Schneier on Security

Skeptical • March 19, 2015 12:18 AM

@Dirk:

And how exactly does supporting neo-nazis contribute to developing a stable democracy? Both Victoria Nuland and John McCain had their pictures taken with Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok, one of the key figures in the Euromaidan protests that lead to the overthrowing of the legitimate Yanukovich government.

My God! A picture! Such international support for a movement has not been seen since… oh, wait, sorry, it’s actually not international support at all. It’s someone taking a picture while US diplomats, and visiting dignitaries, meet various Ukrainian officials and party leaders.

The leaked phone calls, among other things, indicate that the US views the radical right as potentially problematic, and is encouraging the democratic moderates.

It’s really a little bizarre that you’re continuing to question whether the US has any preference for democratic states.

Look up “democratic peace theory” when you get a chance. It’s become an important component of US foreign policy.

But it’s [democracy] definitely not a prerequisite.

No. We live in a world where a viable democracy isn’t a realistic alternative, and so the USG will deal with whom it must. This can be disastrous – autocrats are not the most trustworthy or constant of men – and is generally the choice of the lesser of two evils.

You give a list of small governments from the Cold War, in which (with a few exceptions) the US had no democratic alternatives. There are a couple of cases where the US undertook covert military action on the view that, regardless of the form of government, the nation in question would rapidly come under the thumb of the Soviet Union. Personally I think the US could have handled that aspect of the Cold War much better. But, remember, these were decisions made under the tension of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Every nation, in a fight, especially a global fight, must sometimes make compromises.

Now, against those cases, which were largely governed by the lack of alternatives, you must weigh the vast sums of blood and money that the US poured into saving and then rebuilding Western Europe and Japan, and the immense resources – and lives lost – spent since then in continual defense of those areas.

The smashing successes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya come to mind. Identifying yourself as American in any of these countries is probably ill-advised.

You’re not following.

Ask yourself why the US even bothered to attempt a democratic government in Iraq or Afghanistan (Libya wasn’t really a US show). Why the US bother to attempt to establish one in the Philippines, for that matter, after the Spanish-American War?

In all three cases the US dramatically underestimated the resources needed to accomplish its political goals, but it nonetheless spent considerable – enormous in fact – resources in the attempt.

Had the US not cared at all about democracy, it would have been a simple matter to support rule by another system. But, the US does, and this sometimes drives foreign policy in idealistic directions.

Incidentally, I’ve never had a problem identifying as an American in Vietnam.

It’s called “cause and effect”, a concept that is poorly understood in US foreign policy.

Sorry, the US didn’t “cause” Russia to do anything. The US didn’t “cause” the people of Ukraine to do anything, for that matter. Certain people decided to do something. And then Russia decided to do something. We can discuss whether Russia’s decision was predictable, but it remains Russia’s decision.

After Russia decided that the prospect of new elections and a Constitution that scaled back the President’s powers was such a threat to its national interest that it had no choice but to seize Crimea and then engage in special warfare in Eastern Ukraine, the US did become directly involved. But US involved has been after the fact, and limited to economic sanctions and diplomatic negotiations.

The US poured at least $5 billion into Ukraine with only one intention in mind: ousting the pro-Russia government and replacing it with a pro-EU/US one.

No, Nuland was referring to the entirety of American aid to the Ukraine since the early 90s. It was spread out among many programs to teach principles of democratic institutions, organizing, and political practices.

The “ousting” of pro-Russian parties tended to occur by popular vote. The Orange Revolution, you’ll recall, was sparked by outrage at widespread election fraud. A recount was won, and, as it turns out, the pro-Russian government was indeed ousted – but ousted by the votes of the Ukrainian people.

If it was all about democratic institutions and human rights, the USG would be doing the same in Saudi Arabia, a country that has a far worse track record on those than Ukraine did.

The US is in fact pressuring Saudi Arabia to diminish the power of more extremist clerics, to change some of the things they teach in their schools, to begin the steps towards a more tolerant society. But Saudi Arabia is a very different country than Ukraine. A demand that Saudi Arabia hold elections next year would be disastrous if followed, both for Saudi Arabia and the world.

