Europe’s geopolitical debacle regarding Russia
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
So first, what Strategy isn’t. It’s not a governmental or multinational document, usually thick and dense and illustrated with photographs, nor a speech by a politician, nor above all is it an article in some prestigious review suggesting that a country or alliance should do this or that. Strategy is what governments do, not what they say, guided by a broad set of objectives. Above all, Strategy enables the question “are we going in the right direction?” to be answered, and changes made as necessary. Strategies are top-level, very general, plans extending over at least years and often decades, towards objectives which in turn are themselves quite general. Because the West is very bad at Strategy, and indeed at thinking beyond the next five minutes, the term is overused, whilst the activity itself is hardly performed at all. In the context of this essay, for example, there is no real “NATO Strategy” towards Russia, and there never has been. What there has been is a varying set of attitudes and aspirations over time, which have spawned occasional short-term objectives and initiatives largely disconnected from each other. Of course, no politician is going to admit that “we have no strategy,” any more than supporters (or for that matter critics) of NATO are, but for anyone attached to the meaning of words it is undeniably true. And because we don’t do Strategy ourselves, we don’t know how to recognise and interpret the strategies of others.
Strategy, as I’ve said, is a matter of general and high-level objectives. To be implemented, it has to be accompanied by lower-level objectives and plans, which are traditionally described as “operational-level.” And it’s not an accident that Russia has always been the leader in the theory and practice of the operational level. Let’s discuss a couple of real-life examples of Strategy and its implementation, from opposite ends of the world.
In South Korea in the 1990s, the new civilian government decided on a strategy of reducing US dominance, and moving towards becoming a regional military power. This was part of a broader set of strategies, including copying and supplanting Japan as far as possible, industrially and commercially. By first importing non-US military equipment, broadening defence and security ties and buying Intellectual Property, the Koreans were able to create a domestic arms industry capable of supplying many of their needs, de-emphasising US equipment and finally becoming an arms exporter themselves. At the same time, they developed a blue-water navy and the capacity to deploy ships at a distance, and slowly and quietly developed national command systems to make themselves as independent of the US as possible. That is a strategy, and it has taken a generation to get to where they are now.
Much closer to home, France has pursued a policy of maximum strategic independence for a century, but after 1945, this became critical. With US forces stationed on their territory, US nuclear weapons operated from their bases, and hopelessly mired in unwinnable colonial wars, the postwar French elite realised that something had to be done. The centre-piece was the independent nuclear weapons programme, begun in the early 1950s in great secrecy, together with attempts to strengthen France’s position politically. But it was not until De Gaulle came to power, France was able to get the Army out of Algeria and start modernising it, and the first successful nuclear weapons test took place in 1960, that things began to move. This permitted a gradual disengagement from the NATO military structure, the development of a national command system independent of NATO, and most of all an independent nuclear force and a national defence industry. Together with the later development of national reconnaissance satellites and other technical intelligence systems, this gave the French the strategic autonomy of decision-making they had been seeking, although it took over a generation to arrive there. That is a strategy.
The collective West has nothing like this. It has vague objectives and strategy documents, but nothing is ever organised and followed through. The British, for example, never had a strategy towards Europe, just a grumpy tendency to ultimately go along with ideas they couldn’t actually stop. The United States has had as many strategies towards, say, China, as there are interest groups, and they are seldom followed up. And you can’t build a strategy from the bottom up: whatever pundits may think, a series of improvised and disconnected objectives at different times do not, and cannot, make a strategy.
I emphasise this, because it helps to explain why we don’t understand the strategies of other nations when we see them. Now in the case of Russia, which sees threats primarily arising from the West, its strategy has long been to use various means to keep these threats at the greatest distance possible, and to prevent or weaken, as far as possible, groupings of states that might become a threat to it. Once we understand this simple fact, much becomes clearer. However, this strategy was not chosen randomly, nor can it be dismissed just as obsession with its history, and cultural paranoia, although both contribute. Its origins—and this is where the danger begins—are in geography and the way that geography has been politically divided.
