Ukraine

Republican patience with supporting Ukraine is running out

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / 1 Comment

Robert Bolt’s masterpiece, A Man For All Seasons, tells the story of the doomed, heroic, and very human Sir Thomas More. The moral is that it easy to believe in things when they are popular; far harder, and far more important to do so, when they mean that you will risk something.

I’m not going to be beheaded, as was More. But I do bear an unfashionable message.

Almost the whole of the British elite supports the trendy, hawkish view regarding the war in Ukraine: that Volodymyr Zelensky must be entirely supported and given whatever he wishes. After over a dozen meetings with every sector of the British elite recently, this uniformity of belief was by far my firm’s most striking takeaway. There is literally no debate as to whether this is the wise course.

One common assumption was that Ukraine was self-evidently winning the war, and that American support for Kiev would be endless. The only time I saw any of my British friends squirm was when I suggested that both these lazy suppositions are deeply questionable.

First, the war is devolving into a stalemate that is likely to go on for the next year. Second, as Boris Johnson’s visit to Washington, Republican patience with endless, extensive support for what amounts to (at best) a second-order prioritym is wearing very thin.

These views are not popular. That doesn’t mean they are wrong.

Winter has predictably seen the war grind into stalemate; now two questions may well determine the outcome of the contest.

Will Russian domestic alarm at a lack of victory, now that Vladimir Putin has had to call up reservists in a draft, doom his adventurism? Or will the US, which is overwhelmingly keeping the lights on in Ukraine, experience war weariness of its own?

The realist danger ought to be obvious: Russia, seeing Ukraine as a first-order interest (as America would Mexico), will always care more about the war in Ukraine than the US.

Come the spring, it is clear the Russians will throw new masses of men, numbering between 180,000-300,000 new conscripts, onto the offensive. Although little more than cannon fodder, the new troops are likely by simple numbers to make some gains, if not decisively overrun the country.

Then it will be the Ukrainians turn. Bolstered by more advanced weaponry from its NATO allies, including a number of Leopard 2 tanks from Germany and Europe and Abrams tanks from the US, Kyiv will likely blunt the Russian drive and undertake an offensive of their own, which in turn will grind to a halt given Russian numerical superiority.

If all this holds, we will be back where we are now at the end of the year, in an increasingly attritional war with masses of casualties with little to show for the horrendous sacrifices. It is then, a year on from now, that war fatigue on both sides will become the overriding question.

Little-covered in the British press is that American support, is already fraying. The Republicans, never fashionable at the best of times, has come to the deeply unpopular view that support for Zelensky must be limited, conditional, and even come to an end over time. While almost no-one in the GOP is cheerleading for Putin, they is not mindlessly in the tank for Kiev either.

January polling in the Washington Post makes this clear: a comfortable majority of Democrats supports Joe Biden’s Wilsonian line, but for the first time a bare majority of Republicans (with the trend line decisively heading downwards) is against giving further aid. This bombshell has received far too little exposure in London.

There are three broad factors that together explain this steady erosion in political support.

First, years of frustration at allied free-riding in terms of defence spending are finally bearing fruit.

While for Washington Ukraine is demonstrably a second- or even third-order priority, it is accepted that this is not true in Europe, much closer to the fighting and more affected by the outcome.

Yet, once again, the US seems to care more about European security than do the Europeans. In terms of total aid, America has committed an eye-watering $120 billion to Ukraine, more than the rest of the world put together.

Europe’s collective GDP is roughly the same as America’s, yet 70-plus years after the founding of NATO we find that the US is still cross-subsidizing Europe’s safety net by paying a disproportionate share of the common defence.

Enough, an increasing number of Republicans think, is enough. If the war matters as much as European hawks think, it is time for them to put their money where their mouth is – or simply stop having bold, expensive postures that American taxpayers must pay for.

Second, conveniently forgotten in all the ringing Times editorials, is that fact that America has a debilitating set of domestic problems itself that simply aren’t being addressed. The pandemic made plain that America’s schools are a mess; doing away with testing (as the teacher’s unions advocatine) won’t this glaringly issue any less real.

America’s kids don’t know nearly enough; its infrastructure is falling apart. The opioid crisis (with fentanyl killing more than 70,000 in 2021) is as grossly underreported at home and abroad as it is dangerous to the nation. Border policy is non-existent.

American elites don’t discuss these vital issues enough; practically no foreign commentary dwells on them at all. Were they the centre of media attention the idea that the US ought, or at least might, choose to re-focus on its domestic problems would not seem so outlandish.

Third, and the reason for my personal flagging support, is the geopolitical argument against over-committing to Ukraine. The strategic future of the world is undoubtedly in the Indo-Pacific, location of much of both the world’s future economic growth and its future political risk as China and the US vie for dominance.

For that reason, my firm spends roughly 70 percent of our time on the region. It is safe to say that the Biden administration, in terms of both money and focus, spends far less than they should, and the obvious reason is the war.

The idea that America can do everything is false. With US debt standing at an unfathomable 31 trillion dollars, doubling defence spending to avoid difficult foreign policy decisions is just magical thinking.

It should be obvious that the US should be focusing like a laser-beam on assembling the broadest possible alliance in the Indo-Pacific, training with them and arming them to the teeth, in order to make the Chinese hesitate in making a lunge at Taiwan.

Only by so doing, and (hopefully) peacefully halting China’s adventurous designs can global peace and prosperity be guaranteed for the next generation.

