Cold War Deux?

Tensions with Russia are... probably falling, actually, the violence in Gaza has been pretty distracting and no passenger aircraft have been shot down lately.  This doesn't mean that the situation in Ukraine is necessarily better - though the Ukrainian army has made progress against the secessionists, there's a lot of Russian soldiers hovering on the border, and it's easy to imagine them moving in to rescue persecuted Russian-speaking Ukrainians from those national socialists in Kiev, or responding to an attack that those treacherous Ukrainians claimed they never made.

So it's no great surprise that the cover of the previous issue of Time was mostly red, had Vladimir Putin on it, and was titled "Cold War Two."  The subject is so grave and important that of course the cover story of the issue that came in the mail Sunday was "Manopause" and contained a quote by Obama denying a second Cold War.  But let's humor the magazine anyway.

The Cold War was an exciting time for me - I learned to stop soiling myself, figured out how to walk, and was well on my way to tying my own shoes.  By the time I got to college, political scientists and historians had put together an autopsy report explaining how the previous era started, how it worked, and how it ended.  So it's pretty simple to compare current events to this model to see how accurate Time's Cold War II cover was.  The original Cold War's distinguishing characteristics were its bipolar structure, the ideological basis of the conflict, and the fact that said conflict never escalated to direct fighting.  Are these being repeated in this hypothetical second Cold War?

Bipolarity - Polarity refers to the distribution of power within a system.  Mutlipolarity has been the norm for the past couple of centuries, with a collection of great powers competing and balancing against each other so that no single player was able to totally dominate.  After World War II and the decline of the French and British empires, the world was left with the United States and the Soviet Union as a pair of superpowers that could check each other, but were leagues beyond anyone else.  With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, we had the rare case of one state so powerful that no combination of rivals could challenge it, making it the lone superpower in a unipolar system.  And in America it's best to insist that this is still the case, that the United States is unstoppable and capable of anything, and certainly not suffering from imperial overreach or anything like that.

Since obviously the United States cannot not be a superpower, I guess the question then is whether Russia's caught up to the obscenely bloated US military.  A quick glance at GlobalSecurity's Russia military guide suggests that the answer is "no."

On the other hand, my Russian history professor made a good point when he was discussing the Cold War - at its onset, the Soviet Union's superpower status wasn't due to the might of its armies but where they were.  The Soviets didn't have the best generals, or the best weapons, or the best-trained soldiers, but what it did have it had in bulk, and at the end of World War II that bulk was sitting right between Eastern and Western Europe, positioned to swarm into the rest of the continent faster than you can say "blitzkrieg."  It took some years for the Soviet Union to build enough nukes to become a "legitimate" superpower, but even before that it was treated as one because the power it had was in place to do some major damage.

Today, the Russian army still hasn't recovered from the post-Soviet crisis, and isn't even up to the Soviet Union's standards.  More importantly it isn't sitting in East Germany, poised to defend communism by rolling into Paris or the capitals of its "allies."  It still has a bunch of vintage Soviet nukes, of course, but nuclear weapons are hard to work into calculations of power.  What conflict would be worth going to nuclear war for?  Would the threat of nukes deter conflict, or would Putin calculate that the United States wouldn't be willing to risk atomic retribution by nuking Russian forces liberating Ukraine from those awful Ukrainians?  For all the effort countries put into getting nuclear weapons, they've only been used twice, and most people are very happy for that fact.

The short version is that the Russian military is no match for the United States', and doesn't have the force projection capacity or infrastructure to counter it on a global level.  That said, Russia is more than a match for its neighbors, and is well-positioned to assert its dominance within its neighborhood of former Soviet satellites.  Which is bad news for any of those satellites that might want to move into a more democratic, pro-Western orbit, such as Ukraine.  And just because the United States would probably win a fight with Russia doesn't mean anyone should be looking forward to such a scenario.

Ideology - It wasn't just the distribution of power that made the Cold War unique, it was how those powers defined themselves.  After centuries of competing kingdoms and empires, the Cold War featured two competing political systems, democratic capitalism and communism.  These weren't merely rivals on the world stage, but saw themselves as mutually incompatible, turning the conflict into a struggle over the future of mankind's political evolution.  When the USSR collapsed, it seemed like the great political question of the century had been answered, that democracy was triumphant, leading Fukuyama to declare it the "end of history."  The world could look forward to a future of government by the people, for the people, and everyone would be rich thanks to free markets.

Obviously that isn't how it happened, and the world has in fact gotten less democratic in recent years.  With the expectation that other countries would have no choice but to democratize, the West has sat on its laurels.  But even if communism has been shown to be a dead end, the tyrants of the world are in no hurry to give up their power.  And it turns out that free markets don't necessarily require governments to have free and fair elections, or to stop controlling their people through fear and violence.

Russia is, technically, a democracy.  There are elections, and there are supposedly limits on its government's power.  It's just that the government controls something like 90% of Russia's media, and it's hard for opposition parties to get their message out, or even show up on ballots.  And people who criticize the government end up in jail, or beaten to a pulp, or dead from radiation poisoning under mysterious circumstances.  And Putin keeps rewriting the rules so he can bounce between the offices of President and Prime Minister, never leaving power.  And he owes a lot of his influence to browbeating the oligarchs who looted the country during the wild days of capitalismization into supporting him, with the help of his buddies from the KGB. 

In short, Russia is not a part of the Free World, and its leader views the democratic West as threats and rivals.  But unlike its communist predecessor, modern Russia has no alternative model to offer the world, no revolutionary government that would save it from capitalist exploitation.  Instead, what Putin is backing in places like Syria and Iran is something even older, Czarist notions of absolute sovereignty and governance free from interference by "human rights" organizations, international "law," or anything that limits the power of the state's ruler.  Communism appealed to the masses, what Putin believes in appeals to presidents-for-life and other tyrants.  This is why he (and other non-democracies like China) have to wave the nationalism flag around and find threats within and beyond the nation's borders to rally the people against - it helps excuse the measures he makes to stay in power, and distracts them from questioning why they let him get away with it.

So while the Soviet Union had the communist bloc to support it, Putin's network is much more diverse.  Syria is an illiberal Arab presidency, Iran a Persian theocracy.  Sometimes the "BRICS," the fivesome of up-and-coming states that are or are about to rival the major players of Europe when it comes to economic and military power, are described as some sort of Russian-led alliance, but take a closer look at it: Brazil, a Latin American democracy recovering from a dictatorship, Russia, described above, India, a subcontinent boasting the world's largest democracy, China, a one-party free market powerhouse, and South Africa, perhaps the most functional country in sub-Saharan Africa.  Most of these guys lean closer to democracy than Putinism, and the only thing any of them have in common is that they aren't part of the Western establishment.  The Warsaw Pact 2.0 this ain't.

Russia doesn't have anything to offer the world other than its markets and national resources.  It's not part of an ideological bloc anymore, Putin simply styles himself as the leader of a group of nations(' rulers) that are opposed to the West's domination (because it threatens their grip on power).  At the same time, the West isn't marching in step these days - Bush and Obama have squandered a lot of American soft power, and Europe can't agree on a continent-wide agenda, much less one encompassing the democratic world.  Even after the Malaysian Airlines disaster, France is selling Russia a pair of helicopter carriers.

In short, this current "Cold War" isn't really based on ideology, and there's much less unity within its "sides."

Indirect Conflict - The Cold War is called that because the United States and Soviet Union never declared war on each other, and never acknowledged the times their forces may have fought each other.  Instead they waged war by proxy, backing revolutionaries or governments that agreed with their ideology... or revolutionaries or governments that merely opposed the other guy.  Since both sides had enough combined nuclear weapons to cover the surface of the Earth several times over, it is a very good thing that the Cold War never went hot.  Turning the Third World into a battlefield full of puppet dictators seems a small price to pay for sparing the rest of the planet, hmm?

As recent events in Ukraine show (assuming you believe the capitalist imperialist non-Russian media), this sort of thing is still going on.  Russia has backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and before it had to back those Ukrainian separatists it was backing a pro-Russian regime in Kiev.  In response, the United States has pledged billions of dollars in aid to the new government in Kiev and is moving increasingly closer to providing military training and support.  And like during the Cold War, we're supporting these guys because they're talking about democracy and opposing Russia, and not really considering whether the east Ukrainian separatists have some legitimate grievances about being discriminated against, or being roped into a country they don't want to belong to due to arbitrary post-imperial borders.

On the other hand, we're not doing the same in Georgia or other Russian satellites, probably because Americans would have a hard time finding them on the map.  So unlike the Cold War "I push back wherever you push" mentality, we've grown a bit more discerning.  Ukraine is on Europe's doorstop, and after fifty miserable years under the Soviet Union's thumb, nobody in Eastern Europe wants Russia to start rolling west again.  Central Asia, meh.

