Russia, bounties, and US-Russia relations

John Kenneth Galbraith described the differences of the Democrats during the 1950s of the Cold War with that of Eisenhower's strikingly hawkish Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who tended toward a binary and moralistic view of the US-Soviet antagonism:

The nineteen-fifties in Washington were the years not of Eisenhower but of Dulles. The idea of the irrepressible conflict went virtually unchallenged. The questioning to which, in a democratic society, every important action of the state should be subject was almost completely in abeyance. I saw this, in a minor way, at first hand. I was cochairman with Dean Acheson in the latter fifties of one of the subsidiary organs of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Advisory Council. Acheson was chairman for foreign policy, I for domestic policy. The Council was, by common agreement, the most liberal wing of the opposition - the leading edge. At our meetings Acheson attacked Dulles lucidly, brilliantly and with resourceful invective for being too soft on the Soviets. The debate on his draft foreign policy resolutions consisted almost exclusively of efforts - by Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Herbert Lehman and other moderate members - to tone down his declarations of war. That was the opposition to Dulles. (The Age of Uncertainty, 1977;my emphasis)

Later in the 1950s, the Democrats criticized Eisenhower and the Republicans for a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, which turned out to be nonexistent. And they criticized him for military budgets that were too low. This was another sign of how broad the Cold War consensus was in the US. But I don't want to encourage Ike's overblown reputation as a critic of the military-industrial complex, though we certainly owe the popularity of the phrase to him. Eisenhower's nuclear strategy involved not only the encouragement of a nuclear arms race but relied on a highly risky "tripwire/massive retaliation" strategy to deter Soviet conventional military aggression in Europe. And, wrong though the missile-gap fear turned out to be, it wasn't entirely a fraud. Mistakes do happen, which is why good judgement and critical thinking are even more necessary in military affairs than in other areas.

All of which we should keep in mind when we see stories like that from Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill U.S. troops, intelligence says NYT/Chicago Tribune 06/26/2020. They report:

Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.

“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.

Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked U.S. positions since a February agreement.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats couldn't resist taking a shot at Bunker Boy over his fondness for Putin on the back of this story. And, of course, it's perfectly legitimate and necessary for the opposition and the Congress to demand to know what the Presidential tough guy who blusters bravely about "America First" down there in the bunker is doing about it.

Here's Biden's take, Joe Biden Responds To Report Of Russian Bounties On U.S. Troops NBC News:

Frank Schaeffer, a former Christian Rightist long since turned liberal and effective critic of his former movement, used the news to indulge in a bit of Manicheanism:

Trump's "entire presidency has been a gift to Putin" says Joe Biden. We now know that this is truer than we ever could have imagined. What other US president remained silent and inactive in the face of evidence of a bounty being placed on our troops resulting in multiple murders?

— Frank Schaeffer (@Frank_Schaeffer) June 28, 2020

(Schaeffer even retweeted something from the very dubious Palmer Report.)

I won't get into how the Democrats clumsily and largely ineffectually used the "Russiagate" thing here, except to say that it hasn't done an awful lot to promote a realistic view of Russia's status in the present-day world.

It's a petrostate, people. An oligarchic, authoritarian petrostate that is an important regional power with a roughly equivalent nuclear arsenal to that of the United States. It's also physically the largest country in the world. It has a capitalist economy with major problems - including its petrostate status. Depending on exchange rates of the moment, its GDP is similar to that of Italy, the third largest economy in the EU: Its military is about the size of Germany's and France combined. It shares a border with its long-term rival China, with which it currently has good relations. On its western border, it is militarily strained by its annexation of Crimea and its support of separatist splinter republics in Ukraine and Georgia. It's a significant regional power that is already heavily extended in its foreign policy.

Those are defining parameters for Russia's action in the world. Due to the critical need for the US to work with Russia to reduce nuclear arms proliferation and on climate change. The US and Europe have to work with Russia in managing their positions on in relations to China's ascendant one in world politics. In other words, a realistic and effective US foreign policy with Russia can't be based on some Good-vs-Evil dichotomy.

Continuing with the Charlie Savage et al report:

Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the U.S. military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.

The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.

American intelligence officials say the GRU was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two GRU cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers, and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications. [my emphasis]

I certainly don't have any magical formulas for US-Russia relations. Neither does anyone else, which is the point. But it's worth remembering that the Soviet Union and China were both willing and able to make major, substantial diplomatic agreements with the United States while they were actively supporting the Vietnamese Communists in a serious shooting war with US troops who were backing South Vietnam. Russia isn't nearly the world power the USSR was. But it is big and significant enough that the US will continue to have notable conflicts and areas of cooperation simultaneously.

Also, Russia trying to tie the US down in a war in Afghanistan? Where could they ever have gotten the idea to try that? Juan Cole makes an important relevant point, "it isn’t clear that Russia wants the US out of Afghanistan. In fact, when President Obama was preparing to pull out early in his second term, Russian president Vladimir Putin pleaded with him not to do it." (Trump Likely did Throw US Troops in Afghanistan under the Bus, but Why would the Russians have Targeted Them? Informed Comment 06/28/2020)

Of course, that reading of Russian intentions is certainly compatible with the suggestion in the Times report, "Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan." Cole writes:

Given the Russian line on the dangers of a flimsy US-Taliban peace deal that would leave Afghanistan and Central Asia (Russia’s soft underbelly) vulnerable to renewed Muslim fundamentalist militancy, you might argue that if the GRU did want US troops killed by criminals and terrorists, it was to get American officials’ backs up and change their minds about leaving the country precipitously.

This is also interesting: "Putin is desperately afraid that Afghan heroin will turn Russian youth into zombies and sap national strength." Yeah, Vlad, maybe you want to mount a War on Drugs. Look at what, uh, notable results the US version has had!