The essential question in international politics is how space has been divided by power over time, and how and why this changes. For the vast majority of human history, this was a succession of Empires, and there are parts of the world today—Lebanon would be a good example—where you can see the detritus of thousands of years of different Empires literally piled on top of each other. The normal way in which Empires grew was by expansion and conquest from the homeland, and the more stable and long-lived Empires, like the Roman, Persian, and Ottoman, introduced administrative divisions and governance systems in the conquered territories. From time to time, Empires rubbed up against each other and the interests of other states. In the mid nineteenth century, Russia was trying to expand to the South, into an area of Ottoman dominance, and where the British and French had important strategic interests. Hence the Crimean War, a typical intra-imperial war of the time.
This was, essentially, the state of the world in 1914. The modern “nation-state” was making limited progress, mostly out of what had once been Ottoman territories, and Italy had only just ceased to be, in the famous formula “a geographical expression,” rather than a state. But in Berlin and Prague and Warsaw and Vienna and Budapest and St Petersburg and Skopje and Damascus and Baghdad and Beirut, people lived in Empires, and owed their allegiance to distant sovereigns, whose possessions their territories were. “Nation,”as far as it meant anything, referred to the cultural and historical legacy of a group, often including language and religion.
And then everything changed, as almost overnight these massive structures simply disappeared. In their place, arrived the most confused and arguably the most dangerous concept in political history: the nation-state. A century before, Republican France introduced a new political entity: not the possession of a King, but a state made up of all those who wanted to live there: a “never-ending referendum” as the historian Ernest Renan famously put it. That was why France could, until recently, easily absorb large numbers of immigrants from all over the world: they had come there to be French. In this way of thinking, the “French people,” were the people who lived, voluntarily, in France. The “French nation” was the sum total of all those people. This Republican principle, bitterly opposed by the Right, wasn’t definitively established until after the Second World War, and is now, unfortunately, being undermined again, but this time from the Left.
Yet without the Republican ideological scaffolding, the ideas for “people” and “nation” were inevitably interpreted elsewhere in ethnic and religious terms. Thus, the discourse today is hopelessly confused, even in English, between “nation,” “people” and “state:” the last-named having two quite separate meanings. The confusion is as great within and between other languages. The UN Charter maintains (Article 1) that among the purposes of the UN was “to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace.” This is about as meaningless as you can get, and dangerously so, with its multiple confusion of terms. The full gory story of the negotiating history is usefully set out in a UN Study.
Nonetheless, new countries were welcomed into the world after 1918, as also after 1945, in the complacent belief that it was possible to create such countries out of “nations” and “peoples” who would live together happily. It might have crossed the mind of such enthusiasts that even before the First World War, in 1912, Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Serbia had no sooner ejected the Ottomans from territories they coveted than they fell to fighting about these territories among themselves. And the collapse of Empires in 1918 was accompanied by widespread war, revolution and violence, as the self-determination of peoples turned out to be a bit more difficult than had been assumed.
Nowhere was this problem more serious and more dangerous than with the collection of states that replaced the Hapsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern Empires. From the beginning, these states were on average smaller, poorer and less stable than France and Germany to the West, and the new Soviet Union to the East. Although we tend to think of the diplomacy of the 1920s and 30s as a slightly tedious prelude to the rise of the Nazis and the Second World War, it was in fact a time of fear, violence, revolution and dictatorships, as the new nations endlessly circled each other, and the stronger powers to the East and West, looking for defensive alliances and assurances of some kind.
This is an example of one of those political problems that are ultimately insoluble. I don’t mean there is nothing to be done at all, but rather that there can be no final, just solution in the idealistic terms of the extract from the UN Charter above, and that the best that can be done is to try to manage the problem, and stop it from causing too much trouble. The Second World war showed that the problem was even greater than had been realised, as the new states themselves broke apart in certain cases, and evanescent mini-states such as the independent Croatia and Ukraine made brief and unattractive appearances. Such is the self-determination of peoples in practice.
