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What the war in Ukraine has revealed about alliances.

On February 4, a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon and its payload fell into the ocean off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, after a U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter jet destroyed the balloon with an air-to-air missile. With it went the potential for near-term improvement in U.S.-China relations. The day before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had postponed a planned visit to Beijing, explaining to China’s top diplomat that the appearance of the balloon had “undermined the purpose of the trip.” He added that he hoped to reschedule the visit “as soon as conditions allow,” but given how the balloon episode unfolded it is not at all clear when that might occur.

The balloon fueled what can only be deemed hysteria in Washington and across the country, driven in part by political pressure on the Biden administration to eliminate the threat from China by shooting it down. The Pentagon, however, assessed that falling debris from a shootdown posed a greater danger on the ground than the balloon posed in the air, partly because U.S. countermeasures had minimized its intelligence collection capability. So the balloon drifted from Montana to South Carolina, spreading alarm and outrage before meeting its fate.

It also generated ample speculation about why China would conduct such a hostile and “brazen violation of United States sovereignty,” as the U.S. House of Representatives characterized it in a unanimous condemnation of the balloon’s flight. One of the prevailing theories is that a “rogue” element in the Chinese military intended the balloon to subvert Blinken’s trip to Beijing, presumably to prevent Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who had agreed to meet with Blinken, from engaging in diplomacy that might compromise Chinese interests or security. It is much more likely that the balloon was a routine intelligence operation of which Xi was tactically unaware, and that the Chinese military operators who launched it were inattentive to if not ignorant of Blinken’s visit.

Yet the narrative about the balloon in the United States has largely presumed deliberate and hostile Chinese strategic intent. Congressman Mike Gallagher, chairman of the new House “Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party,” said in an interview that he does not believe the timing of the balloon flight on the eve of Blinken’s planned trip was a coincidence because it would be “well within the CCP’s playbook” to try to humiliate Washington. Beijing did not help its case by claiming that the balloon was a “civilian airship” for “mainly meteorological” research—a weather balloon—that was blown off course by force majeure. The Pentagon was quickly able to refute this by confirming that the balloon was an intelligence collection platform.

But many questions remain unanswered that are highly relevant to assessing Chinese intentions. Although the “airship” was obviously not a weather balloon, it remains unclear whether it was in fact blown off course and out of its operators’ control. It is difficult to understand how the Chinese could have calculated that the balloon would have drifted across the entire continental United States without detection or a response. However, in the wake of the shootdown details began to emerge that multiple such Chinese balloons had previously entered or skirted U.S. airspace over the past several years without a U.S. response. Knowledge of those precedents almost certainly led the Chinese to anticipate that even if this balloon was detected, it was unlikely to be shot down—regardless of whether it was on its intended course. Moreover, Beijing—in a highly unusual step—expressed “regrets” for this “unintended” and “unexpected situation.” In addition, Chinese officials now claim that the United States has flown similar balloons over China.

The goal here is not to adjudicate the facts of the balloon incident and its origins and uniqueness. Rather, the point is that understanding what actually happened and assessing its implications requires an empirical assessment of the facts and the available evidence on Chinese intentions. In this case, however, the relevant facts and evidence have emerged only piecemeal, while in the meantime conclusions were drawn and narratives took hold—based in part on some problematic assumptions. This rush to judgment and action was driven in part by political pressure and inflated threat perceptions in the United States, and by Beijing’s deception and secrecy—which have undermined the credibility of any Chinese explanation or countercharges. This all reflects the emerging adversarial pathology of U.S.-China relations, which is increasingly obstructing any efforts at mutual understanding, and contributing to what many observers have already described as a new cold war.

This volatile dynamic is certain to pose serious challenges for rescheduling Blinken’s trip to China. The balloon incident has increased the stakes and perhaps moved the goalposts for his visit, partly by reinforcing a confrontational American approach to Beijing and intensifying the partisan political attention in Washington to Blinken’s trip. At the same time, the balloon may have significantly reduced the potential for the visit to yield positive results, given its impact on Washington and Beijing’s perceptions of each other’s strategic intentions and posture.

Even before the balloon appeared, expectations for Blinken’s visit were low. The original plan was to use the trip to follow through on notional agreements reached by Biden and Xi at the G-20 summit in Indonesia last November, and to take the next steps forward in establishing principles and “guardrails” to guide the relationship. But there had been little progress in that direction since November, and it appeared likely that Blinken’s trip would produce little more than a standard exchange of grievances.

After the balloon appeared and enflamed anti-China sentiment, White House officials reportedly judged that the trip “wasn’t worth the potential domestic political costs of going, given that Blinken’s talks were not expected to yield much in the first place.” This raises the vital question of under what circumstances the Biden administration would accept the “potential domestic political costs” of a rescheduled trip, given the inevitable political pressure on Blinken to extract concessions from Beijing in the wake of the balloon incident, and the inevitable uncertainty about Beijing’s willingness to accommodate that expectation. With that backdrop, it is hard to see when and on what basis “conditions [will] allow” for Blinken to go ahead with the trip.

Complicating this equation, and the prospects for a productive visit, is the Biden administration’s apparent calculation that the balloon incident strengthens Washington’s hand. This is based on both the notion that Beijing is obliged to make amends for the balloon incursion, and that Xi had previously launched a “charm offensive”—which was likely to include a newly accommodative approach to Washington—because Chinese leaders decided that they need to repair China’s global image and reduce external pressure so they can focus on recent internal policy challenges. This was reflected by an unnamed U.S. official who observed that “China’s foreign policy is a constant search for leverage,” but its defensive reaction to the balloon episode suggests that it is “nearly out of options” in that regard.

Washington, engaged in its own constant search for leverage with Beijing, appears to calculate that it has gained some as a result of Beijing’s misstep with the balloon. This adds a new layer to Blinken’s original agenda for his trip. According to a former U.S. diplomat, the Biden administration’s plan was to focus on highlighting problematic Chinese behaviors and suggesting ways for Beijing to reduce bilateral tensions, rather than suggesting ways the two sides could “play nicely.” Presumably, Blinken will double down on this approach whenever his trip is rescheduled, now with the balloon as ammunition.

This strongly suggests that Washington is focused more on scoring points against Beijing than on pursuing the kind of reciprocal engagement that both sides claim to be seeking and which Xi rhetorically invoked in his meeting with Biden in Indonesia. Indeed, in his State of the Union speech last week, Biden said he had told Xi that “we seek competition, not conflict,” and mentioned the potential for cooperation only as an afterthought. This was echoed a few days later in Congressional testimony by senior State Department and Pentagon officials, who reiterated that the Biden administration’s focus in its interactions with Beijing is “competing vigorously” with China, “managing that competition,” and “maintaining open lines of communication.”

For its part, Beijing is almost certain to deflect if not reject Blinken’s planned approach. Chinese officials have repeatedly criticized Washington’s focus on competition over cooperation in the relationship, and specifically the notion that the United States can deal with China “from a position of strength.” Chinese leaders almost certainly judge that Washington overestimates its leverage in the relationship and underestimates Beijing’s. They probably also judge—and probably correctly—that Washington is misinterpreting the rationale for Beijing’s recent “charm offensive,” which is likely aimed more at scoring points against the United States internationally than at seeking favors from Washington. Accordingly, Beijing is likely to balk at any attempt by Blinken to parlay the balloon incident into greater U.S. leverage with China.

Beijing, of course, has itself to blame for the balloon debacle. The operation may not have been “brazen,” inasmuch as the Chinese apparently didn’t expect the balloon to generate attention, and they uncharacteristically apologized for its appearance. But if it wasn’t brazen, it was stupid, ill-timed, counterproductive, and nonetheless a violation of U.S. sovereignty. As such, it was an unanticipated gift to the Biden administration’s characterization of China as a difficult and challenging partner. Moreover, Beijing’s explanations have been neither complete nor credible, thus undermining its indignation at the U.S. shootdown and complaints that “some politicians and media in the US have hyped it up to attack and smear China.” In addition, the Chinese military spokesman’s statement that Beijing “reserves the right to take necessary measures to deal with similar situations”—by hinting at potential retaliation against U.S. intelligence operations—bodes ill for a relaxation of bilateral tensions in the security realm. This all suggests that Beijing itself may now be more focused on scoring points against Washington than on finding a path toward substantive engagement.

So where does this leave U.S.-China relations? Substantially worse off than they were before the appearance of the balloon, which is unlikely to be a blip from which the relationship quickly recovers. An incident that probably reflected little if any strategic thinking on Beijing’s part (beyond routine intelligence operations) escalated very quickly into a diplomatic crisis and ultimately military action because of exaggerated fears and domestic politics on the U.S. side; bureaucratic fecklessness, lack of transparency, and diplomatic deception on the Chinese side; and strategic distrust and failure to communicate on both sides. It will be difficult and will take time to repair the damage to the point where both Washington and Beijing are prepared to go forward with Blinken’s trip—especially because both sides will probably have elevated the requirements for it to be politically defensible and diplomatically productive. And both sides will probably continue to overestimate their leverage and thus their ability to set the terms of engagement.