So, to wrap things up:

This is not a second Cold War.  Relations between the United States and Putin's Russia are quite chilly, the rhetoric is nasty, Russian-backed insurgents are causing problems, and it looks like Russia may start invading its neighbors again.  But this isn't a global conflict, or an ideological conflict - I'd say it's closer to the United States' relations with Iran.  Our antagonist is once again a country that holds elections but is dominated by an autocrat and his cronies, who are backing insurgents and tyrants where it benefits them, and who happen to be sitting on a bunch of oil they can use as a bargaining chip.  The United States' response to this has not been direct confrontation, but sanctions and attempts to isolate them diplomatically, which are foiled when our allies decide to deal with them anyway.

During the Cold War we tried to contain communism, and since communism is a concept, that meant we got to fight it wherever someone with access to a Kalashnikov read about Marx.  Russia in contrast is just another country, so the scale of this Cold Skirmish is smaller, and the stakes are much lower.  And this should come as a relief, because the Cold War was a godawful period in human history, and the best we can say about it is that it didn't go hot and lead to mankind's extinction in a nuclear holocaust.  Nobody should be eager to return to such a dismal era.

The problem is that it sounds like Putin is.  As awful as the Cold War was, it was also Russia's time in the sun, when Europe's most backward country got to split the planet with another power.  Appealing to that faded glory is winning Putin a lot of support at home, and judging by interviews with Russian-speaking east Ukrainians, a lot of people in or around Russia are happy to fall into the old "the Americans are behind everything and we need to be strong" mentality.  Putin insists that the American-led West is trying to contain and gang up on a resurgent Russia... and unless we want to encourage more incidents like Georgia, or Crimea, or Ukraine, we might just have to.

An Ounce of Prevention

There's two theories concerning what happened in Ukraine last weekend.  One is that the Russian government, as per a tradition of destabilizing neighbors who dared to cross them by arming insurgents within their borders, gave high-end military hardware to idiots who proceeded to shoot down a civilian airliner after mistaking it for a legitimate target.  The other is that Flight 17 was loaded with exsanguinated corpses and shot down by the Ukrainian air force as part of a pretext for an invasion of Russia / after being mistaken for Putin's personal aircraft, all as part of a conspiracy involving Western journalists, the internet, and in fact every media source that isn't controlled by the Russian government.

The whole incident has been called a game-changer, but when the folks on TV use the words their referring to states' policy towards Russia.  I'd prefer it to be a game-changer in terms of changing the way the game is played entirely.

See, despite the phrase "international community," states aren't always good neighbors.  Sure, they occasionally give aid packages to each other, help find another country's lost plane, form neighborhood organizations that change what we think global governance can accomplish, or liberate their friends from their enemies.  But when it comes to civil conflict, the response is usually "could you keep it down, please?"  If the countries of the world were houses on a block, it'd be one with constant gunshots and screams coming from far too many homes, while the rest mostly crank up their sound systems and try to ignore it.

The issue is, as usual, sovereignty.  States are recognized as the ultimate legitimate authority within their borders, and only within those borders.  Therefore, any internal conflict is the problem of that particular state, and others have no "right" or obligation to interfere.  There's a couple of problems with this, though.  First, for a civil war to be going on in the first place, a state has by definition lost its monopoly over the legitimate use of force used within its borders, and is sufficiently weak that a rebel groups believes it stands a chance of overthrowing it.  Or in other words, civil wars happen in states that are least equipped to deal with them, yet their neighbors expect them to handle the problem.

Second, there's no guarantee that a civil war will stay confined to those neat little lines we've drawn on the globe.  Even in a "normal" civil conflict, and despite the aforementioned tenants of sovereignty, states like to meddle.  Russia supplying the separatists in Ukraine is nothing new, the issue of the past week is that this meddling cost an airplane full of noncombatants their lives.  Worse are situations like the one in the Middle East, where the ISIS group is committed to redrawing the map entirely.  It was able to establish itself in Syria during its ongoing civil war, and is now pushing against a neighboring failing state, and is influencing politics throughout the region.

The inevitable questions after looking at all this is: what if, rather than merely condemning the fighting in Syria, someone had decided to intervene and bring it to a conclusion years ago, before ISIS built its power base?  What if someone had helped Kiev's new government pacify its rebellious eastern provinces, and secure its country's borders so no Russian anti-air platforms could be fired by trigger-happy morons at civilian aircraft?

Ah, but the phrasing of the question provides the answer.  When we say "someone needs to do something," we rarely mean "I should do something."

If states are the ultimate authority within their borders, then there is no legitimate agent in the world to go around interceding in civil conflicts to keep things like Flight 17 from happening - at least, not without those states' invitation.  And who would such a do-gooder be, anyway?  The United States, a war-weary superpower with a host of domestic issues to deal with?  The European Union, which can't quite decide whether it wants to move beyond its component national identities?  Or what if it's China or Russia that decides to go about (in Russia's case, overtly) interfering in civil conflicts to resolve them?  Would less authoritarian parts of the world be happy with the results?

And even if the world decided that someone was authorized to go around using force to end civil wars before they spread further, would that agent want to?  Could they afford to?  Some of the factors behind the United States' non-intervention in Syria was the fact that we'd just spent a decade occupying two countries in what's looking like a failed attempt at spreading democracy, and that Syria's anti-air capacities were a couple of levels above those of the regimes we'd previously crushed - the conclusion was that intervening in Syria was likely to be even less pleasant than "fixing" Iraq and Afghanistan.  But even if our military was still in top form, and confident it could evade Syrian AA fire, would we have been willing to commit out forces to a potentially lengthy occupation and peacemaking process?  Or would we be willing to have those soldiers available in case of a crisis that impacted states we were directly interested in?

Maybe it won't always be like this, but we're at an awkward stage in our development as a global community where our humanitarian inclinations are up against national interest and political notions devised to empower kings, which leaves us knowing we ought to act without feeling that we're able to.  And so we get the current situation, where we sit and watch civil wars happen, and hope that they stay relatively civil so we don't have to send troops to prop up an ally when a conflict spills over national borders, or lose citizens to trigger-happy insurgents supplied by a borderline rogue state.  Like watching a neighbor's house burn down and praying that the sparks don't land on our yard.

Not Quite Textbook

It's been a while since my Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies course, so I may not be remembering things correctly, but the current situation between Israel and Palestine doesn't fit into the normal narrative for dispute settlements.  Obviously the fighting has intensified over the past few days, but earlier this week there was an attempt to calm things down, calls for a ceasefire to be negotiated by Egypt. 

Normally, calls for arbitration or ceasefires are the result of a stalemate.  The thinking is that the belligerents enter their conflict each expecting they will win, because why would you fight a war you think you'll lose?  Once the fighting has gone on for a bit, and everyone's true military capacities are exposed on the battlefield, then the combatants realize who is likely to win the war if it continues.  The losing side may call for a time-out in an attempt to save itself, and the winning side is unlikely to comply if it's winning decisively, because why would you negotiate a peace with your foe if you could just crush him?  It is only, therefore, when the fighting has gone on for a bit but both sides are stalemated that you see genuine attempts at negotiated ends to the fighting.  The opportunity for peace is said to be "ripe," the belligerents have accumulated some war weariness, and neither is confident that continuing to fight will pay off more than reaching a settlement.

That's not what happened earlier.  We had one side, the Israelis, dominant yet pushing the hardest for a ceasefire.  The Palestinians in Gaza had made no gains, but were doggedly refusing to budge until they got concessions even when all they can "offer" is days of being bombed.  Evidently my course literature didn't account for suicidal combatants.

But this isn't a simple two-sided conflict, and looking a little deeper makes things make more sense, if a disturbing sort of sense.

In this case, peace, or at least an end to the current fighting, isn't necessarily the main objective, or even a shared objective.  Hamas, the group controlling Gaza, has defined itself through its opposition to Israel, and has been willing to commit terrorist acts in its pursuit of a Palestinian state.  It has little to show for this beyond a role in perpetuating a cycle of violence, but Hamas has at least proven popular enough to be elected to Gaza's leadership.

The problem is that there is now an alternative, an Arab, Islamist, anti-Israeli group that has actually succeeded at taking territory - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  The group has already used the Syrian civil war as a staging point for its expansion into Iraq, and there are worries that it might try and keep expanding into places like Jordan, if not further.  Hamas, in short, has competition.  How fortunate that someone kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens, prompting a revenge killing that escalated into thrown stones, guerrilla warfare, and an Israeli offensive into Gaza?  It's certainly convenient that Hamas has a chance to get in the news and show Palestinians that it can still fight the good fight.

But it can't win the good fight, hence Hamas' dilemma.  For it to stay in power it needs to show that it can get results.  Since it can't do that through an outright victory, it must reject Israel's calls for a ceasefire and provoke more fighting, in hopes of making its inevitable defeat as uncomfortable as possible, bogging the Israelis down in urban warfare, provoking riots and bombings, launching the sort of underground attacks seen today, until the hassle of dealing with Hamas brings Israel to the negotiating table and allows Hamas to wring something, anything, out of them.  This is obviously a terrible spot to be in, hence Hamas' seemingly-insane attempt to get concessions before the Israeli offensive - I don't think anyone would look forward to getting blitzed by the IDF.

