Escalation

While much discussion ensured after Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons two days ago, that's only one avenue for escalation. The other and more likely path is the increasing used of indiscriminate shelling and bombing resulting in huge loss of civilian lives. The longer the invasion goes without Putin reaching his goal of regime change, the more desperate he will get and the more extreme and more violent the Russian forces will be told to be. Unless he is stopped, or unless Ukraine capitulates which seems unlikely, Putin will raze the country to the ground. 

Through a glass darkly

After four days of fighting, Putin's forces have not yet taken the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, nor have they managed to depose its government. Volodymyr Zelensky bravely decided to remain in Kyiv, inspiring many Ukrainians to fight rather than flee, which may have been a factor in slowing the Russian advance.  

In addition to additional sanctions, the West today announced shipments of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine via Poland. It may be too little, too late but since the invasion has not gone to plan, they may still arrive in time to bring fighting to a stalemate.  I am reminded of Israel's stand-off with Hamas and Hezbollah in the Gaza Strip.  Since its highly unlikely that the Ukrainian forces could repel the Russian invasion, a stalemate would be the best likely outcome for Ukraine.  While Putin's offer to negotiate is almost certainly in bad faith, it might afford an opportunity for a temporary cease-fire allowing the West to resupply the Ukrainian armed forces with the weapons they desperately need to keep the Russians carrying out regime change. 

Very worrying is Putin's state of mind. His vituperative rhetoric combined with his miscalculation about both the Ukrainians' and the West's responses to his assault raise questions about his rationality. His decision to ready strategic nuclear weapons looks like an act of desperation; one can only hope that he is bluffing.   If not, we will find out whether the strategists who predicted that the use of battle-field nuclear weapons would be containable and not escalate to the use of long range intercontinental weapons were right. Their argument was predicated on actors on both sides being completely rational; it is unclear weather Putin is.  

While it's comforting to know that now we have serious people with their fingers on the button on this side of the pond, Russia's launch codes are in the hands of just one paranoid, possibly psychotic, individual. Those in West who are paying attention will not sleep well this coming week.   

Reflection

Tonight, as the Russian soldiers being their assault on Kyiv, I thought I should stop thinking about abstractions like the "Pax Americana" or the importance of the "international order" and turn my thoughts to the forty four million people, suddenly upended by one megalomaniac's obsession. 

My father's family fled Czechoslovakia just ahead of the Nazi invasion, just as many Ukrainians are doing today.  The family escaped to Sweden, and my father to London. He arrived with no English just on one trunkful of belongings, working as a technician at the London Hospital during the day, with the Germans bombing the city at night. One of my aunts moved to new York, taught arts and crafts at the Braerley school, studying at night to become a psychoanalyst. My other aunt and her husband moved back to Czechoslovakia after the war. In 1968 they saw Russian tanks on the streets of their home town, Prague. My my family is well acquainted with the trauma of having to flee before an invading army and of having to endure Russian occupation. So I am filled with great sadness and empathy for the people of Ukraine. We are, as a species, no better now than we ever were. The progress we may have made in material things has not been matched by progress in stemming our greed, our thirst for power, our capacity for indifference and cruelty.   

And so, as I sit here in the comfort of a warm home without having to worry whether I will die tonight from enemy bombs, or have to leave the place I call home with little more than I can carry, I am grateful. And I wonder how we could have let this happen again? How could we have thought that diplomacy and non-military means would stop an autocrat bent on war? How did we delude ourselves that tanks and troops on the Ukrainian border were not there for the exact purpose for which they were built? How is it that somehow we failed to learn from history? 

Why sanctions won't work

In response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the West is proposing "stiff sanctions". Simply put they will not work. First, to prevent Putin from effecting regime change in Ukraine, they would have to bite within a week; that as long as one might reasonably expect the Ukrainians to hold out against the Russian onslaught. Within a week, Putin will likely have deposed Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky and installed his own interim administration. But sanctions won't have desired effect in that short a time; they cause problems over weeks not days and Putin has already buffered himself and Russia from their impact, further lessening their efficacy. 

Sanctions will also have two unwelcome consequences for the West. First, they will cause problems for ordinary Russians which will only serve to bolster Putin's hold on power. Just as the Iran theocracy blames the country's woes on Western sanctions, so will Putin. Secondly, sanctions will also impact businesses in in the West that currently trade with, or do business in, Russia. Over time as the America public comes to accept the Russian installed regime as a "new normal", opposition to lifting sanctions will subside and business interests will prevail. 