The Soviet Union, which had seen many of these states and sub-state actors join the German anti-Bolshevik crusade, decided not to take any risks, and where its armies halted, Communist governments controlled from Moscow were installed, headed by compliant leaders who had mostly spent the war in Moscow, as well as through massive occupation forces and the formation of effective Secret Police organisations.
This was one way of controlling space, and I want to emphasise that way of looking at things, because the grammar of power controlling space is more important here as an analytical framework than traditional divisions by country, frontier, and government or political party. Space can be controlled, or at least denied to others, in a whole different set of ways, from direct military occupation at one end to friendship and cooperation, and even military alliance, on the other. Although the Red Army was present in force in every country except Rumania (an exception which there is no time to go into here) the Soviet Union enjoyed considerable influence in Finland, to the point where successive governments positioned themselves carefully so as not to offend Moscow, whilst still cultivating the West. That suited Moscow, as did Austrian neutrality, which does not seem to have been seen as a threat. Sweden, on the other hand, with its deep, although highly secret, links with NATO, seems to have been viewed as an actual enemy.
During the Cold War, therefore, Moscow directly controlled a very large part of the post-1918 space to its West, or at least did not feel threatened by it. This meant both that a pre-emptive war (which Soviet doctrine thought might be necessary) could be launched more easily, and that in any event, much of the fighting and destruction would be outside its national territory, which it was understandably keen to preserve. It also meant that Intermediate Range nuclear weapons capable of hitting Western Europe could be launched from there.
The end of the Cold War produced both a violent change and a surreal superposition of political and military systems. (I remember driving past a Red Army garrison outside Dresden in what had just become a united Germany, in 1991.) Suddenly, the space that Moscow had long counted on as a strategic buffer was out of their direct, or even indirect control, and nobody had much idea what was going to happen next. The Russian political system was preoccupied with domestic affairs, and in the West, much of the strategic community was, as a diplomatic colleague put it after a visit to Washington “in a state of shock.”
The issue of how to deal with the “former Warsaw Pact” countries, as well as the non-Russian Soviet Republics was not high on the agenda of western capitals for some time. They were themselves trying to absorb the shock of the end of everything which they had regarded as central to their security policies for forty years. But they were also trying to deal with the break-up of the Soviet Union itself, the finalisation and implementation of the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, that gave the Cold War a decent burial, what to do with Soviet nuclear weapons in Ukraine and Belarus, the Iraq War and its aftermath, and the European Political and Monetary Union Treaties, to name only the most significant. There was a real question mark over the future of NATO, if indeed it had one, and long and heated arguments about what a genuinely European defence system might mean, and how it would interact with NATO, if it did. And into that, like a truck backing into oncoming traffic, came the Yugoslav crisis, which (to vary the metaphor) seemed to swallow up everything in its path, and to make many of the other problems worse and more complicated.
The question of future relations with the new Russia was one of those problems that arise from time to time which are too important to ignore but too complicated to properly resolve, especially since no two western countries really had the same priorities. The solution was to talk about it, to make some vaguely friendly gestures and to wait to see what actually happened in Moscow. It was not at all obvious that the regime of Yeltsin would last, or that some neo-Communist government would not come to power (a possibility taken seriously in some quarters.) NATO never really had a collective “policy” towards Russia at all, as opposed to a habit of discussing it, and the idea of NATO expansion was not formally addressed as a principle at that point. Insofar as there was a coherent view, it was that NATO would have trouble holding together anyway, and that the idea of taking on new members was a complication that western countries simply didn’t need, at a time when there were half-a-dozen more pressing topics.
