On April 14, Russian SU-24 fighter jets made 30 simulated
attacks on the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea in international waters—roughly
62 kilometers from the Polish port the vessel had departed, and 70 kilometers
from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
That last phrase seems excessively detailed, doesn’t it?
But both bits of information are extremely important, and will
be addressed later.
So who in the world is to blame? Obama? Putin?
The responsibility may lie in a “what” rather than a “who.”
In other words, we need to look at the situation not only as one in which
political agents are acting on the international stage, but rather the
confluence of economic and political changes over the past 25 years.
After years of the U.S. dominating international politics
and economics, the structure of the international sector has changed from one
of unipolarity to multipolarity in which blocks of power have formed to
challenge the domination of the U.S. One of these blocks comes in the form of
Eurasianism, a political theory that sets the former Soviet states between
Europe and Asia with Russia at its center.
As NATO drew closer to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, such
actions were perceived as an incursion on Russia’s “traditional sphere of
influence,” a situation Putin’s regime sought to rectify when the opportunity
presented itself.
The Enemy at the
Gates
Russian President Vladimir Putin claims the problems between
Russia and NATO go back to talks between Mikhail Gorbachev, James Baker and
Helmet Kohl, when Baker and Kohl promised not to expand NATO into Eastern
Europe. However, in a 2014 interview, Gorbachev noted
that in the talks “The topic of ‘NATO
expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years…. Not
a singe [sic] Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the
Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up,
either.”
In a 2007 speech
at the at 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin specifically refers
to the words of NATO General Secretary Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990, “He
said at the time that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army
outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’
Where are these guarantees?”
Examining the quoted sentence with those just above it in Woerner’s 1990 speech,
we see that Woerner meant the passage to provide guarantees that NATO would use
its forces only for defensive purposes, not in relation to Eastern European expansion.
The ambiguity of the word “deploy” is, however, there, and what its use signifies
most is that NATO did not expect the Soviet Union’s impending collapse, and
thus had no sense that such expansion might be possible.
What is more important than Woerner’s specific wording is
the perception of slight that Russia felt in the years following, as NATO
expanded. Gorbachev puts this most clearly in his interview: “Today we need to admit that there is a crisis in
European (and global) politics. One of the reasons, albeit not the only reason,
is a lack of desire on the part of our Western partners to take Russia’s point
of view and legal interests in security into consideration. They paid lip service
to applauding Russia, especially during the Yeltsin years, but in deeds they
didn’t consider it. I am referring primarily to NATO expansion, missile defense
plans, the West’s actions in regions of importance to Russia (Yugoslavia, Iraq,
Georgia, Ukraine). They literally said ‘This is none of your business.’ As a
result, an abscess formed and it burst.”
A Neocon’s Paradise
The fall of the Soviet Union left the United States as the
lone superpower, with military
spending equal to the next 16 countries combined. At the same time, the U.S.
had defeated its Vietnam demons with a decisive victory over Saddam Hussein to
liberate the Kingdom of Kuwait. From 1991 to 1999 the United States intervened
in 12
conflicts around the world, and a notion of the United States’ being in a position
of “global leadership” developed in American politics. By 1997, America’s
global leadership had firmly established itself. The greatest disagreement among
U.S. politic al figures was not the existence of such a leadership role, but
whether it should be unilateral or multilateral.
American intervention as a part of its global leadership was
not simply military, but also economic and political, with an emphasis on loans—which
usually included stipulations of economic reform—and democracy development
programs run by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and
NED (the National Endowment for Democracy).
After 9/11, the Bush administration expanded on these by
including neoconservative ideas in his foreign policy to deal with the problem of
the Middle East. Neoconservatism developed out of a group of intellectuals from
City College of New York in the 1930s and ‘40s who put forward four main
ideas: “a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the
internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral
purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions
to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social
engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its
own ends.”
The Bush administration believed that in its role as global
leader the United States could forcefully change regimes in order to develop
good governance. Such an idea came out of William Kristol and Robert Kagan’s 2000
book Present Dangers, in which the
two neocon thinkers argued, “To many the idea of America using its power to
promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism.
But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in
declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of
the record of the past three decades."
The flaw in the thinking lay in its underestimating the
backlash against the policy by authoritarian leaders—the most powerful of whom
were the governments of China and Russia.
The Color Revolutions
From 1990 to 2006, the number of democracies increased from
76 to 123, according to Freedom House. Some of these were the result of what
came to be known as color revolutions. Three occurred on the borders of Russia
in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. These events greatly concerned the Russian
government, a concern that became sharper after the Arab Spring and Russia’s
own protests prior to the controversial 2012 presidential elections in which
Vladimir Putin was elected to his third term. Putin’s government reacted by creating
a law
that required NGOs receiving money from foreign governments to register as “foreign
agents.”
Since the law was put into place, the Russian government has
raided
nearly 2000 NGOs. At the same time, independent media in the country has been
strangled.
The conflation of democracy development programs, the neocon
effort at regime change and color revolutions tied all of Russia’s concerns to
the US government. Efforts by USAID to
make its case for further funding didn’t help the situation. Democracy Rising,
published by USAID in 2004, described the role its programs had played in
helping advance the democratic movements in Lebanon, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and
Georgia.