What makes foreign policy difficult is the number of variables – the personalities and institutions and interests involved, and the harder to discern role that norms and values play among them.

Democracy IS a strong preference of the United States – but it’s not the only US value. In times of great peril, or when there is simply no other alternative, it is permitted to walk with the devil across the bridge, as the Balkan proverb that Roosevelt became fond of quoting has it. But it’s true of all nations, and all persons.

Indeed, when the US became more actively engaged in a global struggle with the Soviet Union, some key US advisors remarked on the dangers of supporting certain regimes even if those regimes were the only alternative. Those advisors thought that the US would undermine its moral force by doing so – that it should be wary of emphasizing the hard power aspects of Cold War (which were naturally the aspects of greater concern) to the point of unduly minimizing the soft power aspects of the Cold War

Today, the Cold War over, we still confront such dilemmas, though in a different context. And, perhaps, we are less willing to work with dictators who do not show any inclination towards reform, and indeed show an inclination towards greater brutality.

And, research produced near the end of the Cold War and in greater quantities since, has provided ample support for democratic peace theory – the idea that democracies tend not to go to war with each other. This finding has only reinforced an already existing American belief about the nature of democracy – that it was enlightened self-interest for more nations to be democratic – and so it is unsurprising to find it part of the rationale behind American foreign policy.

Foreign policy is always limited by the possible, by domestic political constraints, by resources available. No nation with a broad and complex foreign policy can always choose partners it finds ethical, nor simply make decisions without any thought of ultimate consequences (as Hans Morgenthau liked to quote, the road to hell is paved with good intentions).

So, to sum up, the US views a democratic Ukraine as in its own interests. It also views a democratic Ukraine in the interests of Europe (as does Europe). And as do the people of Ukraine. Only Russia believes that it should hold in effect a military veto over whether Ukraine chooses to become sufficiently democratic, governed by rule of law, and protective of human rights, to join the EU. And if Russia is permitted to do that, without consequence, then the West will have ceded the independence of Eastern Europe, yet again, to Russia.

This we will not do. Russia will not find much space between key European nations and the US on the matter.

Worst of all, this entire affair is avoidable, because it is not in Russia’s own interests to pursue this course. It would pose no threat to Russia even if Ukraine were, someday, to progress sufficiently and join the EU. This is not the 1930s. WW3 will not be fought on the plains of Eastern Europe in tanks. There is no fascist state in Europe eager to take territories by force. Putin is playing a strategy that fits in the 20th century; perhaps blinded by many well-meaning, and wise, advisors who nonetheless see too much of the past in the present, Putin fails to understand that the board has changed.

Indeed, the only power we’ve discussed here to have taken territory by conquest in recent memory is Russia.

Skeptical • March 20, 2015 12:16 AM

@Dirk: So how is this any different from what Russia is now doing in Ukraine ? Because the US are the good guys and Russia the big Satan? That’s double standards.

Who said that everything the US did during the Cold War was right? As to why it’s different now, there is no Cold War. There is zero legitimate security reason for Russia to do this.

Err, are you confusing the peaceful 2004-2005 Orange Revolution with the 2014 Euromaidan clashes ? The former led to a vote recount that eventually brought Yushchenko to power. The 2010 election – declared fair even by international observers – brought back Yanukovych. He was ousted in February last year after violent street protests spear-headed by neo-nazis and disgruntled oligarchs, financially and logistically backed by the EU/US. Feel free to label this “foreign aid” and “democratic process”. I call it direct interference and destabilisation of a democratically elected government.

It’s true that in many cases street protests against violent regimes are led by those most accustomed to violence. But then, these street protests bring together people from many different walks of life. In Tunisia, in Egypt, it was the Ultras and their penchant for fighting the police, that initially led the physical fight, for example.

But in any case that wasn’t the US – you’ve been blind to the events of the last 5 years if you think a nation isn’t perfectly capable of rising in mass protest, and then taking it up a knotch when they see the regime overreacting.

