Two conservative takes on Ukraine policy and one left analysis

Oh, Lord! Max Boot is still offering the world his foreign policy advice.

Max Boot, Very Serious Person, gives advice on Ukraine

Boot was one of the most visible Iraq War enthusiasts in American media back in the day. He now claims to be repentant. But in 2003 - which turned out to be the first year of a long war - he was gushing with enthusiasm over it:

Coalition forces in the second Gulf War were less than half the size of those deployed in the first one. Yet they achieved a much more ambitious goal-occupying all of lraq, rather than just kicking the lraqi army out of Kuwait-in almost half the time, with one-third the casualties, and at one-fourth the cost of the first war [the Gulf War of 1991]. ...

Far from having a 3 to 1 advantage in lraq, coalition ground forces (which never numbered more than 100,000) faced a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 disadvantage. That the United States and its allies won anyway-and won so quickly-must rank as one of the signal achievements in military history....

It was a "spectacular success," he gushed. And "a relatively easy U.S. victory."

Ah, those were the days, huh, Max? The American liberation army sweeping away the uncivilized heathen regime and bringing the blessings of civilization, democracy, and - not to be forgotten - women's rights. And, of course, doing away with (imaginary) "weapons of mass destruction."

Now Max has advice about the current Ukraine war, which he shares in This is no time to hesitate in Ukraine Washington Post 06/05/2022. Despite the title, Boot is cautiously reflective about his advice - no, just kidding! It's Max Boot, after all:

Putin reportedly calculates that he can still win the war by waiting for the will of the West to erode, and there are many in the West who have given him encouragement. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger suggests that Ukraine must cede territory for peace, and French President Emmanuel Macron insists that Russia must not be “humiliated.” Meaning Putin should be rewarded for his unlawful aggression?

This is the counsel of despair, and it is divorced from the facts on the ground. A recent poll finds that nearly 80 percent of Ukrainians say their country is moving in the right direction, and many Ukrainian refugees are returning home. ...

This is not the moment to lose faith in Ukraine. This is the moment to redouble our support for its freedom fighters. [my emphasis]

We're in a macho adrenalin contest, people! Mano a mano! We're eyeball to eyeball and we've gotta make the other guy blink!

Fortunately, there are relevant lessons that we can learn from the disastrous Iraq War that Max Boot in mid-2003 was confident had already been "spectacular success." One of those lessons is: Never Take Advice On Wars From Max Boot Seriously.

Max doesn't mention anything about Russia having, you know, "weapons of mass destruction." Maybe he figures since it turned out that Iraq had none, Russia must not have any, either. Besides, adrenaline and testosterone are the only things that really matter anyway, right, Max?

Also, if you think the Ukraine refugee emergency in Europe is practically over - you are probably Max Boot.

Another conservative, Chrlstopher Caldwell, also has an essay on the current war, The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame. New York Times 05/31/2022

Caldwell is pretty conservative. He thinks the Mean Libruls are too whiny. (Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, 2020) and worries about them thar Muslim immigrants (Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, 2010)

He also did an admiring essay on Robert E. Lee last year. (There Goes Robert E. Lee: His eclipse in American life. Claremont Review of Books Spring 2021)

Caldwell relies on the positions of a conservative French politician, Henri Guaino, to argue that Biden "is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to stop." Somehow, Caldwell manages to argue that "Russia is most directly to blame for the present conflict in Ukraine" but somehow the US made the conflict inevitable.

The polemics over what role Western policy played in leading us to the point of Russia invading Ukraine have often struck me as weird. Of course, Russia was going to worry about NATO expanding toward its borders. But Caldwell wants us to believe that a particular the US-Ukraine strategic partnership agreement signed in November 2021 that set the invasion in motion. That looks more like a way to dump on the Biden administration than a realistic analysis. And for all the problems Russia is having in its current war, but arguing that "by 2014 [Russia] barely had a modern military at all" is clearly overstating the case.

He cites Noam Chomsky and Henry Kissinger offering cautions about prolonging the war unnecessarily and the need to make some kind of concessions during the peace process. And then uses that to launch into the vague conclusion that seems to be saying that the Biden Administration is incapable of doing anything but constantly escalate the war no matter what, which at this moment seems to be a big leap:

The United States is making no concessions. That would be to lose face. There's an election coming. So the administration is closing off avenues of negotiation and working to intensify the war. We're in it to win it. With time, the huge import of deadly weaponry, including that from the newly authorized $40 billion allocation, could take the war to a different level. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned in an address to students this month that the bloodiest days of the war were coming.

