Russia is a hostile power, but this is not a new cold war.
The west needs to step back from the Ukraine crisis and devise a new strategy of containment towards Vladimir Putin
Martin Kettle - The Guardian, Thursday 24 April 2014
'A strategy … can mark the difference between life and death.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon
Plans are worthless but planning is everything, President Eisenhower once observed, drawing on his vast military and political experience. The same could be said about strategy, says Lawrence Freedman in his recent history of the subject. If a strategy is simply a predetermined plan to reach a defined goal, it is not much practical use in the unpredictable real world. But if a strategy is the ability to respond to change within an evolving vision of achievable goals, in essence what Freedman concludes, then it can indeed mark the difference between life and death.
There are few issues in which the need for strategy is more pressing in Europe than in the relationship with Russia over the developing crisis in Ukraine. So on one level it is good news that, as reported in the New York Times this week, the Obama administration is "looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the cold war strategy of containment".
It is good news because such an approach to strategy requires any western leader, not just President Obama, to step back from the immediate instability in eastern Ukraine. This means thinking and reasoning about Ukraine's implications, including those within Russia itself, and devising appropriate long-term narratives and responses that make such conflict both less likely in itself and less likely to have undesirable results. Above all, it means trying to understand Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The downside of this approach is the abiding and beguiling folly – so topical in the centenary year of the first world war – of thinking there is an off-the-peg solution from yesterday sitting on a shelf somewhere that can deal with the instabilities of today and tomorrow.
That's why it is crucial to grasp those things that today's conflict with Russia has in common with the cold war – and the things that it does not.
Cold war containment – the strategy of facing down the Soviet Union without tipping over into nuclear war – certainly worked. But it did not work seamlessly. It could have failed – as it nearly did over Cuba – and it was inconsistently applied. The man who devised the strategy, in 1946, the US diplomat and scholar George F Kennan, shaped American foreign policy for almost half a century. Yet he spent much of the rest of his long life in revolt against the way his ideas were being applied, in particular in nuclear weapons policy and in proxy conflicts such as Vietnam. And, as his recently published diaries reveal, even when Soviet communism finally collapsed, Kennan often observed events with more foreboding than satisfaction.
To read the key Kennan texts today – his "long telegram" from Moscow in 1946 and his Foreign Affairs magazine article The Sources of Soviet Conduct a year later – is time well spent in the light of events in Ukraine. The parallels between Putin's Russia and Stalin's Russia, as analysed by Kennan, are stark. Among them are the Russian nationalism, the untrustworthiness, the belief in a zero-sum international game, the fear, the fundamental absence of shared values with the west, the importance of the nuclear standoff, and the readiness to play adversaries off against one another.
But some differences are starkly revealed too. Putin does not conceal his nationalism under a Marxist cloak, as Stalin did. Neither does he have, with the exception of fellow nationalists and a handful of unreconstructed pro-Russian fellow travellers, any international movement to do his work, as Stalin had with the world's communist parties. Nor, not even if he succeeds in giving substance to his Eurasian imperial dream (which is not impossible) does Putin have the network of client states on his doorstep that Stalin surrounded himself with after 1945.
Putin, moreover, presides over a form of capitalist economy that is deeply interconnected with the west's. Russia's rulers have their own western bank accounts. And the Moscow stock market, its vital energy shares included, collapsed by 10% on the day Putin annexed Crimea. Stalin never had to worry about things of that sort. And while Putin enjoys the mechanics of traditional state repression, he rules a people no longer trapped behind an iron curtain.
Kennan had huge faith in the Russian people; a lot hangs on whether our generation shares a similar confidence today. If we do, Russian opinion needs to be nurtured, not taken for granted. The French diplomat Talleyrand once said something to the effect that the problem with Russia is always that it is both too strong and too weak at the same time. Recent events show this is still true. It helps to explain why the biggest strategic blunder that western policymakers could commit after Ukraine would be to have no shared strategy at all towards Russia.
Like it or not, Russia is a hostile power. In spite of Tony Blair's speech today on radical Islamism, western European nations have few shared interests with Russia and, in the light of current evidence, few shared values. Along with the United States, the western European nations therefore need to be serious but accurate about Russia. They need to take a strategic approach to Russia on issues including reducing energy dependency, ending arms sales, imposing banking restrictions and coordinating military deterrence to protect Ukraine and its neighbours.
But the second biggest mistake would be for western policymakers to deck themselves indiscriminately in cold war clothing. History's lesson is that Russia is far more preoccupied with fears of invasion than with dreams of a drive towards the west. That should not mean, however, that we in the west can continue to duck the long-term implications of Putin's deeply hostile statecraft – not least because whoever succeeds Putin may become even more nationalistic and trigger-happy. But the justification for a thoughtful new containment strategy is already strong enough.