This tortured logic also puts Israel in a bind.  If they strike back too hard, and come out of this latest conflict too victorious, there's a chance that Hamas could fall and something worse could take its place, a group more fanatical and, so far, more successful.  At the same, Hamas is hardly a good neighbor, and being too generous with concessions and ceasefires runs the risk of encouraging them to provoke further conflict.  And Israel can't sidestep the issue and simply cease the current fighting without antagonizing elements of its own population that want vengeance/justice for the lives lost in the conflict's most recent iteration.

Perversely, this would really be a good time for the two sides to work together.  Israel could give Hamas opportunities to be seen leading the Palestinians, and hand over some slight concessions that Hamas could wave around during election season, proving that they can get results and Palestinians don't need to turn to ISIS.  This would also keep Hamas from causing too much trouble, as the more havoc they stir up, the less of a loss for Israel it would be if ISIS ended up taking over.  Unfortunately, if the two sides were able to find a common ground in this manner the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have ended by now.

There are other outs, of course.  A lot of Israel's issues with Gaza only apply if it intends to allow Gaza to remain an independent territory after this conflict, and while they've insisted that its latest campaign is an "incursion" and not an invasion... well, look at it this way, you're being attacked from a neighboring territory and the government controlling it is either unable to stop it or in fact encouraging it.  Occupying Gaza to keep any sort of extremists, Hamas or ISIS or whatever, from running the place may start to look tempting.  The obvious downside is that this would antagonize the entire region and earn Israel criticism from its allies.


Another alternative would be for the people of Gaza to ditch Hamas but pick a non-violent party to replace it, one that wouldn't have to continue this conflict to shore up its legitimacy, but I think the Israeli occupation of Gaza is more likely than that.

What's So Great About America, Anyway?

I’m wary of the phrase “American exceptionalism.”  To consider my country is exceptional is fine and good, but it’s easy to twist that phrase into meaning that exceptions should be made for America, and that doesn’t end well.  We may be the world’s sole superpower, for the moment, but that doesn’t mean what it used to in 1991.  America can “go it alone” when it comes to international consensus over its foreign policy, but that means we get to pay for the consequences ourselves.  The world’s best military is great at destroying things, not so much at building lasting accomplishments.  Our vast resources don’t do us much good when our government can’t balance a budget or reach a consensus on what to do with them.  And so forth. 

Likewise, gushing about how awesome America is can lead one to conclude that it exists as the final chapter of some global narrative.  To describe the country as some shining city on a hill is one thing, to add an element of destiny is another.  Considering all the people that had to die for America to happen, and all the shameful chapters in our national history that led up to this point, if America has any divine mandate it is on behalf of a genocidal, Old Testament sort of deity at odds with the benevolent God most Americans say they worship.  More importantly, claiming that America represents the most that any nation can aspire to blinds us to what we can learn from other countries, or even to the possibility that we can improve ourselves.

Nevertheless, I still think America is an exceptional country, and it doesn't have anything to do with deserving special treatment or our holy destiny.

Whereas other, later colonies were founded on the backs of subjugated indigenous populations, providence saw fit to clear out America's natives with diseases, and the survivors were able to be pushed westward or onto reservations as more colonists arrived.  The result was a lot of land just ripe for the taking, especially attractive if you're coming from a continent where all the real estate was divvied up between a bunch of old, feudal families.  America, once those troublesome natives were swept from it, was a blank slate, a place where someone with no prospects in the old country could make something of himself, become a landowner, and rise to the local aristocracy based on his own efforts, not a family inheritance or passed-down title.

This may be as much to blame for America's conception of men and kings as all those Enlightenment scholars like Locke who are usually cited when discussing the Founding Fathers' ideology.  If Goodman Joseph can get off his boat in New England, work hard for a decade or two, and become a respected landowner with a prosperous farm and associated business, it might be harder to believe that the inhabitants of a distant palace are somehow inherently better than the rest of us.  You might start to think that maybe people are created more or less equal to each other, and their differences in station are due to circumstance and their actions more than anything else.

At any rate, the end result was America's reputation as the Land of Opportunity.  Now, this may not be as true these days as it was a few centuries ago.  America eventually developed an aristocracy of sorts, and has political and business dynasties such as the Kennedys and Bushes, the Rockefellers and Waltons.  The gap between the richest fraction of a percentage of the population and the rest of us is growing wider, and despite our "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" national myth it's a lot easier for a millionaire to become a billionaire than it is for a poor man to become rich.  The frontier is gone, jobs are getting harder to find, and we have a looming water shortage that will one day prove that America does in fact have a maximum sustainable population.  But the main thing is that Americans like to believe that, with the right opportunity, anyone could improve their lot and prosper, and those who are wealthy aren't necessarily "better" than the rest of us.  We can recognize the differences in income while still viewing each other as equal.

This is all important because it attracted so many people to come start a new life in America, and that I think is the most exceptional thing about America.  We're a nation of immigrants, with a strong British heritage but also representatives from every other country on the planet.  Granted, this process was not without friction, and whatever minority population characterized one generation tended to assimilate in time to voice their dismay at the next wave of foreign invaders.  But generally we recognize that anyone on the planet is a potential American, if they buy into our national values.  

In short, "American" is not an ethnicity, though it might be a suffix to one.  Anyone, from anywhere, can come in an become part of our country.  They can wholeheartedly embrace their new homeland, or adopt America's culture and values while retaining the parts of their old country that they want to bring with them as a ___-American, either works.  You can do this in other countries, of course, but you won't fit in as well.  It's a lot easier to become a French or Swedish citizen than it is to become French or Swedish, because those are national identities tied to specific ethnicities and histories.

This is special because it puts us ahead of the curve, in a way.  The basic international unit for the past century or so has been the nation-state, a political entity inhabited by a national entity.  The French live in France, the Swedes live in Sweden, and so on.  The problem is that the world is changing, and populations are moving about - blame globalization for shifting economic opportunities, and modern transportation for making it possible to chase them.  The result is friction, strife, fears of a country being taken over by its immigrants, reactionary xenophobic nationalism, and so on.

America doesn't have to deal with that - or at least, it isn't acceptable to openly admit as much.  When we rail about Central American immigrants, it's because they crossed the border illegally, not simply because there are now Mexicans living in our country.  Oh, there are efforts to enforce English as a national language through de jure legislation rather than de facto custom, and some alarm about immigrant enclaves that are refusing to assimilate into the local culture, but America isn't "threatened" by newcomers in the same way as other countries are.  Beyond being one of the architects of the current globalized world, we're well-situated to weather the turbulence of globalization.  So long as they buy into national values of equality and share our belief in opportunity, we're generally accepting of immigrants.

It's the whole e pluribus unum thing, how a diverse population when it comes to ethnicity, religion, and subculture can still belong to the same ideologically-based nation.  It's why the European Union is so interesting to watch, at least from the perspective as an international affairs-minded American - we can see our own history in it, as a collection of states take steps towards becoming something more.  Granted, a collection of English colonies with limited capacities had an easier time unifying than a continent's worth of nation-states that are or were great powers in their own right, and that's probably why a unified "European" identity isn't taking precedence over national identities yet.  But that may change.  I'm not advocating an "end to history," but I do think America can be considered the future, or at least a future, that other countries can follow.

Until that day, well... in a world with shifting populations, and where states' borders may not necessarily align with, or may even divide, national distributions, the fact that America has been able to build such a successful country that people keep wanting to be a part of, a country based on lofty ideals of equality and opportunity rather than an ethnic identity or totalitarian adherence to a religious or political doctrine, remains pretty exceptional.

Global Governance or the Lack Thereof

The current crisis is of course the violence in Libya.  The one before that was eastern Ukraine, which isn't to say that particular problem has been resolved, but we're currently more interested in other things.  Falling between them was a fuss between China and Vietnam over an oil platform being built in what the latter insists is its territorial waters, which isn't so much a distinct crisis as it is the most recent flareup of an ongoing dispute that's plagued the region like herpes.

It's a problem with serious policy implications and long-term consequences, yet I only found out about it a few days ago, 'cause Fox News was on the TV nearest my treadmill at the gym.  The incident was naturally being used as further proof that the Obama administration had no coherent foreign policy plan, America's weakness was emboldening its enemies, countries like China or Russia will continue to flout international law until someone sends them a firm message, and so forth.  The panel - there's always a panel, Fox is always ready to interpret the news for you so you don't have to draw your own conclusion - stopped short of actually proscribing policy, and didn't explain what firm actions the US should take to keep China from stepping outside its boundaries.  Maybe park our navy outside a Chinese port and threaten to bombard it?  A missile strike or two?  Obama will surely know what to do.