A Stronger Military
for a Stronger Economy
From 1999 to 2013, the Russian economy increased by leaps
and bounds, and with it the country’s military expenditure. By 2013, Russian military spending had increased
to 88 billion dollars, from seventh highest to third highest behind the U.S.
and China. The strengthening of the
Russian military was in large part a result of the growth in GDP and the price
of oil in international markets.
With the strengthening of the military and its economy,
Russia began to see itself as deserving of a larger place in the international
sphere. In 2010, to counter growing
European influence, Russia created Eurasian Customs Union, which brought
together Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia initially, and then later Armenia and
Kyrgyzstan. In 2011, Russia, along with the other BRICS countries,
called for more influence in the global monetary system.
Russia’s movement toward strengthening its political and
military influence began with Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Georgia, which Stratfor
called imperative to Russia’s interests.
Russia began with the Russia-Georgian war in 2008. After the
Rose Revolution in 2003, Georgia had moved closer to Europe and the United
States with a pro-American president Mikheil Saakashvili. In 2005, President
George W. Bush traveled to Tbilisi in which Saakashvili made a speech
thanking America for its “support
for our NATO aspirations, just like the U.S. supported Ukraine on its NATO
aspirations.”
In 2011, Russia used
its military support for separatists in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine
after the ouster of a Russia-friendly government. By March 2014, Russia had
gone as far as annexing Crimea.
Eurasianism and
Empire
Russia’s military and economic expansion was closely
connected to the philosophy of neo-Eurasianism. Neo-Eurasianism, as propounded
by Russian philosopher Aleksander Dugin, builds on the work of Russian
nationalists in exile in the 1930s and ‘40s who were coping with the
humiliation of the White Russians after the revolution. Dugin defines
Neo-Eurasianism as a theory of society and politics based on the cultural and
political placement of Russia and the Turkic countries between Europe and Asia,
and argues for a third political way. The geopolitical element of the theory is
Dugin’s call for Russia to inhabit the center of Eurasian space and provide for
the economic and military leadership.
Marlene Laruelle, in her book Russian
Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire explains “[Eurasianism] is a political doctrine in the strict sense of
the word, a theory of nation and ethnos, an alter-globalist philosophy of
history, a new pragmatic formulation of 'Sovietism,' a substitute for the
global explanatory schemes of Marxism-Leninism, a set of expansionist
geopolitical principles for Russia, and much else,"
Dugin’s theory has often found its way into Vladimir Putin’s
speeches about Russia’s activities in Georgia and Ukraine, as well as the
development of the Eurasian Customs Union and its stance against NATO.
Beyond the Near
Abroad
Following Russia’s entrance into Crimea and building upon
the concern that NATO members in Eastern Europe had about Russia’s neo-Eurasianist
foreign policy, NATO increased spending for its Eastern flank.
A Report
by the European Leadership Network stated, “Between January and
September, the NATO Air Policing Mission conducted 68 ‘hot’ identification and
interdiction missions along the Lithuanian border alone, and Latvia recorded
more than 150 incidents of Russian planes approaching its airspace. Estonia
recorded 6 violations of its airspace in 2014.”
The U.S. moved fighters and tankers from London to
Lithuania. The U.S. also conducted exercise in collaboration with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In
June 2015, the United States sent military equipment to Estonia to protect
against any further incursions by Russia.
On NATO’s southern frontier, Russia’s involvement in Syria
led to an SU-24’s incursion into Turkish airspace ultimately resulting in the
plane’s being shot down.
All of these suggest an already tense atmosphere along NATO’s
eastern border.
USS Donald Cook
Even before the events of April 14, the USS Donald Cook had run
into trouble with SU-24s. In April 2014
during the height of the Crimean conflict, an SU-24 made 12 low passes near the
USS Cook in the Black Sea, which Col. Steve Warren called “provocative and
unprofessional." The most recent incident with the SU-24 buzzing the USS
Cook demonstrates similarities. Both were in international waters in proximity
of a Russian port and the port of a NATO member state. Remember, that Russia
claimed the USS Cook was close to Kaliningrad, while the U.S. military focused
on its proximity to Poland.
This taken into consideration with the history since 1990,
point to the fact that the current tensions have been building for years. NATO
has expanded over the years toward the Russian borders leaving no buffer zone
between the two great power blocks, and heightening the country’s sense of
being under siege. Russia’s previous status as a superpower, it’s expectation
that it was soon to return to this status and the most recent economic problems
due to sanctions and the decline of oil prices have hampered its Eurasianist
aspirations, and have added concerns for maintaining the current internal political
order.
At the same time, the U.S.’s unipolar moment ended with the
rise of China and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Power has become much more diffuse in the
international sector and will ultimately lead to greater challenges to U.S. attempts
at influencing international politics. We are seeing this in the South China
Sea as well.
Ultimately, in the near future, we can expect that this process
will continue to unfold with a growth of alliances of major powers.
Many of the smaller states that find themselves in the
middle, of course, will seek methods of playing the powers off each other and
maneuvering in the interstices to advocate for their own interests.
Unfortunately, this process will make the international
sector much more tense and will lead to similar aggressions, standoffs and even
potentially conflicts.
