"Restrainer" foreign policy and understanding Russia's current role

The Quincy Institute (The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, QI) just launched its website. The invaluable Andrew Bacevich is the President. QI focuses on US foreign policy and describes its vision as a "world where peace is the norm and war the exception."

QI lists its principles as follows:

• Responsible statecraft serves the public interest.
• Responsible statecraft engages the world.
• Responsible statecraft builds a peaceful world.
• Responsible statecraft abhors war.
• Responsible statecraft is democratic.

At the end of 1992, these would have sounded like boilerplate foreign policy talking points, i.e., they would have sounded obvious. The fact that they take on a radical-sounding edge in 2019 - "responsible statecraft abhors war" - is a sign of how badly US foreign policy in the "unipolar moment" after 1989 has gone of the tracks for responsibility and pragmatic realism.

The website features an article by über-Realist Stephen Walt, A Manifesto For Restrainers 12/04/2019. In line with the QI principles listed above, Walt gives his own set of guidelines for a US foreign policy that is actively, constructively engaged with the world but also shows sensible restraint, in particular far more restraint in the use of military force.

I don't know if the label "Restrainers" will catch on. But I hope the policy orientation does.

Walt reminds us the extent to which the American End-of-History foreign policy post-1989 has involved military engagement:

The United States keeps taking on new security obligations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it rarely debates their wisdom or value. Americans are now formally committed to defending more countries around the world than at any time in U.S. history, even though some of these states are hard to defend, have little strategic importance for the United States, and sometimes act in ways that damage U.S. interests. Washington is also engaged in less visible military activities in dozens of other countries, some of them shrouded in secrecy. Yet anytime U.S. leaders contemplate trimming these obligations, alarmists warn that the slightest reduction in America’s global presence will undermine U.S. credibility, embolden rivals, and lead to catastrophe. Having allowed itself to become overextended, the United States ends up fighting endless wars in places with no strategic value in order to convince allies and adversaries that it will still fight in places of greater importance. [my emphasis]

For those familiar with Walt's analyses, one can see echoes there of his critical evaluation of US relations with Israel (he co-authored the 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer; their 2006 working of the same title is online here) and his advocacy after the fall of the USSR for rethinking and replacing NATO. He warned, as did other realists including the late George Kennan, about the risks in expanding the membership of NATO further east.

Walt's broad view of foreign policy emphasizes that China is the most important rising power in the world and that US policy should focus on doing what it can to manage that process peacefully. "It should focus on commitments and missions that can command strong support from the American people - such as helping to ensure that a rising China does not dominate Asia - and eschew obligations that do not make America more secure."

This orientation is not consistent with the current fixation by much of the US foreign policy establishment on Russia, which is often discussed as though it's still a power with the strength of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Donald Trump's corrupt connections with Vladimir Putin's authoritarian oligarchic regime has made the Democratic Party talk about Russia as though it is a far more powerful adversary that it actually is. But Trump's sloppy management of foreign policy combined with his deferral to Putin's priorities in some areas does not mean that he's pursuing a constructive peace policy, as some antiwar leftists seem to have convinced themselves.

For one thing, to have a peaceful policy, an Administration needs to have a foreign policy. Trump's version consists largely of bluster, efforts to benefit the family business, and stumbling mistakes. He's expanded the military budget for no good reason and abandoned not only the US commitment to international cooperation on climate change, he's also tossed out nuclear arms control as any kind of serious priority. And his pursuit of a coup in Venezuela and his Administration's embrace of the coup regime in Bolivia are not signs of a peace-oriented foreign policy.

Walt's "restrainer" outlook does coincide with Trump's stumbling rhetoric around NATO, though Walt certainly doesn't endorse Trump's ridiculous claim that NATO partners aren't paying their "dues".

But he does allude to the ways NATO needs to change:

Restrainers believe allies will pull their weight only when they no longer see Uncle Sam as their first line of defense. Because NATO’s European members are significantly more populous and prosperous than Russia, they should assume primary responsibility for their own defense. Furthermore, the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan, curtail spending on counter-terrorism operations abroad, and let the contending countries in the Middle East balance each other. It should focus most of its military efforts on making sure that China does not achieve a dominant position in Asia, while insisting that its Asian partners pull their weight as well. Above all, the United States should not do more to protect allies than they are willing to do themselves. [my emphasis]

This implies some pretty serious changes in US policy: a more realistic view of Russia's power and world status, a lower US priority on dominating the Middle East, a seriously revised relationship with Israel, and almost certainly a significant adjustment if not complete reorganization of NATO, and the necessity for a common European foreign and military policy.

And always present is the "Spy vs. spy" element. Even in the best of times, intelligence is a shadow side of relations between countries that always has some potential to sidetrack relations, while intelligence cooperation can also strengthen relations. But because so much of that work has to be kept secret, it is especially difficult for the general public to follow or understand issues and events involving intelligence operations. And given Trump's entanglement with Russia along with Russia's use of propaganda operations to partially compensate for its economic and military limitations, developing a more constructive relationship with Russia will be a complicated political challenge domestically.