It should go without saying, but it does not, that the strategic outcome in the Indo-Pacific is overwhelmingly more important than the fate of Ukraine. Yet, nonsensically, the Biden administration is diverting weapons caches promised to Taipei to Kyiv.

For Wilsonian utopians, strategic choices never have to be made; every problem is equal, and all can be solved. But even the US economy has limits, as does the patience of the American people. The public support necessary for a vast new defence spending programme isn’t there.

A year from now, it is a certainty that for all these sound realist reasons, Republican support for the war will be lower than it is today. With the election will be on the horizon, whoever is the GOP nominee (likely Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump) will likely share the party’s view.

Such a shift in the US position will come as a nasty surprise to many. But they will have nobody to blame but themselves for not seeing it coming.

This piece was originally published in Conservative Home

Will Europe be mastered by history in 2023?

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One of the standard aphorisms in my political risk business — used to describe whether a country is rising or falling — is as brutal as it is profound. Either a country is mastering history, so the shorthand goes, or history is mastering it. There is little doubt that Europe, over the last sleepy generation, has been mastered by larger global political forces it was barely even aware of, as it lay basking in the sunny false dawn following the end of the Cold War.

One of the standard aphorisms in my political risk business — used to describe whether a country is rising or falling — is as brutal as it is profound. Either a country is mastering history, so the shorthand goes, or history is mastering it. There is little doubt that Europe, over the last sleepy generation, has been mastered by larger global political forces it was barely even aware of, as it lay basking in the sunny false dawn following the end of the Cold War.

But, with the coming of the Ukraine war and the stirrings of the Sino-American strategic competition for dominance in the Indo-Pacific, we have reached the end of the end of history. Suddenly, global geopolitics and great power competition are all the intellectual rage again, though in truth they never really departed from the scene. Instead, and nowhere more so than in Europe, their enduring importance was merely conveniently forgotten as the continent ruinously chose to take an intellectual holiday from history. But time waits for no man — nor for any decadent continent, either. The damage done by this willful ignorance of how the world really works is only now becoming apparent.

By every great power measure, Europe is a mess. The three basic pillars of power have remained the same since the time of the ancient Greeks. What is the state of a country’s army? What is the state of a country’s economy? How politically unified is a country to act both within and beyond its borders? By these exacting and unchanging political risk standards, Europe remains a busted flush as a great power, a political entity promising much and perpetually underdelivering.

First, the continent punches way below its weight in terms of its military. Germany, both Europe’s greatest power and the source of many of its ills, is a case in point. Berlin long has outsourced its military policy to America, its energy policy to Russia (ruinously), and its trade policy to China. Rather than serving as the engine of the European Union as a rising power, instead Germany has been an intellectual black hole over the past generation, where every good idea for Europe’s revival goes to die.

Defense spending estimates for 2022 make the case clearly for Europe being overrun by lotus-eaters. Whereas the U.S. will spend 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense, only France comes close to NATO’s required 2 percent of spending at 1.9 percent. In contrast, Italy will spend only 1.5 percent, Germany a laughable 1.4 percent, and Spain a risible 1 percent. This isn’t remotely intellectually serious even as the problem has festered for a generation. I remember telling the former head of the German armed forces that my high school football team could take the German army — and I wasn’t far off the mark.

The problem with having only carrots (economic tools) without any sticks (military tools) is that such a strategy works only in a world populated entirely by rabbits. And, say what you will of them, neither President Vladimir Putin of Russia nor President Xi Jinping of China are rabbits. Europe is simply not fit for purpose in a world where military force still matters, as it has every day since the dawn of time.

Economically, Europe is also so much less than meets the eye. While possessing a huge internal market roughly equal to that of the U.S., its sclerotic economic model means the continent falls ever further relatively behind rising great powers such as China and India, as well as the emerging developing world. Again, Germany — the continent’s undoubted economic powerhouse — best explains the problem. Here the Ukraine war has done more than point out Germany’s military follies; it also underlines the fact that its vaunted economic model is now irretrievably broken.

The German model was based on buying cheap Russian energy to make high-end products (machine tools, petrochemicals, luxury cars) that were, in turn, swallowed up by an economically ravenous China. Now, in our dawning age of insecurity, the Russian cheap energy inputs that the German model requires are definitively at an end, even as the outputs — assured access over time to China’s market, assuming it to continue booming and assuming geopolitical tensions with Beijing can be contained — is more up in the air than ever. The German model is definitively broken, and nothing has yet emerged to take its place.

At the same time, Europe has become a daycare center, chock full of a decadent population used to taking more out of the continent than they put in. For example, at the end of September, opinion polls in France showed that around 55 percent of its populace want the pension age to stay the same (62), or to drop back to 60, the demand of both the far left around Jean-Luc Melenchon, and the far right around Marine Le Pen, who between them can block the reformist urges of President Emmanuel Macron in the French parliament.

It is not that Macron has not identified the obvious, glaring problem. He has said, “The truth is that we have to work more and produce more in our country … if we are to keep the French social model.” But a continent in advanced-stage decadence finds this almost impossible to countenance emotionally and intellectually. The notion that people are living dramatically longer than when the safety net was first constructed, and that this requires all of us to work longer, is seen as almost a war crime even to mention. But economic reality exists, whether you choose to ignore it or not.

Finally, Europe is a Tower of Babel. How could it be otherwise? There are 27 countries in the European Union; I could not cajole 27 of my friends to agree on a common ice cream flavor, let alone something as complicated as reaching a genuine consensus over setting out a common foreign policy. As such, the EU’s policy outputs, even when generally on the money, will always amount to half-measures, compromises that do not genuinely “solve” any of its problems.