This turn of events is especially disturbing because nothing is more urgent and vital to salvaging U.S.-China relations than dialogue aimed at mutual understanding and developing the principles for managing the relationship that Biden and Xi talked about in November. This would be best achieved through some attempt at strategic empathy on both sides, but the rapid escalation of the balloon incident raises serious questions about whether the two sides are still capable of understanding and acknowledging each other’s perspectives, and whether their domestic politics would allow room for that to happen. In the meantime, another crisis could escalate quickly, given the volatility of the environment. Washington and Beijing need to find a way to defuse that possibility.

Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Image: Shutterstock.

The occasion did not get much attention, but December 31 marked the end of what came to be called the “war on terrorism” (or alternatively, the “war on terror,” the “global war on terrorism,” or the GWOT). To be more precise, that is the date that overseers of military decorations in the Department of Defense declared to be the final day of eligibility to receive the National Defense Service Medal, which is awarded to all service members on active duty during a time of war. The medal had previously been awarded during the wars in Korea and Vietnam and the first Persian Gulf war. Then there was a period of eligibility lasting more than two decades for the “war on terrorism,” from September 11, 2001, until last New Year’s Eve.

This administrative detail about medals is the closest thing we are likely to get to an official announcement about the end of this latest “war.” American political leaders would understandably be reluctant to declare an end to this endeavor, only to have their opponents replay their words after the next terrorist attack that takes American lives. But now is as good a time as any to reflect on the mistakes that were central to this “war.”

The very concept of a war on terrorism—that is, warfare against a tactic, which many different people have used for many different purposes through the centuries—is fundamentally flawed. As former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, speaking of a war on terrorism is like calling World War II a war on blitzkrieg. The administration of George W. Bush was most responsible for putting the GWOT concept into heavy use, but countless commentators accepted and used the concept as if it made perfect sense.

One of the additional faults of the war metaphor is that it implied the counterterrorist effort had a definite beginning and end—as World War II for the United States could be said to have begun with the attack on Pearl Harbor and ended on VJ Day. But just as terrorism has been used for centuries and lacks an identifiable beginning and ending, counterterrorism has no clear starting and stopping points. Many Americans regard September 11, 2001, as a starting point, but the United States was very much engaged in counterterrorism, with good reason, well before that. (During much of the 1990s I worked in the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA, as chief of analysis and then as deputy chief of the center.)

Although the administrators of military decorations had to come up with some ending date for a “war” that had gone on for two decades, neither terrorism nor the need for counterterrorism has ended. But some of the policies adopted in waging the GWOT implicitly assumed that there would be an end—a counterterrorist equivalent to VJ Day. Some of those policies concerned the detention of captured combatants. In a real war, such issues generally get resolved when the war ends, as prisoners of war are paroled or repatriated. But with the GWOT, thirty-four prisoners remain at Guantanamo, with no indication that this detention facility that is a stain on America’s international reputation will close in the foreseeable future.

Another fault of the war metaphor is to overemphasize the use of military force. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there were even silly pseudo-syllogisms that said the country faced a grave security problem, that to treat the problem seriously we must declare war, and if it’s war then that means we fight it with military force. Military force is only one of several policy tools that can be used in counterterrorism. Like the other tools, it has distinctive advantages but also its own limitations and disadvantages. The chief limitation is that terrorism often does not present good military targets, especially when preparations for a terrorist attack are made in the very country that will be the target of attack. The chief disadvantage is that the spilling of blood from the use of military force can enrage people enough to resort to using terrorism themselves, or to support and sympathize with those who do. This counterproductive aspect of use of the military in the name of counterterrorism can arise even from merely deploying armed forces in a foreign land.

The most damaging and costly use of armed force associated with the GWOT was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Critical to the Bush administration’s ability to muster support for this major act of aggression—against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11—was the notion that the invasion was nonetheless part of a “war on terrorism.”

Wars in the American tradition are seen not only as having a definite end but also as ending in victory—again, just like World War II. With counterterrorism, living in this tradition leads to a kind of mission creep that seeks a victorious ending that is never likely to come. The prime case in point is Afghanistan, where the military intervention aimed at Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts was a justifiable response to 9/11 but morphed into a twenty-year nation-building effort that was bound to fail.

The GWOT’s damage to legal systems and constraints has been substantial, and the war metaphor is largely to blame. In a real war, some normal legal procedures and standards are curtailed or circumvented with the general understanding that a national emergency sometimes requires emergency procedures that will end when the emergency ends. But again, counterterrorism does not end.

The very choice of Guantanamo as the location for a detention facility represented a departure from the rule of law, given that the choice was an attempt to put the facility beyond the reach of U.S., Cuban, or any other law. A military tribunal system that was installed there, in foolish disregard of the substantial and successful record of regular civilian courts in handling terrorism cases—especially in the Southern District of New York, the jurisdiction in which the World Trade Center was attacked—reprised an emergency system that had been used during World War II to prosecute German saboteurs captured in the United States. Whatever was right or wrong about that usage, it was over and done with when World War II ended. Today, the military tribunals at Guantanamo trundle on in a seemingly endless mess of delays and procedural quandaries. Justice still has not been administered to the 9/11 suspects, twenty-one years after their actions.

Perhaps because, as Brzezinski observed, wars do not really get fought against tactics rather than a named enemy, thinking about the GWOT came to postulate a named enemy. That enemy, following naturally from 9/11, was sometimes defined as Al Qaeda and sometimes more generally as foreign radical Islamists. The narrower definition led to widespread misunderstanding about how Islamist terrorism supposedly was the work of a single, centrally controlled group, which it never really was. Even the broader definition was not broad enough to reflect how terrorism, including terrorism that strikes U.S. interests, is by no means solely the work of radical Islamists.

United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres recently warned that the “biggest threat of terrorism” today comes from right-wing and white supremacist groups in the West. Other expert observers have reached a similar conclusion about terrorist threats within the United States. Perceptions of terrorism that developed within a conceptual framework built around a “war” supposedly starting with 9/11 have ill-prepared the American public to understand the terrorist threats the country faces today.

Notions associated with the GWOT continue to impair strategic thinking about national security in other ways as well. One is a tendency to disconnect terrorism from other forms of political violence that can be at least as destructive as terrorism properly defined and can raise some of the same strategic and moral questions. Related to that is a frequent failure to relate terrorism and other forms of political violence to the political context in which they occur. The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and subsequent party politics related to that event, have blurred boundaries between violent extremism and what passes for a political mainstream in much of present-day America. The GWOT framework is not built to understand that blurring or to appreciate the danger it represents.

Finally, the tendency to think of a GWOT as defining an era that ran from the end of the first post-Cold War decade to a current era of great-power competition impedes grand strategy by encouraging the notion that policymakers think, and should think, about only one type of security problem at a time. Great power competition was a big part of the strategic reality that the United States faced during the period of the GWOT, and terrorist threats continue to be part of the reality that the country faces today. Policymakers always have had to walk and chew gum at the same time, and they still do.

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a Contributing Editor for this publication.

Image: Shutterstock.

Following the “long wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is in the midst of attempting a major re-orientation toward the Indo-Pacific region. Concurrently, rising neo-isolationism on both ends of the political spectrum and perennial resource allocation decisions between domestic and security programs are generating questions about America’s role in the world and how to achieve strategic ends given limited strategic means. Not surprisingly, domestic politics, COVID, and economic issues have consumed attention spans and resulted in much self-absorption.

Meanwhile, the nation’s adversaries present as having no such self-questioning. To the contrary, they are clearly on the march: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s increasingly assertive moves throughout the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, North Korea’s continued development and provocative testing of missiles, Iran’s linkages with and support of both Russia and China, and a host of transnational entities ramping up violence and chaos. In short, multiple state and non-state actors are moving into real and perceived vacuums caused by diminishing American presence.

One essential characteristic of American culture is an unquestioned faith that anything can be improved through the application of more and better technology. This is certainly true of the American way of war, which is highly technocentric, even to the point that capability development now seems to be driving the formulation of strategy rather than the other way around. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Indo-Pacific.

All of this brings us to the issue of how the U.S. military in general, and its sea services in particular, are redesigning themselves to contend with Chinese ambitions in the midst of multipolar global turmoil. It is not an encouraging picture. Old strategic paradigms like “containment” are being dressed in new vocabularies and labeled as “modernization.” The self-deceiving trap of “mirror-imaging” dominates deterrence assessments. Various technologies are being hawked as panaceas for reduced American capabilities. 

Current U.S. Marine Corps leadership has so seized on the idea of technologically enabled containment and has divested so much warfighting capability toward that end that it is no longer capable of leading a credible “from the sea” counteroffensive. The essence of its containment concept is emplacing small antiship missile detachments throughout the First Island Chain. Numerous articles have identified significant basing and supportability issues with this concept. Rather than re-visit those valid tactical matters, we want to draw attention to the inherent strategic fallacy undergirding U.S. notions of containment with respect to China.

