John Lenczowski discussed “U.S. Foreign Policy Options” at the Fifth Annual Kosciuszko Chair Spring Symposium, which was on the topic of “Between Russia and NATO: Security Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe.”
This symposium took place on April 25, and was sponsored by The Institute of World Politics.
Now that we are distracted by the war against the Islamic State, what should the U.S. do in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — in a way that deters future aggression and encourages regional peace?
The Obama administration and NATO have made some modest progress in reacting to Putin’s aggression. They have imposed some sanctions and created a 4,000 troop “rapid reaction force” that would rush to the rescue in the event of new Russian aggression elsewhere. In the mind of of Putin and his strategists, however, these actions are not serious. As the Russians measure the “correlation of forces,” the Obama/NATO actions send a signal of weakness, not strength. They will not deter.
Russian interventions in its “near abroad”
Russian strategic intentions in the “near abroad” have been clear for years. Russia’s national security doctrine specifies that it has the right to intervene militarily to protect Russian speakers living in neighboring countries. This doctrine, which is completely contrary to international law, was officially codified in 1992-3.
Since then, Russia has meddled in the internal affairs in all of the former Soviet “union republics.” This involves: intelligence penetration; the buying up and the control of local companies by FSB and Russian mafia-controlled corporations; energy blackmail; financial and other support of political factions and leaders within these nations; and Russia’s longstanding divide-and-rule/conquer policy. This last policy entailed pitting one ethnic or religious group against another, including perpetrating or inciting pogroms. Examples included pitting Azeris against Armenians, Meskhet Turks against Uzbeks, Abkhazians and South Ossetians against Georgians, Gagauz and Russians against Moldovans, Russians against Estonians, Lithuanians against Poles, and now Russians against Ukrainians and Poles against Ukrainians.
Russia has also sought to cast the shadow of its power over NATO countries in East/Central Europe. In addition to pervasive intelligence and commercial penetration, it is likely that the Russians sabotaged the Polish presidential aircraft containing a large percentage of Poland’s leadership that crashed in Smolensk — a leadership that, compared to other Polish leaders, was disproportionately jealous of maintaining Poland’s independence from Russian influence. What is clear here is that there was foul play: explosions that occurred before the plane actually crashed.
A weak American response
In the face of all of this, President Obama’s policy has been silence, willful blindness, or appeasement.
In reaction to Putin’s invasion of Georgia, Washington embarked on its “reset” policy to reduce tensions with Moscow.
In the face of the Smolensk crash, which, if it was indeed Russian sabotage, would have been an act of war against a NATO ally, the Administration failed to call for an international investigation. Instead, it stood silently by as Moscow unambiguously adulterated the crash site and issued a coverup report.
We signed the “New START” agreement that serves no U.S. strategic interest. Moscow continues to modernize its strategic forces in spite of this treaty, which was signed even though the U.S. government knew that Moscow was violating the INF Treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) of 1987.
We abandoned the deployment of an ABM system in Poland and the Czech Republic, and did so in a truly undiplomatic fashion, without consulting and reassuring these NATO allies. The unambiguous message to Moscow was that we were willing to bend over backwards to accommodate its interests.
Weakness is provocative
Now our lack of seriousness in response to Russia’s moves in Crimea and eastern Ukraine will do nothing but tempt Moscow to continue its aggression elsewhere and seek to achieve a long-sought goal: the breakup of NATO.
Putin has questioned the historical validity not only of an independent Ukraine, but also of Kazakhstan. It has created incidents in the Baltic states, including the arrest of an Estonian official and the interdiction of a Lithuanian fishing boat. To break up NATO, Russia just needs to show that the alliance’s security guarantees are worthless at the margin. By the time NATO’s ministers respond to a Russian covert action in Latvia and deploy the “rapid reaction force,” Latvia could very well have been swallowed up. If Moscow’s “separatist” provocateurs seize just a small part of Latvia, one can envision American editorials asking the equivalent of “Why die for Danzig?” When Article 5 proves worthless, NATO members will get the message: forget the useless alliance and make independent security arrangements with Moscow. This process may even be already underway.