The common position on Ukraine is a case in point. Beneath a surface agreement about the war, deep fissures exist on the continent, with the Poles and the British downright hawkish, while the Germans, French and Italians (in terms of public opinion) are far more eager to end the war on almost any terms. As the war drags on into 2023, look for these hairline cracks to become canyons.

Militarily anemic, economically sclerotic, and politically divided — this is the reality of a Europe that has been mastered by history over the past generation. It must face up to these festering problems or be definitively swept into the second tier of powers. And there is simply no more time to waste.

This piece was originally published in The Hill.

As winter sets in, both Russia and Ukraine still think they can win this war

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The fantastic new German cinematic version of Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, makes a telling, universal point about war itself right off the bat: how a conflict plays out is almost never as you imagine it to be.

The young German boys are regaled about the effortless victories they are about to win for Kaiser and fatherland by their paunchy, dead-eyed, middle-aged, history teacher, a man for whom war has always been a glorious theory. The next thing we know, the clueless lads he has swept up in his nationalistic fever are at the hellscape of the western front in World War I, about as far away from chivalric glory as it is possible to be.

Remarque’s microcosm of the folly of the Great War can be easily extrapolated: that if the great men of 1914 had known all that was to come in the deadly whirlwind of the next four years – which would sweep their more civilized world aside in favor of the barbarism of that was to characterize the twentieth century – none of them would have been as suicidally bellicose as they were in the fateful summer. To put it mildly, the Great War did not go according to anyone’s plan.

As the canny Otto von Bismarck put it, when you draw the sword, you roll the dice. Wars start out being about one thing, but their outcome is always a gamble. Rarely do they end as anyone imagined at their start. In the case of the present Russo-Ukrainian War this is surely true. What Vladmir Putin assumed would be a weeks-long mopping-up exercise, as Kiev was once again politically amalgamated into the wider Russian empire, has become something very different, indeed.

Worse, for analysts, the fog of war is a very real thing, as yesterday’s missile incident in Poland helped to demonstrate. Trapped in the myopia of day-to-day events, it is devilishly hard to take an intellectual, strategic step back, and make sense of what the pointillist painting actually looks like, rather than obsessing over-much about the dots.

Yet if we are to make sense of the world, these are the intellectual precepts we must sternly follow to do so.

Two Present Truths

In the case of Ukraine there are presently at least two hidden truths that bear a lot more discussion, as they reveal the trajectory of the war, rather than merely what is happening on any given day.

First, despite wishful thinking on all sides, there is a lot more fighting to come; the end is not yet in sight.

It ought to be axiomatic (it isn’t) that wars continue as long as both sides think they have a realistic chance of attaining victory. In both the Russian and Ukrainian cases at present, both Kiev and Moscow think the spring can still lift them to dominance over the other.

In the case of Moscow, despite the recent humiliating defeat at Kherson, Putin still has reasons to believe ultimate victory will still be his.

First, Russia’s new position on the east bank of the Dnieper River (which neatly bisects Ukraine) is far more defensible that was the Russian army’s line awkwardly jutting across the river to Kherson. Putin’s troops had time to dig in before they executed this long-planned retreat. With winter setting in, and with Ukraine perennially short of arms, the Russian army hopes to regroup during the winter lull before the spring campaign of 2023.

Also, on the plus side, the Kremlin plans to put 300,000 new troops in the field. While the actual number will be smaller (experts estimate 180,000 is more realistic) and while they will be raw and often indifferently trained, as Joseph Stalin put it, at some point quantity becomes quality.

Putin had tried to avoid this draft as long as possible, as politically it puts his regime in danger as average Russians become more affected by the tragedy of the war itself. But in gaining use of this new mass of men there is an immediate military upside. He can hurl these new troops at the Ukrainians, at a minimum blunting their advance, and wait for western war weariness to further his cause.

For all these reasons, and despite the military calamities that have befallen him, the Russian elite still believe ultimate victory in the war is possible. It will fight on.

But given its recent surprising successes at Kherson and around Kharkiv, Kiev is greatly encouraged and of no mind to end a conflict where the military momentum presently lies with them. The Biden administration, which in sending more than half of all military and civilian aid to Kiev is in essence Volodymyr Zelensky’s patron, shows no signs of flagging in its support for the Ukrainian cause.

More advanced American weaponry has arrived in Ukrainian hands, most famously the HIMARS multiple rocket launcher, and with time and practice, Ukrainian troops are using the new, advanced weaponry to increasingly deadly effect. With the coming of the Spring, and with the strategic initiative still with them, Kiev is not remotely minded to throw in the towel.

Second, it is political forces away from the battlefield that will determine the outcome of the war.

The two key present political drivers of the war are as simple to explain as they are hard to gauge: will western war-weariness outpace Russia’s fabled ability to suffer, or will Putin’s calling up of his reservists and issuing a semi-draft be the beginning of the end of Russian tolerance for his botched invasion? The key political question is whether Russian or Western weariness comes to a head first.

For the West, the good news is that the European scramble to secure energy supplies for the coming winter has been tactically successful; most of the storage tanks are around 90 per cent full, in excess of normal EU directives. Europe will be able to get through the coming winter.

But what about the next one? For the EU’s scramble to throw policy plates in the air in terms of its energy policy must not obscure the devastating fact that Brussels has no plan to get through the next winter.