The United States can take some pride in the conception and implementation of “containment” against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But, it risks great hubris if it continues to fail to understand China’s conception of containment—a conception deeply embedded in Chinese culture and much more nuanced and subtle than current Western thinking. 

In their desire to explain China’s more sophisticated strategy, some analysts have turned to a Chinese game, weiqi, better known in the West as Go. Weiqi is believed to have been invented over 2,500 years ago. The very word weiqi (pronounced way-kee) means “encirclement board game” or “board game of surrounding.” As such a name implies, skilled players of weiqi develop a deep understanding of both encircling and counters to encircling. Moreover, unlike more Western forms of direct confrontation, weiqi players seek firstly to build strong structures throughout the board and then from multiple positions of strength weaken and suppress enemy structures. The better players shun contact, preferring to parry threats with counter-threats. From the perspective of weiqi, the PRC homeland is but one structure of many being built around the globe.

A recent Atlantic Council-University of Denver study entitled China-US Competition: Measuring Global Influence uses the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) index to organize data so as to help strategists better understand influence trends over time. Axios extracts three global views (1980, 2000, and 2020) from the study to enable quick tabbing among time frames. These graphics not only highlight increasing Chinese influence and decreasing U.S. influence, but thet also do so in a way that enables us to see the parallels with a sophisticated weiqi strategy: China’s actions over forty years to build influence structures in multiple areas around the globe.

 Applying a weiqi model to PRC global initiatives, we can make several observations:

1. While current U.S. attention on Taiwan, China, and the First Island Chain indicates that the United States is focused on a direct approach to containment, the graphics indicate that China is taking a more indirect approach by developing multiple influence structures globally.

2. While U.S. political leaders talk of a “whole of government” approach to international security but struggle to put one into action, the PRC is already acting, taking advantage of lapses in U.S. presence and capabilities.

3. While the graphics help us understand geospatial aspects of Chinese influence structures, we need to be mindful of weiqi applications in other domains, e.g., cyber, critical materials, information, space, chip industry, and so on.

From these observations, we can derive several implications with respect to strategy and force design:

1. The U.S. military’s divestment of current capabilities to invest in unproven future capabilities in essence removes players from the global board and creates vacuums that China and other adversaries are exploiting. It is precisely the wrong business model at the wrong time.

2. China’s 40-year development of overseas influence structures and capabilities aims to outmaneuver any containment strategy based on the First Island Chain. Strategically, Marine Corps elements planning to occupy portions of the First Island Chain are mostly irrelevant even before they deploy. In weiqi terms, they are attempting to occupy what is already a forbidden point—a point surrounded by opposition stones and having no liberties—a rather compelling way of describing the support conundrum of the Marine emplacement of isolated antiship missile detachments!

3. China’s numerous, capable, and growing influence structures overseas will continue to proliferate absent immediate, decisive, and coordinated action by those seeking to forestall Chinese hegemony. Specifically, that intent on preserving some semblance of a more open and free global order must act to increase U.S. presence.

4. The challenges of securing basing rights in the face of Chinese influence structures indicate that multiple naval task forces of varying sizes operating from the seas are essential to countering both Chinese and other adversary attempts to “re-colonize” lesser developed nations.

5. The number, type, and global dispersion of Chinese influence structures mandate a similarly broad-based Western strategy. Within that strategy, the implication for the U.S. naval services is an increased number of naval task force packages capable of multidimensional combined arms operations across the spectrum of conflict—putting more general-purpose, fully capable players on the global game board. 

Pulling these points together, we can see that both domestic and Long War distractions have created influence vacuums that China and others have exploited. Divesting general-purpose, sea-based forces has removed potent and relevant players from the board at precisely the wrong time. Worse, developing a specialized, unsupported force for a specific area in an attempt at direct containment is precisely the wrong strategy for the wrong adversary. National strategists need to pull back from a direct, technocentric concept and develop a more sophisticated global strategy that appreciates multi-domain, multipolar influence structures. Civilian leaders need to reverse the current process by which myopic, military force design drives strategy. Rather, the nation needs to restore a coherent process of safeguarding national security by which national strategy drives force design.

Brigadier General Keith T. Holcomb, USMC (Ret.), is a former USMC Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment was as Director of the Training and Education Division, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

Image: Z​erbor/Shutterstock.

When Churchill made his famous “Iron Curtain” address, it seemed apposite to the zeitgeist of the time. Alas, now, the curtain swaying across Central Europe—from the Baltic to the Bosphorus Straits, and from Bialystok to the Black Sea—is not one of iron. The Cold War antithesis, that Free Market vs. Communism bivalent thinking which had symbolized everything from the dawn of Christianity onward, became solidified into the concepts of good and evil. That type of thinking, with Liberalism being the successor to Christianity, has continued, although there are several shades of grey now between good and evil. No more the clarified pure air of indians and cowboys, or the honest sun setting on the philanthropic British Empire. No, the twentieth century threw up what the Czech philosopher, Jan Patocka called the polemos of night, a century of war and horror—a reckoning of third-world nations, of revolutions, of metaphysical solutions. After the Enlightenment reaction to Christian thinking and the sanctification of reason, there sat in opposing camps the sciences and the spirit. The legacy of the French Revolution appeared to show the epic struggle of Church vs. State.

Now, in the post-Liberal epoch, the bivalent labels are still used to categorize the good and the bad. The new curtain falling across Europe is a virtual one. It can be moved, reassembled, realigned. Essentially it is a curtain of appearances, a simulacrum of reality. For, behind the “arras” of Enlightenment morality, of “just wars,” lurks Polonius and the spirit of realism. The specter of communism has gone, yet there still stands guard the Janus-faced China, wearing a mask of capital, beyond the wall. Therefore, it tells us something different about the weltanschauung of the present. It is the end of ideology, not the end of history. Realism in politics is back. It comes in three forms; a big Russian bear, a Chinese Silk Road, and a realization that wars of liberal universalism are over.

Realism is an important weather vane, shifting like the frosts of the Eurasian steppe. The new president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, arrived in time for a kind of “Prague Spring,” and very conveniently, in the midst of a volte-face of sorts by the good coalition. Whilst it is a welcome bolstering for the Western alliance forces against Russia, the weather cock of realism has started crowing. The Czechs are rooted in the earthly, ruby soil realism of Bohemia, of the “Good Soldier Svejk” of Jaroslav Hasek. In this, Hasek mocks the pointless crusades of war; it sees through the surreal nightmare of a war and loyalty to an empire the Czechs have no allegiance to. This is realism; it’s opposed to the “blood and soil” of the Third Reich or the Alexander Dugin-type romanticism of the Russian soul. Not for the Czech spirit the existential wonder of war of Ernst Junger. Yet, unlike the liberal credo of the West, it also is not enshrined in the moral language of universalism or the correctness of liberal values. It isn’t therefore bivalent, it is ambivalent. The Czechs sit uncomfortably in this buffer zone of Europe. At once a culture of resigned despair at the alacrity of its neighbors. Hence Pavel strides both of these camps although, as a former NATO commander, he knows the value of realpolitik. It was Bismarck who anecdotally said, “he who is master of Bohemia, is master of Europe.”

The liberal method of transposing its values to foreign policy has hit the buffers, despite Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Sisyphusian demands. You can judge the winds of change in foreign policy by the sudden proliferation of “think tanks” piping up and stating the obvious. There are tanks and think tanks, and, despite the commitment of the Leopards , it may be the think tanks gaining the upper hand. The RAND Corporation posits in its paper Avoiding a Long War: US Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia – Ukraine Conflict that the mantra of Kiev, to push the Russians out of the Ukraine, particularly Crimea, is unrealistic. There is a recognition that a likely Russian counter-offensive this spring will push back any Ukrainian gains. The report sees a kind of “sliding scale”; whilst Ukraine’s territory gains may appease the media of the West, it comes at a greater infliction of Russian infrastructure attacks. A Ukrainian campaign to take Crimea, besides increased loss of life and the fact that Crimeans are aligned with Russia, makes such a move a bridge too far, according to the report. But most tellingly, it also does not align with the United States’ other “global priorities,” and the fact that “duration is the most important” factor for the United States. Biden seems to be lagging behind; he was quoted in The New York Times (January 18) to be all for striking Crimea, a day before his CIA chief, William Burns was hinting to Zelenskyy in Kiev that unlimited aid was old school, despite the new tranche of $45 billion sent forth in December. Putin is manipulating these tendencies, and with China is playing the long-term economic game of Xiangqi—the ancient Chinese board game—the object of which is to surround your opponent by attrition, rather than a knockout blow, like chess. The idea of unlimited support, implanted in the minds of Kiev by portfolio-less politicians like Boris Johnson, also augers badly for future peace talks.