This sounds an awful lot like trying to cover all the bases without actually having to take any actual position about what an alternative course he would prefer to see.

Yanis Varoufakis has some actual ideas about negotiation

Former Greek Finance Minister, economist, and current Member of the Greek Parliament is not only familiar with game theory but was at the center of one of the most high-stakes negotiations of the last decade over the Greek debt crisis. He actually has coherent thoughts on The Peace Process Ukraine’s Supporters Should Support Project Syndicate/https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/ 06/06/2022. he makes this important observation about the sanctions on Russia:

While the war is going badly for Putin, the economic war is working rather nicely for him. Granted, underprivileged Russians are suffering, skilled workers are fleeing, and many industries are running out of parts. Even so, according to Robin Brooks of the Institute of International Finance, a gigantic current-account surplus is in the making (projected to reach $200-250 billion in 2022, up from $95.8 billion in April). No wonder the ruble has recovered fully.

This massive windfall allows Putin’s regime easily to finance a long-term war of attrition in Ukraine. Many Russians will be impoverished, and their economy will be condemned to long-term stagnation. But on Putin’s chessboard, ordinary Russians are mere pawns whose sacrifice is acceptable, if not necessary, to inflict long-term damage on Ukraine while waiting for ruptures to appear within NATO – especially once the fickle Western media turn their attention to other matters. [my emphasis]

And he offers a plausible scenario about how successful peace negotiations might look, though he knows as well as anyone that the specifics of the actual deal matter a lot:

A fair deal, we must agree, should leave everyone somewhat dissatisfied, while constituting a great improvement over every feasible alternative. Both sides must make gains that far exceed their losses, without losing face. To honor the Ukrainians’ aspirations and valiant resistance to Putin’s aggression, the envisaged peace treaty must decree that Russian troops withdraw to their pre-February 24 bases. To deal with sectarian clashes in the Donbas and surrounding areas, the Good Friday Agreement (which ended the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland) can offer tangible guidance on conflict resolution and governance. And, to assuage fear of military re-engagement, a wide demilitarized buffer zone around the Russian-Ukrainian border ought to be included. [The "around" means on both sides.]

Would Putin agree? Possibly, if the treaty offers him three things. Putin will want most sanctions lifted. He will also want the issue of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 to be kicked into the long grass, to be resolved at some undefined time in the future. And he will want security guarantees that only the US can provide, including the lure of a seat at the top table where new security arrangements in Europe must be hammered out. Ukraine needs similar security guarantees from both the US and Russia, so Ukraine’s friends should be planning such arrangements, under the auspices of the United Nations, and involving the US and the EU. [my emphasis]

The point about a settlement on Crimea is not something that doesn't seem to be discussed as much as I might expect in the commentaries I've read and heard. Caldwell seems to be arguing that Russia's claim to Crimea is pretty obviously valid. Actually, no, it's not. But some scenario like Varoufakis indicates that would leave Crimea for some extended period of time in a "frozen conflict" situation seems like a realistic possibility.

"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.

The German Left Party and Russia

Stefan Liebich, the foreign policy speaker for the Left Party (DIE LINKE) in the German national Bundestag, the lower House of Parliament, provided a summary this week of his party's current position on relations with Russia. (Nicht mit zweierlei Maß messen Neues Deutschland 09.01.2019)

The Left Party was officially founded in 2007 in a merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the party Labor and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG). The PDS was the "post-communist" successor party to the former ruling party of East Germany, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The Left Party has been skeptical of military intervention and in favor of peaceful and friendly relations to Russia.

But the Left Party has a, well, left political perspective. So it is not sympathetic to the oligarchic/authoritarian style of rule that is the current system in Putin's Russia. Putin's ideological soulmates in Germany and the rest of the EU are generally the far-right populist parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), and the Lega in Italy. But generalizations on this can be tricky. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is a similar far-right formation, but its version of Polish nationalism includes, not surprisingly, a suspicious-to-hostile view of Russia. Hungary's President Viktor Orbán is the closest in its authoritarian ruling style to Putin's, but his Fidesz party is formally affilited to the conservative party bloc in the EU Parliament, not to the far-right blac.

