Saturday, February 12, 2022

War News

 

Pine forest near Klavdievo, Borodianka Raion, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Aymayna Khikari via Wikimedia Commons.


Glenn's finally convinced me: if he thinks it's worth giving his time to trying to prove that the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine is justified, then there's really not going to be an invasion. If only because, whatever you say about Vladimir Putin, you know he's not as dumb as Glenn.

No, the US did not invade Iraq "for no reasons whatever". It invaded Iraq because George W. Bush, a featherheaded preppie who was less interested in foreign countries than in being a cosplay cowboy, turned over US national security policy to Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, John Bolton, and other signers of the January 1998 Project for a New American Century letter to President Bill Clinton demanding that the United States overthrow the Iraqi government. 

And, given the power to do it three years later, they went ahead and did it, by fabricating evidence, bribing allies, intimidating all the Democratic senators thinking about running for the presidency in 2004 into acquiescence, and giving George W. Bush an opportunity to be a cosplay flying ace, because they believed that it would contribute to their aim "that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces." It was a garbage reason, and may have been hiding other reasons, financial or political, but it was a long-term, diligently pursued plan. They openly called it a "project".

The Russian Federation, too, may have reasons for invading Ukraine. I don't count the "provocations" Greenwald alludes to, of which the most recent real one goes back to 18 years ago, when NATO admitted Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia states to the alliance, to which Putin replied with a tit-for-tat adventure in the tiny Georgian enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia sympathizers claim that the 2014 Russian incursions into Crimea and Donbas were somehow responses to NATO provocations, with the theory that popular rage at Yanukovych's massive corruption and his backtracking on promises to join the EU weren't enough to explain Yanukovych's overthrow and must have been orchestrated by secret maneuvers from the West, but that's just stupid; Putin knew exactly who to blame, which is why he turned to punishing not NATO but Ukraine, with the seizure of actually valuable territory (the mining region of the east, and the crucial Black Sea naval facilities in the port of Sevastopol, which Russia happened to really want control over in any case).

The most established Putinian thread of reasons to outright conquer Ukraine is his nostalgia for the lost Russian greatness of the period from 1812 or so to 1991, of the  post-Napoleonic empire and the USSR, when Russia was as much a Great Power as the US is now, his desire to be effectively what they used to call "Tsar of all the Russias" (Great Russia, White Russia or Belarus, and Little Russia or Ukraine). I don't think I doubt at all that he feels that way, but when you look at his efforts to restore that, they don't seem to be quite commensurate with the grandeur of the ambition. In fact, what they have in common is that they're all kind of cheap.

This is the burden of a piece by the political scientist Harun Yilmaz, published in Aljazeera on Wednesday and featured on NPR this morning, that all Russia's imperial adventures in the Putin period have been taken on with a gimlet eye on their cost-effectiveness. In Georgia in 2008, for instance,

the Russian forces did not really face a formidable adversary and were able to easily defeat the Georgian forces in South Ossetia in days. The Russian troops then crossed into Georgia proper, ransacked the city of Gori and halted. Once the limited goal of pushing back Georgian forces from South Ossetia and Abkhazia was achieved, Moscow was open to European mediation.

The Russian troops could have completely cut Georgia in two, gained control of the precious transit oil and gas pipelines from Azerbaijan to Turkey, and paralysed the economy and political system. All these gains would have been valuable bargaining chips to force the Georgian government to recognise the independence of the separatist regions. Yet, the regional and global costs of these advancements would have been too high for Russia, so it stopped at a limited military operation.

The same goes for Putin's adoption of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a client; Russia didn't contribute much in the way of forces or hardware, and kept negotiating with stakeholders like the US, Israel, and Turkey, to keep its costs down. And also for Ukraine, at least to date; the seizure of Crimea was nearly bloodless, accomplished more by a "referendum" than military action, while when the action in Donbas began killing too many Russian soldiers, they were generally withdrawn, leaving the situation in a stalemate under the control of local militias like those in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

For that matter, Belarus is maintained as a client state with a murderous dictator who has to bear most of the costs himself, as are the "Stans" of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, and until recently (following the 2018 revolution and institutions of a very fragile democracy) Armenia. Even in undisputedly Russian territory in Chechnya, following then–vice president Putin's war of 1999-2000, on-the-ground power was gradually turned over from ethnic-Russian to Chechen fighters and a warlord dictator, Ramzan Kadyrov. 

In each case, the Russian government has had a clear understanding of the risks on the ground. It has made a careful cost-benefit analysis and established clear and limited goals for the use of hard power. The cost-effective policy is a conscious choice because the Russian decision-makers know well that they do not have the means to maintain a large-scale war.

Ergo, no large-scale war is being planned in Ukraine. It would cost much more than Putin has shown himself willing to spend in his 22 years of ruling Russia, and achieve too little. In one of the weirdest developments, there are now really loud protests inside the Russian military establishment against Putin's apparent abandonment of the cost-effectiveness principle, as Fred Kaplan reports at Slate:

The most eyebrow-raising of these dissents is an open letter by retired Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov posted on the website of the All-Russian Officers’ Assembly, which he chairs. In it, he rejects Putin’s claim that NATO poses a threat to Russia’s vital interests, warns that invading Ukraine “will forever make Russians and Ukrainians mortal enemies,” and calls on Putin to step down. He concludes, “We, Russia’s officers, demand that the President of the Russian Federation reject the criminal policy of provoking a war in which Russia would find itself alone against the united forces of the West.”

What could achieve a great deal at little expense, in contrast, is threatening to invade Ukraine, as a bargaining tool to achieve the things he wants from NATO. Indeed, according to Yilmaz, something like this is happening:

And this strategy seems to be working. Since 1991, this is the first time the West has engaged seriously with Russia to discuss European security.

Russian officials undoubtedly understand that Ukraine will not enter NATO, as there is no enthusiasm for it within the military organisation right now. What the Kremlin worries about is whether the US will deploy missiles or missile defence elements on Ukrainian soil.

But to be effective, the threat had to be convincing—so convincing as to persuade Col. Gen. Ivashov, not to mention the security apparatuses of the UK and US. If the NATO leadership thought Putin was bluffing, they wouldn't negotiate seriously, just as in the past. (It didn't wholly convince France, Germany or the Kyiv government.) This is why the disinformation US officials are picking up and leaking, which I really wish they would try not to do, is getting so elaborate, like today's

U.S. intelligence officials had initially thought Mr. Putin would wait until the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing later this month before deciding whether to go ahead with an offensive, to avoid antagonizing President Xi Jinping of China, a critical ally. In recent days, however, new intelligence and further Russian troop deployments prompted a change in their assessment. American officials said it was still unclear whether Mr. Putin had made a decision to invade.

But all in all, I'm genuinely convinced now that it will be OK. I know there's an August 2014 feeling going around at the moment, an awareness of how easy it is to blunder into a war you didn't intend, but the situation isn't at all like that. Biden, as in the departure from Afghanistan, is also not bluffing, he cannot be tricked into a war, and the alliance is really holding together not in spite of the diversity of views but because of them—flexibility is strength. Russia will get something it genuinely needs, but Putin won't break up NATO, and Ukraine will survive.

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