Washington pundits are jumping on a proposal
to send weapons to Ukraine. Here's why they
all need to take a deep breath.
By Stephen M. Walt
February 09, 2015 "ICH"
- "FP"-
Should the United States start arming
Ukraine, so it can better resist and maybe
even defeat the Russian-backed rebels in its
eastern provinces? A lot of seasoned
American diplomats and foreign policy
experts seem to think so; a
task force assembled by the Brookings
Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs wants the
United States to send Ukraine $1 billion in
military assistance as soon as possible,
with more to come. The Obama administration
is
rethinking its earlier reluctance, and
secretary of defense nominee Ash Carter told
a Senate hearing he was
“very much inclined” to favor this
course as well.
Unless cooler heads
prevail, therefore, the United States seems
to be moving toward raising the stakes in
Ukraine. This decision is somewhat
surprising, however, because few experts
think this bankrupt and divided country is a
vital strategic interest and no one is
talking about sending U.S. troops to fight
on Kiev’s behalf. So the question is: does
sending Ukraine a bunch of advanced weaponry
make sense?
The answer is no.
One reason to be skeptical
of the report from the three think tanks is
the track record of its like-minded members.
The task force wasn’t made up of a diverse
set of experts seeking to explore a wide
range of options and find some creative
common ground. On the contrary, its members
were all people who have long backed NATO
expansion and have an obvious desire to
defend that policy, which has played a
central role in creating the present crisis.
After all, these are the same people who
have been telling us since the late 1990s
that expanding NATO eastwards
posed no threat to Russia and would
instead create a vast and enduring zone of
peace in Europe. That prediction is now in
tatters, alas, but these experts are now
doubling down to defend a policy that was
questionable from the beginning and clearly
taken much too far. As the critics warned it
would, open-ended NATO expansion has done
more to poison relations with Russia than
any other single Western policy.
Those who favor arming
Ukraine are also applying “deterrence model”
remedies to what is almost certainly a
“spiral model” situation. In his classic
book
Perception and Misperception in
International Politics, political
scientist Robert Jervis pointed out that
states may undertake what appear to be
threatening actions for two very different
reasons.
Sometimes states act
aggressively because their leaders are
greedy, seeking some sort of personal glory,
or ideologically driven to expand, and are
not reacting to perceived threats from
others. The classic example, of course, is
Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and in such
cases accommodation won’t work. Here the
“deterrence model” applies: the only thing
to do is issue warnings and credible threats
so that the potential aggressor is deterred
from pursuing its irrevocably revisionist
aims.
By contrast, the “spiral
model” applies when a state’s seemingly
aggressive policy is motivated primarily by
fear or insecurity. Making threats and
trying to deter or coerce them will only
reinforce their fears and make them even
more aggressive, in effect triggering an
action-reaction spiral of growing hostility.
When insecurity is the
taproot of a state’s revisionist actions,
making threats just makes the situation
worse. When the
“spiral model” applies, the proper response
is a diplomatic process of accommodation and
appeasement (yes, appeasement) to allay the
insecure state’s concerns. Such efforts do
not require giving an opponent everything it
might want or removing every one of its
worries, but it does require a serious
effort to address the insecurities that are
motivating the other side’s objectionable
behavior.
The problem, of course, is
that responses that work well in one
situation tend to fail badly in the other.
Applying the deterrence model to an insecure
adversary will heighten its paranoia and
fuel its defensive reactions, while
appeasing an incorrigible aggressor is
likely to whet its appetite and make it
harder to deter it in the future.
Those who now favor arming
Ukraine clearly believe the “deterrence
model” is the right way to think about this
problem. In this view, Vladimir Putin is a
relentless aggressor who is trying to
recreate something akin to the old Soviet
empire, and thus not confronting him over
Ukraine will lead him to take aggressive
actions elsewhere. The only thing to do,
therefore, is increase the costs until
Russia backs down and leaves Ukraine free to
pursue its own foreign policy. This is
precisely the course of action the report
from the three think tanks recommends: in
addition to “bolstering deterrence,” its
authors believe arming Ukraine will help
“produce conditions in which Moscow decides
to negotiate a genuine settlement that
allows Ukraine to reestablish full
sovereignty.” In addition to bolstering
deterrence, in short, giving arms to Kiev is
intended to coerce Moscow into doing what we
want.