Martin Kettle - The Guardian, Thursday 24 April 2014
'A strategy … can mark the difference between life and death.' Illustration by Matt Kenyon
Plans are worthless but planning is everything, President Eisenhower once observed, drawing on his vast military and political experience. The same could be said about strategy, says Lawrence Freedman in his recent history of the subject. If a strategy is simply a predetermined plan to reach a defined goal, it is not much practical use in the unpredictable real world. But if a strategy is the ability to respond to change within an evolving vision of achievable goals, in essence what Freedman concludes, then it can indeed mark the difference between life and death.
There are few issues in which the need for strategy is more pressing in Europe than in the relationship with Russia over the developing crisis in Ukraine. So on one level it is good news that, as reported in the New York Times this week, the Obama administration is "looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russia that applies an updated version of the cold war strategy of containment".
It is good news because such an approach to strategy requires any western leader, not just President Obama, to step back from the immediate instability in eastern Ukraine. This means thinking and reasoning about Ukraine's implications, including those within Russia itself, and devising appropriate long-term narratives and responses that make such conflict both less likely in itself and less likely to have undesirable results. Above all, it means trying to understand Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The downside of this approach is the abiding and beguiling folly – so topical in the centenary year of the first world war – of thinking there is an off-the-peg solution from yesterday sitting on a shelf somewhere that can deal with the instabilities of today and tomorrow.
That's why it is crucial to grasp those things that today's conflict with Russia has in common with the cold war – and the things that it does not.
Cold war containment – the strategy of facing down the Soviet Union without tipping over into nuclear war – certainly worked. But it did not work seamlessly. It could have failed – as it nearly did over Cuba – and it was inconsistently applied. The man who devised the strategy, in 1946, the US diplomat and scholar George F Kennan, shaped American foreign policy for almost half a century. Yet he spent much of the rest of his long life in revolt against the way his ideas were being applied, in particular in nuclear weapons policy and in proxy conflicts such as Vietnam. And, as his recently published diaries reveal, even when Soviet communism finally collapsed, Kennan often observed events with more foreboding than satisfaction.
To read the key Kennan texts today – his "long telegram" from Moscow in 1946 and his Foreign Affairs magazine article The Sources of Soviet Conduct a year later – is time well spent in the light of events in Ukraine. The parallels between Putin's Russia and Stalin's Russia, as analysed by Kennan, are stark. Among them are the Russian nationalism, the untrustworthiness, the belief in a zero-sum international game, the fear, the fundamental absence of shared values with the west, the importance of the nuclear standoff, and the readiness to play adversaries off against one another.
But some differences are starkly revealed too. Putin does not conceal his nationalism under a Marxist cloak, as Stalin did. Neither does he have, with the exception of fellow nationalists and a handful of unreconstructed pro-Russian fellow travellers, any international movement to do his work, as Stalin had with the world's communist parties. Nor, not even if he succeeds in giving substance to his Eurasian imperial dream (which is not impossible) does Putin have the network of client states on his doorstep that Stalin surrounded himself with after 1945.
Putin, moreover, presides over a form of capitalist economy that is deeply interconnected with the west's. Russia's rulers have their own western bank accounts. And the Moscow stock market, its vital energy shares included, collapsed by 10% on the day Putin annexed Crimea. Stalin never had to worry about things of that sort. And while Putin enjoys the mechanics of traditional state repression, he rules a people no longer trapped behind an iron curtain.
Kennan had huge faith in the Russian people; a lot hangs on whether our generation shares a similar confidence today. If we do, Russian opinion needs to be nurtured, not taken for granted. The French diplomat Talleyrand once said something to the effect that the problem with Russia is always that it is both too strong and too weak at the same time. Recent events show this is still true. It helps to explain why the biggest strategic blunder that western policymakers could commit after Ukraine would be to have no shared strategy at all towards Russia.
Like it or not, Russia is a hostile power. In spite of Tony Blair's speech today on radical Islamism, western European nations have few shared interests with Russia and, in the light of current evidence, few shared values. Along with the United States, the western European nations therefore need to be serious but accurate about Russia. They need to take a strategic approach to Russia on issues including reducing energy dependency, ending arms sales, imposing banking restrictions and coordinating military deterrence to protect Ukraine and its neighbours.
But the second biggest mistake would be for western policymakers to deck themselves indiscriminately in cold war clothing. History's lesson is that Russia is far more preoccupied with fears of invasion than with dreams of a drive towards the west. That should not mean, however, that we in the west can continue to duck the long-term implications of Putin's deeply hostile statecraft – not least because whoever succeeds Putin may become even more nationalistic and trigger-happy. But the justification for a thoughtful new containment strategy is already strong enough.
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