One can see how ineffective they are in the US' policy toward China and Afghanistan. China's stance towards the US has hardened in the last five year despite tariffs and sanctions against Hwawei. North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons. Iran is continuing to enrich uranium. And the Taliban is not becoming more liberal in its attitudes towards women while the Afghan people starve; because of that the West will change course before China, North Korean, or the Taliban. And while sanctions remain in place, Russia will seek to develop trading relations with other countries, further reducing both their medium term impact and making them still less effective as a future deterrent.  

That makes President Biden's reported statement that were Russia to attack a member of the NATO alliance, "the use of military force is not off the table" significant.  It means that the use of military force is not an inevitable consequence were Putin to move against a NATO country in Europe. Given the futility of sanctions and the possibility that Putin could threaten and invade NATO member countries without a military response from the West, he must now feel he has considerably more freedom to act as he pleases.

The Endgame in Ukraine

Eugene Robinson suggested today that two hundred thousand troops may be enough to defeat the Ukrainian military but not sufficient to hold the country. That misses the point. Putin will remove Zelenskyy, the elected president, and in his place establish an interim government. He'll run a rigged election and install a Russian puppet in Kyiv. He will maintain that all this will be "in complete accordance with the Ukrainian constitution".  He does not need to hold the country with soldiers on the streets; he needs only a pliant Ukrainian administration, at which point his tanks can return home to Russia. 

Putin's hold on power

There has been some discussion about how Putin's invasion of Ukraine will impact his popularity at home. His answer may be "I don't care". As long as he continues to rig elections, as has has likely done in the past, and controls the security apparatus, he has little to fear. He can't be voted out of office and any protests, should they arise, will be met with a swift crack down, and the arrest or untimely demise, accidental or otherwise, of its leaders. His position is secure as long has he can continue to pay those he needs to carry out his orders. Given his control over the state coffers, that looks unlikely to change any time soon.  

A war in Europe

For the first time since 1945, a full scale conventional war is underway in Europe. As unimaginable as that was a year ago, it upends long-held assumptions about peace, stability and the world order. For too long it had been assumed that economic integration and the benefits of stability, in addition to the deterrence of nuclear weapons, would keep the peace. That in part was the underlying rationale for the creation of the European Economic Community, now the European Union. Vladimir Putin has blown up that assumption. He has demonstrated what one individual in a position of power can do when they decide to discard the conventional play-book. Of the three possibilities I had envisioned, a limited incursion in the east of Ukraine, a slow incremental scaling up of hostilities and and full scale onslaught, the latter seemed to me the least likely; but that's where we are.   

The problem that the West must now grapple with is whether Putin is rational or not. It had been widely assumed that we was; that while he might appear unpredictable, as a means of keeping his enemies off balance, ultimately he would weigh the costs and benefits and reach the same conclusion envisioned by his game-theory adversaries in the West; that after all was the genesis of game-theory. 

Unable to rely on long held assumptions about the range of Russia's likely actions, we are now back in the position we were seventy years ago of being hard-put to predict Putin's next moves. He has threatened all-out nuclear war, a specter that had largely disappeared from everyone's thinking when the Berlin Wall fell. Suddenly that has re-entered the realm of possibilities. 

Graham Alison's analysis of the Cuban missile crisis is instructive. We should not necessarily treat countries as rational actors. What makes sense for Russia may be quite different from what makes sense for Vladimir Putin.  

We should however be thankful for small mercies; at least now there's an adult in the White House. Had Biden't predecessor been reelected, the prospect of two unpredictable, megalomaniacal leaders with delusions of grandeur, both with nuclear arsenals, one of whom is egregiously ignorant, is almost too frightful to contemplate. 

Timing

Yesterday Vladimir Putin recognized Donbass and Luhansk, two regions in the east of Ukraine, as "independent republics" and promptly dispatched "peace-keeping" troops. The Biden administration did act, imposing sanctions, but in a very limited way, only on companies doing business in Donbass and Luhansk - so effectively nothing. The New York Times editorial argued today that it was too soon to pull the trigger on the threatened strong sanctions. That raises the question when is the right time?

Putin is not going to declare war; no one does that any more. That's as out-dated as challenging your enemy to pistols at dawn.  It is increasingly difficult to say exactly when hostilities start. Is a cyber attack by a foreign government an act of war? If so Russia has been at war with the US since 2016 if not earlier. Is a drone strike? If is it, America has been at war with numerous countries for decades.  Is artillery fire across country borders? How about one soldier straying across the border. What if it were a platoon; or a battalion?  