The discussions I took part in, or was present at, or read about, all went round the same limited series of questions. To admit one new member you’d have to admit everybody else as well. That could conceivably include Russia, in which case NATO would have a frontier with China. Oh. Or you didn’t include Russia, in which case you were making a potential enemy. On the other hand, if you didn’t enlarge NATO, you were effectively promising to take sides, even militarily, in a crisis between, say, Germany and Poland. Was this what you wanted? Yet on the other other hand, how were you going to explain to interested states (and the world in general) that they couldn’t join an organisation that was theoretically open to everyone, and had been enlarged several times already? Realistically, “the Russians won’t like it” was not something you could say in public. Very well then, try to replace NATO with something, but not completely either, because its existence was the key to the CFE Treaty. But either the organisation would not include the US, in which case it would be dominated by Russia, or it would include both, in which case it would be permanently deadlocked. The only way around that, was to have an organisation that was too weak to actually do anything. There was, of course, a mass of pundit literature being produced advocating everything from the expansion of NATO and war with Russia, to the end of NATO and love and peace everywhere, but little of it had any influence on a problem which was recognised to have no solution.
As usual with a problem that has no solution, and in the absence of anything resembling a “strategy,” which NATO was incapable of producing anyway, the result was a whole series of impromptu mini-decisions, as circumstances developed and all sorts of transitory factors came and went. There might be consequences for this or that decision in the future, but somebody else would deal with them, wouldn’t they? And any initial nervousness about Russian reactions faded from memory, as the Russians protested, but no more. Curiously, the fighting in Yugoslavia, for all that it massively complicated the management of other issues, was useful as a salutary shock to those who had lightly assumed that the only problem had been Communism and, now that it was gone, peace, love and market economies would magically come about. Suddenly, western decision-makers began to realise that history was a contemporary fact, and that it could be a divisive factor even within the West: Austria and Germany supported Croatian independence for electoral and cultural reasons, while several other western governments, including Washington, allowed themselves to be manipulated by the Muslim government in Sarajevo. Both to western powers, and to governments in the new countries, it became uncomfortably clear that the end of the Warsaw Pact hadn’t solved anything, but rather liberated important tensions from the deep-freeze in which they had been held.
This was the age of post Cold War arrogance, when western governments assumed, without feeling the need for much debate, that the best way of ensuring peace and stability to their East was to transform these new states as quickly as possible into versions of the same kind of norms-based Liberal society that was fantasised about in the Union Treaties of 1991, and, ultimately to integrate them economically. Indeed, as time passed, voices were increasingly heard suggesting that in fact it was important to get country X or Y into the EU, not because that organisation would be strengthened thereby, but because it would help country X or Y to avoid sliding into the kind of political chaos that western capitals increasingly feared. Autumn had come to the Springtime of Nations far more quickly than anyone had ever imagined. (Ideas for Ukraine in the EU are, I suppose, the ultimate parody of this argument.)
The practical effect of all this was increasingly to colonise a political space that had historically been controlled by Russia, but without any real overall plan, with initiatives mostly at national level, and without any organised consideration of what Russian reactions might be (“Oh, they’re always complaining!”) The West thus obtained the worst of both worlds. At one extreme, and exercising considerable efforts of imagination, it was possible to turn the whole thing into a conspiracy to bring down Russia. Except that in that case, the West would not have radically reduced the size of its armed forces, abandoned conscription, reconfigured its military for small-scale expeditionary operations, run down its defence industries and made itself incapable of fighting a serious war for more than a few days. The problem was complicated by the fact that a new norms-based generation of decision-makers had absorbed the idea that they could do what they liked anyway, because Russia was economically and socially backward, its militarily was weak and its state and Army would crumple at the first challenge.
