In September 2015, Putin opted for a new military endeavor, a limited military intervention in Syria. His action turned the civil war in Syria to the advantage of the incumbent regime of Bashar al-Assad. It has not been very costly, but it has not aroused any enthusiasm among ordinary Russians, while it greatly raised Russia’s international standing.
Putin’s actions are reminiscent of Tsar Nicholas I, who functioned as the gendarme of Europe during the liberal European revolutions of 1848–1849, quashing democratic uprisings from Poland to Hungary. In a similar fashion, Putin sees the so-called colored revolutions as his main enemy, whether they occur in post-Soviet or Arab countries.
The Kremlin’s increasing inclination to pursue small wars to mobilize the Russian nation may be rational, but this tactic is becoming increasingly risky as others start understanding what is going on. The power base of the regime appears to be narrowing to the state administration, the secret police, and other militarized branches of government.
Wars are expensive. Russia’s fiscal statistics remain surprisingly open. They show that Crimea costs the Russian federal budget about $2 billion a year. No public numbers seem to be available for the Donbas, but a fair guess is that it costs about as much. That would mean 0.3 percent of Russia’s GDP a year. In the discussion of the cost of Western sanctions, the IMF has suggested 1–1.5 percent of Russia’s GDP each year. Finally, the SIPRI numbers on Russia’s military expenditures show a rise by 2 percent of GDP from 2008 to 2016 (fig. 9.2). This is 3–4 percent of GDP each year, which is a lot for a country whose economy grows by merely 1.5 percent a year. It is not clear whether Russia can manage such a large military cost politically.
In the summer of 2018, the Russian government raised the retirement age for men from sixty to sixty-five and for women from fifty-five to sixty, which aroused great popular unrest, arguably the greatest since Putin’s attempt at a social-benefit reform in January 2005. At the same time, the government raised the value-added tax by two percentage points from 18 to 20 percent. The political implication is that Putin has violated the implicit social contract, that he delivers a growing standard of living while the people stay out of politics. Real disposable income fell by 17 percent from 2014 to 2017, and now government policy is eroding the standard of living.
It is difficult to see any opportunity for closer relations between Russia and the West unless the Kremlin decides to return the Donbas to Ukraine. The sanctions have marginalized Russia’s importance to Western economies, and a broad consensus is that they are likely to last. A problem for the West is that Russia has so little to benefit from cooperation with the West that it may abandon all international rules.
Putin’s regime is not likely to reform, but is it sustainable? Many stagnant and backward regimes have survived for decades. Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe are illustrative examples. In 1919, the liberal economist Ludwig von Mises concluded that the Soviet economic system without private property rights was not sustainable. He was right, but the Soviet Union persisted until 1991. Immense natural wealth, war, and repression did the trick. Moreover, changes usually require a catalyst that might be absent for years.36
Portugal offers another challenging example. The authoritarian António Salazar ruled as prime minister for thirty-six years until 1968 and died of old age in 1970. He was a nationalist who pursued corporatist authoritarianism and opposed democracy, communism, socialism, and liberalism. His economic policies can be summarized as fiscal responsibility and protectionism, leaving Portugal as the poorest and least educated country in Western Europe. Salazar pursued three colonial wars in Africa but managed to survive politically. Only in 1974, four years after his death, did the Carnation Revolution take place. Today Portugal is twice as wealthy as Russia in terms of GDP per capita at current exchange rates.37
Putin’s regime possesses considerable sources of sustenance. It appears rational and well informed. The Kremlin understands its current budgetary constraints and its military inferiority in a big war. Few democratic governments can boast a corresponding coordination of policies. The risk of accidents in economic policy seems uncommonly small. Nor does the regime proffer any definite goal against which it could be measured, such as the restoration of the Russian Empire or any specific economic goal, which could lead to exaggerated expectations. Whatever happens, Putin may with some credibility say that the result was his aim.
Still, the reasons for the unsustainability of the Putin regime appear stronger. The regime’s power base seems to be shrinking, and serious economic reforms are out of the question. Russian sociologist Natalia Zubarevich remarks that “the general direction of the Putin regime is clear: antimodernization and isolationism.” Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center concurs that “Putin has lost the support of the urban middle class of larger cities, and he does not expect to win it back.” The elite abandoned Putin in 2011, and he decided to cultivate the working class, the old, the poorly educated, and the provincial population, pursuing an antimodern electoral strategy similar to that of President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.38
The greatest risk may be that Putin is tempted to take greater risks than he can manage. So far, he has been cautious, but as the range of his options is shrinking, he seems increasingly prone to take greater risks. As the common cake is not growing, the competition for the pickings among different vested interests within the ruling elite is intensifying.
The disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which unleashed the Russian revolution of 1905, is the outstanding example of excessive Kremlin risk-taking. Another example is the Crimean War of 1853–1856, which ended the reign of Nicholas I, and allowed his successor Tsar Alexander II to launch imperial Russia’s greatest reforms. A third case is the Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1988, which contributed greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin reforms of the 1990s. A severe tremor would be needed to break this seemingly solid system. Such shocks are usually surprising and can lead either to disaster or to fortuitous reforms.