Nor did the US make the decisions of the Ukrainian Parliament in choosing (with arguable legality) to impeach him (they were a few shorts shy of a quorum on the one hand – on the other hand, there was a national emergency and it was imperatve to resolve the matter).

That, again, was all Ukraine.

It’s curious the extent to which you think that the US is playing puppet master in Ukraine, fomenting a protest here, a shooting there, a toppling of the government, etc. I’m not sure whether this is because you have outsized views of what the US can do or it’s because you don’t know much about Ukraine and so, in your mind’s eye, they’re less vivid than the US.

I am familiar with the doctrine. In terms of US foreign policy, it’s essentially a not even thinly disguised euphemism for toppling selectively targeted regimes seen as anti-American and putting pro-US leaders in their place.

Democratic peace theory attempts to explain why democracies do not go to war with one another. There are various attempts, some of them good, but the evidence for the underlying presumption – that democracies tend not to go to war wtih one another – is quite strong and well accepted at this point.

This forms a large part of the reason that the US views stable democracy, assuming a society is ready for it, as that most conducive to global peace and prosperity.

It was not until 2008 that relations turned sour again when the US/EU decided to expand further into former Soviet states, the EU moving forward with its “Eastern Partnership” and NATO announcing that both Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO member states. This was categorically unacceptable to Putin, and from a Russian perspective the equivalent of what Canada or Mexico joining the Warsaw Pact would have been for the US.

Dirk, this could have been written by a Kremlin apologist. You speak as though NATO and the EU “decided to expand further into former Soviet States”, as though Georgia and Ukraine were helpless victims.

In fact, Ukraine and Georgia both sought to join NATO for the protection it offered against Russia (you’ll remember who was in power then). NATO considered, but rejected, their applications, mostly because of the adverse effect it would have on its relationship with Russia.

Whether the US likes it or not, Putin has made it very clear that he will use any means available to stop Ukraine from joining the West. Which leaves two options on the table:

<i>Further EU/NATO expansion into Eastern Europe is shelved and the region returns to the pre-20008 status quo, perhaps with Ukraine as a neutral buffer state.</i>

That’s not an option given Putin’s continued meddling in Ukraine. And, frankly, even if Putin were to stop, I think Ukraine would be clamboring for NATO membership at every opportunity.

<i>The US, on general principle and pushed by DC hawks and lobbyists, persists in its "democracy promotion" campaign and a proxy war with Russia ensues. Ukraine goes down in flames, a lot of people die, and Europe, for all practical purposes, is back to the days of the cold war.</i>

Proxy war?? The only party to have provided weapons, soldiers, and heavy artillery to a belligerent has been Russia. Let’s be real about this. The US is not fighting a war. Europe is not fighting a war. Ukraine is fighting a quasi-civil war, partly against genuine separatists and partly against Russian invaders.

As a bonus, a rift is created in NATO and the transatlantic alliance between the US/UK on one side, and France and Germany on the other. Because nobody in Europe wants such a scenario that even NATO generals have warned against.

In the meantime Ukranians clamor for an EU or UN peacekeeping force (which they’re actually doing), while Russian-backed separatists have launched hundreds of attacks since Minsk 2. Both Germany and France have made clear that further sanctions would be forthcoming if the cease fire does not hold.

To sum it up: Russia did not make a move against the US, Western or even Eastern Europe. The US/EU tried to expand into former Soviet states and that policy backfired in a way they’d never expected. Personally, I don’t care too much who’s running Ukraine. And that goes for most Europeans.

Yes, Russia didn’t make a move against the US.

It made a move against Ukraine.

Yes, Russia didn’t prevent the US from doing anything.

It prevented Ukraine from doing something.

You don’t get it. The Ukrainians wanted a turn – a matter contested, but in general – towards Europe, and away from what they associated as the corruption and domination of Russia. This is what sparked Russia’s military intervention. The perfectly valid plan of a struggling nation to find better economic fortunes through more robust democratic systems and stronger ties to democratic allies.