Yet the evidence in this
case suggests the spiral model is far more
applicable. Russia is not an ambitious
rising power like Nazi Germany or
contemporary China; it is an aging,
depopulating, and declining great power
trying to cling to whatever international
influence it still possesses and preserve a
modest sphere of influence near its borders,
so that stronger states — and especially the
United States — cannot take advantage of its
growing vulnerabilities. Putin & Co. are
also genuinely worried about America’s
efforts to promote “regime change” around
the world — including Ukraine — a policy
that could eventually threaten their own
positions. It is lingering fear, rather than
relentless ambition, that underpins Russia’s
response in Ukraine.
Moreover, the Ukraine
crisis did not begin with a bold Russian
move or even a series of illegitimate
Russian demands; it began when the United
States and European Union
tried to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit
and into the West’s sphere of influence.
That objective may be desirable in the
abstract, but Moscow made it abundantly
clear it would fight this process tooth and
nail. U.S. leaders blithely ignored these
warnings — which clearly stemmed from
Russian insecurity rather than territorial
greed — and not surprisingly they have been
blindsided by Moscow’s reaction. The failure
of U.S. diplomats to anticipate Putin’s
heavy-handed response was an act of
remarkable diplomatic incompetence, and one
can only wonder why the individuals who
helped produce this train wreck still have
their jobs.
If we are in a “spiral
model” situation, arming Ukraine will only
make things worse. It certainly will not
enable Ukraine to defeat the far stronger
Russian army; it will simply intensify the
conflict and add to the suffering of the
Ukrainian people.
Nor is arming Ukraine
likely to convince Putin to cave in and give
Washington what it wants. Ukraine is
historically linked to Russia, they are
right next door to each other, Russian
intelligence has long-standing links inside
Ukraine’s own security institutions, and
Russia is far stronger militarily. Even
massive arms shipments from the United
States won’t tip the balance in Kiev’s
favor, and Moscow can always escalate if the
fighting turns against the rebels, as it did
last summer.
Most importantly,
Ukraine’s fate is much more important to
Moscow than it is to us, which means that
Putin and Russia will be willing to pay a
bigger price to achieve their aims than we
will. The balance of resolve as well as the
local balance of power strongly favors
Moscow in this conflict. Before starting
down an escalatory path, therefore,
Americans should ask themselves just how far
they are willing to go. If Moscow has more
options, is willing to endure more pain, and
run more risks than we are, then it makes no
sense to begin a competition in resolve we
are unlikely to win. And no, that doesn’t
show the West is irresolute, craven, or
spineless; it simply means Ukraine is a
vital strategic interest for Russia but not
for us.
Efforts to resolve this
crisis are also handicapped by the U.S.
tendency to indulge in “take-it-or-leave it”
diplomacy.
Instead of engaging in genuine bargaining,
American officials tend to tell others what
to do and then ramp up the pressure if they
do not comply. Today, those who want to arm
Ukraine are demanding that Russia cease all
of its activities in Ukraine, withdraw from
Crimea, and let Ukraine join the EU and/or
NATO if it wants and if it meets the
membership requirements. In other words,
they expect Moscow to abandon its own
interests in Ukraine, full stop. It would be
wonderful if Western diplomacy could pull
off this miracle, but how likely is it?
Given Russia’s history, its proximity to
Ukraine, and its long-term security
concerns, it is hard to imagine Putin
capitulating to our demands without a long
and costly struggle that will do enormous
additional damage to Ukraine.
And let’s not forget the
broader costs of this feckless policy. We
are pushing Russia closer to China, which is
not in the long-term U.S. interest. We have
brought cooperation on nuclear security with
Russia to an end, even though there are
still large quantities of inadequately
secured nuclear material on Russian soil.
And we are surely prolonging the suffering
of the Ukrainian people.
The solution to this
crisis is for the United States and its
allies to abandon the dangerous and
unnecessary goal of endless NATO expansion
and do whatever it takes to convince Russia
that we want Ukraine to be a neutral buffer
state in perpetuity. We should then work
with Russia, the EU, and the IMF to develop
an economic program that puts that
unfortunate country back on its feet.
Arming Ukraine, on the
other hand, is a recipe for a longer and
more destructive conflict. It’s easy to
prescribe such actions when you’re safely
located in a Washington think tank, but
destroying Ukraine in order to save it is
hardly smart or morally correct diplomacy.
Stephen M. Walt is the
Robert and Renée Belfer professor of
international relations at Harvard
University.
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