Bracing for Cold Peace. US-Russia Relations after Ukraine

Abstract

The crisis in Ukraine has turned the tables of the post-Cold War relationship between the United States and Russia. The ongoing transformation can result in a number of outcomes, which can be conceived in terms of scenarios of normalisation, escalation and ‘cold peace’ – the latter two scenarios being much more probable than the first. NATO ought to shore up its defences in Central and Eastern Europe while Washington and its allies engage in a comprehensive political strategy of ‘new containment’. This means combining political and economic stabilisation of the transatlantic area with credible offers of benefits to partners in the East and pragmatic relations with Russia which are neither instrumentalised (as was the case with the ‘reset’) nor naïvely conceived as a ‘partnership’.

Keywords:

• US
• Russia
• Ukraine
• cold peace

Notes

¹ Schneider et al., “Exploring the Past”, 3.

² Fukuyama, The End of History; Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations?”.

³ Cf. Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics”.

⁴ Ikenberry, “The Illusion of Geopolitics”.

⁵ US Energy Information Administration, “Russia: Country Profile”, 2014, http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=rs.

⁶ Cf. Zamyatin and Zamyatin, Imperiya prostranstva [Imperial Space], 17.

⁷ Behnke, NATO’s Security Discourse.

⁸ Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour, 52.

⁹ Cf. Schimmelfennig, EU, NATO and Integration of Europe.

¹⁰ G. Kennan, “A Fatal Error”, New York Times, 5 February 1997.

¹¹ Mearsheimer, “Imperial by Design”.

¹² Cf. Souleimanov and Ditrych, “Internationalisation of Russian-Chechen Conflict”.

¹³ A leaked private letter from Obama to Dmitri Medvedev from Feb. 2009 appears to provide evidence that the administration saw this as a proposed direct quid pro quo for progress on START and Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes issue.

¹⁴ The position of the US government is that the vast amount of classified material Snowden appropriated was unrelated to NSA’s surveillance programmes, such as PRISM or eavesdropping on allies (cf. E. Epstein, “Was Snowden's Heist a Foreign Espionage Operation?”, Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2014).

¹⁵ Rohde and Mohammed, “How America Lost Vladimir Putin”.

¹⁶ Cf. Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War”, 37.

¹⁷ Cf. Berzins, Russia’s New Generation Warfare; Darczewska, Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare.

¹⁸ The deliveries may have included the Buk air defence systems apparently used in the downing of the Malaysian Airlines passenger plane on 17 July 2014. Those could also have been captured by the separatists who may however have benefited from Russia’s expertise in repairing and manning them.

¹⁹ It should be noted that this was not the first time the US, unlike the EU, imposed sanctions on Russia. The Magnitsky Act (2012) introduced asset freezes and visa bans on officials assumed to be involved in the murder of Sergey Magnitsky and other persons involved in investigating human rights abuses in Russia. The act, which was initially opposed by the Obama administration but passed through Congress due to extensive non-governmental lobbying, is under review at the time of writing and could be extended as a different avenue of imposing additional restrictive measures.

²⁰ Moscow’s actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine were immediately punished by the markets in terms of falling value of the ruble and Russian stocks and further withdrawal of investment capital (approx. USD 70 bn., more than the amount that left Russia over all of last year). But this happened before the sanctions were imposed, by which time both the ruble and the markets had stabilised.

²¹ Moscow was swift to frame Washington as the real transgressor and itself as a ‘victim’, including through a reminder of the ‘offensive’ nature of the US and NATO missile defence plans.

²² Russia is the US’ twentieth largest trading partner, but the EU’s third. Trade between the EU and Russia is currently valued at more than USD 400 billion per annum, which is some ten times more than the trade between the US and Russia.

²³ At the time of writing, responsibility for the accident has not been independently determined. However, the US government indicated it had evidence the separatists launched the surface-to-air missile that downed the plane, while metaphors of ‘Lockerbie’ – with the clear intent to portray Moscow as a terrorism sponsor – proliferated in the Western press.

²⁴ Levada center, “March approval ratings”, 8 August 2014, http://www.levada.ru/13-03-2014/martovskie-reitingi-odobreniya.

²⁵ Cf. Barbashin and Thoburn, “Putin’s Brain”; Fleischhauer, “Putin's Not Post-Communist”.

²⁶ Cf. Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere.

²⁷ Predictably, Russia would restore its hold over Poland, but also embrace Finland in its sphere of influence while, curiously, Estonia – unlike the other two Baltic republics – would find itself controlled by Germany. Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki [The Foundations of Geopolitics].

²⁸ Havel, The Power of the Powerless.

²⁹ White House, “Press Conference with President Obama and Prime Minister Rutte of the Netherlands”, 25 March 2014, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/25/press-conference-president-obama-and-prime-minister-rutte-netherlands.

³⁰ Motyl, “Is Putin Rational?”, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141039/alexander-j-motyl/is-putin-rational.

³¹ It is implausible to see Russia as a leader of the BRICs, for example, not only due to the largely artificial character of the bloc with its numerous internal tensions, but also to the role of China which, unlike Russia, enjoys the status of what Martin Wolf has called a ‘premature superpower’ (quoted in Nye, Future of Power, 173).

³² Cf. Hosking, Russia: People and Empire; Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine and the Breakup.

³³ Cf. Nowak, Ab imperio.

³⁴ Cf. Nowak, Historia politycznych tradycji [The History of Political Traditions]. The government’s disciplining effort appears to have borne some success. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, only 23% of Russians have a favourable opinion of the United States (down from 51% a year ago), and 39% (as opposed to last year’s 63%) have a favourable opinion of the EU. Pew Research Center, “Despite Concerns about Governance, Ukrainians Want to Remain One Country”, 8 May 2014, http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/05/08/despite-concerns-about-governance-ukrainians-want-to-remain-one-country/.

³⁵ Cf. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment.

³⁶ A recording of a phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US ambassador to Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt that testifies to that was leaked in the beginning of February 2014, with the Russian government first bringing public attention to it.

³⁷ Obama during the State of the Union Address, 28 January 2014.

³⁸ Cf. Indyk et al., Bending History.

³⁹ Chandler, Empire in Denial.

⁴⁰ Motyl, “Is Putin Rational?”

⁴¹ Cf. Deutsch et al., Political Community.

⁴² Cf. Marten, Warlords.

⁴³ In theory, this could result in different regions pursuing their own integration strategies with the EU and the Eurasian Union. Even if in practice Ukraine’s sovereign statehood would be turned into a simulation, existence of such incompatible regulatory frameworks under one jurisdiction might be impossible if such a simulation were to be sustained.

⁴⁴ Cf. Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy.

⁴⁵ Cf. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment.

⁴⁶ Cf. Mastny, “NATO at Fifty”.

⁴⁷ Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”. Since Kennan did not believe that the Soviet Union represented a real military threat to the US, the strategy was political rather than military. A consequence was his support for aggressive ‘political warfare’ which, conducted by the CIA, resulted in a long series of more or less catastrophic failures (cf. Wiener, Legacy of Ashes) – certainly not something suggested for emulation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ondrej Ditrych

Ondrej Ditrych is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague and an Assistant Professor at Charles University in Prague. Email: [email protected]