From Georgia in 2008, and especially from Ukraine in 2014, one tendency in the vast and fragmented western strategic community started to get alarmed at Russian intentions, even if they still discounted their capability. Typically, though, they assumed that what they saw as increased Russian aggressiveness had nothing to do with western actions, but was a reversion to the Soviet model, and the beginning of an attempted reconstruction of something like the Warsaw Pact. Ukraine was increasingly seen as a first line of defence against such aggression, but in different ways and to different degrees. Some well-known personalities in the US and Canada seem to have entertained genuine hopes of using Ukraine to bring about a political change in Russia. More moderate opinion, especially in Europe, was nonetheless genuinely alarmed at the fighting in the East of the country in 2014. As their statements at the time indicated, western leaders assumed that the separatist movement was organised and directed by Russia as the first stage in a conquest of Ukraine, to be followed by who knew what? The cease-fire and separation agreements summarised in the Minsk documents were seen as a triumph in that they prevented the war from spreading, and gave Ukraine a chance to build up its defences with western help, against what European nations thought would be the highly-likely invasion. They believed (and still do) that the current war validates their 2014 analysis.
Yet of course the Russians didn’t see the period after the mid-1990s like that at all. What they saw, was loss of control of what had previously been precious strategic space, with no obvious way to recover it. (For Russia too, though, Minsk was a welcome relief, since they did not have the forces available to intervene decisively on the side of the rebels, and needed time to prepare. Indeed, they made better use of the period up to 2022 than Ukraine and the West did.) However, few of the nations who had been members of the Warsaw Pact were keen to renew close relations, so the best that could be hoped otherwise for was try to to discourage them from falling under what the Russians saw as the control of the West. This could be accompanied by attempts to weaken cohesion within NATO and the EU themselves, and exert military pressure, thus helping by extension to preserve at least some influence over the contested space. But until quite recently, the Russians lacked the resources to do this very effectively.
The fact that western thinking about Russia was disorganised, arrogant, ill-informed and episodic, each iteration of politics and diplomacy leaving new problems for the next one to sort out, is one of the causes of the catastrophic situation in which the West finds itself. The other is a misunderstanding of what Strategy is in the first place, and especially what Russian Strategy is, and what its consequences are likely to be. This leads to a weird situation where the West doesn’t really appreciate that there is a zero-sum competition under way for control and influence over the strategic space to the West of Russia’s borders. For the West, it’s partly a robotic process driven by institutional and normative imperatives and justifying NATO’s existence. For the Russians it’s an existential issue. Neither understands the other. Until recently, the West had the means but not the strategy, and the Russians had the strategy but not the means. Now, the Russians have both the strategy and the means, and the West has neither.
There are many reasons why Russia has historically emphasised Strategy and the West hasn’t. Obviously, an overall strategy is easier for a single country than for a large and very diverse group. But geography is the main driver: dominating the strategic space to the West, preventing others from doing so, and exerting as much control and influence as possible in that direction, has always been the main strategic priority. It’s geography, rather than politics, that is the cause of the continuity between Soviet and Russian strategy. Keeping potential threats at the greatest geographical distance has been a consistent Russian priority, whereas the West has been all over the place, with regular conflicts and flip-flops in what passes for strategic thinking. (Indeed, all those articles you read claiming to find coherence and continuity in western strategies are probably best regarded as wish-fulfilment fantasies : if only …” )
So what will the Russians do now? I don’t know, of course, but we can make some intelligent projections, just by taking their obvious strategy, and asking what a reasonable government would do to implement it under current circumstances. The strategic objective, as indicated by the draft Treaty with NATO of December 2021, is the political domination of what was the old Warsaw Pact area, such that no hostile actions can be mounted from there, and the securing of Russian strategic dominance in Europe. What that means in practice is not military occupation (which destroyed the Russian economy when last it was tried) but the use of military superiority to achieve practical political dominance of these countries. They might remain formally members of NATO (in fact there are attractions in that from the Russian perspective) but they would not allow foreign forces to be stationed, their own forces would be expected to be modest in size, and they would pay a great deal of careful attention to what was said by Moscow.
