Is Putin’s Syrian gambit really about Europe?

The thesis is perhaps an obvious one — but so disastrous in its implications that very few people acknowledge it.

By Walter Nicklin

Russia could overrun Eastern Europe in just 72 hours! So sounds the alarm of a new RAND Corp. war game that shows NATO being caught napping by Vadimir Putin’s resurgent Russia. The think tank concludes that America and its allies currently have neither the troop strength nor weaponry needed to halt a Russian advance across the Baltic states. (http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1253.html)

As if on cue, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, in a Feb. 2 speech on prioritizing national security threats, focused primarily on Russia, behind China, North Korea, Iran, even Mideast-spawned terrorism. To deter potential Russian aggression, Carter says U.S. military spending in Europe needs to quadruple, from $789 million currently to $3.4 billion in 2017.

But the most immediate Russian threat to Europe is more Machiavellian, less easily sensationalized; indeed, it is seldom remarked upon at all. It comes from Europe’s soft, southern flank, where Putin’s low-risk, high-reward gambit in Syria is not only stabilizing the Assad regime and retaking rebel-held territory, with a relative low cost in Russian blood and treasure, but also helping to generate ever more refugees whose destination of choice is the European Union.

Just since early February, tens of thousands of newly displaced Syrians — terrorized by Russian bombs in and around Aleppo — have fled toward the Turkish border.

By thus stirring the pot in Syria, Putin ensured that the refugee crisis would only intensify — putting ever increasing stress on the very fabric binding together the European Union. The stress comes not only in the sheer numbers of the immigrants themselves and the ability of the EU member states to absorb them (1 million into Germany alone) — but in the destabilization of domestic politics with the inevitable extremist backlash from anti-immigrant right-wing political parties.

Was this Syrian impact on the EU part of Putin’s calculus all along? Though not normally known as a strategic thinker, Putin at the moment seems a formidable opponent on a chessboard that can be said to have begun in the Ukraine.

Would Ukraine remain within Russia’s “near abroad” sphere of influence, or pivot to the west through new and stronger associations with the European Union? That question is, after all, what precipitated the Ukrainian crisis. And from that EU question came the collapse of the old Ukrainian government; the Russian retaliation in invading and taking over the Crimea; then Russia’s active support of a “civil war” in eastern Ukraine.

That Putin perceives the EU as his opposing chess player, if not declared enemy, should not surprise. For all through the Cold War, the Soviets did everything they could, short of military force, to thwart Western European integration. For them, the European Common Market was simply an economic (and sometimes political) extension of NATO, and therefore a projection of American power.

Ironically, the negative external pressure of Soviet opposition to what would become the EU helped ensure its success. Fear of the Soviets — together with the positive external support from the U.S. — reinforced the internal dynamics set in play by “the European idea” from such visionaries as Jean Monnet. As students and professors of international relations have affirmed in countless research papers and dissertations, systemic pressures, external to Western Europe itself, were critical in defining and creating what is now the European Union.

This pressure from Russia — except for the chaotic period after the collapse of the Soviet Union — has continued in one form or another. Pressure from the Ukrainian crisis did not directly destabilize Europe; rather, as during the Cold War, it helped solidify European unity, this time in a common policy of economic sanctions as counter-pressure trying to modify Russian behavior. The sanctions — initially introduced for one year on July 31, 2014 — were extended for six months on Dec. 21.

But now — through Putin’s Syrian gambit — is it possible that Russian pressure will finally take a tragic toll on the EU, as manifested in the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War? From Berlin, a Reuters correspondent reports that Russians seem to be taking special glee in the chaos created by the Syrian refugees. In Paris, Le Monde reports the same.

This interplay between Europe and the Mideast has its roots, of course, in the First World War, whose 100th anniversary is now being commemorated. Conventional wisdom holds that war to be the inevitable result of German militarism triggering “a tragedy of miscalculation.” But on the occasion of the anniversary, revisionist historians see Russia as at least equally culpable. When Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II ordered general mobilization on July 30, 1914, he’s the one who started the ball of miscalculation rolling.

The Russians hoped a war in Europe would lead to a partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, so that they would then control the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. A century later the Turkish heirs to the Ottoman Empire continue to give the Russians trouble, however; and what would become Syria smolders still.

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P.S. Subsequently, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, financier George Soros, and Senator John McCain have also raised alarms about Putin, in Friedman’s words, “deliberately bombing anti-regime Syrians to drive them into Europe in hopes of creating a rift in the European Union, strain its resources and make it a weaker rival to Russia and a weaker ally for America.”

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Walter Nicklin, as founding editor of what was the European Union’s U.S. magazine “Europe,” reported from Brussels and Washington for “The Economist.” He now occasionally contributes to the D.C.-based European Institute and other publications.