A Syrian Escalation Ladder?

Amidst the long run-up to last week's somewhat anti-climactic missile strikes against Syria, a few folks raised a concerning specter: could a US bombing campaign lead American into a wider war?

For all the talk of a "new Cold War" between the US and Russia, we're nowhere near that point. The Syria case illustrates this nicely, and helps understand why Syria is unlikely to be the flashpoint for World War III.

First, even with the end of the Cold War in 1991 the United States and Russia remain strategic nuclear-capable states, meaning that each possesses the capability to threaten the existence of the other as a functioning society, and indeed to threaten life on the planet. Strategic nuclear arsenals have declined from their peak in the early 1980s, but both sides retain plenty of capacity to effectively annihilate the other.

What has changed since the Cold War is that the US and Russia no longer seek to actively destroy or overthrow the other. Putin enjoys messing with the West, but largely because he wants to create some breathing space within what he regards as Russia's sphere of influence so he can do what he wants. Today's Russia, unlike Stalin's USSR, has no grand ideology for taking over the world. Putin may be a local megalomaniac, but a global megalomaniac he is not.

Because of this shift, the US is no longer nearly as concerned as we once were that Moscow could try to destroy us at any moment. This used to be a real, if debated, concern, but there is no equivalent to the Committee on the Present Danger today - no more talk of Nuclear Vulnerability Windows and Strategic First Strike capabilities and the other sorts of things we used to worry about.

All of this is to say that, compared to the 1970s and early 1980s, the global superpower stakes are a LOT lower. If anybody wants to replace the US as global hegemon, it's China, and they seem content to focus on economics as a tool for doing so. They also have the good sense to stay the heck out of Syria, and indeed the Middle East as a whole.

So what does all of this mean for the US involvement in Syria? In the short term, we got through the strikes over the weekend without any obvious escalation. Trump, despite his proclaimed aversion to telling people what he's going to do, had telegraphed the attack for a week, so everyone had time to prepare. The US military also had plenty of opportunity to warn the Russians, who do have personnel and equipment on the ground in Syria. That warning was undoubtedly passed on to the Syrian regime, possibly lessening the impact of the strikes, but the whole thing was mostly symbolic anyway.

The fact that the US military can warn the Russian military directly in a theater of operations shows how far the two sides have gone to avoid direct confrontation, which neither of them wants. Syria isn't important enough to either side to consider risking a broader crisis, and unlike the Cold War era there's no "domino theory" today that would link a conflict in a minor regional state to an existential threat to the US.

There are only two things the US can do in Syria that could provoke a significant Russian military response. The first is to kill actual Russian soldiers (not mercenaries, whom all sides agree are on their own - the whole point of those forces, on both sides, is plausible deniability). If the US were to target a Russian facility and kill uniformed Russian forces, particularly in significant numbers, Russia would almost certainly feel compelled to respond in some way. Ongoing communication between US and Russian commanders in the area is a way to keep this from happening by accident, which so far has worked well.

The other thing that could produce a significant Russian reaction would be to directly threaten the survival of the Assad regime. Were to US to launch a truly massive bombing campaign, possibly combined with ground forces, that threatened to overthrow Assad and replace him with a more pro-Western alternative, we would be forcing Russia to make a choice: risk war with the US in order to protect their ally, or abandon their alliance and retreat. That's a difficult choice, given all that Russia has invested in the Syrian regime.

Luckily, it's a choice that Russia will almost certainly never have to make. Current US foreign policy, taken collectively, doesn't care nearly enough about Syria to try to alter the outcome of the Syrian civil war. Trump himself dislikes the whole thing and, now that ISIS is mostly defeated, wants to get the heck out. Others in the administration may have other views, but together they haven't been able to come up with a coherent Syria policy. In the absence of consensus on Syria, and given Trump's indifference to its future, it is extremely unlikely that the US will do anything that might push the situation towards a Russian response.

So much, then, for starting World War III. The other escalation axis people have been watching is Israel-Iran, but this too probably isn't going anywhere. Iran's support for Syria, while significant, is mostly through weapons and money, not Iranian forces on the ground. Iran doesn't like it when Israel bombs things in Syria, but there's not much the Iranians can do about it. Iran lacks a counter-deterrent to Israel's nuclear arsenal, and it lacks any other significant capacity to strike Israel except through terrorist proxies. As many scholars in my field have pointed out, proximity is a major factor in the likelihood of war, and Israel and Iran are not near each other.