The Russian liberal veteran politician Leonid Gozman summarizes the essence of the Putin regime: “To judge from the statements of our propagandists, the Russian state is very valuable and at the same time a very fragile construct that can be destroyed by anything: the fight against corruption, independent monitoring of elections, protest meetings with demands for the ouster of stealing or incompetent officials.” The state’s decisions are “often not beneficial to the citizens, but to the state itself, or to those state capitalists and special services that actually say: ‘The state is us.’” As a consequence, the state budget is increasingly militarized at the expense of science, education, and health care. In order to justify such an allocation of state financing, the Russian “government talks about external threats (NATO and terrorists), while it is actually preparing for an attack from its people, which it perceives as a terminal danger.”39
The big question is what strategy the Kremlin may choose. In his thoughtful book Destined for War, the eminent strategic thinker Graham Allison focuses on the risk of war between the world’s two leading powers, the United States and China, because China is currently overtaking the United States in economic strength, and such shifts usually lead to war.
A subtheme in Allison’s book is Austria-Hungary, which was a declining power at the beginning of World War I. The empire started the war after having been dissatisfied with Serbia’s response to its ultimatum, and the Russian Empire, then a rising power, defended Serbia. Today Russia looks like a dangerous declining power reminiscent of Austria-Hungary in 1914, with its stagnant economy and impressive military might set to decrease. Its natural inclination is to be a spoiler in international affairs rather than a constructive player. Logic encourages the Kremlin to act while it still has the third largest military budget in the world and nuclear arms that are matched only by the United States. That means that we should expect Moscow to be ever less cooperative and more prone to risk-taking until the Kremlin realize
s that the chips are down.40
The United States has become Russia’s prime enemy. Both sides have been guilty in this gradual drift. Political scientist James Goldgeier and former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul determine that in the 1990s the “pro-American lobby in Russia, including Yeltsin, often felt cheated by their American partners. Disappointed expectations . . . eventually produced disillusion.”41
Since 2007, anti-Americanism has been a dominant feature of Putin’s foreign policy, even if the Barack Obama–Dmitri Medvedev reset in 2009 brought about a pause until Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. The Kremlin needs a credible external enemy to mobilize the nation around the flag, and the United States is the only suitable candidate. Europe is too wobbly, and China too dangerous. Russian popular sentiment toward the United States fluctuates considerably, but usually about 60 percent of the Russians express a negative attitude to the United States, and the Kremlin can raise Russian negativity.42
As an old imperial power, Russia possesses great strategic thinking and considerable diplomatic skills. It wants to be represented at each important international table, and it knows how to make its presence felt. The official propaganda uses foreign policy to strengthen the domestic standing of the Russian leaders. Its foremost aims are to detach the United States from the European Union, to divide the European Union, and to isolate former Soviet republics—notably Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova—from the West.43
After the warfare in Ukraine began, an article published one year earlier by Russia’s powerful chief of the general staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, attracted great attention. It has become known as the Gerasimov Doctrine. Gerasimov noted that the line between war and peace had been blurred, because nobody declared war any longer. Focusing on the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and the Arab Spring, his salient line was that “the role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of weapons in their efficacy.”44
The essence of the Gerasimov Doctrine is that Russia’s economic resources are limited, and military hardware is expensive. Therefore, Russian warfare must rely more on unconventional military components, such as cyber, disinformation, economic warfare, and subversion. The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously claimed: “War is . . . the continuation of politics by different means.” This statement frames Russia’s new hybrid warfare. Cyber especially has dissolved the dividing line between war and politics.45
Now that Putin has engaged in four wars in the past decade, he appears hungry for another “small victorious war” when he feels it would be beneficial for national mobilization and his domestic political standing. Hardly anyone predicted the Russian annexation of Crimea or the Russian military engagement in Syria, rendering it foolhardy to try to foresee what comes next.
Putin is no chess player, but he pursues judo, of which he has said, “Judo is not just a sport. . . . It’s a philosophy. It’s respect for your elders and for your opponents. It’s not for weaklings.” Judo favors surprises. We should expect the unexpected. So far, Putin’s actions can be characterized as intelligent and rational, but his appetite is clearly increasing with his eating, and so is his appetite for risk as his domestic situation becomes more embattled.46
Mark Galeotti offers an interesting assessment of Russian intelligence services. There “can be little question about the aggressiveness of the Russian intelligence community.” In the Ukrainian conflict, “the Russians often displayed extremely good intelligence on a tactical [military] level,” but there was “a startling dearth of effective political and strategic intelligence.” The problem lies with Putin, who possesses all this intelligence but is caught in “his dreams of Russia as a renewed great power.” Overall, the cruder and more aggressive FSB is expanding at the expense of the more sophisticated SVR or GRU. Increasingly, the Kremlin is outsourcing subversion, disinformation, and cyber warfare to private contractors and outright organized crime, which offers the Kremlin deniability but also undermines its control and professionalism.47
Because the Kremlin no longer can build its legitimacy on rising standards of living, or bread, it needs more circus, which means war. The Kremlin has jeopardized its old ideas of international law. Russia used to be legalistic but not necessarily legal. Now the Kremlin is increasingly appearing as a rogue actor. It has thrown aside all international conventions concluded from the end of World War II, including the Founding Charter of the United Nations, the Helsinki Act of 1975 and all its consecutive agreements, the Russia-Ukraine Friendship Treaty of 1997, and so on. Why should anybody even try to conclude an agreement with such an actor? Therefore, we should expect the Kremlin to attempt more small victorious wars, as in Georgia and Crimea. This implies that the likelihood is increasing that the Kremlin takes on excessive risks and gets bogged down in wars that are too costly.