It got me thinking, mostly morose thoughts about how international governance can be easily spoiled by a few brutes who refuse to play by the rules everyone else has agreed to, and how little these normative and legal regimes can do to stop transgressors.  We - mainly the countries in the West - build something like the UN that's supposed to resolve international conflicts, and act sort of  like a world government, yet cringe at the thought of an official world government.  We like local government just fine, and are willing to tolerate national governments, but as things scale up, our attitudes change.

If my neighbor is trying to build a well, and according to my documents he's trying to do it on my property, it's not going to be hard for me to resolve the issue.  I can show him my property deed and where the lines are drawn, and point out that if he continues he'll be violating the law.  If he refuses to stop, I call the police, who can use force to stop him.

If my neighboring country is trying to build a well on what according to international agreement is my property, it's a bit different.  I can show him these treaties and the maps and argue that he's violating international law, but he may declare that these treaties are unfair, or inaccurate, or illegitimate.  If he refuses to stop... I guess I get to decide how far I'm willing to go to try and stop him.  If I'm Luxembourg, and my neighbor is the United States, I'm probably not going to be able to stop him at all.

If the neighbors are individuals within a country, we rarely see a flat-out rejection of the law, even if neither party was involved in crafting it.  I have no idea who came up with the system used to determine what land I can "own," or who drew the lines that carved out my home property.  I don't question the legitimacy of my property lines, they're part of a legal system I was born into, and even though I don't participate in it, I don't mind living under it.  I suppose I do have a little say in how it operates if I remember to vote once every so often, assuming the candidates I vote for get elected and happen to make a decision regarding property laws.  But it's indirect control at best.

Likewise, I don't quail at the thought of a policeman appearing on my street.  It helps that I'm a white male in a white male's country, of course, but even if I weren't, I doubt the notion of a cop stepping in to settle my property dispute would generate the sort of abhorrence we see when we suggest establishing some sort of hard enforcement mechanism for international law.

In short, while some states are keen on the idea of global governance, and are willing to adhere to international agreements, or even let foreign soldiers onto their soil as peacekeepers in emergencies, there is a real reluctance to give international institutions the sort of coercive power necessary to fully govern.

The state-level explanation for this is straightforward.  The world we live in is dominated by a number of actors called states, institutions that define themselves as the ultimate legal authority in their respective territories, and claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in their domain.  Adding any "higher" laws, or allowing an outside organization to step in with armed forces, undermines this definition and goes against their self-interest (unless they decide it is in their self-interest to abide by this laws or allow foreign forces into their country). 

A related argument would be that states play at higher "stakes" than bickering neighbors, and have to be strong enough to repel their rivals, and therefore refuse to weaken themselves by empowering international governments.  Or in other words, the world system is anarchical and "help yourself," so states can't afford to create something capable of bringing order to the system or helping themselves and others.  I find this explanation particularly unsatisfying.

I prefer to work on the individual or "people" level, states only exist in our minds anyway.  From this angle, the explanation for the lack of strong global governance is as follows - I'm not a minority living in a country dominated by a different ethnic group or other demographic, so when I talk about my government or my police, I feel a connection to them.  Even if the laws of the land are drawn up in a distant capital, they were made by "my" people, and a few folks from my region were at least in the room when those laws were signed.  Police officers are similarly drawn from the cities they protect, making them as much neighbors as they are enforcers of the federal government.  In short, I see a lot of myself in the people writing and executing the laws, so I feel like they're looking after my interest, or at least not out to get me.

If we talk about international law, or some sort of global army to enforce the United Nations' decisions, I can't feel so confident.  Are people from a culture from the other side of the planet, who grew up hearing different morality tales from a different religion, whose history diverges from mine so many, many centuries ago, really like me?  Can I trust them to keep my interests in mind, or are they out to get me?  More importantly, if we try to make the UN less dysfunctional by removing the five permanent Security Council members' vetoes, how could I stop the General Assembly from denouncing Israel?  Things only get worse when you consider some armed force that could settle things like border disputes - can you really trust someone who doesn't even speak your language?

So this is why right wingnut fears about the New World Order and world government are pretty silly - whether on the individual or national level, not many people are comfortable with the idea.  But I think that might change, in time.  We've got this wonderful, globalized world, where ideas can flow and diffuse with greater speed and ease than at any point in human history.  We had, until recent setbacks, and attempt to spread a particular group of norms that were supportive of regional and international governance.  And modern communications have allowed people to connect from all corners of the world, proving that whether they're from the United States or Brazil, Russia or China, people are equally capable of jackassery on the internet.

So maybe there will come a time when we see enough of ourselves in the Hague to give the International Criminal Court some real weight (or maybe even ratify it!).  Maybe someday we'll feel comfortable with empowering other countries' soldiers with the authority to use force to keep countries from building platforms where they're not allowed, even if those countries could potentially include us.  But we've a ways to go, and in the meantime we're stuck with figuring out how to talk China into voluntarily following an international law it would rather ignore.

Emergent-cy

One of the neat things to come out of my qualitative research methods class is the idea of emergent or grounded theory.  Now I'm just a novice, but my understanding of the concept is as follows: rather than walking into a situation with a hypothesis to be tested through quantitative data analysis, a qualitative researcher approaches an issue with enough background information to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about it, but no specific theory in mind. 

Instead, the qualitative researcher looks for patterns and processes, notices trends, comes up with a starting theory, and then goes back to collect more data, bouncing back and forth between data collection and theory-crafting until there's nothing more to be learned from the situation, and the researcher has something that does a good job of explaining it.  There's no concern about applicability; as the study progresses the researcher may be able to pull in other work describing similar patterns and behavior, but creating some grand universal theory is less important than one that works for the topic.

Quite different from quantitative work, in other words.  It's slower and meticulous, unconcerned with prediction or prescription.  And perhaps not as attractive to policymakers wanting someone to load some case data into an equation and spit out the odds that Dysfunctionstan is about to explode.

But it made me think about my other course readings, and the names on them - Kupchan, de Mesquita, Svensson, with a few exceptions, the names are all European, Western.  When Morgenthau wrote his realist theory of international relations, the examples he used were from European history, particularly the exciting bits around World War II, or else Western nations' (particularly America) dealings with the rest of the world.  Keohane's book on neorealism isn't much different, and aside from a brief mention of China's warring states period, is based on European history and European theorists. 

And of course this makes a lot of sense, it's going to be a lot more important for a political scientist to study the history and politics of nearby nations, and the West designed and dominates the current world.  And you could argue that a monarchy is a monarchy, a dictator a dictator, whether they're in Paris or Mogadishu or Beijing or Kabul.

But I can't help but think of Marxism, which was devised by a German, then picked up and applied in Russia, Cambodia, China, and too many other places.  And in all cases, the result was an appalling body count and a coercive totalitarian state unlike the happy little dictatorship Marx envisioned.  This is probably a bad example, as Marx couldn't even predict what would happen in his own country, but it reminds me of America's recent difficulties spreading democracy, or the confusion of early Western visitors to Japan who mistook the shogun for an emperor and the emperor for a pope.

In short, I want to see fewer attempts to apply venerable political theories born in the West to any given political development, and more scholars from the rest of the world walking into their studies with an open mind and seeing what they come up with.  If the results turn out identical to those aforementioned Western theories, fantastic, let's give Morgenthau and the others another award.  And if the results are different, we may learn something we didn't know, have a better way at looking at the world, and could even open further research to compare and contrast the new theories with the old ones.

If nothing else, we'd get more diversity on the syllabus.

What To Do About Russia

I'm not sure anyone is surprised by Russia announcing the formal annexation of Crimea - a substantial part of the local population supports the move, and more importantly the region is swarming with Russian soldiers.  Ukraine and Western leaders are of course outraged at this illegitimate referndum and brazen land-grab, and are threatening additional consequences on top of already-issued sanctions and travel restrictions on high-ranking Russian political figures.

But unless the recent clash between Ukrainian and Russian forces gets out of control, the situation in Crimea is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.  Ever since the crisis started, pundits in the United States have been calling for a more developed Russia strategy from the Obama Administration, amid concerns that it may not even have one.

As for what such a strategy should entail, that depends on a few important questions.

First, is this a personal matter?  Last Friday, Secretary of State Kerry insisted that his warnings of consequences for Russia's actions were not "meant in a personal way," but whether America's problem is with Russia in general or Putin in particular will have a huge effect on its strategy.  If we expect that Russia's current bad behavior - a campaign against international organizations and political freedom within its borders, bullying of states on its borders, and now an outright annexation of territory - to be inherent to the system, so to speak, then our strategy against Russia may turn out to be a decades-long plan to isolate and counter a predatory illiberal regime.

On the other hand, we could pin all of this on Putin.  Given the sparse limits on his power and the handful of other figures who can be said to have any input on his decision-making, it would be easy for America to focus its discontent on Russia's de facto dictator while insisting that it has no problem with the rest of the country.  This would give us a better chance to reach out to Putin's successors - the man is 61 years old in a country where the average male life expectancy is 64, after all, so we should only be dealing with him for at most another administration or two.  Perhaps just as importantly, this would argue against any sort of "East vs West" rhetoric put forth to explain America and Europe's response to the Crimean crisis.