The Washington Post signals a “post-war military balance that will help Kiev deter any repetition of Russia’s brutal invasion.” Hence the Article 5-like support is waning and the tactic will be the allocation of weapons rather than fighter jets or NATO entering the equation. It would seem the United States is angling for the sense of the April 2022 proposal in Istanbul; military backing by the West but a foregoing of NATO membership by Kiev. Boredom and Time are ephemeral things. Schopenhauer, the arch-melancholic who made Sartre look like a stand-up comedian, opined that “Life swings like a pendulum back and forward between pain and boredom.” Where the pendulum freezes will determine whether the short-termism of the West, the drain on cash and weapons, will inflict too much pain on the Faustian liberal West. The Russian spirit, accustomed to hardship, to the vast endless plains of Dostoyevsky’s soul, are used to playing a long game.

Despite the advent of Pavel in the Czech Republic, the new school of realism is drawing the curtain. The president of Croatia, Zoran Milanovic, has said he is opposed to “sending any lethal arms as it prolongs the war” describing the war as “deeply immoral” due to a continuation of the war. A Just War must be tempered by realism and suffering. Continued support raises other issues such as the fate of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in the Donbass. Two-thirds of the ethnic populations of Donetsk and Lugansk have left to Russia or Ukraine respectively. Ukraine would be looking at a re-plantation of the Donbass; the history of Northern Ireland being a sobering lesson for the future. The Western alliance is not de facto uniform; Croatia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy are noticeable “culture” states opposed to the pastorate like civilizing missions of the Western powers. Yet the Western alliance is predicated on a liberal worldview that incorporates a globalist economic perspective. This is the petrol in the think tank, the resource-driven contradiction which conflicts with a moral hegemony. The battle between tanks and think tanks continues. The virtual curtain flutters through Bohemia. Meanwhile Zelenskyy ushers in a campaign against corruption, no doubt aware of Machiavelli’s maxim: “War makes thieves and peace hangs them.”

Brian Patrick Bolger studied at the LSE. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the United States, the UK, Italy, Canada, and Germany in magazines such as The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, The Hungarian Conservative, The Salisbury Review, The Village, New English Review, The Burkean, The Daily Globe, American Thinker, The Internationalist, Philosophy News. His book, Coronavirus and the Strange Death of Truth, is now available in the UK and the United States. His new book, Nowhere Fast: The Decline of Liberal Democracy, will be published soon by Ethics International Press. He lives near Prague, Czech Republic.

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is grabbing all the attention. But we need to look South, too. Neither the European Union nor NATO will be the strategic leaders in the Greater Mediterranean. Washington and Rome will have to play that role.

A stable, prosperous, peaceful Europe would be a boon to the entire transatlantic community. A free and open Greater Mediterranean is key to that goal. 

One reason is energy security. The Greater Mediterranean includes North Africa, Southern Europe, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the entrance into the Middle Corridor through the Caucasus to Central Asia. As Europe diversifies energy sources, countries will draw increasingly from North Africa, the Caucuses, and Central Asia, as well as the Middle East and the United States. A lot of those resources will flow to energy hubs in Southern Europe, and those nodes need to be protected.

Another reason is supply chains. Redundant, resilient supply chains that reduce dependencies on Russia and China and open new sources of natural resources will, in the long run, reduce risks and costs to the West. They will also spur additional commercial activity. These new supply chains, too, will pass through Southern Europe.

Stability is another issue—one threatened by illegal immigration. The population of Africa is blowing out. Uncontrolled, unregulated mass migration North would be completely destabilizing. Southern Europe needs to be a bridge and a partner for the Global South, not a gateway for chaos. 

Finally, the Greater Mediterranean will be an active arena in the great power competition—whether the West wants it or not. To counterbalance its difficulties in Ukraine, Moscow is trying to strengthen its influence in Africa, thus putting pressure on NATO’s southern flank. A close partnership between Washington and Rome in the Mediterranean basin could effectively counter this strategy, promoting the stabilization of North Africa. Meanwhile, China is always looking to fill voids. Right now, for instance, they are making a full-court press in Tunisia. 

Why should Rome and Washington step in? They have common interests in addressing these problems. And, let’s face it, NATO’s top priority is going to be the eastern flank. The EU has no common foreign policy looking south, and little capacity to do much more than throwing ineffective foreign aid in all directions. Meanwhile, German leadership is moribund, and France’s has been demonstrably inept. 

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is ready to pick up the slack. The main objective of her foreign policy is to relaunch Italy’s role in NATO and in the Mediterranean basin. She understands the strategic importance of the southern flank in countering China’s inroads and Russia’s persistent influence in North Africa and the Sahel region. In January, Meloni made two trips to North Africa, focusing on increasing energy supplies and tackling the problem of illegal immigration. Rome is trying to reduce the import of Russian gas and forestall Moscow’s potential weaponization of African migration flows. 

As such, when it comes to the Mediterranean basin, Italian foreign policy is gradually aligning itself with Washington. For instance, Meloni went to Tripoli, Libya, a few weeks after the director of the CIA met with Libyan prime minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and Gen. Khalifa Haftar. During her recent visit, the Italian prime minister declared her support for the political stabilization of the North African country, a position expressed, just a few days later, also by the U.S. Secretary of State during a meeting in Cairo with the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. 

While focusing its attention on the Mediterranean basin and on the Middle East, Italy’s conservative government is, at the same time, relaunching transatlantic relations and confirming its support for Kiev: after all, the challenges that both the eastern and southern flanks of NATO are facing are closely interconnected.

What the United States brings to the table is presence. For instance, the United States has been granted additional access to military facilities in Greece and Romania, allowing Washington to deploy reconnaissance aircraft, missile defenses, and other security enablers that make its southern European allies far more effective. This is a much smaller and more cost-effective footprint than what the United States deployed during the Cold War to deter the Soviet Union. 

Additionally, the United States can bring in foreign direct investment, mostly from the private sector, that can speed “friend-shoring.” This will help the region decrease its dependence on China and Russia while helping grow economies in Europe. Finally, the United States can bring diplomatic heft, sorting through the myriad of thorny relationship challenges in the region. 

Of course, the EU and NATO will always have a role to play in southern Europe. But a bilateral effort from Washington and Rome can be the catalyst for greater stability and prosperity throughout the Greater Mediterranean. 

Stefano Graziosi is an essayist and a political analyst who writes for the Italian newspaper La Verità and the weekly magazine Panorama.

A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research on matters of national security and foreign relations.

Image: Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock.

Qui tire la sonnette d'alarme à propos de la « trop faible » croissance des salaires et des « distorsions [qui] rognent de manière excessive le pouvoir de négociation des salariés » ? Le patron de la Confédération générale du travail (CGT) ? Non point. Les propos émanent de M. Maurice Obstfeld, chef (...) / Économie, Idées, Mondialisation, Mouvement de contestation, Mutation, Travail, Chômage - 2017/12

The American commentariat and public were abuzz over the transit of a Chinese government surveillance balloon across the United States, with social media tracking its path (and reverse-engineering it), debating whether to shoot it down, both overplaying and underplaying the story, and asking if it matters at all. There has since been verification that there are multiple Chinese balloons in the Western Hemisphere, including one located in South America.

As far as we know, the spy balloon crossed into U.S. airspace in the Aleutian Islands and passed over Alaska and Canada before reaching the continental United States, where it loitered over important military and government installations. Media reports have claimed it “poses no safety threat to civilians,” a statement that the Biden administration trotted out to avoid shooting down the balloon while it was over land. The Department of Defense stated that “this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective,” contributing to the choice not to down the vessel until it reached the Atlantic. Other officials stated that this was not an isolated incident, but was “different” because the balloon remained over American airspace for far longer than usual. Besides the novel admission of previous incidents, this shows an escalation on the part of the Chinese regime. At the same time, Beijing averred that the military balloon is a civilian one and only accidentally entered American airspace—a contention that the U.S. military forcefully rebutted.

Eventually, the balloon was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina, but only after completing its journey across the continent. The only response, besides a belated shoot-down, that the Biden administration has thus proffered is canceling Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing. The wording used by Blinken in addressing this provocative infiltration of American sovereign airspace was weak, labeling the deliberate sending of a surveillance balloon as merely “an irresponsible act.” The confusion and lack of response to this clear act of aggression have made the U.S. government look slow, unprepared, and timid. The cancellation of a meeting is doing the absolute minimum when this act—a deliberate test of our resolve—demands a stronger response.

As the Pentagon mentioned, this was not an isolated incident. America’s authoritarian foes have been steadily increasing their malign actions and military presence in the Western Hemisphere over the past few months.

In addition to sending these surveillance balloons across the American heartland, Beijing has courted countries across Latin America. One such target is Nicaragua, led by the brutal authoritarian Ortega regime, which sits at a strategically-critical part of Central America. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used its economic largesse to flip Nicaragua from recognizing Taiwan to recognizing the People’s Republic of China, promising sweetheart deals for Ortega cronies, dual-use infrastructure projects, and military engagement. The deal may end up revitalizing the defunct Nicaragua Canal project, meant to be a Chinese-built waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific, and competing directly with the Panama Canal. China has also wooed nations in South America, notably Argentina. Near the end of 2022, it was revealed that China was planning to establish a naval base at Ushuaia in the far south of the country near the Straits of Magellan and the critical Drake Passage. A military facility in Tierra del Fuego would allow the CCP to intercept communications across the region, monitor maritime transit in the South Atlantic, and enhance its ability to project power in the Western Hemisphere.

