“Domino theory” update: Is Russia intending to “move on to Poland and other places”?

NATO deterrence against Russian aggression: “Western deterrence, while prudent and necessary, will be dangerously counterproductive if it is unaccompanied by a diplomatic framework for long-term strategic stability in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region.” (1)

That is from the introduction to a Quincy Institute policy brief, “Right-Sizing the Russian Threat to Europe.”

This shouldn’t be controversial. Of course, if you have an enemy with whom a war is probable under the wrong circumstance, countries have a moral obligation to their citizens to use active diplomacy to reduce the risk of war. I see only three types of remotely rational arguments against that: one from militarists who want to promote war; one from arms lobbyists who are only thinking about their employers’ short-range profits; and, one from people without any minimal sense of responsibility about foreign policy.

And those arguments really would have only very remote relationships to rationality.

Speaking of rationality, the report reminds us of one of the basic ideas of nuclear deterrence:

NATO’s powerful military deterrent alone cannot create stability in Europe. Paradoxically, an excessive reliance on military deterrence is likely to increase instability by inducing Russia to rely increasingly on its nuclear force as its primary basis for deterrence. Unlike conventional forces, Russia and NATO possess roughly the same amount of nuclear weapons. Washington must work to defuse this increasingly unstable dynamic by restoring diplomatic lines of communication between Russia and the West. [my emphasis]

But the arrogant illusions of Cold War triumphalism in the US and many other Western countries has made such sensible and critically important consideration seem almost exotic in current discussion of US foreign policy.

Joe Biden in his ill-fated debate with convicted felon Donald Trump on June 28 declared a contemporary version of the Domino Theory, whose adherents always assume that it’s 1938 and Hitler is about to invade Czechoslovakia and Neville Chamberlain is losing a critical testosterone test with Hitler over the whole thing.

[If] you want to have war, just let Putin go ahead and take Kyiv, make sure they move on, see what happens in Poland, Hungary, and other places along that border. Then you have a war. …

The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: He wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet Empire. Not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine. That’s what he wants.

And then do you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?

What happens if, in fact, you have Putin continue to go into NATO? We have an Article Five agreement, attack on one is attack on all. You want to start the nuclear war he keeps talking about, go ahead, let Putin go in and control Ukraine and then move on to Poland and other places. See what happens then. [my emphasis] (2)

As John Mearsheimer has been patiently repeating in many interviews since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has never declared in anything in the public record that he wants to take all of Ukraine. He has said things about the historical links between Ukraine and Russia but not that he intends to seize all of Ukraine. (3) The Quincy study notes:

Assessments of the Kremlin’s intentions vis-a-vis its neighbors and states on NATO’s eastern flank are all too often premised on belligerent statements made by commentators on Russian state media. There is no basis for drawing a direct line between these sound bites and serious foreign policy discussions between Putin and other key Russian stakeholders.

Mearsheimer’s judgment is that Putin is mainly interest in keeping Ukraine out of NATO, although he will in any case insist on maintaining control of Crimea, which provides its access to the Black Sea. Lacking an agreement with NATO and Ukraine that Ukraine will stay out of NATO, he thinks Putin at this point will concentrate on consolidate his control of the provinces it now holds and maybe seize more territory if the war continues. But that Putin doesn’t want to seize the central and western sections where there are fewer “ethnic Russians.” Because Russia would face a continuous, draining partisan war in those areas if Russia were to take them. Mearsheimer also believes that Russia wants to leave western Ukraine as a rump state that would almost inevitably be a “failed state.” It would also be a geographic buffer between the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine and NATO.

Here a very recent interview with Mearsheimer: (4)

The Quincy report states:

Trying to occupy any state of NATO’s eastern flank is not in Russia’s interests and contradicts Moscow’s core objective of reducing NATO’s military presence along Russian territory. … Pushing westward into NATO territory would not only be deeply counterproductive to Russia’s compellence strategy but also would altogether subvert its core aim of securing and maintaining a buffer against the West in the post-Soviet space.

It's also worth remembering that the biggest reason that Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and abandon the previous kind of Soviet control over those countries was the fact that he judged that the arrangement was costing the USSR too much for what benefits it gave them. Ukraine was then part of the Soviet Union itself. But it’s hard to imagine that the financial and material and human costs of Russia dominating all of Ukraine indefinitely appears as an attractive prospect to the Kremlin.