Related to this is the question of what the rest of the world wants to do with Russia.  If we're content to once again divide Eurasia between rival power blocs for the foreseeable future, this allows us to be quite strict with the economic sanctions and other consequences for Crimea, since anything that hurts the Enemy is good for us.  But if we look forward to a time we can work with a post-Putin Russia, or entertain thoughts of expanding the West to create an economically-integrated, liberal-democratic North, that puts more limits on our actions precisely when we're trying to deter Putin/Russia from further bad behavior.

Enacting crippling economic sanctions in the vein of those that the United States likes to put on Iran, or excluding Russia from international clubs such as the G8, would be counter-productive if we hope to eventually win the country over.  Coming down too hard on Russia would only drive it further away from Europe, and give it extra incentive to consolidate its "Eurasian Union" neo-Soviet hegemony.  More to the point, there are concerns that we may not be able to effectively sanction Russia.  It's a major energy exporter supplying Europe, which makes some of our allies hesitant to sanction the people sending them gas, and Russia has another enormous potential market in the form of China, who might not see what all the fuss in Crimea is about.  We may be able to hurt it, but not necessarily hurt it enough to serve as a proper rebuke.

This leads into America and the West's non-economic response to Crimea.  A throwaway sentence in a BBC report mentioned that Russia's parliament is considering "a bill on a procedure to admit parts of a foreign state to Russia."  It sounds like Russia's government foresees future territorial expansion, and while Russia's foreign minister has insisted that "Russia doesn't and can't have any plans to invade southeastern regions of Ukraine," Putin has expressed concern about the safety of Russian-speaking citizens in those very regions, and holds that Russia has a responsibility to protect its own.  It's unlikely Russia would consider a move into eastern Ukraine any more an invasion than it does its current occupation of Crimea.

This isn't a threat that's limited to Ukraine: Stewart Patrick points out that there are Russian minorities in the Baltic states, which are under NATO protection, and in Belarus and Kazakhstan, which are not.  Given Russia's tactic of seeding to-be-annexed territory with Russian passports before launching invasions to protect its new citizens, this theoretically puts every country on Russia's border at risk.  Stephen Blank has some good ideas regarding a build-up of forces in Eastern Europe (though I'd argue over missile defense), especially since that seems to be the area under immediate threat.

But where do we go from there?  Should the United States try to rope Belarus and Kazakhstan into defensive pacts in case Russia looks their way?  Do we need a return to Cold War notions of containment?  Could the United States even afford an attempt at encircling Russia right now, and how would Putin react if he felt the West was trying to surround him?

I think a better question for the talking heads on the 24-hour news networks to ask would be not what America's Russia policy should be, but whether it really needs one.

After all, President Obama has baffled observers by breaking with tradition and not creating a coherent "Obama Doctrine" to guide US foreign policy, preferring instead the flexibility to take issues on a case-by-case basis.  There's little reason to expect he'd handle Russia any differently.

More than that, America already spent the better part of the previous century designing its foreign policy around keeping Russia in check, and we're still paying the price for it - not just economically or diplomatically, but in the unholy alliances we made to get our chess pieces in the right position, entanglements with non-democracies that continue to poison our claims of supporting freedom and human rights.  We've seen what happens when we decide that a country we otherwise have little in common with and no strategic interest in is too important to fall to the enemy.  We should not be eager to go down this path again.

Another thing to consider is that drastic action may not be necessary to punish Russia - as Ilan Berman tells us, Russia's economy was stumbling even before the Crimean crisis, and the market fallout from subsequent events and the initial round of sanctions is only making things worse.  It would be satisfyingly ironic for Putin's attempt to bolster his poll numbers and console his loss of Ukraine proper to hamstring any further expansion.

So what to do in the meantime?

Again, Stephen Blank's prescription for an increased focus on Ukraine is sensible, and hopefully the threat of escalation will dissuade Russia from pulling a similar stunt in the Russian-speaking border regions of Ukraine that it did in Crimea.  Providing economic and political assistance to the country would also build up another functional democracy in a world where freedom is in decline, and counter the propaganda labeling Ukraine's post-revolutionary government a bunch of Nazis.

It would also be helpful to, as Patrick recommends, do a better job of explaining why the United States and the rest of the West is outraged over the annexation of Crimea.  Yet we shouldn't pretend that the probable majority of the region doesn't want to rejoin Russia and that it is still part of Ukraine - instead, we could set conditions on Western acceptance of the annexation.  Ask for a plebiscite with an option to remain a part of Ukraine, held with international observers to ensure a fair vote, and without masked Russian grunts holding the region in lockdown.  Maybe we could ask for assurances that Crimean-Ukrainians won't face any persecution, and that the Tatars won't be deported again.  I'd be surprised if Russia agreed to this, but then it would have to explain why it's afraid of a legitimate vote.

Rather than scrambling to secure Belarus and Kazakhstan from Russian aggression, we may be able to wait and see if Russia makes any moves in those directions.  Its seizure of Crimea seems to be an attempt to save face following the loss of a local puppet, while Belarus and Kazakhstan seem comfortable in their current orbits around Russia.  More bluntly, those petty dictatorships are probably not worth "saving" from Russia.  In the meanwhile, it would be wise to reaffirm America's (and NATO's) commitment to the Baltic countries, just in case of any staggering lapses of Russian judgment.

I would argue that we should keep any economic sanctions of Russia to a minimum.  Though this runs counter to the notion of rebuking the country for its misdeeds, if Russia is truly on the verge of an economic decline, the less the West does to aid this, the less Russia can blame it for its problems, and therefore the worse for Putin and his cronies.  After all, America's heavy sanctions on Iran did hurt and isolate the country, but didn't actually change its regime. 

This isn't to say that Putin being voted out of office is particularly likely, but if the Russian people's ire is focused more on its leadership than the West, this will make it significantly easier to engage with Russia later if the West offers to help Russia out of its economic difficulties.  Such offers should come with stipulations, demands that Russia loosen state control of its media, be less restrictive of NGOs, and other political and economic reforms.  Similarly, Russia should be ostracized for its actions, but not made a pariah - rather than expelling it from the G8 or other international organizations, instead we could revoke some of its privileges and again set conditions for their return. 

America's goal should not be a long-term strategy to contain or defeat Russia, but a plan to dissuade future Crimeas in the short term, with a wider goal of pulling the country out of Putinism, proving to Russia that becoming part of the liberal, democratic West (or North) is better than making itself an authoritarian regional hegemon once again competing with Europe for influence and "prestige."  In other words, America needs to succeed where it failed at the end of the Cold War.

Then we would no more need a Russia policy than we currently need a Germany policy.

The Ups and Downs of National Self-Determination

In theory, there's nothing wrong with people voting for independence from one country, or voting to join a country they feel a closer affiliation with than the one they're currently a part of.  After all, the United States and the West were supportive of Kosovo and South Sudan when they decided to break away from regimes that were waging war against them.

In general, though, states don't like it when borders are redrawn, and not just due to conservatism or a fondness for the old maps.  The champions of Western liberalism are not exempt from internal demographic issues: the United Kingdom controls a portion of an adjacent island that some would very much like to merge with the rest of Ireland, Spain has Basque separatists not content with status as an autonomous community, and even in the United States there are fears that a growing Hispanic population might try to reclaim former Mexican territories in the southwest.  True, none of these communities can claim to be persecuted or victimized to the extent of Kosovo or South Sudan, but support for the latter breakaway states may cause the former to ask why they can't enjoy the same self-determination.

More than that, such sentiments would wreck havoc with the post-colonial world.  When carving up the continent of Africa in particular, the European colonial powers famously ignored traditional ethnic or cultural boundaries, and in some cases purposely divided populations so that an empowered minority would be dependent on its colonial masters for survival against a disenfranchised majority.  The countries that emerged when colonialism petered out were unstable enough without a myriad of ethnic groups fighting to redraw arbitrary borders or form new nations, and thus the newly-liberated Third World was encouraged to either support multinationalism or create a new national identity based on an artificial state.  Such sentiments have since spread to the rest of the planet as increased immigration and shifting populations have challenged traditional notions of the nation-state, leading to a burgeoning "European" identity on one continent and no small amount of tension in countries with surging numbers of foreign workers - Qatar notably has its citizens outnumbered by such laborers.

So Kosovo and South Sudan are exceptions rather than the rule.  Should Crimea be another?  Overlooking for the moment that this flash of "self-determination" is taking place with thousands of undeclared Russian troops watching over these free and fair elections, and the options are "join Russia immediately" or "go indpendent," with no choice to remain a part of Ukraine.

As of a 2001 census, 60% of Crimeans identified as Russian, and the majority of its population speaks Russian.  During the Soviet era, Crimea used to belong to the Russian republic until Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, Crimea chose to remain a part of Ukraine, but with significant autonomy.  We could complain that this would have been a better time for the region to separate from Ukraine, but from its history, Crimea has a strong argument for becoming part of Russia. 