Because the point at which war begins has become indeterminate, when to impose sanctions becomes problematic. If, as the NYT suggests, one holds off until the smoke clears it may be far too late. By making many very small moves, Putin increases the ambiguity about when hostilities can be said to have reached a level that justifies the "big sanction package". And that's what Putin is banking on. 

Taking both sides

One advantage (and disadvantage) of flip-flopping on an issue is that whatever the outcome one ends up being both right (once) and wrong (once). On Feb 11th I argued that Putin had put himself into a position in which invading Ukraine was his only logical alternative.  I took a contrary position six days later. Then yesterday I did another one-eighty.  Today it appears as if my first (and third) takes were the right ones.

What now remains to be see is what the West will do. As has been argued here and elsewhere, much is riding on its response. A weak or ineffective response opens the door to more of the same from Russia perhaps into other of its close neighbors, from China into Taiwan, or from other rogue states who see this as a green light to take land they want by force.  While the West has threatened strong sanctions it may be that these and other "non-kinetic" approaches do not raise the costs for going to war sufficiently to either deter Russia and will certainly be ineffective in halting it once in progress.  Ukraine's forces are likely to be soon overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the Russian military at which point supplying them with weapons ceases to be useful (or feasible).    

So as far as Ukraine goes the cards have been dealt and all that remains is to see how each hand is played. The scope for variation without missteps is narrow; but assuming none are made, Zelensky's regime will be toppled, and just as it did in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1960s, Russia will install a pliant puppet government. Europe (and the US) will for a while endure higher energy prices in applying the promised sanctions. Ultimately, however, they will come to accept Russia's actions in order to lift sanctions and restore access to cheaper natural gas.  It is remotely possible that if that normalization takes long enough, Germany might reverse itself on its "no nuclear" policy and ween itself off fossil fuels but that is far from certain.  Putin will appease his oligarchs at home by making good the losses they will suffer from the personalized sanctions being discussed in the Washington, blunting their effectiveness. The Russian economy may decline but Putin's patriotic stand for "Mother Russia" will shield him from much of the domestic political blow-back.    

The larger question is what happens after Ukraine? Will the apparent unity the NATO alliance has been showing recently allow it to respond more robustly in the face of future Russian aggression? Will NATO learn the lessons of Russia's recent adventurism and act with sufficient resolve to prevent Russia from future incursions? And (as Eugene Robinson noted in today's paper) what if Trump is in power next time?  As if things weren't bad enough, that is a truly sobering thought.

In the long run?

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson may be right, that if Putin does occupy Ukraine by force, it will ultimately be to his and Russia's detriment in the long term. But in the short term lives will be lost and in the medium term, at least until Ukraine is able to return to sovereign self-rule, Ukrainians will pay a heavy price, from loss of freedom to economic stagnation under Russian or "Russian approved" governance. That should net be seen as acceptable. If the West is serious about defending democracy, perhaps it should admit Ukraine to NATO immediately and begin moving troops and military assets into the country to defend it in the face of Russia's current and possible future aggression. 

... Or not

On Thursday is seemed as if there were signs of Putin hesitating, perhaps having second thoughts about invading Ukraine. It seems that was wrong.  The absurd video of what looked like tiny model tanks on flatbeds crossing a bridge, purportedly returning to barracks, could have been a clue that this was all just a stalling tactic. 

Troop numbers at the Ukrainian border have risen since them to in excess of one hundred  an fifty thousand.  More alarming still is the deployment of short-range nuclear weapons.  Were they to be used, it would be the first time that a nuclear weapon would have been used in a European theatre; the decision-making then begins to look more like the Cuban missile crisis than tanks rolling into Georgia or Crimea. It would not an exaggeration to say we may be on the brink of a nuclear war in Europe.  

If Putin needed to stall to make ready his invasion plans, one must hope that besides the West's diplomatic efforts, it has prepared an immediate and significant response to invasion, one that will hit home in hours rather than days or weeks. Sanctions may change Putin's calculus over the long term but they won't stop his tanks next week. The West's tepid response to both Russia's invasion of Georgia and annexation of Crimea may have given Putin a sense of security (whether false or otherwise remains to be seen) and he has correctly deduced that first movers do have strategic advantage.  While the West plays catch-up, he can, and indeed has, prepared Russia to buffer itself from the West's long signaled response. Unless the West has some tactic we don't know about, Putin's hand, which he is playing close to his chest, seems for the moment far stronger. 