It will take time for the German engineers to construct the vast Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminals in the north of the country to offload American shale. Likewise, gas-rich Qatar would like to help, but its long-term contracts until recently have been with Asian countries.

There will be more gas from the Netherlands and Norway, but the black hole that emanates from Europe divesting itself from Russian natural gas (due to the moronic energy policies on the continent of the past two decades) will not go away. It is next winter that remains the problem.

Is Europe really prepared to theoretically support a Ukraine most of its citizens have never visited, given the practical economic and social costs that may ensue? Is a decadent Europe really prepared to genuinely make sacrifices for anything?

A fine European Council on Foreign Relations poll of June makes for bleak reading. When Europeans were asked whether the goal over the Ukraine war should be to for it to end immediately or to see Russia defeated, a plurality of 35 per cent wanted peace at all costs, while only 22 wanted justice for Ukraine. Further, pluralities favored peace at any price in Italy, Germany, and France.

If things get tougher, it is an open strategic question as to whether Europe is not the weak link in sustaining the Ukrainian cause.

For the hawkish Russian elite, the danger is that further defeats – and even the absence of a confidently expected victory – will lead to Putin’s demise or at least desire to save face in some way at the negotiating table. While the Russian President is undoubtedly hoping that time is on his side as the Europeans waver in their support for Ukraine as 2023 progresses, time can also be seen as moving against the Kremlin.

A war that was supposed to take days has taken years. Easy victory has given way to humiliating stalemate at best and defeat at worst, sullying the very Russian nationalism brand that has been the source of both Putin’s political legitimacy and surprising popularity for decades. John Kennedy put it well: while victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan.

Putin may find himself increasingly alone, isolated, and politically endangered if Russia’s masses of men cannot change the current trajectory of battle. Saving face at the negotiating table (with the Europeans and Americans restraining the Ukrainians on the basis that they are paying for everything) may be his last, best hope of survival in time.

So, these are the new truths of the Russo-Ukrainian War. What Remarque would entirely understand is that lying beneath these strategic questions there lies one horrible, human certainty; the suffering is bound to continue.

This piece was originally published in Conservative Home.

The Ukraine war reaches its Gettysburg moment. Will we see a draft that could end Putin, or the disintegration of western unity?

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The early 1900s baseball star (and sometime philosopher, they often go together) ‘Wee’ Willie Keeler put it perfectly – that the key to the sport is to ‘hit ‘em where they ain’t.’

The same simple, effective philosophy, to an even larger extent, explains Ukraine’s dramatic strategic offensive of last week to the northeast of the country, relieving the pressure on its second city, Kharkiv.

While the world, including the Russian general staff, was engrossed by the much-advertised Ukrainian offensive in the south around Kherson – a centre of over 200,000 people and the largest city to be captured by the Russians so far – the Ukrainians adroitly followed Keeler’s maxim. So when Russian troops were dispatched from the Kharkiv area to support its defenders in Kherson, the Zelensky government masterfully struck the suddenly-undermanned northeast.

In the space of just as few days, the front lines – which had stabilized into almost World War I-style trench warfare following the petering out of the Russian offensive in the Donbas in June – were magically opened up by Ukraine’s surprise attack.

In the course of just the past few days, Kiev has retaken up to 700 square miles of territory in the northeast, even as the Russians have scrambled to repair the breach in the line. At a tactical minimum, it is the greatest Ukrainian victory in the war since March, when it dramatically turned Russian forces away from the gates of Kiev itself.

So is this Ukraine’s ‘Gettysburg Moment’ – the decisive battle that will determine not just the immediate and tactical, but the outcome of the war itself?

More than a few caveats are in order before we answer this central political risk question. For while what is strategically going on is momentous, there is a lot of terrible fighting still to come. It must be remembered that, as of this morning, Russia still controls a significant 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory. For all of Kiev’s undoubted heroics, all it has managed to do up, until the present, is to show its vital western backers it can heroically lose the war at a far slower pace than had been expected.

Furthermore, geography matters mightily in evaluating the (relatively) good news. Liberating the northeast is important, but it is not the key to the present situation; the struggle for Kherson has far more strategic impact, since re-taking this major city would upend Vladimir Putin’s current ‘southern strategy’ in Ukraine.

While stopped in his earlier blitzkrieg effort to quickly decapitate the Ukrainian government, take Kiev, and make the country a genuine colony of the Kremlin, Putin has been far more successful in the south.

He has largely succeeded in militarily establishing a land bridge – connecting Rostov on Don in Russia itself, much of the Donbas, and the City of Mariupol (making the Sea of Azov a Russian lake), linking a good portion of the north coast of the Black Sea to already-held Crimea.

If Putin can stabilise the Donbas, he may settle for this major bite of the Ukrainian apple, declare victory and initiate a cease-fire – in essence partitioning Ukraine itself. This is the major strategic gambit of the war at present; comparatively, the Kharkiv region is a sideshow.

But for all these necessary caveats, the Ukrainian offensive might just herald the climax of the present conflict. There are two major – and woefully undiscussed – reasons for my bold political risk call (and do remember that my firm said there would be an invasion in the near term in November of last year).

First, the strategic initiative in a war matters; someone is always on the offensive and someone on the defensive. Since the Ukrainian army’s heroism before the gates of Kiev in March, the strategic initiative has been largely with the Russian army. They have glacially, and at great loss, inched their way forward in the Donbas, taking the whole of Luhansk, and much of Donetsk in the late Spring-early Summer of this year. It is been slow, ugly, and unedifying, but the Russians have retained the initiative until their latest June offensive petered out over the summer.