The vital U.S. national interest
Ultimately, our policy must be shaped by our vital national interests. The first of these in this region is ensuring that all the countries of Europe remain well behaved toward one another. If Europe is at peace, economic development and international trade are maximized, not only to Europe’s benefit, but to ours as well.
NATO was expanded to do just this, and it has been a wildly successful investment. Membership in NATO gave its new members the incentive to suppress the temptation to irredentism and the igniting of conflicts arising from members of one national group living as a minority in a neighboring country.
It is also a vital national interest to ensure that Russia channel its energies into constructive policies of internal economic development and security from genuine threats. So, Russia must first be deterred and then only then invited to cooperate on matters of real mutual interest: preventing the expansion of Islamist terrorism and containing Chinese expansionism.
Finally, it is a vital national interest to ensure that we retain credibility as an ally and that we retain true alliance relations with many countries whose cooperation we will surely need in future situations.
Serious deterrence
To realize these vital interests, the U.S. needs to send Russia, its neighbors, and the world signals of strength so that we retain our credibility both as an adversary and as an ally. The first step in this process is to re-establish credible deterrence — a task which has been made all the more difficult given the Administration’s weak policies.
Serious deterrence will require:
Sanctions
While the Administration has leveled a number of sanctions, there are signs that Moscow has a scornful attitude toward them. In light of this, there are measures that deserve the most serious consideration. One strategy that must be considered is a cooperative effort within NATO to have some alliance members purchase weapons and other products that were originally bound for Russia but which are being withheld as part of the current sanctions regimen. An effort of this sort can help minimize the pain that individual countries and their affected industries may suffer as a result of these sanctions, thus providing an incentive to continue to cooperate in a theater that required a common approach. An example here would be the purchase — perhaps even for our own ship-deprived Navy — of the Mistral destroyers that France has been constructing for Moscow.
Trumping Russian energy blackmail
As many have commented, among the most important steps that can be taken here are those that would deprive Russia of its ability to conduct energy blackmail against Ukraine and against many of our NATO allies in Europe. An active policy — in contrast to the Administration’s passivity, if not obstruction — of seeking national energy independence, is long overdue. This would be the first step in what should be an urgent effort to supply U.S. oil and liquefied natural gas to our European allies and Ukraine.
Another urgent initiative is for our government to supply Ukraine and our European allies with the new revolutionary EM2 nuclear reactor developed by General Atomics. This tiny reactor can be transported on the back of a flatbed truck. It is much safer than existing reactors, as it is helium cooled, much less vulnerable to melting down, and so small that it can be buried. It transforms nuclear waste into power. It is much less vulnerable to nuclear proliferation abuse. And this small unit can supply all the power needs for a city of 333,000 people.
U.S. government expenditures for such a reactor are national defense expenditures, and the benefits that they would supply us and our NATO allies far outweigh their cost — which is negligible in national strategic terms. (It should also be mentioned that a good supply of these reactors should be available within the United States as an insurance policy against the threat of the shut-down of the nation’s entire electrical grid by an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP), whether it comes from a nuclear attack or from solar storm activity.)
Countering Russian propaganda
What no one is talking about but which needs to be implemented urgently is a broad-scale informational campaign to counter Moscow’s extraordinary propaganda and perceptions management efforts. Such a campaign would put Putin on the political defensive by exposing the ongoing record of Russian violations of the sovereignty of its neighbors, Russian violations of its solemn international obligations, and Russian criminality that extends from its suppression of independent media to the assassination of its political enemies in foreign capitals. Putin charges that the new government in Ukraine is illegitimate. The irony is that Putin’s own election was so laden with corruption and manipulation that his own legitimacy is subject to even more question.
Another issue that deserves much greater exposure is the fact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes a violation of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. In this agreement, signed in 1994, Russia pledged to respect the sovereignty of Ukraine within its current borders. In return, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons. None of the other signatories, including the U.S., have done anything to ensure compliance with this agreement.
