Cold War is the New Normal?
Vladimir Putin is a problem for the next Commander-In-Chief
I’m going to start with a simple and uncontroversial premise: Russian politics has a name.
That name is Vladimir Putin.
His rise to power in The Russian Federation is a long story and I won’t attempt to retell it here. The end result is Putin in permanent control of the political machinations of Moscow. It doesn’t seem to matter what the political climate du jour of Russia is at any given time; Putin is able to jump from party to party always at the forefront of the national consciousness. In effect he has transcended the need for political party backing, becoming his own political brand name.
Putin has become the master of a self-correcting cycle of bureaucrats and oligarchs. These bureaucrats become multi-millionaires off the bribes of oligarchs in return for protecting the status quo. Meanwhile, these oligarchs become billionaires from the institutional corruption in government contracts, land purchasing, and construction. There is no institution more corrupt than the state security services, helmed by Putin’s former KGB colleagues. This is a system entirely devoid of checks or balances.
There isn’t a people more historically tolerant of overwhelming tragedy and massive hardship than the Russians; popular overthrow of the government is not going to happen. Political rivals routinely die in accidents and protest organizers are remitted to permanent psychiatric care at alarmingly predictable rates of correlation. The state-run media efficiently directs popular attention away from scandal and policy issues, instead blaming external threats for Russia’s problems; chiefly the United States.
As long as he continues to deliver profits, Putin doesn’t fear ousting from the elites, and as long as he remains the epicenter of the cult of personality that the state media has cultivated, he doesn’t fear popular uprising. Putin will remain in control as long he makes the nation feel strong — fairness is an afterthought and freedom is negotiable.
This is Russia as it is — and no credible estimates or foreign policy plans forecast anything but bleak continuance of the same.
But why does this concern the United States?
A few months ago a friend of a friend sent me the US Army War College’s research topics. These topics are valuable because they are, in effect, what American military decision makers are worried about. The number one issue, above the pivot to Asia or the Middle Eastern conflicts, is full scale war with Russia. Putin’s continually a topic of discussion in the current presidential debates and in American political circles in general. There are enough policy makers still alive who remember the Cold War to ensure Russia stays a preeminent foreign policy topic, but few seem to understand the evolving nature of Putin‘s Russia as a reality.
The Soviet Empire was a decidedly hostile rival that openly plotted America’s destruction and downfall. But that was decades ago; an eternity in geopolitics. Many Americans would agree that Russia merited this much attention while it was a hostile communist empire, but not today as an economically defunct kleptocracy run by strongman politicians. A nation with 20% of its GDP in a shadow economy of bribes and kick-backs isn’t really a danger, is it?
It is. But not necessarily in the traditional sense.
While the chances nuclear conflict are much lower than they once were, and Russian military spending currently hovers at 11% of the United States’, Moscow has found new ways to market itself as a powerful force. From cyber intervention in the American election, saber rattling with NATO forces, and an increasingly interventionist policy abroad Moscow is behaving less like a federation and more like its former Soviet self. Russian military adventurism in Syria is little more than an expression of how desperate Moscow, and Putin in particular, is becoming to market itself as relevant and powerful abroad.
This circles back to Putin; the corruption engine he sits on has grown too large for him to effectively control. Kleptocracies, like pyramid schemes, have one thing in common: to stave off collapse they must continually be fed new income. In the case of Russia, it must create external, that is, international, tension to keep the populace’s attention away from rampant internal problems and maintain a constant flow of oil and gas income to replace the rubles exported to the private accounts of public servants. Putin benefits from and directs the bureaucrat/oligarch cycle that only he can hold together, but no one, not even Putin, can stop it now. It will continue until its (probably violent) collapse.
Russian aggression is two things: opportunistic and predicated on its own internal instability. Moscow’s saber rattling ramps up primarily when its own internal problems have become overwhelmingly severe or when its non-NATO neighbors have exploitable internal problems (like the Ukraine uprisings). The UN is largely powerless to stop these actions or even draft resolutions to condemn them, due to Russia’s permanent status as a UN security council member and the unlimited veto power this position holds.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the only thing stopping Russia from intervening any further in European political affairs. NATO has tolerated Russian violence in Chechnya and Georgia through the 2000s and more recently in Ukraine with the added annexation of Crimea, but how much further will NATO allow them to push? The mutual defense clause of the NATO accords keeps an invasion of member states off the table in Russian planning circles. Putin, one of NATO’s harshest and most vocal critics uses it to justify his own military buildup and actively seeks to undermine and break-up this alliance.
This idea cannot be over-emphasized. If Putin was given one wish, I doubt it would be anything other than the total break-up of the NATO alliance. Article 5 of the NATO treaty provides for a mutual and total defense of its members: If Putin aggressively moves into Latvia, Estonia, or any of the other minor member nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the rest of NATO are obligated to declare immediate and unconditional war. If followed through, this severely limits Moscow’s interventionist options in Europe. However, what if the United States declines to invoke article 5 after an attack on a member state? Putin’s wish comes true and NATO falls apart.
Enter the 2016 American elections and the candidates America has chosen. From the hack of Democratic National Committee by Russian government cyber forces to Trump’s sincere praises of Russia’s president — Vladimir Putin has had his face and name all over this election.
In reality, what can we expect from the candidates? How might they deal with an increasingly reckless and interventionist Vladimir Putin?
Hillary Clinton, along with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, doubted the Obama-ordered and overly optimistic approach of the 2009 “Russian Relations Reset”. I doubt Clinton would be more trusting as President than she would be as Secretary of State, even before Russian military intervention in Syria or Ukraine. Consider the open criticism of Putin in the wake of election scandals and the anti-Clinton/anti-NATO campaign run by Russian state media. Putin has a preferred candidate, and it is not Hillary Clinton. Under a Clinton Presidency, we can imagine if Russian tanks in roll into Poland then America will invoke Article 5.
Trump, however, has famously set conditions on American commitment to NATO based on the non-binding 2% GDP defense spending clause. When we add to this the Donald’s habit of praising Putin for the way he “keeps control at home,” his open request that Russia continue cyber attacks against the Democrats, and his NATO label: “obsolete and expensive”, this leaves NATO members with a question to American commitment. What will President Trump do to counteract a Russian expedition into Eastern Europe? The fact that this question even exists means there are military planners in Moscow looking at options that were formerly off the table.
Even though Russia is not what the Soviet Union once was, it remains a real threat to America and her interests. There is a large portion of the Eastern European community that watches the presidential campaigns of the United States with more interest than they watch their own. These people depend on NATO and its promise of military insurance from the United States. Putin’s reign cannot last forever, but how the next American president handles NATO and Vladimir Putin’s Russia will help determine the shape of geopolitics for decades to come.
Bradford Barrett is a veteran of the US Navy. Aviator. Policy thinker. Graduate of Texas A&M University. Student of Martial Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Military Science.