Now, beyond doubt, in both the northeast around Kharkiv and the south around Kherson, the strategic initiative has gone over the Ukrainians; they are in the offensive driver’s seat now. While it is true that this may be a short-lived phenomenon (winter will likely put on end to both armies’ freedom to manoeuvre and stage large-scale operations), for the present the momentum of the war has swung back in the Ukrainians favor. This is a truly momentous development.

Second, as the great Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, put it, war is politics by other means. Both Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky have real political challenges ahead, which amount to the decisive factors as to which side will ultimately emerge victorious in the conflict. The present Ukrainian offensive amplifies their present political difficulties, throwing into stark relief the political risk factors that will determine the outcome of the war.

For the Kremlin, their choice of words about the Ukrainian conflict is instructive; they call their barbarity a ‘special military operation;’ God forbid it is discussed as a war. This is not just the usual Orwellian pronouncements of an increasingly totalitarian state. For were Putin to admit that his dreams of federation with Ukraine had been this terribly miscalculated, that the country did not welcome the invading Russian forces with open arms, but instead fought them tooth and nail for control of the country, would be to call Putin’s strategic judgement, and Putin alone, into dangerous question.

A ‘war’ would require a general draft of the Russian people – another hardship visited upon them by their beleaguered leadership. The political risk trap for Putin is that he has to finish his invasion of Ukraine with one hand tied behind his back. For him to unleash total war, which he may have to do to actually conquer a country as vast and well-defended as Ukraine, would be to admit his great miscalculations in the first place. The all-out draft he needs to win could paradoxically bring about his end.

On the other hand, in the words of Tennesse Williams’s tragic heroine, Blanche DuBois, the Ukrainians are dependent on the kindness of strangers – particularly the United States, which has accounted for a decisive 70 percent of all military aid given to Kiev. It is estimated that Ukraine, a political and economic basket case even before the war, needs around $9 billion a month just to keep going.

The political risk danger point is the West is afflicted with a serious cost-of-living crisis, with the beast of inflation loosed from its cage, and with an energy-induced recession about to hit the European continent. It is an open question, as energy is rationed in Europe and America has to weather significant economic troubles of its own, how long Washington and the others are prepared to write tens of billions dollars of open-ended checks for a Ukraine unable to re-take ground in its own country (in essence, just losing gallantly) as its own people suffer for a strategic cause that is secondary at best.

It is in this larger political and strategic context that the present Ukrainian offensive must be seen. If Zelensky’s forces can re-take ground around Kharkiv, the political pressure on the Biden White House lessens, and the necessary cheques will keep being written.

In such a situation, the pressure on Putin to institute a wide-ranging draft to avoid disaster becomes almost unbearable. On the other hand, a stalled offensive would keep the political heat on western leaders from their increasingly restive publics, even as Putin has time to put his announced new 130,000 men in the field by the Spring.  It is for these other, whispered, political risk factors that we have indeed arrived at our ‘Gettysburg Moment’ in Ukraine.

The Tsar’s throne trembles – as the consequences of Putin’s war haunt Russia in the Caucasus

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It is not too much to say that Vladimir Putin’s miscalculations over Ukraine have birthed a new era. At the strategic level, the Russian President is guilty of three seminal errors.

First, his battle plan for invading Ukraine was far too byzantine – a fussy three-pronged assault that quickly bogged down partly as a result of this very complexity.

Second, he didn’t believe that Ukraine was truly a nation, that the country (particularly its Russian-speaking eastern portion) would rally around its beleaguered government in Kiev, let alone heroically fight for it.

Third, the Kremlin didn’t count on quick and decisive Western support for Ukraine, embodied in the crippling sanctions imposed on a shocked Russia. These three dramatic miscalculations led to the failure of the Russian blitzkrieg.

But the war, far from making little geostrategic sense as much as the British commentariat presently opines – the very same people who blithely assured us that the invasion wouldn’t happen in the first place – is eminently explicable in realist terms.

Like his hero, Peter the Great, the present Russian Tsar wants to restore Russian prestige by resurrecting a very old, organic geo-political concept that has protected ‘Mother Russia’ for centuries, that of strategic depth.

When Russia has been successful in the past, it has arrayed a series of satellite countries in front of it, providing itself with geographic space as invaders have come on. In traversing the great distances from their homelands through the satellites and then, at last, entering the vast Russian steppes, the invaders have been swallowed up by the immensity of the country itself.

Indeed, Russian defenders have three times (against Charles XII of Sweden in the eighteenth century, Napoleon in the nineteenth century, and Hitler in the twentieth century) traded land for time, and then let the Russian winter do its fearful work. It is neither odd nor anachronistic of Putin to wish to re-establish either Russia’s great power status, or the strategic depth paradigm that underwrites it.

Again, looking historically, the invasion of Ukraine is not an isolated event. Instead, Putin has been setting about this plan for the entirety of his time in power. He has restored traditional Russian influence in the Balkans. In saving the dictator Alexander Lukashenko from his people last year, he has made Belarus a firm satrapy of Moscow. Following his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and after successfully brokering an end to the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of last year, the Kremlin was back as the dominant force in the Caucasus region.