Skeptical • March 21, 2015 6:26 PM

@Dirk: In essence, you (and the USG) keep ignoring the many strategic and economic interests Russia has in Ukraine: significant portions of the country are populated by ethnic Russians (Crimea, Eastern regions), Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet is headquartered in Sevastopol, half of gas sales to Europe go through Ukrainian pipelines and its industries overall are tightly integrated into the Russian economy. In recent years, there have also been several natural gas discoveries off the coasts of Romania, Ukraine and around the Black Sea. So yes, and from a geopolitical point of view, I do understand Putin taking issue with Ukraine moving over to the West.

None of that is sufficient to justify an invasion. Populations were not threatened, Ukraine was hardly about to hold Russia’s oil or gas transports hostage, and there was no question that Russia would have been able to renew its lease.

The question is not whether Russia has any interest in Ukraine. The question is whether there was a threat to those interests sufficient to justify an invasion.

The answer is no – unless you think Germany is also justified in invading Ukraine because of the dependence it, and the eurozone generally, has on oil and gas imports through those pipelines.

Your reasoning is however interesting in the sense that it reveals a recurring and fatal flaw in US foreign policy when dealing with non-US friendly regimes: the utter inability to properly assess local/regional sensitivities and interests as well as consequences of US actions under the misguided belief that the only opinion that really matters is that of the USG.

Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Australia, et al disagree with you.

It’s a bit shocking to see how casually you seem to accept Russia’s use of military force to dissuade an Eastern European nation from turning towards Europe. You can understand why many find this extremely troubling.

Not at all. As I said before, the Orange Revolution was a popular uprising. Euromaidan was not. The US may not have been the puppet master in the sense that it orchestrated and organised the coup – as Putin claims -, but its financial and logistic support to anti-Yanukovych forces both embolded and empowered them to overthrow a legitimately elected president.

Yanukovych’s fall had everything to do with his response to protesters, general dissatisfaction, and ultimately the decision of the Ukrainian Parliament. The US certainly sought to influence, peacefully, the aftermath. In western Ukraine, the aftermath involved elections. Where Russian forces operated, the aftermath involved civil war or annexation.

I prefer the term “independent analyst”. And I actually quoted John Mearsheimer, Senior Professor International Relations at the University of Chicago. He was one of three key presenters at a round table conference on “Defining a new security architecture for Europe that brings Russia in from the cold”, held in Brussels on March 2nd.

Ah, the same Mearsheimer who argued that Ukraine should retain a nuclear deterrent to avoid Russian domination.

Oddly, Mearsheimer now also believes that Ukraine is such a core strategic interest of Russia that closer economic ties between it and the EU would somehow threaten Russian security, justifying and motivating Russia’s military intervention.

And what Mearsheimer thinks is that the West is naively following a theory of international liberalism, leading it to take provocative actions as viewed by Russia who reacts predictably (as predicted, he’d say, by his theory of offensive neorealism). In other words, the problem of the West is that it pursued a policy based on the expansion of democracy, human rights, and free trade, rather than viewing the world as an anarchic international system dominated by regional hegemons, each of which would resist by force any diminishing of their respective power.

The varieties of realism do get some things right, but it’s curiously blind to entire dimensions of human affairs.

Now, as to whether Putin believes Mearsheimer’s claims is an interesting question.

Unfortunately, Putin’s actions left the West with very little choice themselves but to respond. I think if he had stopped with Crimea, Russia would be in a better position today. Eastern Ukraine was and remains a dubious and dangerous venture. A much better approach would have been to use Russia’s leverage in Ukraine to push decentralization, and then forming tighter networks with those regions naturally attuned to Russian interest and influence. But that approach would have not been as beneficial to Putin in domestic politics.

This all gets much worse.

Because Putin has utilized this entire affair to ratchet up his own support, and has tied all of this to a frankly paranoid, anti-American, anti-Western framework, I do not see how he can possibly pivot and improve Russian relations without removing a vital component of his domestic political strategy.

In other words, in Russia needs to be hostile to the US because the current Russian leadership needs that hostility to maintain power. And now we’re back in George Kennan territory.