Everything came to a head in the US presidential elections of 2016, when the Kremlin did whatever it could to influence the outcome of the elections to the benefit of Donald Trump. Two Russian intelligence services, the FSB and the GRU, hacked the Democratic National Committee. They distributed the leaks through the social networks, skillfully dominating the dumbfounded US media. The Kremlin interacted in an unprecedented fashion with many members of the Trump campaign. It instigated massive social network interference and, in all probability, assisted with financing. It remains to see what was illegal and how effective it was, but the Russian interference was massive and multipronged. The Kremlin has made it a habit to interfere in elections all over the West with anonymous slander on social networks and on the web, hacking of a political nature, financing of both right-wing and left-wing extremists, and many other things.48
The Kremlin has also become blatant with murders in the West. It has been accused of sixteen suspicious deaths connected with Russia in the United Kingdom since the murder of the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006, which the British government neglected to investigate for years. Similarly, the former Russian information minister Mikhail Lesin, who had fallen out with Putin’s media tsar Yuri Kovalchuk, seems to have been murdered in a Washington hotel in November 2015. The biggest shock was the attempted murder of the former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent in the United Kingdom in March 2018.49
The Kremlin appears to have abandoned all the old rules of the game, but this also means that it has boxed Russia into a corner. The United States and Europe have united against its aggression toward Ukraine and will likely remain unified on this issue. The neighboring former Soviet republics are dead scared. Few observers see any hope for the economic reforms necessary for significant economic growth.
In many ways, the Kremlin has returned to the 1980s. Former ambassador Daniel Fried summarizes the situation: “Moscow now, like then, has been going down a dark road of confrontation with the United States and aggression elsewhere. As with the Soviets and reactionary tsars, external confrontation coincides with, and may be compensation for, stagnation at home. Putin’s tactics, like the demonization of the United States in Russian official media, appear recycled from the Cold War.” This is a risky tactic, and the Kremlin appears more prone to risk today than in the 1980s.50
The West must no longer harbor any illusions about Putin. In the past decade, Putin has played a weak economic, political, and military hand with remarkable skill, and for its part, the West has reacted poorly. The West needs to get serious to counter Russian foreign policy better. The postcommunist transition is over, and no systemic convergence is under way. The Kremlin no longer sees democracy building as desirable but views it as a hostile, subversive act. It no longer aspires to join the West, which must face up to this new reality.
The West needs to maintain a credible military defense and military solidarity so that Russia dares not launch a small war against any NATO member. NATO is the best deterrent against Russian military adventures and thus the best framework for
preserving the peace. The West needs to stay united and shore up support for both NATO and the European Union. If NATO splinters, Europe would lack the US nuclear umbrella and the security guarantee of mutual assured destruction. My late friend Boris Nemtsov always said that Putin respects NATO’s article 5, which states the principle of one for all, all for one. So far, this has held true. As long as that holds, all the NATO countries seem to be out of bounds for outright Russian aggression. Subversion is another matter.
Although Western military strength is overwhelming, its credibility is weak. When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the measure of John F. Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961, he found Kennedy lacking. His assessment provoked the Cuban missile crisis. Putin might have drawn similar conclusions from his meetings with President Trump in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, and in Helsinki on July 16, 2018. The West must reinforce its unity and credibility for the sake of peace.51
The basic Western demand is that Russia end its military aggression in Ukraine. Short of credible security guarantees or constructive negotiations, sanctions are the West’s tool of political choice. However, sanctions are always a second best, because they reduce interaction and aggravate alienation, and yet they are preferable to doing nothing in the face of aggression or violations of international law. The four main categories of sanctions at play are: trade, financial, technological, and personal.
Trade sanctions are a double-edged sword. They impose certain costs on the nation sanctioned, but they offer such regimes great opportunities to seize control over private trade and companies. In Serbia, Iraq, and Iran, international trade sanctions greatly strengthened the regime’s control over the economy. They also aggravated organized crime’s collusion with the regime. Trade sanctions hurt ordinary citizens, who naturally turn against the countries that have imposed the sanctions, rendering their political benefit dubious. Putin regularly praises trade sanctions for supporting import substitution, and the Kremlin has imposed its own countersanctions on Western food.
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