Russian propaganda, disinformation, and covert influence operations need to be analyzed and exposed. Moscow conducted the Crimean intervention on the basis of specious claims about how their countrymen in Crimea were allegedly endangered by “fascists” in Kiev. It continues making these charges concerning Russians living in eastern Ukraine. Where is the truth to counter these falsehoods? Where is this Administration’s strategic communication effort?
While Russia has been challenging the legitimacy of post-Cold War borders, an issue could be made of the illegitimacy of Russia’s possession of Kaliningrad, which was never Russian territory, and which never should have remained part of Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Russian rule over considerable non-Russian lands such as those in the Caucasus could be raised before the UN Special Committee on Decolonization.
Conclusion
The protection of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of an independent Ukraine is a matter with serious geostrategic implications for the security of large portions of Europe, as well as the many other independent countries that used to be captive nations within the USSR. The Administration appears now to consider the annexation of Crimea — and maybe even portions of eastern Ukraine — as a fait accompli which cannot be challenged. But if Russia is able to get away with any part of Ukraine, what will stop it from annexing all or part of Moldova, another independent member state of the United Nations? What will stop it from reabsorbing part or all of Kazakhstan? Or, for that matter, taking over the rest of Georgia?
Congress should let the Administration know that its policy of accepting a Russian fait accompli is unacceptable and harmful to America’s efforts to maintain peace in Eurasia.
With a sufficient number of serious signals of American and Western strength, a wise policy of diplomatic action that can discreetly give the Russians a face-saving exit from Crimea and eastern Ukraine would be the first order of business. But such diplomacy will be surely a failure unless Putin and his gang encounter serious disincentives against the continuation of their current aggression.
“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
-Sun Tzu
2500 years ago, Sun Tzu said that to defeat your enemy without using force is the acme of skill. So, how does one do this? It involves the use of various arts of statecraft that are not well-cultivated in the United States. But the Russians have long cultivated them.
During the Cold War, the Russians conducted various types of covert and overt influence operations using agents of influence, disinformation, and forgeries (together called “active measures”), as well as propaganda, and offensive counterintelligence operations. Their targets included: the national strategic leadership of NATO countries, as well as of other countries throughout the world; various non-governmental groups that had influence over governmental decision-making; the media, including the film industry; educational institutions at all levels; churches; unions; and the public at large.
Putin’s regime has not forgotten these techniques. It has been using them blatantly in its attempts to annex Crimea and pry off several other provinces from Ukraine. It has been using agents of influence to corrupt the decision-making of many of its neighboring countries. It has used its intelligence services to bribe members of Parliament and other government officials in these countries.
The West has not been exempt from Russian “active measures.” As Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the General Secretary of NATO, charged a couple of weeks ago, Russia has been using these various techniques to influence environmental organizations in Europe to oppose the domestic production of shale gas, specifically for the purpose of keeping Europe dependent upon Russian gas and vulnerable to Russian energy blackmail.
The General Secretary of NATO is not usually prone to making serious charges of this sort without solid intelligence — charges that some could interpret to be a conspiracy theory.
Does this mean that every Western European environmental organization is a Russian agent? By no means. But it does mean that there are people within some of these organizations who are Russian agents of influence or are influenced by them.
This was exactly the case with the so-called “peace” movement during the Cold War. Then, the Soviets organized numerous front organizations, most of whose members were innocent people of goodwill who feared nuclear war and sought nuclear disarmament. But these front organizations were also invariably filled with people who were directly doing Moscow’s bidding.
The U.S. government used to collect intelligence on these various techniques and would vitiate their effectiveness by declassifying the intelligence about them and publicizing them. This was a decisive non-military dimension of the national security strategy of this country, which has been completely junked by recent administrations. If the U.S. is to spare itself from excessive vulnerability to these types of strategic influence, we should reconstitute intelligence collection and analysis and expose these strategic influence operations. We should also reconstitute our counterintelligence capabilities, in order to protect against these “active measures.”
If the Russians won’t forget the lessons of Sun Tzu, is it wise for us to do so?
John Lenczowski discussed Russia’s information war in Eastern Ukraine on Press Conference USA, a radio program of the Voice of America hosted by Carol Castiel, on May 24.
An audio recording of the program can be found at this link, or below.