Even the old naval base at Tartus has been reclaimed, following Russia’s successful intervention in the bloody Syrian Civil War. But the final piece of the puzzle, the jewel in the crown of any strategic depth strategy, must leave Moscow with a pliant Ukrainian client state next door, rather than the pro-western regime which presently exists there. That is why Putin raised the sword and rolled the dice; but in failing in his initial blitzkrieg, he has greatly endangered his other quasi-imperial gains.

In settling the Armenian-Azerbaijani war of 2021, Putin emerged as the kingmaker of the Caucasus. Its recent slide back to tension reflects the waning of Russian influence over the region.

The six-week war of last year over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh—an Armenian-populated enclave within Azerbaijan that has been dominated for a generation by Yerevan—resulted in a surprising Azerbaijani victory. The bloody conflict (up to 6600 were killed) was dominated by Baku’s use of new technology, specifically Israeli- and Turkish-manufactured drones, which routed the antiquated Armenian forces. Much of Nagorno-Karabakh, de facto in Armenian hands since the 1990s, reverted to Azerbaijani control.

Before its traditional ally, Armenia, was wholly militarily humiliated, Putin jumped into the fray, organising a ceasefire, which was secured by Russia placing 2000 soldiers along the line of contact between the two sides during a cooling off period.

Further, Putin has cleverly managed the diplomacy so that both sides are beholden to Moscow, with the Kremlin emerging as the steadfast friend of Yerevan, and the newfound friend of Baku, traditionally the ally of Turkey.

However, with the Russian cat away, the local mice will play. Clashes on March 24th-25th occurred along the line of control, with Moscow accusing Azerbaijan of violating the truce. While both Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, and Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, agreed to peace talks brokered by Charles Michel, the EU Council President, in Brussels this week, it is likely the old great game in the region is afoot, as Russia’s increasing weakness is palpably clear to all.

Given their substantial losses in Ukraine, Putin has been forced to transfer troops away from its two sponsored, separatist enclaves in the nearby country of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, for use as reinforcements in the current war. Surely Azerbaijan is watching like a hawk as to whether the Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh will be the next to go.

Traditionally allied to Turkey, perpetually wary of Moscow’s influence in the Caucasus, and supremely confident after their military victory of last year, it is clear that Azerbaijan is probing Russia’s commitment to the region, given the dumpster fire in Ukraine. With the modern-day Tsar’s powers ebbing, the rest of his satellite strategy for retaining its great power status is increasingly in peril as Baku clearly aspires to finish the job, taking the rest of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

Even in quiescent Georgia, which Putin dismembered following a short war in 2008, recent political tremors are indicative of Russia’s increasing weakness. South Ossetia, a small enclave in the north of the country of only 50,000 people, plans to take steps to formally join next-door Russia itself, to the strenuous objections of Georgia.

Anatoly Bibilov, the President of the breakaway republic, recently announced his intention to hold a referendum ‘linked to the window of opportunity opened in the current situation,’ meaning the Ukraine war. Given that the Russian-speaking enclave has strong historical ties to North Ossetia, already formally a part of Russia, a successful referendum outcome would be a foregone conclusion.

However, it is another symbol of Russian weakness, not strength. In essence, Moscow is engineering this gambit to bank its winnings from 2008, even as it is being forced to withdraw some of the 10,000 troops it put in place in both separatist enclaves following Russia’s successful prosecution of the 2008 war. As its power in the Caucasus wanes, today’s Tsar is trying to salvage what he can from Russia’s strategic depth strategy.

War always brings a myriad of unintended consequences. The strategic irony is that, in this case, even as Putin strove with a successful lightning invasion of Ukraine to complete his life’s work of restoring strategic depth for Russia’s defense, in failing he has imperiled the other satellites he has already managed to dominate. It is not just a pliant Ukraine Putin has lost. Indeed, as events in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia show, the whole Tsarist edifice Putin has painstakingly put in place is now in the greatest of danger.

This post was originally published in Conservative Home

Ukraine is the victim of Europe’s refusal to wean itself off of Russian gas

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Either you master history or history masters you. Decades worth of political risk analysis can almost always be boiled down to this aphorism.

In the case of Europe’s dealings with Vladimir Putin, rather than mastering history, Europe has vainly tried to take a holiday from it; we’re now watching the doleful results.

First, let’s dispense with Prime Minister Johnson’s speculation that the Russian President is somehow an “irrational actor”.

While his methods are odious, there is nothing in political risk terms regarding Putin’s strategy that strikes me as remotely irrational. Forget the smoke and mirrors about Ukraine’s possible NATO expansion; Putin knows this is not going to happen in his lifetime, if at all. The real reason for Russia’s aggressive actions could not be either more organic or reasonable from the Kremlin’s point of view.

Putin, in his Peter the Great Tsarist pose, wants to restore Russia’s strategic depth, the force that has been the cornerstone of the country’s strategic playbook for the past 300 years.

Mother Russia managed to see off wars of annihilation with Charles XII of Sweden in the 18 century, Napoleon in the 19 century, and the Kaiser and Hitler in the 20th century, all by trading land for time. Surrounded by pliant client states, Russia’s leaders let the invading armies march into the vastness of their country, all the while waiting for time to pass and Russia’s game-changing winter to come. Rather than being irrational, this has formed the basis of a very successful strategic orientation since time immemorial.

With the demise of the USSR, all this was lost, as Russia was weak, led by the chaotic Boris Yeltsin, and NATO expansion proceeded ever closer to Moscow. Upon taking over in late 1999, Putin has made it his life’s mission to restore Russia to at least great power status, even if it will never play in the superpower league as the US and China. To do so, the plan is to restore the country’s lost strategic depth.