Syria is a good example of how the most powerful state in the system doesn't always get its way. In this case that's because the US, despite its significant military advantages over all competitors, doesn't care as much as others do about the outcome. The American body politic is extremely unwilling to suffer any serious costs over Syria - Trump may be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose voters but if he gets a couple thousand Americans killed fighting in Syria he may see his support cut in half. There's no agreement in Washington among foreign policy elites (of any party) as to what to do either. And so we dither and muddle along, while those with clearer goals and greater commitment forge ahead.

This is unlikely to change any time soon, and the end result is likely Assad remaining in charge of a significantly damaged Syria. On the way to that outcome, we can at least rest assured that this war is unlikely to spiral outward into a wider one.

Syria and Deterrence: A Depressing Primer

So here we are again. The Syrian regime has once again used chemical weapons against civilians, and the US is again faced with the decision of what to do about it. Same old, same old.

First, to give the current administration its due: complaints about the deal reached during the Obama administration to supposedly rid Syria of its chemical weapons are legit. That deal obviously didn't work, and I suspect that most of those involved in negotiating it at the time knew it wouldn't. Without verifiability and serious Russian backing, there was no way Syria would disarm. There was obviously no penalty for Assad to cheat, and so he cheated.

That said, whining about the past isn't a foreign policy. Trump owns this problem now, just as he owned it a year ago. Last year, faced with the same situation, he lambasted Obama's foreign policy and then proceeded to lob a few missiles at Syria. He declared victory and called it a day.

And here we are again.

To be clear, there are indications from those who know the situation that this recent attack is not an isolated incident. Syria has been using chemicals a lot. It just doesn't make the news very often, probably because most of the country is unreachable by outside media - it's just too dangerous, and Assad's forces aren't interested in press coverage of their war.

If this is the case, then the Trump administration's attempts to deter further chemical weapons use by the Assad government have failed. That certainly seems to be the case with this latest attack, even if we accept former Ambassador Ford's contention that this incident is unrelated to Trump's comment last week that he wants to get out of Syria.

The failure of US deterrence efforts was easy to foresee. Deterrence is remarkably straightforward, and rests on imposing costs significant enough to override all other concerns (cognitive or affective). For all that I tend to see emotion as the primary motivating factor much of the time, there are times when facts impose their will on the situation.

The basic deterrence equation is simple. I declare the behavior that I want my opponent to not do. In this case, the US government wants Syria to not use chemical weapons. This had been a fairly robust international norm in general, but we can see that norms alone don't influence Syrian behavior.

Once I've made it clear what I don't want you to do, I then issue a threat: if you do that thing, I will inflict punishment on you. That punishment has to have at least two characteristics to work:

1) It has to be sufficiently severe that it overshadows the gains you might get from doing the thing I want you not to do.

2) You have to believe that I will actually carry out the threat - that punishment is certain if you cross the line.

The Trump administration's deterrence efforts have failed on both counts. Previous rounds of military strikes have been relatively mild, a small price to pay if Assad thinks that chemical weapons use will help him win his long-running civil war. And we haven't been consistent in applying those punishments. If the Syrian regime thinks there's a chance it won't get punished at all (based on past experience), that increases the chances they'll cross the line again.

At this point, a year into the Trump Presidency, he's dug himself a pretty serious hole in terms of deterring Assad. The only way to get out of that hole would be to reestablish both of the criteria above, swiftly and decisively and above all consistently over time.

In practice, this would mean a sustained campaign of airstrikes against a wide range of Syrian targets, sufficient in both quantity and importance that they threaten Syria's increasingly-certain victory in its internal war. Assad is willing to trade punishment in exchange for victory - in order for a punishment to be strong enough (condition 1), it needs to put that victory in doubt. And in order for him to change his belief that he can just wait it out (condition 2), such strikes would have to be carried out over a long period of time, for months not weeks or days.