Tom McTague writes about Britain’s Secret War With Russia (Also in Defense One 12/04/2019), with a kind of narrative that is engaging but also easier to incorporate into a Cold War spy movie framework than into a nuanced foreign policy understanding of a complex set of relationships with Russia. He writes about an Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
lab in Switzerland:

Over the course of a few months in 2018, however, this gentle existence was upended, as the lab became caught in a cold war between Russia on one side and the United Kingdom and the West on the other, fought in public and in the shadows, online and in person, occasionally flashing hot in deadly fashion. From the attempted assassination of a double agent in a sleepy English city to the expulsion of scores of Russian diplomats from Western capitals, this fight would grow and morph, drawing in a chemical-weapons attack in Syria and rolling scandals about Russian sports doping.

Through it all, Russia and Britain went toe-to-toe in an international intelligence and PR battle, one in which each landed blows, exposing fissures in their respective systems and societies. Yet, as NATO leaders meet in London this week to discuss the future of the military alliance 70 years after its founding, other lessons emerge, with implications for the wider contest between Russia and the West, which are vying for influence, respect, security, and raw geopolitical power. [my emphasis]

Let's note that the "blows" exchanged after the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal were (so far as we know) metaphorical blows on the level of diplomatic expulsions and information operations. McTague elaborates in good Cold War fashion:

Whereas NATO was founded to unite the Western world against the threat of conventional military aggression by the Soviet Union, eventually contributing to the Communist bloc’s demise, the alliance is today confronted with a recalcitrant Russia that seeks to leverage propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion and discontent, and that exhibits a willingness to use its traditional military force and intelligence agencies to expand its influence. It is a Moscow that is able to project disproportionate power — despite being dwarfed in economic size and resources by even mid-tier Western countries — thanks to a web of international influence, aggression, tactical cunning, and criminality. [my emphasis]

That "despite being dwarfed in economic size and resources by even mid-tier Western countries" is an extremely important qualifier that too often gets swallowed up, as McTague continues immediately:

At the same time, NATO and its members are divided, distracted, and shorn of a coherent strategy to deal with Russia’s efforts. The grouping’s superpower, the United States, is led by a president whose commitment to the alliance’s underlying principle of collective defense is in doubt; its other significant members are consumed by domestic strife (Britain), questioning NATO’s strategic future (France), or lack the military might and political will to fill the gap (Germany). And faced with a new array of threats from Russia, the alliance has more than once been caught unawares, at times thanks to its own unforced errors but also in no small part due to a lack of long-term vision to do anything other than de-escalate tensions. Despite Russia deploying a chemical weapon on the streets of a NATO member (also Britain), the country’s international freeze is already beginning to thaw, its economy is growing, and its leadership, on the face of it at least, remains secure. It has successfully expanded its influence in the Middle East and has secured its illegal land grab in Crimea. [my emphasis]

Calls to action are appealing in politics. And the US national security establishment generally shows a bias toward activism, which far too often translates into calls for military action. And we see that reflected in the passages quoted. Instead of the "new array of threats" invoked, the remainder of the article is devoted to discussing the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in Britain, an action credibly attributed to Putin's government. Of course, countries have to react to incidents like this, and they do. McTague gives us an interesting description of strategies Russia used in response to being publicly accused of the action.

But whether or not the Spkripal assassination attempt can be meaningfully described as "deploying a chemical weapon on the streets of a NATO member," the Cold War framing he gives the article presents Russia as a super-efficient, hostile, and expansionist power presenting the NATO countries with a pressing military threat while the latter are floundering in helpless disarray, with a flourishing economy, a secure regime, and a vast web of international influence.

We could also state the situation he describes in a different way: Russia engages in information operations in various countries with some degree of success, though the effects are difficult to measure, but the countries of the NATO alliance have been coping with similar disinformation campaigns while conducting their own. Western governments have plenty of experience in dealig with them, even though Twitter and Facebook haven't always been around as media platforms.

Russia's seemingly intensive use of information operations results in no small part from their need for asymmetric methods in dealing with more powerful countries and the NATO alliance. Russia is to a significant extent a petrostate, and the five-year slump in oil prices have significantly burdened its economy. After decades of deepening involvement by the US in the Middle East, an involvement that has produced massive disasters and shown the limits of US influence there, Russia is engaging in a similar effort, but there is no real sign that Russia can count on it benefitting them any more than it has the US in the last two decades.

Meanwhile, it has occupied and annexed Crimea and is supporting separatist movements elsewhere in Ukraine, including by limited direct military intervention, giving it significant burdens in the need to defend Crimea, while Ukraine has been successfully countering the Russian military pressure with Western assistance. Since Cold Warriors have been bragging for decades how Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan were a major blow to the USSR's continuing existence, there seems to be reason to think that those involvements are more a problem for Russia than some kind of magnification of its power. But at least if Putin's government is reasonably secure for the time being, that offers real opportunities to reach mutually beneficially arrangements with Russia on a broad spectrum of issues.

Hopefully, the "rstrainer" view will increase greatly in the post-Trump era with the result that sensible caution and prudent restraint will play a larger role than it has since the End of History.