These actions are of a piece, both being concerned with establishing a permanent presence in the Western Hemisphere and monitoring important maritime traffic. Control of international waterways has been a paramount geostrategic concern for millennia, and China has already made it known that it subscribes to this idea—the militarization of the South China Sea is a prime example. The Belt and Road infrastructure program also falls into this category, as Beijing is investing in ports, canals, railways, and other potential dual-use projects. The military dimension of these relations is key, as China seeks to establish itself as a global power player. After building a naval base in Djibouti at the heavily-trafficked confluence of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, a facility at Ushuaia would expand this presence into another strategically-important region.

Iran has been engaging in aggressive incursions into the Western Hemisphere as well. The theocratic regime in Tehran works closely with nations like Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua to evade sanctions and launder money. The regime’s terrorist catspaw, Hezbollah, is also very active in Latin America, using it as a source of funds and support. Hezbollah gains intelligence on Western soft targets, profits from the illicit trade in drugs, and plans attacks, all within what many would consider America’s backyard. More provocatively, Iran has stated that it is sending two warships to the Western Hemisphere to visit its allies in the region and transit the Panama Canal. The Iranian Navy has been steadily growing its international operations, but this intrusion into the Western Hemisphere is novel and disturbing.

Russia, a perennial player in Latin America going back to the Soviet era, has also ramped up its interest in the Western Hemisphere since (re)invading Ukraine last February. Russia has expanded its ties with the anti-American regimes of the region throughout President Vladimir Putin’s tenure, and it has put those relationships to work over the past year. Russia, like its allies Iran and Venezuela, is evading international sanctions via the use of falsely-flagged vessels to ship its oil to another foe of American power, China. Russia has also called on its diplomatic ties with Latin America at the United Nations. In UN Resolution ES-11/4—a condemnation of the illegal Russian annexations of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine—Russia’s Latin American friends either voted against the resolution (Nicaragua), abstained (Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras), or simply didn’t show up (Venezuela, El Salvador). The resolution was resoundingly passed, but the varying degrees of dissent from Latin American states were noticeable and worrying.

All of these bold actions by authoritarian, anti-American adversaries are meant not only to test their reach into our hemisphere so as to destabilize American hegemony and counter our interests, but also to test our response and resolve. How the United States responds to local provocations could be very informative as to how it may respond to more global provocations. As such, Washington’s response is vital for countering this influence and signaling U.S. resolve to do so wherever and whenever it interferes with our interests. There are plenty of concrete actions that can be taken beyond the immediacy of the shootdown and the cancellation of Blinken’s trip. America should interdict any further incursions of its territory, whether balloon-based or otherwise, to send a deterrent signal to U.S. adversaries. We should increase military patrols of the key waterways in our hemisphere, police falsely-flagged vessels, and work to productively engage with our neighbors on security and economic issues. In the case of more permanent issues like the Chinese base at Ushuaia, America should seek to respond in kind, potentially with a basing agreement with Britain at the Falkland Islands.

Still, since none of these actions by American rivals have crossed the threshold into direct aggression (yet), the signaling response should be even more powerful to deter escalation that passes beyond that line. The era of great power conflict has returned, with non-state actors taking a backseat to the danger of grander, more kinetic warfare. We have seen this change manifest over the past few years, but it has struck with a vengeance in the case of Ukraine. American policymakers need to embrace this new reality of broad-based geopolitical competition if they seek to extend American hegemony into the future. The answer to this global—and regional—challenge lies in our past, when great power rivalry was the watchword of international affairs. It is time for a revitalization of the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary.

200 years ago, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and during the Latin American revolutions, President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams promulgated the idea that would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. In his seventh annual address to Congress, Monroe declared that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” This message, which also decried the puppet monarchs of European states, was a sea change in how America conducted its foreign policy, asserting a strong stance against foreign interlopers in the Western Hemisphere. For the most part, the doctrine was successful, despite America being far weaker than the European states it sought to constrain.

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt added to the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine and brought it into a new century. In what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary, the president posited that:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

This “international police power” was intended to reinforce the Monroe Doctrine and ensure that the Western Hemisphere was secure for American interests. To Roosevelt, “a great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil,” a mission statement that has influenced American foreign policy ever since. The key passage of the Roosevelt Corollary reads:

We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence cannot be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.

118 years later, Roosevelt’s statement and the principle it defends still retain their importance.

In 2023, in a new era of great power competition, a renewal of the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary is long overdue. America must live up to the words and promises of these great statesmen and ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains free from the influence of foreign autocrats. Our region’s nations are unique in their democratic birth and republican spirit; we need to retain that legacy if we wish to bring that spirit forward into the twenty-first century. American leaders should say, point blank, that the Western Hemisphere is not safe for totalitarian foreign powers that wish to destroy or undermine the historic freedom of our region. We cannot countenance the rising presence of authoritarian foes in our own backyard.

Competing against Russia, China, and Iran is extremely important, as is containing their revanchist imperial aims. We cannot present a credible deterrent in Eastern Europe, the Pacific, or the Middle East if we allow our rivals to do whatever they please in our own neck of the woods. If anything, a poor response here makes our longer-range deterrent seem far less credible. And that would be a disaster for the whole world, not just the Western Hemisphere. That security through deterrence starts closer to home; it is beyond time we recognized that reality and acted on it.

Mike Coté is a writer and historian focusing on Great Power rivalry and geopolitics. He blogs at rationalpolicy.com, hosts the Rational Policy podcast, and can be found on Twitter @ratlpolicy.

Image: Flickr/U.S. Navy.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second year, there is endless speculation not only on how it could end but also on how it should end. What is clear is that the Ukraine conflict could go on indefinitely. The problem for the West is that time is probably on the side of the Russians. Moscow will be able to continue exerting pressure on Ukraine not only by threatening its critical infrastructure but also by interfering with its grain shipments and other exports. Russia can also threaten greater ecological damage should it, for example, allow the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia to leak radiation.

Adding to the urgency is the fact that strains on NATO defense industries, increasing domestic war-weariness, or higher priorities such as deterring China could force Ukraine’s partners to reduce, if not end, their support. Should that happen, the contest will become one of endurance, which is a contest Russia could win.

So it is time to talk specifics about what a just settlement might look like. Determining those specifics requires answering three questions: 1) should Ukraine revise its military objectives to make settlement more likely; 2) at what point are the United States and NATO permitted to reduce or end assistance even if there is not a just settlement; 3) at what point are the United States and NATO permitted to escalate to bring a more rapid—and just—end to the conflict.

The proper goal of a just war is a better state of peace, which requires at a minimum the vindication of the rights of the aggressed party. To vindicate an aggressed party’s rights, also at a minimum, the aggressor must publicly end hostilities, exchange prisoners of war, apologize, demilitarize at least to the point it cannot renew hostilities, and be held accountable for war crimes. Without meeting these minimum conditions, grievances will fester and aggressors will buy time to rebuild military capability and renew hostilities. However, if one accepts that Ukraine, even with foreign assistance, will not realize its goal of restoring its full sovereignty, then even this minimal standard may not be realistic.

Moreover, even if Ukraine’s goals are realistic, it must also consider the cost of attaining them. As Ukraine liberates more territory, Russian president Vladimir Putin will become increasingly desperate. Even if he does not use nuclear weapons, the Russian military will very likely continue its indiscriminate attacks against civilians and critical civilian infrastructure to force Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to negotiate. Moreover, given the expected resistance by Russian and separatist forces, the occupied areas will also experience significant destruction with any Ukrainian military operation to liberate them.

These points do not suggest that Ukraine should offer to negotiate terms now. Ending the war on any terms favorable to Russia would likely incentivize future aggression and set the stage for a renewal of hostilities when the Russians believe they have sufficiently recovered. If nothing else, Russia will be in a position to continue provoking Ukraine and the West, leading to further instability.

What these points do suggest, however, is that Ukraine should first consider under what conditions continued fighting will become either ineffective or disproportionate. Second, they should consider what conditions they can offer that Russia will accept while establishing a better, if not optimal, state of peace. This may sound like appeasement, but it does not have to be.

Thus, the answer to the first question posed at the outset—should Ukraine revise its military objectives—is provisionally “no.” But getting to a solution that the Russians can accept requires putting Moscow in a position where accepting a settlement and ceasing hostilities is preferable for them to continue fighting. Getting to that point will likely require greater Ukrainian military success before any diplomatic initiative has a chance of success.

To make the Russians better off if they stop fighting, the United States and NATO should consider addressing their security concerns, especially regarding NATO expansion. In the past, NATO has refused to offer such guarantees on the principle of respecting state sovereignty. However, given the costs of fighting and the urgency to resolve the conflict, compromising on this principle seems reasonable and low. For example, such an agreement does not prevent the United States and NATO from providing Ukraine with security guarantees should hostilities renew. NATO leaders should also continue efforts to admit Finland and Sweden as a cost for initiating hostilities in the first place and make it clear to the Russians that the alliance will continue to expand, and will admit Ukraine, should Russia not cease hostilities and negotiate a settlement.