True, Ukrainian death squads haven't been trying to purge the region of Russians, but Crimea's view of the new government in Kiev as a bunch of Nazis, combined with that parliament's move to revoke a law giving Russian status as a regional language - in effect forcing Crimea to use another nation's tongue as its official language - evidently caused enough alarm to produce in 2014 the separatist movement that failed to succeed in 1991.  The invasion of unmarked Russian troops was of course a happy coincidence.

So Crimea may have legitimate reasons for becoming part of Russia, which is probably what's going to happen anyway. 

We might be able to mollify some of Crimea's concerns, urge it to remain a part of Ukraine for a year or so and see how the new government turns out once the upcoming elections are over.  Maybe the most unpalatable of Ukraine's fascist element will fail to win any seats, and perhaps we could encourage them to keep their heads down for the sake of the old borders.  Another obvious move would be to urge Kiev's government to reinstate Ukraine's language law and allow Crimea's autonomous government to conduct its business in its own language.  And of course we could try bribes, reminding Crimea that it could share in foreign aid packages to Ukraine, assuming we could outbid Russia.

Unfortunately, even if the Crimean people decide they'd rather remain part of Ukraine, there's no guarantee that Putin would accept that any more than he accepted the Ukrainian people turning on Yanukovych.  And again, the presence of all those Russian troops severely hampers Crimeans' ability to freely determine their region's destiny.  So any attempt to sway the masses in Crimea is probably a wasted effort.

On the other hand, if Putin is suddenly interested in national self-determination, maybe we could ask Chechnya and other Russian-minority federal subjects if they want to remain a part of the Russian Federation, or go independent...

A Question of Sovereignty

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War by introducing the concept of sovereignty.  After decades of destructive religious conflict, the nations of Europe decided that another country's internal affairs were no longer a valid causus belli.  World leaders would, at least on paper, no longer meddle in neighboring countries and recognize each others' respective jurisdictions.

"Sovereignty" is of course derived from the word "sovereign," which indicates the political climate that codified the concept, a world dominated by kings and emperors.  But soon an alternative notion of "national sovereignty" would be introduced by liberal political philosophers, suggesting that the people of a country should be its ultimate authority, rather than the subjects of an all-powerful ruler.

The gulf between these notions of sovereignty, I believe, is the source of the current conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine.  It's not just a matter of conflicting national interests, but incompatible worldviews.

The United States and the rest of Europe are proponents of national sovereignty.  To them, the protests against the now-ousted President Yanukovich were unfortunate, but legitimate.  The government of Ukraine was no longer responsive to the will of the people, as seen when Yanukovich abandoned an economic deal with the European Union at the last minute to strike a deal with Russia instead.  Any legitimacy Yanukovich had was lost when he resorted to force to remain in power, and between his attempts to repress the Euromaidan and general corruption, he is a wanted criminal, not a country's president.  Ideally, Ukraine's political process would have been able to see his ouster through a nonviolent election, but if that process is compromised by corruption, sometimes revolution is the only way for the people to express their will.

Russia, or more specifically Putin, is a proponent of sovereign-based sovereignty.  To him, the methods President Yanukovich used to take and wield power are unimportant, and legitimate.  The people of Ukraine had no right to break the law and governmental process with their complaints over their leader's policies.  A sovereign has the right to use whatever means necessary to preserve order and stay in power, and even though armed mobs have forced Yanukovich to take shelter with his ally, he is still his country's only legitimate president.  Ideally, Ukraine's citizens would be content to wait until the next election to make their voices heard, but if the government's authority is threatened by rebellion, sometimes violence is the only way to prevent anarchy.

Of course, both sides are also waffling when it suits them.  America and the West was quick to greet the post-Yanukovich regime as the legitimate government of Ukraine, an expression of the people's will.  But when a similar revolt played out in Crimea, taking over the government and rallying for a merger with Russia, they refuse to recognize it.  Similarly, the pro-Western revolution in Kiev is decried as fascists by Russia, but the pro-Russia revolution in Crimea is of course legitimate. 

Russia thinks the "popular" revolution in Kiev was purchased by NATO, but insists that the thousands of soldiers with Russian-style equipment, using Russian tactics, and driving trucks with license plates from the Black Sea Fleet, are simply local "self-defense" forces - and anyway, if Russian forces were in the Crimea, they have a treaty allowing a certain number of troops in the region.  The West scoffs at the notion of a legitimate national referendum taking place with those "self-defense" forces holding Crimea in a stranglehold, and overtly Russian troops doing exercises on Ukraine's border.  Proper democracy could be ensured with international observers and activists, the West declares, and of course those local "self-defense" forces are unwilling to let foreign agents in to subvert Crimea's government and population.

It's an impasse, modern popular liberal internationalism colliding with pre-revolutionary absolute sovereignty.  Both sides have make some good points and are ignoring others when it suits them.  Which one you support will probably depend on whether you think it's better to have someone like Yanukovich or al-Assad in power, or run the risk of Ukraine's neo-Nazis or Syria's al-Qaeda taking over.  Whether you'd prefer to live in the 21st century, a world of international norms and governance, citizens using new technology to make increasing demands of their governments, and interdependence among countries, or a world of almighty sovereigns who are expected to mind their own business and ignore what their neighbors do to their subjects.

It would be nice to think that the 21st century should automatically win out, that Putin needs to get with the times.  Except freedom is no longer on the march, and the world is getting less democratic.  So the West's challenge in Ukraine is to find a way to reverse that trend, avoid a potentially dangerous conflict, and somehow bridge the centuries-wide divide between it and the new czar in Moscow.  Or in other words, convince that czar that he ought not to have so much power.

I foresee a protracted, unpleasant stalemate.  At least until Russia has a new leader.

What Army, Where and Why

Over the past decade, after Afghanistan and Iraq went from overwhelming victories to exhausting occupations, a narrative emerged in Time magazine, on CNN, and in other journals.  It asked why we needed 150-million-dollar air superiority fighters when our enemies were insurgents who were lucky if they had a pickup truck, and bemoaned that in a world of subterfuge, drone strikes, and special forces teams attacking terrorists from helicopters, the United States military was still built around defending Western Europe from the Warsaw Pact.  War was changing, the narrative went, and the military was too conservative and obstinate to adapt to the times.

With the current Crimean crisis, such sentiments are looking premature.

Now there's a new narrative, in which our idealistic president's foreign policy strategy and a reduced military budget have left our military ill-prepared for this sort of crisis.  Even if we don't end up actually fighting Putin, the critics say, a strong, capable military would give us a bigger bargaining chip as we try to resolve the situation, or may even have been enough to avoid it entirely.

Of course, this narrative could change again in an instant, if for instance Afghanistan or Iraq implodes and we get dragged in to run a counter-insurgency all over again.  But it does present a dilemma: what is our military for?  What foe should it be designed to battle?

A vast juggernaut of a military isn't all that useful when fighting terrorists or insurgents, since they're hard to deter, aren't interested in a fair fight, and typically so ill-equipped that sending tanks against them is cost-inefficient overkill.  If we want to continue the "War on Terror," or foresee a need to clear out the next Taliban from somewhere (or the previous Taliban from Afghanistan, again), then we'd be better served by a mobile military supported by good on-the-ground intelligence.  More drones, less F-22s.  More elites, less National Guard guarding other nations.

On the other hand, if we plan on lining up on the other side of a border from someone like Russia or China, we're going to want as many men, with as many big guns, as possible.  In this case the military's nostalgia becomes far-sighted, as we maintain a military capable of fighting another great power, an army more interested in defeating the enemy and driving them from a territory than in occupying and policing that territory, or scouring a region for insurgents.

But which scenario is more important?  Which is more likely?

There will always be terrorists somewhere, and often in places that threaten our (more odious) allies, so there would always be something for an anti-terror Army to do.  And anti-terror campaigns are easy to get into since they're not "real" wars, can happen with or without the cooperation of the host government, and in some cases can go on without officially happening.  On the other hand, terrorists are small fry who can cause death and destruction, but not nearly on the scale of a proper military, or even certain acts of nature.

Conventional, great power wars are as old as nations, and can cause mayhem several orders of magnitude above the likes of Al Qaeda.  As a consequence, considerable effort is made to prevent them from happening, leading to the irony of a state possessing a large, expensive military that it hopes to never use.  On the upside, the threat of force can often be just as useful as the use of force, so that even an "unused" army can prove a wise investment.  And of course if you have a nearby neighbor with a big conventional army, you'll probably want one of your own just in case, even if you'd rather be chasing terrorists somewhere.

The third option would be to combine the two, muster a big army to find in the field, and also support elites to run counter-terror operations.  But that may not be practical when Congress can barely pass a budget, much less a balanced budget.