Putin may just have blinked

A Russian T-72B3 tank fires as troops take part
in drills at the Kadamovskiy firing range. AP

Six days ago I wrote that war in Ukraine seemed inevitable. But the anticipated day came and went, and on the day troops were supposed to have begun the assault on Ukraine, Putin said he was moving some away from their forward positions (though whether that was true is still debatable). 

My rationale was that in threatening Ukraine without actually invading, Putin had created, from his point of view, the worst possible outcome: the West was now unified against him, it was taking steps to insulate itself from his economic leverage through sales of gas, and it had not made the concessions Putin had been demanding. So there was and still is no further downside to invading besides the losses he has already racked up other than the loss of life of the Russian soldiers he would be sending in (for which he may care little other than for the impact that might have on his domestic political standing). 

On the upside, he would expand the Russian empire, something apparently dear to his heart. Yet he is hesitating, which may suggest that he is having second thoughts about going through with an invasion. His bluff appears to have been called and it is possible he may have folded. Of course it is still way too soon to tell as there remain over a hundred thousand troops at the ready near the Ukrainian border, and until they return to barracks, he could still invade at a moments notice. But assuming at least for the moment that he has, if not blinked, at least had a moment's hesitation, that in and of itself is significant. We will likely never know his thinking yet I'm sure intelligence analysts, think-tanks and journalists will be debating what this means for days, weeks if not years to come. 

Trump; the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st Century?

What has led Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine now (or at least early next week)? Little had changed on the ground. The West and NATO have not moved short or medium range weapons nearer to Russia. They have not positioned more troops nearer the Russian border. So it can't be a rising level of threat to which Russia is responding.  Perhaps it was the ousting of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych? But that was eight years ago. Another theory is that Europe, and Germany in particular will be muted in its response to a military incursion by its dependence on Russian energy? But Nord Steam 2 is not yet operational so Germany's dependency would have been much greater a year from now, so that looks unlikely as a factor. 

What has changed in recent years is Donald Trump. It's not his fawning behavior toward Putin that may have led Putin to decide now is the time, but rather the sentiment his election uncovered and then amplified; that the US has no interest in maintaining the international order and little interest in conflicts that have no proximity to, or impact on, the US. Trump's America First approach, and its resonance with his acolytes on the right and even some anti-war folk on the left was enough indication to Putin that any repercussions would be manageable for him to take the decision to invade Ukraine. 

And so, bizarrely, not only will Trump have done enormous damage to democracy at home, he will also have helped shred the international order that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War.  Not only will the world be less safe and more conflict-prone as a result, but the economic prosperity enjoyed by countries, including America, that depended on trade and relative geopolitical stability, is now in serious jeopardy.  He should be Time magazine's man of the century.

Unexpected Consequences

If Sarah Palin wins her defamation suit against the New York Times, the far right which is relishing "sticking it" to the establishment and the main stream media, may before too long rue the day. 

If the Times, which maintains that the error was unintentional and quickly corrected looses, what does that mean for Fax and the even less scrupulous so calls "news" channels? The alleged offense was not in the paper's reporting but in its editorial, in other words an opinion piece. If the standard for defamation is relaxed and the protection from legal action the media have had enjoyed disappears, Fox and its kind will either have to clean up their act. It has claimed that there is a distinction between its news programs and its opinion programming. 

If an opinion piece in the Times is cause for a successful defamation suit, Hanity, Ingraham, Carlson and Shapiro may be in for a rough  ride. Perhaps those on the right should be a little more careful what they wish for. 

On the eve of war in Europe

It looks increasingly likely that early next week Europe will once again be at war; or at least Eastern Europe. What initially looked like first a ploy by Russia to extract concessions from NATO and the West, then a possible incursion into the eastern part of Ukraine where the population is mostly Russian-speaking now looks set to be a full stale occupation of a sovereign state.  That would effectively move the "iron curtain" almost half way back to its pre-Glasnost / Perestroika position. The West's lack of resolve is  reminiscent of the repose to Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland. Britain was sure that Hitler could be reasoned with. But that hope was in vain. The adage "give them and inch and they take a mile" looks ever more salient. 

The thought occurred to me today that Staw and Ross' paper on escalating commitment is partially applicable. Partially in that it is not clear that the course of action is a failing one, but their model of escalating commitment, from psychological to social to political is entirely appropriate here.

Putin's next move, for a long time unpredictable, now seems clear; how the West responds and the efficacy of that response will have ramifications for the international order, not just in Europe but in the Far East  as well, for decades to come.