On April 21, John Lenczowski participated in a panel on “Propaganda, Disinformation, and Dirty Tricks: The Resurgence of Russian Political Warfare” at The Heritage Foundation. He gave some background on Soviet propaganda and how some of the themes and methods of this propaganda relate to current events in Russia and Ukraine.
Other speakers on the panel were Paul Goble, Former Special Advisor to the International Broadcasting Board and Guest Lecturer at The Institute of World Politics, and Dr. Ariel Cohen, Senior Research Fellow for Russia and Eurasia Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Putin’s propaganda machine is in high gear, while the U.S. scales back the VOA. Why?
The full text of this article can be found at the website of the Wall Street Journal.
Vladimir Putin’s action against Ukraine validates the historic relationship between propaganda and aggression. Having seized control of major broadcasters, his henchman are censoring websites and telling Russians in Ukraine that “fascists” in Kiev are planning to round them up and kill them. Russian provocateurs whip up protests against Ukraine’s government. U.S. correspondents report that Ukrainians and Russians are being “brainwashed” by Russian disinformation.
All this is designed to motivate Russian armed forces and secure public support on both sides of the border for Mr. Putin’s efforts to “protect” Russian Ukrainians not only in Crimea but throughout the country. Moscow has a virtual monopoly on the narrative. The question is how far must Mr. Putin go before the West, and particularly the U.S., returns to the airwaves in full force to counter the Kremlin’s propaganda.
Today the Washington Post reports that the last peeps of American broadcasting over the Voice of America on a Russian AM radio transmitter were just shut down.
Broadcasting over the AM band (as anyone who listens to a car radio knows) involves reaching only a local audience. Nothing could be simpler for Moscow than to close down US access to local transmission facilities.
The scandal that lurks behind this seemingly minor episode is that the United States long since shut down its shortwave broadcasts to Russia, which could reach vast swaths of Russian territory from transmission facilities located far away from the target area.
Putin’s latest action is merely the latest effort to shut down any free media that could contradict his government’s propaganda line. It is this propaganda that has been an indispensable aid to his ability to conduct his aggression against Ukraine.
When will the U.S. government take seriously the role of information and propaganda in foreign policy?
In dealing with Putin’s Russia, the U.S. needs a new “reset” — of its own policies and tactics.
The full text of this article can be found on National Review Online.
What should the United States do — in a way that avoids war — in response to the Russian invasion of Crimea? It is a legitimate and vital question. But it is like asking what do you do now that you have been dealt the worst hand of cards possible whereas, in earlier rounds, the hands you were dealt were much more favorable. Whenever I hear this question, I ask myself: Why should our nation’s leaders only now be thinking seriously about Ukraine, when they should have been thinking about it seriously for a very long time?
RUSSIA AND ITS “NEAR ABROAD”
We have long known about the Russians’ strategic intentions in Ukraine and in the other countries they call the “near abroad.” Their national-security doctrine argues that Moscow has the “right” to intervene militarily to protect “Russian-speaking people” wherever they live in neighboring countries. This doctrine, which is completely contrary to international law, was officially ensconced in Russian policy all the way back in the first two years of post-Soviet Russia.
For two decades, we have witnessed Russian meddling in the internal affairs of the former captive nations that are now independent, sovereign states. This includes: pervasive intelligence penetration; the buying up of local companies by corporations controlled by the FSB (Federal Security Service) or the Russian mafia; the use of energy blackmail; the financial and other support of political factions and individual leaders within these various nations; and the continuation of Russia’s divide-and-conquer policy. This policy entails pitting one ethnic or religious group against another — and even inciting pogroms by one ethnic group against another. Examples included pitting Azeris against Armenians, Meskhet Turks against Uzbeks, Abkhazians and South Ossetians against Georgians, Gagauz and Russians against Moldovans, Russians against Estonians, Lithuanians against Poles, and now Russians against Ukrainians and Poles against Ukrainians.
Russia has also sought to cast the shadow of its power over Eastern/Central Europe, mainly through pervasive intelligence and commercial penetration. In addition, there have been increasing questions over the past two years about whether the Polish presidential aircraft that crashed in Smolensk, Russia, in 2010 had been sabotaged.