It's not clear that the US government (Trump's emotional volatility aside) has the stomach for such an undertaking. It would be enormously expensive, even if (or especially if) we keep pilots out of harm's way by using cruise missiles and other strike-at-a-distance technologies. Deploying the forces necessary would put a strain on US military efforts elsewhere (Korea, anyone?) Innocent civilians will die, which will create international pressure to cease and desist. And Russia, of course, will object, and may engage in further bad behavior aimed at us or our interests.

So Trump will bluster, as he always does. There may well be some limited strikes, which Trump will praise as the "big price to pay" that he promised. Assad will quit with the chemicals for a few weeks, and everyone will forget about it. Then he'll go back to doing what he wants.

This is lousy foreign policy, not least because it makes the United States look like a paper tiger. But bluster and Twitter rants aside, it's not clear that there are any good options here. A Hillary Clinton administration would likely be stuck in the same situation, with the same lousy choices and the same calculations. The Obama administration did face this same situation, tried things a different way, and failed, just as Trump is failing now.

In addition to the tragedy within Syria (which is horrific for the Syrian people caught in the fighting), the longer-range problem is that Syria, with active Russian and Iranian backing, is largely dismantling the international norm against chemical weapons that we spent decades constructing during the Cold War. It's not clear that there has ever been a point, post-1991, where the United States could have stopped that erosion, or what exactly we would have done to change that path. But it does mean that future use of chemical weapons is more likely by the day, and that future efforts to deter that use will be even less effective than they are now.

Eastern Ukraine: Irredentism Isn't What We Think It Is

I've read several interesting and insightful things about Eastern Ukraine recently. The first was posted a while back by Will Moore, who asked "Is Crimea's Ethnic Conflict Banal?" Picking up on work by John Mueller on Bosnia back in the 1990s Moore points out the likelihood that, far from being a "popular uprising," it is likely that the armed takeovers of Crimean (and now, eastern Ukrainian) buildings by various "local" groups were largely done by gangs of thugs who could be easily mobilized because they like exercising power and threatening (or using) violence on others. I found this argument persuasive back in the 1990s when Mueller first proposed it, and I think that Moore's application of it Ukraine is spot-on. It certainly fits the broader picture that seems to be emerging, which is one of Russian interference through intermediaries - who now seem to be rather well-armed for a "citizen militia".

The second piece was a well-considered article posted recently to Political Violence @ a Glance by Brantislav Slantchev. In it he puts together a key argument about Russia's motives in Ukraine:

As I have argued here and here, Putin’s regime is by now almost entirely legitimized by the idea of recovering Russia’s rightful place in the sun. His policies have explicitly aimed at overcoming what I call theCold War Syndrome – the purported illness that has afflicted Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union and that is to blame for all its current troubles at home and abroad. Briefly, with the disappearance of the military might of the USSR, Russia has been unable to resist the victorious West which has relentlessly advanced everywhere, pushing a new Iron Curtain ever closer to the Russian borders. The expansions of NATO and the EU, the increasing commercial and cultural penetration around the globe, globalization itself, all of this has marginalized Russia, depriving it of influence and forcing it into the humiliating role akin to that of former colonies of the West: exporter of raw materials to fund Western consumerism. Russia can only prosper if it counters these tendencies and establishes a zone of influence in Eurasia. It must halt the inexorable advance of the West, which has moved the Iron Curtain east, and this can only be done if it recovers its military posture.

His take-away from this argument is that sanctions are unlikely to reverse Russian behavior, and may even make matters worse. That's an important conclusion in itself, but Slantchev's argument struck me also for what it says about the likely future course of the conflict in Ukraine.

If Slantchev is right, then either destabilizing or dismembering Ukraine is central to Putin's domestic political legitimacy. Crimea was low-hanging fruit, but if Putin is trying to make the argument that Russia is returning to its "proper place" in the world then dominating Ukraine is a necessary step in such an argument - far more so than influencing the Stans or even beating up on small former Soviet republics like Georgia. If this is true, then there is a serious motivation gap here: Russia may care about the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine far more than either the US or Europe (many Americans can't even fine Ukraine on a map). That kind of motivational edge can be a powerful advantage.