I hope that Putin is adroit enough to turn this away from such hostility, as it is greatly detrimental to Russia over the long run, but we will see. I lack insight into his actual motivation or thinking, beyond the handful of public statements of his that I sometimes read, and scattered reporting in the press.

Given the circumstances, the only sane course of action is to decline the request unless some retard on general principle wants an all-out war between NATO and Russia. Remember Article 5.

Ukraine was always an unlikely entrant into NATO, in part because of its instability and in part out of sensitivity to Russia.

The real question for many policy-makers in the West, I believe, was whether Russia would allow former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe to remain independent absent explicit NATO commitment.

All the West have ever desired, since the very start of the Cold War, is that these nations be independent and democratically determinative of their own destiny. The US in particular, rightly or wrongly, has long viewed liberal democracy and trade as the solution to what were centuries of warfare in Europe. Ultimately the goal is for the stable peace that accompanies such arrangements to ensure that the US never again need fight another European war, never again need bury its dead in European cemeteries, never again need offer for sacrifice entire divisions simply to make clear to a hostile authoritarian system the extent of US commitment to a free Europe.

So the US does not desire conflict in Europe. The US did not seek it, the US did not encourage it, and the US fully understands the dangers such a conflict raises. It is precisely because of that understanding that US continues to make such preventive efforts in Europe. And should such preventive efforts ever fail, should the unthinkable happen yet again, there is no doubt that the US would fight with the same intensity and complete ruthlessness with which it would defend its own soil.

One would think, after the last century, after the second world war, after the reconstruction of Western Europe (though funds were offered to Eastern Europe as well), after the defense of it that the US maintained throughout the Cold War at the risk of its own existence, steadfastly through the hours of maximum danger, and even to this very second, not impinging upon the independence and democratic self-determination of those nations but rather protecting it, that there would be no doubt as to US intentions.

Re-read what I said: a proxy war will ensue (future tense) if the US decides to stay the course, send in “advisors” and arm Ukraine.

Staying the course involves continuation of sanctions contingent upon Russian action, not an escalation to lethal support.

This may put some domestic pressure on Putin as soon as the body bags start coming in, but it’s just as likely that the entire nation will rally even more behind him. There are no winners in either scenario. Even Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, US army commander in Europe, doesn’t believe such a war can be won. The net result is Ukraine going down in flames and relations between Russia and the EU damaged beyond repair. The only party to benefit hereof is the US military-industrial complex. Everybody else loses.

A decision to provide lethal support would be insignificant to the US economy and to major US defense companies. That’s not a factor.

The effects of such an escalation on Ukraine, on Europe, and on Russia, are factors.

What the Ukrainian people – as any other people – want is a competent government, free of corruption and nepotism, that brings about economic prosperity and social justice. Yanukovych and his government were horribly corrupt and incompetent. But so were Yushchenko, Timoschenko and the other politicians that took over in 2005, to the point that they were sent home in the 2010 elections that brought back Yanukovych.

Yes. Closer relationships with the EU help on those matters, because such relationships reward anti-corruption efforts and discourage official corruption. One cannot say the same, presently, about relationships with Russia.

Euromaidan did not bring democratically elected leaders to power, but US/EU-backed oligarchs, kleptocrats and technocrats that care as much about democracy as their pro-Russia predecessors did. Net gain for the Ukrainian people: zilch.

Due to the refusal of separatists to allow participation in the election in certain regions, the results of the election certainly favored pro-Western parties. That’s not a result of US or EU backing, but a result of Russian military involvement. The result served Russian ends by further severing Eastern Ukraine (Crimea was lost by that point) from the Ukrainian Government.

The US and Europe have both worked quite hard to aid efforts in Ukraine to monitor elections and ensure that they were fair.

The reality is that once Russia saw that Yanukovych could not possibly retain power, they activated a military campaign. By contrast, the US and EU urged moderation, unity, and a democratic process.

The implication for Ukraine is stark, and the truth will out, however buried beneath Russian propaganda it may be for some.