The answer to the second question (i.e, at what point can the United States and NATO reduce or end their assistance even without a just settlement) is that the United States and NATO should continue to assist Ukraine until Russia is ready to negotiate a minimally just settlement. Even if the fighting does stop, Ukraine will need to continue to improve its military capabilities to deter Russia from trying again. The difficulty with this response, of course, is that it ignores certain political and economic realities. The first is that support to Ukraine has strained U.S. and NATO defense industries, which must significantly increase the production of critical materials not just to keep Ukraine in the fight but also to allow the West to maintain its deterrent threat against other adversaries like China. The second is that domestic politics in each of these countries could result in an abrupt end to assistance. In the United States, for example, there is a movement in Congress to end assistance and use these funds to improve the U.S. economy. Should the economy worsen, this argument will seem more compelling.

The morally obvious response here is for Western political leaders to remain resolute. Should the United States and NATO abruptly reduce assistance to the point where Ukraine cannot sustain the fight, the blame for the resulting injustice will partially lie with them. To avoid reaching the point where assistance to Ukraine is no longer politically viable, the United States and NATO should consider how much assistance they would provide to avoid a Ukrainian defeat and provide that now rather than providing it piecemeal in reaction to Russian successes. While the United States and Germany have recently announced their intention to provide modern battle tanks and better air defense systems, this assistance comes a year after the war started and its effects will take some time as Ukrainian crews will have to be trained on the new equipment.

While it may have made some ethical sense to limit assistance to Ukraine in the beginning to avoid escalation, that is no longer the case. If time is on the Russian side, providing assistance in reaction to Russian successes is a recipe for failure. This point does not entail giving the Ukrainians a blank check or undermining the necessity to manage escalation. However, it does suggest that it makes sense to provide now all the assistance one would eventually provide later should the tide turn more in the Russian favor.

This point naturally segues into the third question regarding escalation by the United States and NATO to bring a more rapid end to the conflict. Doing so, of course, increases the chances of direct conflict between Russia and NATO forces. Moreover, unilateral escalation by the United States and NATO will play into Putin’s narrative of NATO as a security threat, which will strengthen his hand domestically and make it more difficult to isolate him internationally.

Having said that, as Russia escalates, as it has done with attacks on civilians, the United States and NATO should find ways to increase costs to Russia as well as assistance to Ukraine to mediate the effects of that escalation. Doing so will underscore Western resolve while undermining the Russian narrative and its ability to build international support.

In considering what one should do, one first must establish what will happen if one does nothing. At current levels of assistance and Ukrainian military capability, the conflict will likely freeze. Such a freeze favors the Russians, who will continue threatening Ukraine while it consolidates its gains in the east, making their annexation a fait accompli. On the other hand, giving Russia a way out does not necessarily entail abandoning the vindication of Ukraine’s right or the demands of a better state of peace. It just means finding other ways to impose them. Thus, the ethics of conflict termination, as described here, suggest the following path to a just termination of the conflict.

First, Ukraine should continue to fight, and the United States and NATO should continue to provide assistance as long as the former’s military goals are feasible and the means to achieve them are proportionate.

Second, as long as Russia fails to return occupied Ukrainian territory, the United States and NATO should continue to impose sanctions and other costs to incentivize meaningful participation in negotiations.

Third, to ensure Russia is not able to exploit any pause a frozen conflict allows, the United States and NATO should continue military cooperation with Ukraine to improve its ability to defend itself in the future. The United States and NATO should also consider offering Zelenskyy the security guarantees he has asked for to further deter future Russian aggression.

Fourth, the United States and NATO should address Russia’s security concerns, while not recognizing Russia’s illegitimate claims to Ukrainian territory.

Fifth, the United States and NATO should not lift sanctions until Russia compensates Ukraine for the destruction it has caused and holds the soldiers who have committed war crimes, as well as their leaders, accountable. While there may be some room to negotiate whether this accountability occurs in domestic or international courts, any outcome that diminishes or ignores these crimes should be sufficient justification for continued sanctions and isolation.

Sixth, should Russian domestic conditions change, and it agrees to a minimally just settlement, the United States should consider a more rehabilitative approach and not just lift sanctions, but also assist Russia to improve its economic conditions and restore its relations with the international community.

Pursuing these measures is not likely to persuade Putin to negotiate. However, given the realities of this war, these measures vindicate the rights of Ukrainians even if the military capacity does not exist to fully restore them. Moreover, they provide an alternative to fighting that leaves Russia in a position where its ability to continue to provoke its neighbors is significantly diminished. Whether over the mid to long term, these conditions lead to a Russian government collapse or increased Russian resilience is difficult to say. But either way, they should make Ukraine more secure while placing the United States and NATO in a better position to address either Russian collapse or continued provocation and aggression.

Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff is the Research Professor for the Military Profession and Ethics at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. The views represented here are his own and do not necessarily reflect that of the United States Government.

Image: kibri_ho / Shutterstock.com

Le précédent gouvernement français avait promis la création d'un compte personnel de pénibilité, ouvrant le droit à un départ plus précoce. Non seulement les critères ont été réduits par l'actuelle équipe, mais la plupart avaient été définis en fonction du travail masculin. Les facteurs de risques encourus (...) / Droit, Femmes, Inégalités, Politique, Santé, Travail - 2017/12

On February 17, political leaders, journalists, academics, and defense officials from around the world will converge at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC). A year after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s “Zeitenwende” speech, the MSC will center its program around Germany’s epochal turn toward taking its strategic reality seriously, and emergence as a reliable security actor in a world where conflict exists. Unfortunately for Germany, the United States, and their mutual security partners, Germany has not moved on from business as usual, even as war rages two borders away. This reflects the continued perception that Russia does not pose a direct military threat to Germany, based on the flawed assumption that Germany’s Eastern European neighbors and the United States would contain a Russian attack on NATO member states from physically reaching Germany itself. 

Wishful thinking such as this, in continuity with the prewar policies of previous governments, is increasingly divorced from the fact that the United States will direct fewer military resources to Europe over time as strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) places greater demands on its finite capacity. Combined with Russia’s continued commitment to what it views as a long-term military confrontation with NATO, Germany’s failure to truly embrace the Zeitenwende has major ramifications for European and German security. Both the United States and Germans who understand the challenge at hand must clearly communicate both the direct military threat Russia poses to Germany itself, and the consequences for Germany’s immediate national security if it fails to adequately resource its military.

Misread History

During the Cold War, when the Soviet military directly threatened the Bundesrepublik across the inner-German border, Germany maintained the second most powerful military in NATO, after the United States. Despite Germany’s partition, the fresh memory of World War II’s horrors, and the potential for German soldiers to once again fight Russians, who had suffered so much to defeat Nazism, West Germany mustered the resources necessary to contribute its share to NATO’s collective defense in line with its economic power and size. This made sense for West Germany itself, which recognized that a war fought deep in its territory would be devastating, and thus sought to stop the Soviets at the inner-German border. The Soviet threat’s immediacy was enough for the West German government to overcome popular apathy towards national defense and build an army capable of defending NATO’s eastern flank in partnership with its allies to the west.

With the Cold War’s end, and NATO enlargement through the 2000s, NATO’s vulnerable eastern flank now lies 1,000 km east of Berlin in the Baltic states. Germany is surrounded by friendly neighbors, with a “neglected” military that struggles to meet Germany’s existing collective defense commitments. In addition, despite near-constant warnings from its Eastern European allies, a generation of German leaders continued to deepen its economic relationship with Russia, built a dependency on Russian energy supplies, and blocked both Ukraine and Georgia from joining NATO in 2008. 

Such behavior primarily reflects a combination of the false sense of security Germany’s peaceful post-Cold War neighborhood provided it, and the reality that ultimately other countries, including Ukraine, bore the risks stemming from political and economic engagement with Russia while Germany reaped the benefits. Germany consistently prioritized its own national interests, even when they conflicted with those of its European Union partners and NATO allies. For example, Germany shaped the euro in a way that supported its export-centric economy at the expense of its less-developed European partners, precipitating the eurozone crisis before imposing bruising austerity measures on the indebted countries. It also unilaterally opened its borders during the 2015 migrant crisis, encouraging further migration over the objections of other European countries and without any consensus within the European Union. When Germany saw an opportunity to advance its national interests, the country was willing to pursue them, even at the expense of its neighbors, though this is not unique behavior in the anarchic Westphalian international system.

Contemporary Struggles

Since February, however, it has been impossible to credibly argue that Russia does not pose a direct military threat to Germany, the rest of Europe, and NATO. Still, most Germans remain unconvinced. Recent polling from the Körber Foundation finds that 68 percent of Germans do not wish to see Germany play a military leadership role in Europe, and only 22 percent see Russia as a major military threat to Germany’s security. Germany is content to do just enough to barely stay in its allies’ good graces but does this out of a desire to be a good multilateral partner rather than actual concern for its national security. 

