example of such thinking, which is to be avoided in the future.

At the same time, the scope and scale of the threat that Russia’s global activism poses to U.S. interests will depend largely on how Washington defines those interests in regions where Russia has expanded its footprint over the past decade. Absent a sober assessment of Russia’s gains and tools for power projection, the United States will position itself to needlessly chase after the specter of Russian expansionism in distant corners of the world where major U.S. interests are not at stake. 

This paper makes four central arguments: 

• First, in proceeding with NATO enlargement in the 1990s and early 2000s under U.S. leadership, the alliance ignored key lessons of the Cold War and the long-term drivers of Russian policy—namely, threat perceptions and the lengths to which its leaders were prepared to go to secure the homeland. 

• Second, outside Europe, which is the principal theater of East-West confrontation, Russia’s gains have been considerably less significant than commonly portrayed. 

• Third, while Russia’s global activism is a challenge to U.S. interests, the scale of that challenge is determined largely by how narrowly or expansively the United States defines its interests in those regions where Russia has expanded its footprint over the past decade. 

• Fourth, for the foreseeable future Russia will remain a top tier challenge on the national security agenda of the United States and must be dealt with by the president and his most senior national security officials.

Misconstruing Russian motivations and capabilities is especially dangerous when the “correlation of forces” on the ground favors Russia rather than the United States. The U.S.-led effort to extend NATO membership invitations to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 did not take into account either the strength of Russia’s opposition to this or its capabilities for preventing the two countries from joining the alliance. The result has been a situation in which the United States has overpromised and demonstrated its inability to deliver on the pledge for well over a decade.

It is an open question as to whether the Biden administration is up to the job of competence in dealing with Russia. Just as open are questions of whether it can also deal competently with China, the environment, insane fiscal policy, erosion of the rule of law and other important issues at the same time. 

One of the few things that is fairly certain in politics is this: If Trump had been re-elected, none of those questions would be open, especially questions about the environment, China and the collapse of the rule of law. The US and its interests would be significantly worse off on all of those matters.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this analysis to my attention.