The repression of Chinese anti-corruption activist Xu Zhiyong is part of a political crackdown on scores of activists, journalists, and intellectuals. This crackdown involves increased internet controls and a Marxist-Leninist ideological purification campaign for Chinese journalists on which I have commented earlier.
What is particularly fascinating about this new and predictable round of Chinese communist repression is that it has been accompanied by an official anti-corruption campaign organized by none other than Chinese Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping. This is uncannily reminiscent of the official Soviet reaction to corruption within the ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Effects of corruption in the USSR
In the Soviet case, this corruption was the tip of an iceberg of a much larger crisis — namely, a crisis of Party discipline. It was this crisis that was one of the central reasons for the collapse of the communist enterprise in the Soviet Union.
What is the connection between this crisis and the Soviet collapse?
First of all, one must recognize that the CPSU had grown to be a massive bureaucratic monstrosity with over 20 million members. Most of them were ideological workers — i.e., propagandists and agitators — and prefects, who were non-productive monitors of what productive activity was undertaken in the USSR in order to ensure conformity with the Party line. The fundamental problem that had developed within this system was that orders issued from the top would suffer from erosion and ultimately would not be implemented efficiently or at all when they reached the lower and local levels.
This lack of discipline was partly a function of bureaucracy and partly the result of corruption. The corruption, in turn, originated from the black market, which the Party had to tolerate because it was the only vehicle ensuring literally the physical survival of the labor force. It was the only means by which acute shortages of goods and services could be filled — and this was done through the price mechanism.
The underground economy always existed within the USSR, even during the harshest periods of Stalinist repression. Over time, the underground entrepreneurs, led by the mafia, gained ever greater influence and freedom of operation because of their success in bribing Party officials. Eventually, those officials began to invest in illegal underground commercial ventures.
So, both these investments and the bribes meant that ever larger numbers of Party cadre were developing forms of self-interest that were at variance with the Party’s interest. This was called a crisis of partiinost’ (Party-mindedness).
A crisis of Party discipline
By the time of the General Secretaryship of former KGB Chief Yuri Andropov, the Party leadership had recognized this crisis of discipline and had begun to initiate measures to combat it. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he intensified these measures. He conducted an ideological purification campaign of the Party membership. He arrested and prosecuted 250,000 members of the Party and managerial elite for various types of corruption. He conducted a massive crackdown on the underground economy, during which 800,000 underground entrepreneurs were arrested or fled their jobs for fear of arrest.
Gorbachev launched the glasnost’ campaign, which Soviet propaganda gave Westerners to believe was a campaign of increased openness, transparency, and even freedom of speech, when in fact, it was designed to encourage people to tattle on and denounce Party corruption. The irony of this situation was that ordinary people took advantage of this campaign, exploiting a critical vulnerability of the Party state. This vulnerability grew out of the crisis in the Soviet military economy, which was unable to remain technologically competitive with the United States.
The only way the Party could remedy that military industrial crisis was to seek an economic bailout from the West. But to do this, Gorbachev could not present himself and the Party as ruthless oppressors of their own people or active enemies of the West. So, in one of the few such periods in Soviet history, there opened a window of opportunity for people to criticize the regime, denounce its corruption, and call for radical political change without the usual risk of being thrown into the Gulag.
Let us not be under any illusions, however. Gorbachev was forced against his will into presenting both an image and a partial reality of liberalism. But he did invade Lithuania. His regime incited inter-ethnic conflicts in many of the Union republics as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. The KGB spurred pogroms by Azeris against Armenians. His armed forces invaded Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. His goons used poison gas on freedom demonstrators in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and slaughtered them with sharpened military shovels. Most of these ruthless measures remain unknown in the West, as they were overshadowed by Gorbachev’s charm campaign.
It is for this combination of reasons that close to a million people could take to the streets of Moscow to demonstrate for radical political change in 1991, putting immense pressure on the regime.
Corruption in China today
The Chinese communist regime has worked mightily to learn from, and avoid, a repetition of this Soviet experience. It has attempted to make self interest compatible with Party membership as part of its controlled economic reforms, where most major enterprises are under the control of Party officials or People’s Liberation Army officers.