This is why ideas of “cease-fires” and some geographical division of Ukraine haven’t got, and won’t get, anywhere. The game has moved on, and the stakes are much higher than they were. In 2022, the Russians would probably have accepted a genuinely neutral Ukraine, with no stationed forces and with nationalist extremists excluded from government. (They might well have asked for more than that, of course, but that’s what they would probably have accepted.) There’s no chance of that now, and I interpret the current bombardment of Kiev as part of an operational-level strategy to destroy the country as a viable entity, such that it cannot be used in the future as a base for military operations. Bridges, communication systems, ports, electricity generation and distribution, transport networks, industrial facilities and airports, among others, will be destroyed. It would take decades, and an unimaginable amount of money to rebuild the country, still less to make it a base for possible military operations. The analogy would be sinking an aircraft carrier, rather than driving it away from your coast. In such a situation, western posturing, or the activities of nationalist fanatics, or even the exact constitution of the government in Kiev won’t matter very much. The idea of building up Ukraine again for some future conflict will just seem even more obviously a fantasy than it does now. The best that can be hoped for is that Moscow will stop the destruction at some point, in return for effective political control of the country.
There’s no sign the West understands this, because it doesn’t understand Strategy. Russia has no interest in a war with Europe, although it is in a position to win one in a matter of days. But it doesn’t need to fight a war anyway; it can simply threaten Europe with the use of highly accurate conventional missiles which the West does not have, and against which there are only very limited defences. Or indeed, it may simply parade some of these weapons to demonstrate their effectiveness, and then wait for the West to draw the obvious conclusions, which of course they won’t. They won’t because they don’t realise that Russian strategy has gone far beyond Ukraine now, and is about banishing the spectre of a potential attack from the West for at least a generation, maybe more. This involves military, and thus political, dominance first of the former Warsaw Pact space to the West of Ukraine and then, to a lesser degree, as far as the Channel. (The US is not a factor here: its forces in Europe are roughly equivalent to those of Belgium and there is no obvious way of usefully increasing them.) It may be true, as I heard some idiot on the radio say the other today, that taken together European forces are comparable in size with Russia. But just look at a map. Even if by some miracle of logistic planning, using resources that don’t exist, NATO units could be transported at fantastic cost over distances never before attempted, somehow organised into coherent units and properly trained and commanded, they are predominantly light mechanised Brigades, and could be expected to be annihilated in a matter of hours, by Russian weapons and tactics the West has no answer to. And their objective in a war against Russia would be … Moscow? You have to be kidding me. Meanwhile, Russia itself could wipe out NATO forces deployed on their home territory with drones and missiles.
Finally, the West doesn’t realise that Russian Strategy, as set out in all those boring books that stay on the shelves, is a holistic one, involving political, psychological and economic as well as military means. The Russians will not scruple to use economic means, including sanctions and blockades, if they think they are useful. They will certainly employ psychological warfare, because it’s in their box of tricks. Whether they are behind stray drones, factories burning down, information technology attacks, disinformation and so forth I have no idea at the moment. Even if they are, they are certainly professional enough to cover their tracks. But there’s no doubt that the Russians regard such attacks as part of their potential strategy, and they will resort to them if they see a need and a use. Unlike for the West, such attacks would not be random, or done for propaganda purposes, but as part of a deliberate strategy.
It’s a fine mess that our ignorant, arrogant ruling class has got us into, with a country much more powerful than we are, and which we have angered and harmed. The most extraordinary thing is that any negative Russian reaction to our support of Ukraine is treated as somehow improper. It’s OK for us to help Kiev bombard Moscow, but any implication that there might be adverse consequences in return is viewed with shuddering horror as a violation of the natural order of things. But the actual order of things is that the Russians are angry and resentful, and they will take that out on us to some extent. We do not know how far the experience of almost five years of warfare will affect Russian thinking and practice, but wars do, of course, have a tendency to radicalise the positions of states. As a legalistic people, they will no doubt try to negotiate treaties, and may even succeed. But as a practical people, they will be seeking to create facts on the ground, and we might not like some of these facts very much.
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