In a way, the Crimean Crisis is refreshing.  It's making us question how we've been using our army, and really our foreign policy focus ever since 2001.  Maybe now we'll be less concerned with what a terrorist with a car bomb can do, and more with what a tyrant with a state can do.  Maybe instead of trying to ensure that no one, anywhere, can ever attack a US citizen or ally with explosive undergarments, we could try to create a world where a country can't occupy and annex territory.  We thought we'd done the latter some time ago, but evidently we were distracted by the exploding underpants.

The Western Threat

What struck me, reading some of the stories about events in Ukraine, was the Russian names in the comments sections.  Putin and his flunkies have been blaming America, NATO, or the West in general for this and that, and naturally insist that the Ukrainian revolution was a Western plot.  Because really, why else would thousands of people rise up against their country's corrupt and repressive leader who took them into economic stagnation and reversed course on a highly-anticipated trade deal?

The alarming thing is that the Russians commenting on English-language internet media sites are repeating the same accusations.  I would assume that, if you have access to such websites, you'd be able to get more balanced and complete information about international issues, so that you might be less inclined to believe that there were CIA agents riling up the crowds, or posing as Ukrainian snipers and firing upon protestors, or whatever the conspiracy theory is.  Optimistically those Russian names are working for Putin's government, and the rest of the country knows better. 

The worst part about that conspiracy theory is how insulting it is.  Here in the West there's been some finger-pointing and gnashing teeth about how the events in Ukraine caught everyone off-guard, and how tepid and unprofessional the Obama Administration's response has been to them.  If that administration was orchestrating those events, surely Obama would have a plan ready to execute, and would have already resolved the crisis?  The conclusion is that Russia thinks that the Untied States is conniving enough to start a revolution but too incompetent to follow through on it.  Which is probably more probable than the previous scenario, but there is such a thing as tact, Russia.

On the other hand, there is some truth to Putin's accusations.

As I think I've said before, we live in a world without a great ideological debate, or rather a debate between ideologies.  There is a club of democratic countries arguing for government for and by the people, we'll call them the West.  And then there are the other countries, which alternately try to keep their citizens from hearing about this democracy nonsense, or distract their citizens with shiny trinkets, or attempt to negotiate with democratic principles and argue why their country should benefit from the modern world economy but still keep its one-party system, repressive religious laws, and so forth.

Putin's Russia certainly isn't democratic, nor can it try to hide democracy from its citizens.  I've encountered a few statements criticizing the West for expecting everyone to follow its development path, but not any sort of comprehensive theory of Slavic exceptionalism to explain why democracy is incompatible with Russia.  So the best the country can do is use a high GDP fueled by natural resources to make up for the lack of Russian democracy, much like how Saudi Arabia has to throw cash as its citizens whenever something like the Arab Spring happens.  Though recent events suggest that invading a neighbor may be a good way of distracting people.

I've read that Putin is more a cynic than a believer in anything, someone who sees hypocrisy and self-interest behind all of democracy's claims of enlightenment.  At any rate, he can't offer much in place of liberal government beyond economic development and aggressive nationalism.  And that means he'll always have a problem with the West, because it can provide citizens with a high GDP, nationalism, and a more representative government.

Whenever a leader's time in office ends and he's prevented from running again due to term limits, Putin is threatened.  Whenever a journalist's investigation puts a politician in prison instead of vice versa, Putin is threatened.  Whenever citizens vote out an unpopular leader, whenever an executive's power is checked by another branch of the government, whenever a leader is subject to intense media criticism, the Russian people might notice and wonder "why can't we have that here?"

This isn't the Cold War, Putin can't appeal to the inexorable course of history, or insist that his repressive measures are necessary steps on the road to a proletariat paradise.  He doesn't have a counter-argument for democracy, and thus we, the West, threaten his position simply by existing. 

So he's right, the West is behind the revolution in Ukraine.  But we didn't need to send spies or anything, all we had to do was prove that there was an alternative to corrupt autocracy, and that was enough to mobilize people. 

On the other hand, accusations that foreign agents are attempting to stir up some sort of fascist revolt... well, those are a good justification for clamping down on non-governmental agencies and keeping as tight a grip on the national media as possible.  So we can expect Putin's people to continue insisting that the West is playing an active role in undermining him, rather than undermining him as a side-effect of our day-to-day functions.

It makes me wonder what me might accomplish if we were actively undermining him as much as he says we are...

I'd Love to Stop Discussing Ukraine, But Things Keep Happening

The tragedy is that my Russian Politics course only barely touched on the Crimean War, focusing instead on the Soviet Union and events of the past hundred years, so I lack the knowledge to make any historical comparisons to recent events.  This piece provides a bit of background on the place that Russian troops may have invaded - I have to say "may" because they're not wearing insignia, but the soldiers reportedly speak Russian, they showed up a day after a pro-Russian leader took over Crimea and asked for Russia's assistance keeping the peace, and the same day Russia's parliament authorized military force in Ukraine. 

The motive ascribed for this invasion/peacekeeping mission seems to be Putin wanting Ukraine in Russia's sphere of influence by any means necessary, which is in a word "reckless," and more to the point a few days overdue.  Wouldn't it have been easier to send forces to prop up Yanukovych's regime while it was still dysfunctional, as opposed to collapsed?  But alternative explanations don't make much sense - Crimean demonstrations of the past few days have been overwhelmingly pro-Russian, so unless Russia believed the rumors that the new regime was going to send forces to try and take over the autonomous region (a somewhat suicidal action), they shouldn't feel in danger of "losing" it. 

So Putin is either trying to recapture something he didn't try to save, or else protecting something that isn't in danger, and in the process creating a mountain of uncertainty, exacerbating an already tumultuous situation, and bringing up the specter of great power war in Europe if the West gets drawn in.  Reports from a few days ago warned of the situation in Crimea: these two analysts had some suggestions that are probably defunct now, while the aforementioned crisis guide to Crimea reasoned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would be counter-productive, so I'm not the only one surprised by this.  Maybe the situation looks better in the Russian (Putin-friendly) media, the heroic rescue of loyal Russians from fascist, Western-backed revolutionaries?

The big question is what the US should do about Ukraine, which is a familiar question by this point, since we keep re-asking it every time the situation changes.  Secretary of State Kerry has condemned the invasion, which Russia hasn't admitted has happened, while President Obama spent an hour and a half on the phone with Putin.  The White House assures us that Obama warned that Russia's actions "would negatively impact Russia's standing in the international community," which is not so much a threat as it is a reminder of how global opinion works, and how it cannot physically stop you from invading a neighbor.

Others want us to do more - this fellow notes that we haven't even called a Security Council meeting on the topic (remember that Russia has a permanent veto on said council), and urges Congress to act where the Obama Administration has not, by passing new sanction legislation on Iran.  This would not directly help the situation in Crimea, but it may put more backbone into America's foreign policy, so that the next time Russia invades a country they may have to think twice.

Problem is, our options are limited.  Nobody wants a fight with Russia, even if defending a country with a history of resisting invaders wouldn't present the sort of problems encountered by those who tried to invade Russia itself.  More than that, if we wanted a fight with Russia, our army just got out of two long, nasty wars, and if you believe this commentary, has been emasculated by defense cuts.  Some in Congress are proposing sanctions, "targeted" and unspecified, though I'm not sure how we could hurt an economy based on resource extraction, especially if we prefer to get our oil from Arabian rather than Slavic autocrats.

The other issue would be the basis for our actions.  Intervening in Ukraine naturally raises questions about why we aren't intervening in countries like Syria, where citizens are not welcoming the offending army as brothers and protectors.  If we call Russia's actions an unlawful invasion, they can point at Iraq.  If we take issue with the pro-Russian mobs taking over Crimea, they can point to the pro-Western mobs that took over Kiev.  If we accuse Russia of trampling democracy in defense of its Black Sea naval base, they can remind us that Bahrain is #8 on Politico's list of America's top 25 Most Awkward Allies.  If we speak of the importance of democracy and self-determination, they can argue that eastern Ukrainians want close ties with Russia, and their chief complaint with the country's previous leader was his level of repression, not his international alignment.

In short, our objection to the situation in Crimea largely boils down to the fact that the wrong guy is "winning," i.e. not us.  Admitting this would be refreshingly honest, yet depressingly realist.  The United States ought to be better than that, at least able to appeal to the principles it likes to insist it upholds.

There's still potential for common ground, though.  The developing situation is in danger of making Sarah Palin look like some sort of political visionary, and I'm not sure anyone wants that.  It's not too late, Putin - you can either validate the guys who lost the 2008 election, or take a stand for sanity.

Off-Script

Ukrainian President Yanukovych abandoned his office on Saturday, his regime has collapsed, the protestors have won, and it looks like there's two responses to these events: uncertainty or "so what else is on?"  Ukraine has dropped off CNN.com's front page and "trending" banner, and the last I saw of it was a side feature next to Samsung's new phone and the end of the "Got Milk?" ads the other night.