Liebich reviews his party's view of the development of the West's relations with Russia since 1989. In their view, the 1990 arrangement between the US, Canada, and Western European countries with Russia (then still the dominant country in the Soviet Union) known as the Paris Charter, which aimed at improving East-West integration under the auspices of what is now the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Lieblich argues that with the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact, NATO should also have been abolished.

Obviously, that didn't happen. But the diplomatic position of the West was that NATO could be broadened to include even Russia. It seems unlikely that anyone could have ever taken that position very seriously, however convenient it may have been to pretend that they did. NATO was formed as an alliance to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union and it also brought the NATO allies under the American nuclear umbrella. Liebach notes that instead of the NATO alliance being ended, "NATO expanded and the desire of [Russian Presidents]Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev for the inclusion of Russia was ignored by the 'victors'." Nearly 30 years after the fall of the [Berlin] Wall, we find ourselves in a new ice age." (All translations from the German are mine.)

Lutz Schrader notes in this article on the OSCE from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BPB), Die OSZE – ein Erfolgsmodell muss sich neu erfinden 22.02.2017, that the Clinton Administration used the formal prospect of NATO ascension for Russia to make the actual expansion of NATO to former Warsaw Pact countries more acceptable. And that they informed the Russians formally in March 1995 that they had no intention of expanding NATO to include Russia.

It might be an exaggeration to say that the notion of expanding NATO to included Russia was always a joke. But not by much. And it doesn't seem to realistic that Putin in his first Presidency (2000-2008) or Medvedev during his (2008-2012) might have still been expecting that inclusion in NATO was a realistic option. Because essentially the Western countries quit pretending by 1995.

Liebach's states the Left Party's position on Russian expansionism as follows:

The LINKE criticize the incorporation of the Crimea into the territory of Russia as a violation of international law, just as the removal of Kosovo from Serbia was. The proposal of the Russian President [Putin] before the Federation Council to send soldiers into the Ukraine on the grounds that there was allegedly a threat to Russian citizens living there was as much a violation of the ban written into the UN Charter on the threat of violence as the military intervention in Grenada in 1983 was under US President Ronald Reagan, who in any case chose the same justification. It is occasionally argued that Russia could act in that way because the USA also did, and that [Russia] had to defend itself against a strategy of encirclement. But we [the Left Party] aren't making geopolitics from Russia's point of view but rather left peace policy. We stand for international law and against violations of it. If we are blind in one eye [i.e., one-sided in such criticism], we damage our credibility and weaken ourselves even when we oppose unjustified attacks against Russia. If we criticize the national government for using two different standards, we shouldn't also do that ourselves.

Liebich states the Left Party's position as opposing the current sanctions against Russia. And he holds out the 1990 goal of a pan-European OSCE instead of NATO.

Keeping longterm goals in mind is important in foreign policy. But it's safe to say that a pan-European OSCE that replaces NATO is a more distant goal now than it was in 1990. And, in practice, ending the current sanctions is part of a larger package of international issues with Russia.

I've thought for a long time that the post-1990 expansion of NATO - "NATO enlargement" in the standard jargon - was a reckless action done with too little consideration of how Russia as a nation would see itself required to respond, no matter what kind of government it had. That process played out pretty obviously the way that the foreign policy "realist" school predicted. The US found itself as the world's "hyperpower" in a "unipolar world." In the realist scheme, the US would look for ways to maintain its dominance and prevent the rise of "peer comptetitors" in the world. Preserving NATO and expanding it eastward was an obvious way to pursue that goal. That's not to say that those were the only choices that could have been made, of course.

Having united Germany as part of NATO was one level of risk. That arrangement was negotiated in the "Two Plus Four" process in 1990 to unify Germany. The 1999 inclusion of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland was another level of risk, the first incorporation of former Warsaw Pact countries. The next round of expansion took place in 2004, adding former Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia; the oncetime Yugoslav republic of Slovenia; and three countries previously part of the Soviet Union itself, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And that was even a higher level of risk.

Russia subsequently created a situation in the former Soviet republics of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) in which Russian forces controlled parts of their territory secessionist entities in ethnic-Russian dominated areas and with the incorpration of the Ukrainian Crimea formally into Russia itself. That greatly complicates any move by NATO to incorporate either of those nations in a further expansion, since neither country currently controls all of its own territory and therefore explicit agreements with Russia would be required to achieve that.