What strikes me most about all of this is what it says about irredentism and our popular notions about ethnic conflict. I myself tend to be pretty sympathetic to ethnic separatism and irredentism, if only because I think that people ought to be governed by those they want to be governed by. But what we see playing out in eastern Ukraine today isn't about ethnic self-determination. Irredentism it may be, but irredentism as a tool in the service of elite power

Continued interference from Russia suggests that the conflict is about Russia's domestic politics, not the rights of various Ukrainian groups - and it is extremely unlikely that Putin is motivated by any coherent sense of "Russian nationalism" beyond wanting to bolster the strength of his own regime. The escalating violence on the ground, being driven to a large degree by self-appointed armed gangs, demonstrates that even if there are forces internal to Ukraine driving some of this they are not interested in what "the people" want. Any additional "elections" or "referenda" conducted from here on out will be about as legitimate as elections under the old Soviet Union, or perhaps a bit like some labor union "elections" is the bad old days - vote the "right way" or be subject to severe sanctions.

Ultimately what we're seeing in Ukraine is a slow-motion breakdown of political processes in favor of brute force. Russia, through threats and proxies, has indicated how it wants things to go and has signaled its willingness to use whatever means necessary to get the outcomes it likes - whether that involved annexing additional chunks of Ukraine, replacing the government in Kiev, or simply creating a long-running conflict that cripples the Ukrainian state. This may play very well in Russian domestic politics, as it looks like Russia is "regaining its strength". To the rest of the world, it simply signals a Russian government that - like its proxies in Donetsk and elsewhere - behaves thugishly and with no respect for the rule of law. It's good domestic politics and lousy foreign policy - just what we have come to expect in that part of the world.

Is Russia Going to Invade Eastern Ukraine?

There's a lot of hype talk in the media about the ongoing crisis between Russia and Ukraine. Yes, Russia did just steal a chunk of Ukrainian territory, in contravention of many international laws. Yes, they're unlikely to give Crimea back anytime soon. All of that is pretty much over and done with - and so not very interesting if you're CNN.

Instead, it's more fun to talk about the 40,000 Russian troops "massing" on the border with Ukraine, and to speculate about whether Russia has designs on still more territory in eastern Ukraine - which is, we are told, just packed full of Russians pining for the good old days of the Soviet Union.

In a word: no. As much as war is good business for media, it seems unlikely in the current situation.

Why? Well, first there's the lack of any coherent Russian nationalist ideology. Yes, there are plenty of old-age pensioners in the Near Abroad who would love to bring back the Soviet welfare state. There are also lots of younger 20- and 30-somethings, kids and grandkids of those pensioners, who have decidedly more complex views of the world. All in all, there isn't a sufficiently stable shared idea of who is and isn't a Russian to sustain a "Greater Russia" project - a point my coauthor Steve Saideman and I made a few weeks ago in The Monkey Cage, echoing what we argued a few years back in our book.

Then there's the questionable domestic politics of such a venture - a point I made a few weeks ago. Yes, some of Putin's base approves of "rescuing" Russians from nearby states - but most of them just don't care enough. And the more costly such "rescues" get, the fewer people are going to support them.

Now the Christian Science Monitor has come to the same conclusion by looking at the facts on the ground. CNN may be breathless about those "massing" 40,000 Russian soldiers, but in modern military strategy 40,000 isn't an invasion force, it's theater. Conventional strategy - that is, trying to use troops and tanks to capture territory - requires an attacker-to-defender advantage of at least 3:1, with 5:1 or better in key spots. 40,000 Russian troops may sound menacing, but they are not three times larger than the Ukrainian military, or even a reasonable portion thereof. Simply put, the Russian force currently dancing on the border with Ukraine is big enough to look menacing to western journalists, but not big enough to actually accomplish much of significance.

Russia behavior towards Ukraine has been terrible and retrograde and barbaric, and should rightly be condemned by everybody interested in an even modestly stable international order. Despite that, the fact that Russia is likely to get away with its seizure of Crimea is (to borrow John Mearsheimer's phrase) part of the tragedy of great-power politics. All of that is pretty well understood. Let's not muddy an already bad situation with irresponsible speculation about further Russian territorial aggression that appears, by all accounts, to be pretty unlikely in the foreseeable future.