Meanwhile more scholarly websites are trying to make sense of recent events: the Council for Foreign Relations have a transcript of a teleconference on that topic, and Foreign Affairs has a letter from Kiev that mentions protestors staying put in case their discontent is needed again.  An analysis from Slate makes me glad I didn't try to comment on Ukraine over the weekend, since the author ended up updating it every few hours as the situation went from "the president signed a power sharing deal" to "the president has legged it" to "so who's in charge right now?"

As for me, I'm curious how this will be presented in future international relations textbooks.

For my Peace and Conflict Resolution class I got to read Chenoweth and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works, which argues that nonviolent campaigns are more effective than violent insurgencies.  The main point is that it's easier for your average oppressed citizen to take to the streets in a demonstration for a few days than it is for him to run off to the hills and join a guerrilla movement, and the revolution that results from such mass, popular efforts will be more durable, more democratic and more peaceful than what results from a revolutionary war. 

There are issues with data - the authors admit that they can't measure the revolutions that never got going for one reason for another, while some from my class raised dubious eyebrows at the graphs and charts used to support the central argument - but I think the book's worth reading just for the case studies.  Four are presented to illustrate the ways nonviolence can work, or not work.

Their best example is the Philippines' "People Power" movement, where the nonviolent demonstrators mobilized the middle class, thus negating their oppressors' claims that the revolutionaries were a communist minority.  The movement also courted defectors from the army or security forces, protecting rebel barracks with praying human shields, while keeping the demonstrations nonviolent.  Ultimately the People Power revolution succeeded in ousting Ferdinand Marcos from power, something Marxist and Islamic guerrillas had been failing to do for years.

That is the only case study where everything went right, however: the Iranian Revolution is listed as an example where the "mass mobilization" and "capture the country's military" went according to plan, only for a lack of cohesion among the resistance to allow an Islamist minority to hijack the revolution and introduce a new kind of tyranny.  The First Intifada shows how such a hijacking can occur even before the revolution happens, where initially successful and sympathetic nonviolent protests were derailed when the PLO ran in and tried to turn it into an armed uprising.  And then there's the failed Burmese uprising, where not only was the regime able to successfully quash any cohesion among the resistance, but a would-be rebel leader explicitly told her followers not to try and recruit the military to their cause, and continued to praise the armed forces butchering her countrymen.

Ukraine doesn't quite fit any of these molds, and it's probably a stretch to call the recent revolution "nonviolent," what with the riots and burning buildings and battles between police and protesters.  The Ukrainian military didn't get involved, and eventually the police withdrew and went home, so I suppose that might count as the revolution "capturing" the security forces of the regime - it's more important that they not fire on protestors than it is that they take part in the marches, I'd wager.

Russia eventually withdrew its support from the Yanukovych regime when it became clear that it was losing control of the country, much like how increasing international pressure and Marcos' dwindling supports forced America to tell its former champion of democracy to give up power in the Philippines.  But Marcos and Yanukovych left power a little differently - the former defiantly renewed his oath of office even while the opposition was setting up a parallel government, but when the last state-controlled TV station fell to rebels, that combined with US pressure and Marcos' hemorrhaging support drove the dictator to negotiate for his flight from the country.

In Ukraine's case, Yanukovych actually signed a power-sharing deal that would have let him stay in power, only to be threatened with an "armed surge" from the protestors unless he resigned, which led to his flight.  This doesn't fit the narrative of "dictator bows to overwhelming nonviolent pressure," plus we don't know where the guy is, and he's still vowed to keep fighting somehow.

There is an element of mass mobilization in that even Yanukovych's party turned on him, declaring him and his cronies to be corrupt criminals, but this of course raises concerns about the unity of the post-revolutionary government, or that extremists might be able to hijack the revolution.  Already there's a couple of factions among Ukraine's would-be reformers, and though Russia loves to throw around the word "fascist" without a trace of irony, one of the Ukrainian minority parties is descended from Nazi-aligned partisans and has talked about a "Jewish-Russian mafia" controlling their country.  And of course, discontent with the former president notwithstanding, Ukraine is hardly united when it comes to deciding where to go from here.  Plenty of people would be happy to have an authoritarian Russian puppet if he were less corrupt than the last guy.

So a qualitative comparison to historical cases isn't exceptionally useful, in other words.  The most we can say is that the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution is sort of like a couple of past revolutions that ended up going in very different directions.  The good news is that Ukraine gets to make its own path, the bad news is that we don't know where that path is going.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than something quantitative, where I'd stick a bunch of variables into STATA and say with "confidence" that there's a 45.992% chance of enduring democracy and an ERROR percent chance that things will get worse.

Countries, Lost and Found

This isn't how you do a truce, guys.  On the other hand, since this isn't the first time the sides have declared a truce and then continued killing each other, we probably shouldn't be surprised by this outcome.  Russia's response hasn't been surprising either: the West is behind everything, Washington is arming the rebels, this is part of an attempted coup, etc. 

But some of the stuff from the West has been interesting.  I'd always considered sanctions to be a way to kill hundreds of thousands of a nation's most vulnerable citizens in hopes that the dictator ruling them suddenly develops a conscience and change his policy, and don't think doing that to a country already undergoing economic hardship is going to make things better.  Except the US and EU are talking about "targeted" sanctions going after Ukraine's leadership, freezing assets and visas.  Now, I'd worry that putting economic pressure on a group already leaning towards Russian handouts might at best do nothing and at worst drive them further away, but I'm sure these policymakers know what they're doing.

There's also John McCain's reaction; he likes the sanctions idea, but he's also finding time to criticize the president for I guess not doing enough against Russia and Putin?  He says that Putin's "played" us, and that Russia's leader is "amoral, he’s cold, he’s distant, he’s tough,” and all of that I can agree with.  But calling Obama naive is unfair - the guy orders drone strike assassinations of targets regardless of the cooperation of the country whose airspace he's violating, for crying out loud.  It's better to say that Obama is simply unwilling to commit much to certain situations, such as Ukraine or Syria, where he either doesn't seen an American interest or a chance of getting a cost-effective positive outcome.  If anything, I'd call him a cynic.

The most surprising thing I found was from the Council on Foreign Relations' neat Ukrainian issue guide, not so much due to the linked article's content, but its subject.  It was short commentary from someone complaining that we - the US, the EU, the West - are "losing" Ukraine.  This is a bit of an odd notion to think about, as we - the west, the EU, the US - never really "had" Ukraine at any point, did we?  So why should we care if Putin "takes" it?

The Cold War is over, thank the deity of your choice.  The great debate of whether democracy or communism is better for a country's people has been decided through the military-industrial complex and horrific proxy wars.  We've reached the "end of history," where the big political debate isn't between one or more ideologies, but to what extent you can fit the Western liberal capitalist model with your country; there isn't a globally-viable alternative anymore, no great philosophy offering a different world model.

Putin doesn't like this.  He sees himself - or I've read various works characterizing him this way - as the leader of a bloc providing an alternative to the West, a bloc built upon principles of... well, it looks like Putin's club is all about being able to stay in power indefinitely, thwart popular sovereignty, and crush protesting citizens without anyone else being judgmental about it.  As such, this has led him to align with Syria and Iran, and is part of the reason why he's leaning so hard on Ukraine's regime.  The other reason is that he doesn't consider "Little Russia" an independent state.

Competing with Russia over Ukraine's future, then, runs the risk of playing into Putin's hands, validating his worldview as the leader of nondemocratic Russia facing off against the West in Cold War II.  But like I said it isn't the same situation, no fringe political scientists are arguing in favor of Putinism, and nobody outside the ruling regimes of Kiev and Damascus particularly wants that style of government.  The West isn't competing with Russia to see who can control the most puppet regimes, and doesn't need to "have" Ukraine for that reason.

But that doesn't mean we should do nothing, or feel comfortable if Ukraine "goes" to Russia instead of the West, like so many of its people want.  If the Cold War was about paying lip service to democracy while ignoring the piles of bodies, maybe now we can ignore the political angle and focus on helping people.  Because the problem isn't that the Ukraine is building close ties to Russia; the two countries have a long history, and while it's been less amiable than relations between, say, Canada and Great Britain, it's only natural for countries to feel a bond due to their shared past.

The problem is that Ukraine is building close ties to an autocratic, oligarchic Russia.  The problem is that if Kiev severs ties with the West and becomes Moscow's puppet, a lot of Ukrainians are going to suffer.  And there's enough suffering going on in the world that the West isn't acting upon, so maybe we should put forth a bit more effort into at least preventing more from occurring.

Really, we shouldn't be beating ourselves up for losing Ukraine, we should be lamenting that we lost Russia.  If we had come up with a better transition strategy than "shock therapy," if we had been a bit more outspoken when Yeltsin was shelling the Russian parliament, if we had helped Russia rebuild itself into a liberal, functional state instead of a combination of the worst parts of capitalism and pre-Soviet authoritarianism, Ukraine wouldn't be an issue.  And we could be continuing to do nothing about Syria instead.