And what Sandra Kostner and Stefan Luft wrote in 2023 is still the case:

The maxim advocated by many Western politicians that Putin's armed conflict must not be successful in any way prevents a diplomatic solution. Because this would inevitably include concessions to Moscow, such as Ukraine's neutrality. Yet: if the goal is that Putin must not be allowed to profit from the war, then it follows that the war, as EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said, "must be decided on the battlefield." (5)

Of course, Ukraine’s leadership and public opinion also have a major say in this. But there are as yet no formal peace talks in process.

The Quincy study also sketches out what a conventional Russian attack on NATO might look like and how a convention war would likely play out in its initial stages. It’s a stomach-turning prospect. But even aside from the nuclear deterrence, NATO substantially superior forces would have huge advantages. Especially on the defense, which of course would be the case if Russia were to invade the Baltic countries. And even more so if their initial target was Poland.

The Domino Theory scenario that Biden brought up in the June 28 debate is highly unlikely because the NATO conventional deterrent is already so substantial.

But that fact is also a reminder that the NATO alliance has considerably expanded, a fact of which Joe Biden is especially proud. And that has real-world consequences. One is in Russia’s perception of the potential threat from NATO. However frivolously chronic hawks use the “credibility” argument to justify military actions, most of those cases in the last several decades have been overblown. Remember how US credibility would be endangered if we didn’t go to war in Afghanistan? And how it was endangered when we withdrew 20 years later and left the Taliban back in power?

But the military defense commitments in formal treaties, and especially in the case of NATO, do have remain credible if the complicated matrix of deterrence and military balance involved with it are going to work. The NATO expansions since 1989 look more dubious in retrospect than they did even at the time. The US and the older NATO members let themselves get too stuck in the Cold War triumphalism bubble. They took the earlier NATO expansions as more-or-less freebies given Russia’s weakness at the time.

That doesn’t mean that NATO is a once-in never-out arrangement. So the alliance could definitely change. For instance, if Türkiye’s President Tayyip Erdoğan were to actually follow through on this threat, (5) it could definitely cause a stir among other NATO members.

But the NATO commitments are real and in practice none of the members can ignore them. Whatever chance their was to create a broader and more stable security arrangement for Europe between NATO and Russia in the years after 1989, that opportunity was collectively squandered.

It’s important to remember that for the United States, China has been the official primary concern of the National Security Strategy among potential adversaries since the Obama Administration. As the foreign policy “realist” theorists like to remind everyone, taking that strategy seriously would create a strong imperative to improve relations with Russia as a balancing power against China. What’s happened around the Ukraine War has so far had the opposite effect.

The Quincy study also looks at the “unconventional” (nuclear) situation:

The great risk presented by this situation is that, in understanding its conventional disadvantages, Russia will rely more heavily on its nuclear forces. As opposed to conventional forces, Russia retains full parity with NATO in the field of nuclear weapons. As of 2023, Russia was estimated to have 5,889 nuclear warheads (1,549 deployed) to the U.S., 5,244 (1,419 deployed); the French, 290; and the British, 225.42 Russia has 11 ballistic missile submarines to the U.S. 14; Britain and France have four each. These arsenals are enough to destroy the United States, Russia, and Europe and end modern civilization worldwide. [my emphasis]

Which brings to mind the saying: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

But, boy hidey, we’re really stickin’ it to the Rooskies in Ukraine, ain’t we?!

Notes:

(1) Beebe, George & Episkopos, Mark & Lieven, Anatol (2024): Right-Sizing the Russian Threat to Europe. Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft July 2024. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-threat/> (Accessed: 2024-17-07). Direct link to report: https://quincyinst.org/research/right-sizing-the-russian-threat-to-europe/#

(2) Biden-Trump debate transcript. CNN 06/28/2024. <https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/politics/read-biden-trump-debate-rush-transcript/index.html> (Accessed: 2024-29-07).

(3) An important example is: Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. Government of Russia-Kremlin 07/12/2021. <http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181> (Accessed: 2024-29-07).

(4) How will US political upheaval influence Ukraine; John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris Glenn Diese. The Duran YouTube channel 07/26/2024. https://youtu.be/xkUaRScpmEU?si=MHUgRdc3BxNDwwEI (Accessed: 2024-29-07).

5) Kostner, Sandra & Luft, Stefan, eds. (2023): Einleitung. Lasst die Waffen sprechen oder vom Ende der Diplomatie. In: Ukrainekrieg. Warum Europa eine neue Entspannungspolitik braucht, 9. Frankfurt am Main: Westend Verlag. My translation from German.