A "New Cold War"? Let's Review the Basics...

There's been a lot of talk in the media in the last few days, as the Crimea crisis works its way towards a de facto annexation by Russia, about a "new Cold War" between Russia and the US. John McCain, eager to criticize Obama on almost anything, seems positively slavering over the prospect. But what McCain wants to call a "return to Realism" is anything but, and those journalists who want to make parallels between today's geopolitics and the Cold War need to go back to school.

While there were differing theories about the Cold War and what caused it, they boiled down in the end to an argument between three camps - the Classical Realists, the Neorealists, and the Hegemonic Stability Realists. Each saw the Cold War in a slightly different light:

- For Classical Realists (e.g. Hans Morgenthau), the Cold War was a struggle between two fairly evenly matched great powers, one of which liked things they way they were (a Status Quo power) and one of which wanted to change the world in its image (an Imperialist power). For Morgenthau, the conflict was a struggle for power driven not so much by the particular ideologies (communism vs. democracy) as by the underlying motivations. The US, in Morgenthau's view, was trying to defend the world largely as it was, while the Soviet Union wanted to topple that world and replace it with something else in its own image. This was a classic "aggressor-defender" model on the world stage, and a fairly persuasive argument to folks like George Kennan who were architects of US foreign policy in the 1950s.

- Neorealists (Ken Waltz and his successors) agreed with the Classical Realists that the world was bipolar - that is, that the US and the USSR were fairly evenly matched, and that no other powers were anywhere close. But Waltz argued that, to a great extent, motive doesn't matter. You don't need one of the two bipolar superpowers to be Imperialist (or Revisionist, or whatever you want to call someone who wants to change the system); you just need for there to be two superpowers. That, in and of itself, will generate conflict largely through the Security Dilemma. Waltz' other insight was that, while this conflict flowed from the structure of the international system itself (never mind what the superpowers actually wanted, they were more or less destined to compete), a bipolar system also constrained that conflict to reasonably stable levels (i.e. no major wars). Indeed, as historian John Lewis Gaddis (a big fan of Waltz' work) latter put it, the problem was not explaining the Cold War but the "Long Peace" - how did we manage to go so long with no wars between the major powers? In Waltz' view, the Cold War was determined by the bipolar structure of the international system, which also kept it from getting too far out of hand.

- Hegemonic Stability Theorists (think Robert Gilpin) broke with both of these traditions and argued that the Cold War did not represent a period of bipolarity between two equal superpowers, but rather a competition between one Hegemonic power at the top of the heap (aka the US) and a Challenger (the USSR) which, while somewhat weaker, was trying to catch up and topple the Hegemon. This is not far off from Morgenthau's Status Quo/Imperialist categories, but Gilpin saw the power equation as more dynamic - that Hegemonic powers inevitably decline while Challengers tend to catch up and overtake them. This doesn't always happen, of course - sometimes the Challenger fails, as the USSR apparently did in 1991.

So if we want to be Realists about Russia (and, apparently, both prominent Republicans and journalists are just dying to wear that language), then the Cold War was either a bipolar struggle between two equal powers or a struggle between a hegemon and a challenger trying to unseat it. Depending on your flavor of Realism, motives either do or don't matter - take your pick.

Here's the problem - none of this applies to today's relationship with Russia. Any similarities are entirely superficial - the fundamental variables have all drastically changed. So talk of a new "Cold War" is not just premature - it's foolish. Consider:

- Today's Russia is not a superpower equal to the US. It's not even close. The Russian economy has shrunk drastically since its Soviet days, as has its military might and reach. The Russian army taking over Crimea is roughly like the US military invading Tijuana - it's right there, the locals are vastly overmatched, and there are no nearby counterbalancing powers. Morgenthau understood that power declines with distance; apparently McCain has forgotten that lesson. So recent events notwithstanding, we are not dealing with a bipolar world with power divided between the US and Russia. China and Europe are far larger things than Russia is.

- Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin's intentions, and whatever imperialist motives you want to attribute to the Russia psyche, they are not out to take over the world. At worst, Putin's Russia wants to reestablish the previous empire, which was slightly larger than Russia is now - and even that may not be in the cards. But whereas Stalin, Khrushchev, and even Brezhnev actively sought to overthrow of democracy in the West, Putin could care less about what kind of government runs Washington, London, or Berlin. He doesn't want to take over the world, just his corner of it. Which means that unlike the 1950s, there is no existential threat to the West - not that Russia has the power to pose such a threat in any case.

All of this, of course, is IR Theory 101. Russia would have to get a lot more powerful and (depending on your view) its motives would have to change drastically in order for there to be the potential of a new "Cold War". Absent those factors - which don't seem anywhere on the horizon - let's drop the silly historical comparisons and focus on what is. If you want to be a Realist in making US foreign policy, you need to deal with the real world of today.

Russia, Ukraine, and Ethnic Partition: We're Still Right

The problem with not having much time to write these days is that other people, both smarter and faster than I am, get there first. Thus my friend and co-author Steve Saideman has already blogged about the Ukraine/Russia/Crimea situation not once but four times: here, here, here, and here. Andrew Kydd recently added an excellent piece at Political Violence @ a Glance, where some of Steve's stuff has also appeared. There's lots of other great stuff out there, too, from some very bright people who have more time to think and write than I do. So much for Nicholas Kristof's argument that political scientists aren't engaged in blogging enough on today's issues.

Despite being slow off the blocks I feel some obligation to jump in, if only because I was primarily responsible for the Russia chapter in my book with Steve on ethnic irredentism - a chapter that features the Crimea case prominently. In that chapter we argued that Russia didn't go after the Crimea in the 1990s because, while the locals were supportive of such a move, there wasn't enough of a coherent Russian identity within Russia to fashion an ethnic irredentist campaign on.

That's still true today. Putin is no Zhirinovsky. But he is clearly running Russia as a strong man, meaning that he needs both carrots and sticks to maintain the power of his regime. And this brings us back to the argument of the Bill & Steve book - that irredentist foreign policy is driven no so much by primordial nationalism as by domestic political calculations. Just as Milosevic could be a Serbian nationalist (even if he didn't believe a lot of the primordialist rhetoric he was spewing), Putin can be a Russian nationalist if it helps his domestic political cause.

Here Kydd's piece (cited above) is onto something. The main thrust of his argument is international - is Putin trying to divide Ukraine or develop a bargaining chip to control them in the future? But there's a domestic political side to this, hinted at when Kydd writes:

It ["liberating" Russian-speaking provinces like Crimea from Ukraine] would certainly send a signal that crossing Moscow is very dangerous, and it would bring direct tangible benefits by bringing home Russian territory and populations while greatly weakening the rump Ukraine. Putin, the recoverer of lost territories! Putin as Bismarck!

Irredentism is a signal not only for the future Ukrainian leadership, but for Russians at home. A lot of Western press focuses on the repressive side of Putin's regime - running politically-motivated show trials, jailing members of Pussy Riot, forcing critics into exile abroad. All of this is certainly real, but very few regimes can run on repression alone. Putin needs a base of support, preferably from a substantial majority of Russians who think he's doing a good job.

Whether "liberating" some bits of Ukraine will actually help build his base of support or not is an open question - but it seems reasonable to suspect that it will. It is certainly likely to play well in the western regions of Russia nearest Ukraine, where there are perceptions (however fallacious) of an impending Ukrainian "fascism" that will suppress the Russian-speaking population. If Putin can achieve either de facto or even de jure irredentism with a minimum of cost, the rest of Russia is unlikely to care much, generating a net positive for Putin's domestic political standing. The moment irredentism costs him serious political problems at home, I suspect he'll find a way to drop it.

Steve has wondered whether we will need to write a second edition of For Kin or Country to update the Russia chapter (assuming Columbia would actually publish such a thing). Certainly current events might warrant such an update, in that the previous outcome (no Russian irredentism) may be shifting before our eyes. But I think the underlying argument of the book is still sound. For all that Realists want to focus on the international balance of power calculations of the Russia-Ukraine relationship while ethnic Primordialists want to talk about the fundamental need for empire deep in the Russian psyche, in the end domestic politics tends to drive the bus. In that conclusion the book is still sound, even if the outcomes of particular cases change over time.