This Putin has begun to do. Russian influence in the Balkans has grown, even as Belarus and the Caucasus states (following the Azerbaijani-Armenian war) are now firmly in Moscow’s orbit. But Ukraine remains the jewel in the crown of the strategic depth strategy, for without it in the political fold, as Putin himself remarked in his national address, hypersonic missiles can strike Moscow in just minutes time.

So, Putin looks around, and what does he see? He sees a distracted America pivoting to the Indo-Pacific, where much of the strategic risk is a contest with China and much of the economic reward of the world’s future growth are both lodged.

Then he turns to the EU, and he sees absolutely no threat. The EU is economically sclerotic, politically divided, and militarily impotent. Above all an isolationist Germany, the economic motor of the continent, is addicted to Russian energy, getting over one-third of all its natural gas from Russia. With the addition of the mammoth Nord Stream 2 pipeline this economic dependence was set to become servitude. It is hard to expect the Germans to be tough with anyone who can make them very cold in the winter.

There have been warnings about this for decades, which predictably fell on deaf ears. In political war games I did to help the EU grapple with its energy dependence on Russia there was a predictable outcome: Europe needed to diversify its gas imports, taking more from Norway, Algeria (Europe’s other two major suppliers) as well as Qatar and the US. I was profusely thanked for my efforts, paid in a timely manner. And of course, nothing happened.

If the UK truly wants to “do something” about Putin, even at this late date, it must join with Europe in crafting a dramatically new energy policy, where the sources of supply are finally taken into primary account in political risk terms. The UK has avoided the Russian energy trap, getting less than five percent of its total from Putin. It can and must team up with a befuddled Europe, looking at an energy plan that does not castrate the continent, particularly when it is necessary for it to stand strong in relation to the Kremlin. Putin’s adventurism is not irrational; Europe’s energy policy is. 

This post was originally published in City A.M.

We must stop pretending the EU is a great power

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This is a tale of two delusional think tank meetings I have recently attended, illustrating how far gone is most political risk analysis regarding the status of the EU. Cheerleading has taken the place of thinking, as the simple fact is that Brussels is funding many of the supposedly independent observers at such conclaves. To expect critical thinking from “experts” whose financial imperatives revolve around keeping the EU’s mandarins happy is to expect too much.

At the first meeting, I found myself sitting on a panel with an American Wilsonian. He was representing the Democratic Party view of US relations with China, while I represented the Republican Party view. After a good discussion, questions came from the primarily European audience. The first revolved around the fact that the questioner wanted to know where the EU fits into the strategic picture of the Sino-American cold war, as wasn’t it so that Brussels must be counted as the world’s third great superpower?

Even though it was a Zoom call, my Wilsonian counterpart — whom I agreed with over almost nothing — and I exchanged ironic glances. Finally, for all his innate pro-EU inclinations, he brutally told the questioner the truth: The EU, while a trading superpower and a huge internal market, simply doesn’t play at the global strategic level as a great power (let alone a superpower), as it is less and less economically dynamic, is endemically politically divided and is militarily (other than France) impotent. In the shocked silence that followed, I quipped that I wanted to cede all my time to my Democratic counterpart for having the temerity to tell the brainwashed audience the truth — that the EU simply isn’t a great power.

If this is so, my second think tank meeting focused on the nub of the problem: A mercantilist, neutralist, isolationist-leaning Germany. In standard fashion, the German think tank denizen sent to debate me made all the usual excuses; while I am right to be critical, Germany (in that most galling of phrases) “would now do its homework,” easily overcoming a generation’s-worth of historical and empirical evidence to the contrary, and would decisively right its ship of state over the coming months.

Exasperated, and tired of the analytical lying at cocktail parties, I brutally interjected that the reality is that Germany would do nothing over the next year and change nothing, as its people prefer their cosseted lifestyle (and genteel decline) to the real sacrifices that would be involved in paying for a relevant military and crafting a common European foreign policy. I was met by hateful stares and a sullen, unchallenged silence, for what could they say, given the last decades of Berlin’s holiday from history?

Crises intellectually clarify, even for the most obtuse observers. Two recent challenges to Brussels from the world’s revisionist powers, China and Russia, ought to make plain that wishful thinking has taken the place of facts-based political risk assessments of an EU that is so much less than meets the eye.

First, tiny Lithuania — to the fury of Beijing — has decided to favor Taiwan in the crafting of its foreign and economic policy. China responded by putting pressure on Vilnius and defying the EU, particularly Germany, to do anything about this. While in the past few days, the EU launched a legal action against China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) after Beijing restricted or blocked imports from and exports to Lithuania, Berlin responded precisely as I would have predicted — that is, in a neutralist, isolationist, mercantilist manner — and not as EU cheerleaders would have it. Glumly aware, as an export-driven superpower, that China, for the fifth year in a row, is its largest export destination, Germany is pressing Brussels to tone down its criticism of China and to de-escalate the controversy.

Major German companies, particularly carmakers heavily dependent on trade with Beijing, have warned Vilnius that they will pull out of Lithuania unless the dispute is quickly settled. For, despite all its usual blather about how much the EU means to it, when push comes to shove and with its now economic interests on the line, Berlin has seen to its commercial interests  at the expense of European unity.

Likewise, over the Ukraine crisis, in a basic way President Vladimir Putin is airing his grievances. As such, in the earliest days of the crisis, Moscow met with the US, NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, not with the EU.

