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.
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