To Germany’s credit, as of late November, it is the second-largest source of military aid to Ukraine, following the United States. The problem is that the country’s allies have had to consistently cajole it along to each new step of military support, with Germany reluctantly following. In addition, Germany remains on track to miss the NATO 2 percent of GDP defense spending target through at least 2024 and has struggled to translate its €100 billion special military investment package into contracts and acquired capabilities. One can imagine what the counterfactual Western response to Russia’s invasion may have looked like in the absence of American leadership, and it likely would have resulted in Ukraine’s defeat, as MSC chairman Ambassador Christoph Heusgen recently suggested.  

However, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, 66 percent of Americans see Russia as a major military threat to the United States, demonstrating that political will and effective securitization can overcome geographical remoteness. This comes as the German government attempts to preserve a “relationship with Russia and with Putin for the future,” and limit German material support for Ukraine to avoid “breaking a special relationship,” per German parliamentarian Norbert Röttgen. Too many Germans still see the Russo-Ukrainian War as something happening “over there,” hence the prevalence of discussions centered on nuclear escalation as one of the few ways it could actually become Germany’s conflict. 

While there are prominent voices in Germany that do argue for greater military support for Ukraine and adequate resourcing of the Bundeswehr, discussion of German security policy is often quickly diluted by significant, but peripheral, issues. This distracts from the crisis of Germany’s national defense capacity while it faces a direct military threat from Russia. If the Zeitenwende is about everything, including action on climate change, a values-based foreign policy, and other factors separate from the balance of military power in eastern Europe, then the Zeitenwende quickly becomes nothing. As General Christopher Cavoli, NATO supreme allied commander Europe, recently said, “the great irreducible feature of warfare is hard power,” and “kinetic effects are what produce results on the battlefield.” Germany’s military leadership in Europe requires it to adequately resource the hard power capabilities needed from a nation with its size and economic strength. There are many pressing foreign policy issues facing the country, but fixing the weakness of European, and especially German, military capabilities relative to Russia should be the foremost priority at this critical juncture.

Deteriorating Security Environment

Though Russia failed to achieve its overall strategic goals at this point in the Russo-Ukrainian War, its performance indicates that it still poses a major threat to NATO’s most vulnerable members. Flawed assumptions about Ukrainian military resistance led Russia to attempt an invasion resembling the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, when it should have resembled the 2003 invasion of Iraq, using a military with a force structure more suited for mobilizing to liberate Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War. The likelihood of Russia making this same mistake leading up to a war with NATO is much smaller, and even with major failures, Russia still seized and controls significant portions of Ukrainian territory nearly a year after the invasion.

Exacerbating this challenge, the United States’ contribution to NATO’s conventional force presence in Europe is likely to shrink in the coming years. The Center for Strategic & International Studies’ recent wargames on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan demonstrate the significant challenge the U.S. military faces in deterring such a conflict. While the report shows that the United States, Taiwan, and Japan can repel the invasion, this effort would require the U.S. military’s near full devotion, including strategic enablers that European militaries often lack and the bulk of U.S. tactical airpower. This two-front challenge will force the United States to choose between prioritizing deterring the PRC, its self-described pacing threat, and resourcing European defense, with significant ramifications for Germany.

In light of this challenge, with a near-certain reduction of the U.S. military presence in Europe over the coming years and a Russian military that remains poised to target vulnerable NATO members such as the Baltic states, Germany faces an increasingly precarious security environment. The assumption that other allies will bear Germany’s share of the military defense burden ignores the clear trend towards a less favorable European NATO-Russia conventional force balance. Other countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom, recognize that their own national security rests on deterring and, if necessary, defeating aggression at their geographically distant allies’ borders. 

Germany’s reluctance to embrace such thinking, and the costs that come with resourcing the policies it demands, ignores the direct security threat Russia poses. A NATO-Russia war would spread westward across Europe’s strategic depth, just as Russian cruise missiles have rained down on western Ukraine while ground combat rages in the east. The country and its government are more than capable of breaking from “business as usual” when the political will is there, as German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck’s hard work to replace its energy supply while divesting from Russian oil, natural gas, and coal demonstrates. Unfortunately, the same sense of urgency has not been there for the Bundeswehr, resulting in the underwhelming Zeitenwende.

A Productive Way Forward

To address this urgent issue, American policymakers and interlocuters need to make it abundantly clear to their German counterparts that an enduring U.S. military presence in Europe will not come at the cost of a military defeat in the Indo-Pacific. The United States doesn’t need to performatively criticize Germany—as doing so would be counterproductive—but Americans need to have frank, realistic, and open conversations with Germans about America’s military commitments in the current strategic environment. This discourse should emphasize the immediate dangers that a gap in NATO’s capacity to defend its frontiers poses for Germany itself, and the steps Germany can take right now to adequately resource its contribution to this capacity. 

Old arguments that the German defense ministry and Bundeswehr would just waste increased funding, making institutional reform more important than spending increases, ignore the fact that all countries accept degrees of waste in their security apparatus. They continue to accept this because the existential costs of failure are far greater than those of inefficiency. If Germany was able to maintain Western Europe’s most powerful military just twenty years after World War II, then neither a supposed pacifist legacy nor disquiet over conflict with Russians is a meaningful justification for continued failure to meet its alliance defense commitments. Germans need to recognize the reality of a potential war with Russia, and how it would unfold in Germany itself even if most of the fighting was confined to the most vulnerable eastern NATO member states. Given the trajectories of Russia’s military power and the American military presence in Europe over the coming years, Germany can’t afford to lose any more time making the Zeitenwende happen, or the country itself will risk the consequences of inaction.

George Pavlakis is a U.S. Army officer currently earning an M.Sc. in Politics & Technology at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, where he focuses on European security and emerging military technologies. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image: Shutterstock.

In today’s fraught international environment, technological innovations such as artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, quantum technology, and space technology generally provide exceptional advantages to states and shape global power competition. China, which has attracted attention with its investments and policies in these areas, has started to emerge as a significant opponent of the United States.

China aims to take advantage of the political, economic, military, and commercial opportunities offered by innovative technologies to become the world leader in technology. China’s strategy, in which all Chinese state mechanisms act together, intends to increase support for state-owned enterprises, prioritize research and development activities, ensure high-tech industrialization, and boost innovation programs. But what does this approach, which has recently worried Western countries, mean?

China’s technological pragmatism

In early 2006, China’s cabinet declared that it sees innovative technology as a strategic choice within the National Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology (2006-2020). In this context, China, which focuses on reinforcing its capabilities in areas such as unmanned aerial vehicles and space, has started to popularize using digital technologies and automation in line with its five-year development plans. Under the 973 Program, which started in 2009 under the coordination of the Ministry of Science and Technology, China has increased its support for many scientific programs, including quantum technology, space and satellite technologies, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, automation systems, and robotics.

China, which codified its technology goals in 2015 when it announced its “Made in China 2025” and Internet Plus plans, has particularly focused on investments in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and big data. Technological development also provides large-scale economic opportunities to China, though challenges remain in developing high-tech industry and increasing market share. Against an actor with big technology companies like the United States, Chinese policymakers are trying to increase China’s capacity and to become an actor that can compete in the global market with companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

Another purpose of China’s investments in innovative technology is to integrate these capabilities and other dual-use technologies into the military area. China under President Xi Jinping began reforming the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 2015 as a part of its civil-military integration policy, and has since improved the PLA Strategic Support Forces’ capabilities in areas, including space, cyber war, and electronic warfare. Thus, while modernizing its army, China also is aiming to implement a new military doctrine based on competition in space and future wars.

In line with this doctrine and the goal of restructuring the armed forces, state-owned companies, private technology companies, universities, and research centers are in partnership with the Chinese military. At this point, quantum technology, cyber capabilities, space programs, automation, robots, and artificial intelligence stand out as the basic components of China’s civil-military integration strategy. China, which established the Integrated Military and Civil Development Central Commission in 2017 to coordinate civil-military integration policies, has given this commission broad powers to determine and supply needs.

China, which sent a quantum satellite into space in 2016 to raise its military capabilities, has sought opportunities to improve its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities and gain an advantage over global rivals. Similarly, China’s 360 Enterprise Security Group, the country’s first civil-military cyber security innovation center, has started to create cyber defense systems for military needs.

Global competition in the shadow of innovative technology

For Washington, China’s rising technological capacity has become one of the main issues in bilateral relations with Beijing. Given American decisionmakers’ desire to maintain Washington’s global leadership in economic, military, and technological spaces, Beijing’s civil-military integration and development of dual-use technologies have become crucial challenges for the United States. Therefore, as early as the 2010s, Washington under the Obama administration adopted a strategy to limit China’s rapid economic rise. After President Donald Trump was elected, he adopted a more aggressive policy involving economic and technological sanctions. The sanctions-based policy has inflicted significant losses on Chinese companies such as Huawei. Washington’s policy of combating China continues under President Joe Biden, although the methods are different.

Despite this, it can be said that Washington’s China policy is not clear yet. However, four crucial parameters can be discerned: maintaining its technological, economic, and military leadership; limiting China’s influence in the technology market by deepening cooperation with its allies; producing alternative technologies; and building a techno-political structure against its rivals.

