Semi-Competence as a Limited Virtue; False Competence as Absolute Vice

I strongly recommend Joshua Foust’s takedown of Putin-as-master-strategist worship.

What to make of Amer­i­can com­men­ta­tors who seem to love Vladimir Putin? From almost any angle, the Russ­ian dic­ta­tor seems to sat­isfy all the instincts that make a cer­tain brand of wonk sali­vate with almost sex­ual envy: brash­ness, unapolo­getic and near-homoerotic dis­plays of mas­culin­ity, a refusal to nego­ti­ate or con­sider alter­na­tives, a lit­eral destruc­tion of dis­sent and polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. To too many, Putin is the pres­i­dent they wish would run Amer­ica — of course, only in line with their own pol­icy pref­er­ences (which are as con­tra­dic­tory and reflex­ively anti-Obama as you’d expect in our era of polit­i­cal derangement).

Foust is, admittedly, a far greater prose stylist than I am and his concise and powerful rendering of what I have spent a lot of bits and bytes analyzing is commendable. I will however, qualify in one big way. Obama’s policy and strategy has been abysmal in its own right. If Obama has gotten some big things right (such as not committing himself to a no-fly/no-drive zone), let’s also be frank that he has done some things quite wrong as well. I will divide these wr0ngs into sins of formulation and sins of implementation. I will begin with the latter considering they are much more visible.

Even folks like Robert Farley, who one would hardly call a Putin-worshipper, have noted the confusion, semi-coherence, and reactive quality of administration policymaking on Twitter. It is difficult to know where to begin with this. Shall we begin with the millions blown on fielding a grand total of 5–6 operational Syrian proxies? Or the older but also galling Mosul briefing that wasn’t? Strategy is not just a matter of reasoning and choice; it is also a matter of skilled decision process and implementation. And then there is the Obama administration’s petulant refusal to admit responsibility for its failures and tendency to instead blame them on its political opponents. For those of us that are closer to the administration than its opponents, this kind of bumbling and lack of basic presidential responsibility makes it difficult to defend. However, the sins of implementation likely stem from a bigger problem inherent in the sins of formulation.

I have tried to always be frank with my readers when possible, and here I will also be blunt and impolite: the Obama administration wants to hand off the Syrian and Iraqi conundrum to its successor. As Nick Prime and I noted a while ago, if we can discern revealed preference from the Obama administration’s often fractious decisionmaking that preference strongly points in one direction — tamping down ISIS enough to keep it out of the news. Even analysts of strategy have consciences and a sense of outrage, so these sins of formulation do not sit well with me. They are not only instrumentally undesirable; they also are very much counter to the responsibility of the presidency that Obama rhetorically pays tribute to so often. And it is not difficult to see how they have made it difficult for him to achieve even the aims he has committed to.

However, in strategy, as MLR Smith observes, analysts observe moral neutrality. We are not interested in the inherent normative rightness or wrongness of an strategic approach as much as its mechanics, dynamics, and operations. If we are cynical, we have to admit that presidents that make bellicose (and other!) promises often lie to their publics and also fudge, distort, and bullshit the very intelligence that tracks and predicts events of interest to their publics. As noted before, we do have consciences, ideologies, and policy preferences of our own. Nonetheless, at the end of the day we also are not so driven by them that we cannot try to make higher judgements and inferences.

In this respect, the harms inherent in semi-competence of the kind that the Obama administration has demonstrated cannot be meaningfully equated to the dangers of false competence that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has demonstrated. Putin certainly presents a seductive trap for even seasoned strategic analysts like Edward Luttwak. Many in the strategy world are conservative, antiquarian, suspicious of liberalism and universalism by temperament, focused on political and military power and its observable tactical implementation, and often hew to a romantic mindset that sees the world as in thrall to a soulless technocratic rationalism. This mindset also renders them often suspicious of modern ideas about international relations and political science and more interested in the idea of world affairs as driven by more elemental and emotional forces of fear, honor, and interest. I should know, since I once certainly did too.

Certainly fear and honor ought not to be dismissed, but as Daniel Nexon observed recently a fixation on those two elements has come to outweigh discussion of interest. And in this respect Putin, while certainly skilled in the theatrical arts of chest-puffing, collar-popping, and other discrete forms of manly posturing (and yes, dick-waving), cannot be said to be a master strategist. Putin is certainly, as I have noted, an adept exploiter of the West’s confusion, weakness, and indecision. He is not a mindless brute either. Putin ought to underestimated at our own peril. However, as Nexon observed, we should not let Putin’s seemingly old-school, “back to basics” mindset obscure the reality that he has done much more poorly at the basics than his opponents:

In the summer of 2013, Ukraine’s incumbent party — the Party of Regions, under President Yanukovych — played its traditional balancing act but was, when compared to its main opposition, relatively pro-Moscow. Putin initiated a trade war against Ukraine to force it out of its European Union Association Agreement. It worked. Except that it caused a backlash that brought down the government in a (largely) non-violent revolution. The new regime was decidedly less pro-Moscow and more pro-western. Moscow responded, at first, by seizing control of Crimea — an asset from the perspective of Russian nationalism but an economic liability — and its aging naval fleet. In doing so, it violated its obligations under the Budapest memorandum and produced widespread concern among the major European powers. Not content to stop there, Russia initiated a proxy (and not-so proxy) war in Ukraine.

This war shows no signs of toppling a the Ukrainian government, and the ‘best’ outcome looks likely to be frozen conflicts by which Moscow might enjoy some additional leverage over a very unhappy Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, western sanctions have compounded the sharp drop in petroleum prices to send Russia into an economic contraction. Russia signed a pretty unfavorable deals with China. Sweden and Finland are contemplating NATO membership. The US has more capabilities deployed directly on the Russian border than, well, ever. It is difficult to really demonstrate that the United States is in any way less secure since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict

Luttwak, despite his unfortunate valorization of Putin, did write a good set of material about strategy’s “paradoxical logic” a while back. We can add another paradox: an American president that is far more MSNBC than Bismarck can thwart a former KGB operative that has such a seemingly vintage realpolitik attitude that you’d think he was preparing a Henry Kissinger costume for Halloween. Semi-competence may be a limited virtue if the opponent is playing a bad hand and is much more talk than delivery; projecting false competence when your opponent materially outclasses you in many ways is an absolute vice.