Why should he? In practical terms, Moscow met great power to superpower (the US), with the world’s most important military alliance (NATO) and with the largest gathering of transatlantic states (the OSCE). The EU simply does not play a major role in strategic terms; for Putin to prioritize meeting with Brussels would have been a colossal waste of time. While a shocked Brussels looked impotently on (and I am shocked that they are shocked), Putin made it clear that, in a crisis, the EU simply does not have the relevance its cheerleaders dream of. Nor is this state of affairs likely to change.

Instead of swallowing comforting, if delusional, fairy tales about its far-flung importance, it is time to analytically shout from the rooftops the obvious: That the EU emperor simply isn’t wearing any clothes.

This post was originally published in Arab News.

A realistic approach may help master the crisis in Ukraine

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At present, the only great power combination that can really threaten America’s global position in our new age is an ironclad alliance between revisionist powers China and Russia. And, for all their shared antipathy to the U.S., and for all that they strategically tilt toward one another, Beijing and Moscow are not there yet.

Russian resentment at taking a back seat to China does not fit comfortably with President Vladimir Putin’s Great Russian nationalism. On the other hand, China’s desire to economically — and eventually, militarily — challenge Russia for dominance in Central Asia does not make the two easy bedfellows. At the highest level, all American foreign policy must be about not throwing its two rivals into each other’s arms.

Of the two, China — the only possible peer superpower competitor — is the greater threat. Given that Russia is an uneasy part of Western civilization, it also makes it a better long-term option to pry away from the dangerous, putative Sino-Russian alliance. Even the outspoken Russia critic, former acting director of the CIA Michael Morell, recently said that “it is too bad we cannot have closer relations with Russia, because it could be a strategic partner with us against China.” This is why it is overwhelmingly in America’s interests, if it can be managed, to avoid open conflict with Russia over the Ukraine crisis.  

But how does this long-term geostrategic reality mesh with the immediate crisis in Ukraine? To be clear, the harsh, recent U.S.-Russia negotiations had an old, Cold War vibe. However, there are important differences between now and then. The current conflicts with the Kremlin are about Russia’s real or imagined security phobias and idiosyncrasies, not a fight over competing global ideologies. This is a new great power struggle, but not an ideological battle. As such, theoretically, the chasm between the two could be bridged.

Second, present weaknesses in the Western alliance are only spurring on Putin, even before Russia strikes. De facto neutralist Germany took unplugging the Kremlin from the global SWIFT banking system off the table, and the new governing coalition of Olaf Scholz is hedging on Germany’s earlier commitment not to allow the massive Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany to come online in the case of Russian invasion.

President Biden, in his news conference last week, suggested that a limited invasion might trigger only limited sanctions. Such weakness is no way to make fraught negotiations work. 

Instead, Washington and all the NATO allies must make it clear to Moscow that no effective “win-win” negotiations can be undertaken with the Russian military threat imminent. Any significant U.S. step toward Russia under current circumstances would be interpreted as just another sign of weakness by the Biden administration.

Instead, allowing that a cooling-off period can be managed, negotiations should be held with the clear intention to strengthen America’s geopolitical posture, while proposing to Russia a fair deal.

Some of Russia’s concerns can be acknowledged, in terms of verbal understandings, if not treaty obligations. George Friedman put it explicitly: “Russia has been invaded in the 17th century by the Swedes, in the 19th century by the French and in the 20th century twice by the Germans. In each case, they won the war or survived it by strategic depth.” 

Obviously, Ukraine is the number one priority for Russia, as far as a goal to reinstate some of the strategic depth lost with the fall of the USSR. They fear that another sudden outburst of aggression will — as it has done time and again — come from Europe, and they will have to defend themselves on frontlines dangerously close to Moscow. This is particularly relevant in our era of hypersonic missiles.

But the U.S. should make clear to the Kremlin that Russia’s neighbors also have an understandable historical dread of Russian aggression. Such trepidations may be alleviated by the further expansion of NATO to their territory, if they so wish, and when all other NATO members agree — which (crucially) so far, they do not. We must remind Putin that no NATO expansion to the East has happened since 2009 because of Germany’s and France’s fervent opposition, and that this is unlikely to change. While the U.S. cannot give in on the theory of further NATO expansion, reality can be directly conveyed to the Russian delegation. In practice, politically there is absolutely no appetite in the alliance for expansion to Russia’s borders, nor will it occur in the near term.

Leading European NATO powers (Germany, France and Italy) openly oppose further NATO expansion. This is not only because of the energy crisis and the German dependence on Russian gas but also because of their long-term interest in developing Russian markets and natural resources. The last thing any of these states wishes to do is to take a stick to the Russian beehive.

Putin’s preference, in time-honored Russian fashion, is to secure the country’s western borders. Negotiations on a renewed European security system could offer Russia enough strategically and tie Moscow’s hands for many years while the intricacies of a compact are developed, greatly reducing the dangerous incentive for it to form a military-political alliance with China.

The Russian proverb says that “a bad peace is better than a good war” — especially if the war can escalate in an age of nuclear weapons. Instead, a realistic approach could allow us time to find solutions acceptable to both sides, including agreements on limitations of strategic weapons deployment in Eastern Europe, military maneuvers, and offensive arms sales to Russian neighbors.

Quiet, realistic understandings, short of flashy treaties that are impossible to pass in the U.S. Congress, may be possible regarding NATO’s Eastern borderlands. Given the geostrategic stakes in play, thinking creatively is worth the effort.

This post was originally published in The Hill.