For instance, NATO’s close focus on China’s technological rise is a significant indicator of the West’s concern. Western companies have been encouraged to limit cooperation with China and, in some cases, restrictions have been legislated. Efforts have also been made to limit Beijing’s acquisition of Western companies.

However, the conditions and areas of competition in today’s world are not solely based on the security paradigm. The current global order’s institutions and actors closely interact with China. In other words, in today’s competitive environment, there is no bipolar structure. Many actors, including the United States and its allies, must interact with China in diverse fields. This situation complicates the scope and future of the anti-China campaign.

Moreover, technological competition is not only limited to physical or geopolitical spaces. The competitive environment reaches beyond states, institutions, companies, and other actors to include information and data-based areas. This competition in the digital space is not an area where states, governments, or other actors—even hegemonic ones—can exercise direct dominance. This situation heightens the importance of discussions about the future of today’s competitive environment.

Mesut Özcan is a Ph.D. student at Sakarya University Middle East Institute studying how innovative technologies will shape security and international competition.

Image: Shutterstock.

Vladislav Surkov, an ex-aide to Vladimir Putin, claims that, under Putin, Russia entered a new historical era—“the long state of Putin,” in which it returned to “its natural and only possible state of a great expanding and land-gathering community of people.” Per Surkov, Russia will exist in this capacity for hundreds of years.

Surkov states that Russia is back to its old imperial self. There is even a new clause in the Russian constitution allowing the inclusion of new territories into the Russian Federation. Numerous public figures, including Putin, claim that gathering lands for Russia is a historically just endeavor. Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian politician who has served in several key positions in the Russian government, even claims that Russia has a right to take back any lands where Russians have shed their blood and sweat. 

Yet Surkov’s prediction regarding the longevity of the “state of Putin” is unlikely to come true. Indeed, under Putin, Russia has entered a new historical era: both the most frightening and the most fragile in its history. It is the most alarming because of the unprecedented nature of the new nationalism of Russia’s political leadership. It is the weakest because of the weakness of Russia’s institutions of power, armed forces, and national unity.

This newly promoted nationalism is belligerent and retrogressive. For the first time in Russian history, the ruling elite praises nearly all of Russia’s past, all its powerful leaders, and all its wars. Moreover, a seemingly unthinkable merge of Czarism and Communism has taken place. The best symbol of this merge is the order of the “Hero of Labor,” a civilian award introduced by Joseph Stalin in 1938 as the “Hero of Socialist Labor.” In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, the first Russian president Boris Yeltsin eliminated the order. Yet Putin restored it in 2013 under a slightly different name, “The Hero of Labor.”

In the Soviet Union, the order was in the form of the five-point golden star embossed with the hammer and sickle: the symbols of communist ideology and working-class solidarity. Putin’s new “Hero” order is also in the form of the golden star, yet now it is embossed with the double-headed eagle: the symbol of the Russian Empire. The two initially warring ideologies stand reconciled under the banner of Russian expansionism.

The Russian government now portrays all wars Russia has fought over centuries as both necessary and just. The Russian constitution legalizes this in a new amendment: “The Russian Federation honors the memory of defenders of the Fatherland and safeguards the defense of historical truth. Diminishing the significance of the heroism of the people in defending the Fatherland is not allowed.” Following this logic, Putin now justifies the “Winter War”—an act of brutal aggression by Stalin’s Soviet Union against Finland in 1939–1940. Even in the Soviet Union, especially in the post-Stalin era, this war was not portrayed as necessary or just. 

Most frighteningly, Russia’s new nationalism borrows directly from German Nazism. One of the slogans, posted on billboards throughout Russia and on the occupied territories of Ukraine, reads “One People. One History. One Country.” This a direct reference to the Russian-Ukrainian War, which is almost identical to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer” (One People, One County, One Leader). The latter was used during the Nazi-led referendum on the annexation of Austria on April 10, 1938.

Similarly, Russia’s ruling elites, with the personal involvement of Putin, lionize the legacy of Ivan Ilyin, a Russian anti-communist philosopher who was expelled from the Soviet Union shortly after the Communist Revolution and who expressed sympathy for fascism. In 1933, Ilyin wrote that Hitler did Europe a huge favor by rescuing it from Bolshevism, declaring “While Mussolini leads Europe and Hitler leads Germany, European culture gets a break.” After World War II, when the crimes of the Nazi regime became widely known, Ilyin still justified fascism, calling it a complex phenomenon within which “one finds elements of health and illness.” In October 2005, the remains of Ilyin were brought back to Russia and reburied in Moscow under the personal patronage of Putin. Putin even cites Ilyin in his speeches.

Primordialism, or the desire to have one long continuous history, is another facet of Russia’s new nationalism. The Russian elites want to be heirs of all its purported predecessors: Kyivan Rus, the Mongols, the Byzantine Empire, and, most unbelievably, the Aryans. Viacheslav Nikonov, one’s of Russian most prominent political and media personages, who happens to be a grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov, called Russians the Aryans in a statement posted at some point on the website of the Russian parliament.

Primordialism leads to the idea of a civilization-state: the belief that Russia is a unique civilization with its own political, social, and cultural norms. Per Putin, “it is precisely the state-civilization model that has shaped” Russia’s state polity. This model is discriminatory both in practice and by the letter of the law. The Russian constitution now labels the Russians a “state-forming people.” Whether being a Russian is determined by one’s physical appearance, culture, language, or religion is not discussed. Neither is it clear who decides whether a person is Russian.

This horrid nationalism notwithstanding, Russia today is fragile as never before. Putin and his cronies are aware of this. Therefore, they introduce draconian amendments and laws banning any kind of dissent and, “God forbid,” separatism.

Several key factors explain why the current political regime is unlikely to survive after Putin. 

First, Putin now rules as a petty and capricious tyrant, resulting in unwise decisions. It was his sole choice to launch a full-scale war against Ukraine in February of 2022. Even Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, was reportedly unaware of Putin’s plans. And just two days before the war, Putin publicly chastised Russia’s otherwise hawkish spymaster Sergei Naryshkin for appearing indecisive on invading Ukraine. This is exceptional even in Russian history. The Russian Czars and Soviet Leaders consulted their inner circle on key issues. For example, the decision to send Soviet troops to Afghanistan in December of 1979 resulted from long and collegial discussions at the Politburo, the highest Soviet governing authority. 

Second, there are frictions between the three elements of the Russian invasion—the regular military, the Wagner Group, and the various Chechen battalions. The Wagner Group is a mercenary army and criminal organization owned by Putin’s notorious pal Evgeny Prigozhin. It is known for its brutal war tactics, including recruiting convicts from prisons and executing those who refuse to fight on the battlefield. The Chechen battalions are semi-autonomous, as they are allegiant to the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and Chechnya itself rather than to Putin or Russia. Prigozhin and Kadyrov have publicly criticized Russia’s military command, claiming that it has been their forces that have realized Russia’s recent territorial grabs.

Third, Putin wages this war with a colonial-style army. Russians from affluent families dodge the draft and flee Russia en masse, forcing the Russian military and the Wagner Group to recruit from ethnic minorities—Lezgins, Avars, Buryats, Tatars, Chuvash, etc. However, since Russia has historically oppressed its national minorities, it is implausible to imagine that they have a genuine allegiance to the Russian state. If the situation permits, they may cease fighting or even turn against Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the great Russian writer and humanist Leo Tolstoy called Russia “a combination” and predicted that it would eventually collapse. “The circumstance that all these nationalities are regarded as parts of Russia is an accidental and temporary one,” he wrote.

Lastly, and perhaps most disturbingly, Russian propaganda has never been so aggressive and simultaneously absurd. For example, TV presenter Olga Skabeeva has claimed that the entire West is now at war with Russia, just like allegedly during World War II. Surely, Skabeeva knows that the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain were allies after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. Another TV presenter, Vladimir Soloviev, scorns German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, saying that a Nazi uniform would fit her the best. The political commentator Igor Korotchenko says that Russia should treat Germany’s Chancellor Scholtz as Adolf Hitler and repeatedly calls for nuclear strikes on the United States.

It is difficult to imagine that the Kremlin can keep Russia in this state of national psychosis for a prolonged period of time, especially after Putin goes. The United States, the European Union, and NATO are currently strategizing how to enable Ukraine to end Russian aggression. This is a noble cause. Yet it is also time to prepare for the potential collapse of Putin’s or post-Putin’s Russia. Given Russia’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, it may not be beneficial for everyone involved, including Ukraine. If Russia disintegrates along the borders of its national autonomous republics—Dagestan, Chechnya, Tatarstan, etc.—this could very well turn into a nuclear Armageddon. The United States, the European Union, and NATO need to have a long-term strategy to avoid this.

Peter Eltsov is professor of international security studies at the College of International Security Affairs at National Defense University and the author of the recent book, The Long Telegram 2: A Neo-Kennanite Approach to Russia.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U. S. government.

Image: Shutterstock.

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