But there is no escaping the corrosive effects that corruption has on Party discipline and the social alienation that this corruption causes. So long as there is this amazing level of corruption in the Chinese Party, the regime will continue to be the target of anti-corruption activists. It will continue to suffer from pandemic civil disturbances — over 70,000 of these nationwide on an annual basis. And it will continue to have to crack down on all of this.
The Chinese communists are riding a tiger that they may not be able to control. The question for the United States is: should we continue to allow our trade with China to provide the regime with resources that help it survive such pressures?
The protests in Ukraine that have been proceeding for many weeks have major strategic implications. The proximate question is whether Ukraine will become an integral part of the Western economic community and, by extension, the Western security community, or whether Russia will succeed in co-opting it into its own political and economic space. The larger issue is whether Ukraine will remain an independent country, or whether it will eventually be fully absorbed into the Russian empire.
It is no secret what Vladimir Putin and the bosses of his power ministries want. They are suffering from an intense imperial nostalgia. They lament the collapse of the USSR and its breakup into its various constituent parts. They continue to celebrate on an annual basis the founding of the Cheka, which later became the OGPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and today a combination of several agencies, most notably the FSB and the SVR — organizations that are completely incompatible with democracy.
Ever since Russia articulated the first versions of its post-Soviet national security doctrine, starting as early as 1992, it has reserved for itself the right of military intervention into any neighboring country to protect “Russian-speaking people” whom it considers have been mistreated. The problem is that most people in the former Soviet republics speak Russian — and so, how does one distinguish between a Russian citizen is from a non-Russian? In any event, this particular doctrine is incompatible with international law, and it represents an ongoing threat to each of those countries in what the Russians call “the near abroad.”
Russia’s attempts to re-absorb many of its surrounding territories involve numerous maneuvers, most notably its infiltration of these lands with its agents of influence, many of whom are associated with major Russian corporations that are associated with Putin’s oligarchy. Sometimes these corporations buy or control companies in these neighboring lands. Insofar as some of these corporations are mafia-controlled, they use strong-arm tactics to assert their influence or control. The SVR and FSB have dossiers on hundreds if not thousands of individuals in the near abroad whom they can manipulate to serve Russian strategic interests.
Russia also has long used energy blackmail as means of extending its influence, particularly against Ukraine. It uses divide-and-conquer tactics that principally involve pitting different ethnic and religious groups against one another in neighboring lands. This is what it has done in most of its neighboring countries, with the most dramatic example being in Georgia, where Russia has aggravated relations between the Abkhazians and the Ossetians on the one hand and the central Georgian government on the other.
They also famously use propaganda and “active measures” (i.e. disinformation, forgeries, and covert influence operations) to influence opinion and policy in those countries.
And they work mightily to resist any attempts by these countries to associate themselves with the NATO alliance.
If Poland, the Baltic States, and Georgia have been able to see clearly the geostrategic implications of the expansion of the Russian political and economic space, why cannot the United States?
One of the reasons why the new NATO members from the former communist countries of East/Central Europe are so committed to the NATO alliance is their fear of Russian revanchism and their intense desire to retain that liberty which was so long denied them when they were under the Soviet yoke.
Two world wars centered heavily around geostrategic competition for the lands between Western Europe and the USSR/Russia. The decision to expand NATO into these lands was precisely with an eye to preventing that strategic competition from continuing: namely, by placing those lands firmly in the sphere of the West without being under the thumb of any imperial power.
The United States would do well to support Ukrainian independence. Failure to do so will only encourage Russia’s expansionism and instability surrounding its borders. It could threaten the independence of our East-Central European NATO allies, and ultimately distract the United States from other major security threats. Supporting Ukraine means abandoning feckless attempts to “reset” relations with Russia on the basis of ignoring its regional expansionist ambitions. If U.S.-Russian relations are to improve, it will have to be on the basis of exploring and cooperating on areas of genuinely mutual national interests, such as resistance to Islamist terrorism and Chinese expansionism.