Putin's Master Plan. Douglas E. Schoen
sudden strike in Syria was a master class in interventionism and a stark counterpoint to failed Western efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Russia leveraged overwhelming air power to strengthen Assad’s position, seriously weaken ISIS and al-Qaeda, and expand its own military presence in Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean.42 Yet Western leaders were smugly confident that Putin had acted too boldly; Obama predicted that Russia’s intervention was “just going to get them stuck in a quagmire and it won’t work.”43
Just six months later, Putin defied this prediction and declared his mission in Syria accomplished as the Russian military began withdrawing forces and turning its focus to building out permanent bases in Syria.44 America’s leaders were blindsided, and the “quagmire” narrative demolished. Obama and his advisors had been certain that Syria would turn into Putin’s Vietnam, but instead it became his Grenada: a surgically precise military action with limited goals that were accomplished swiftly, and with little loss.
Putin’s Syrian success was epitomized by Assad’s recapture of Palmyra, an ancient and historically significant city that had earlier fallen to ISIS. When the Syrian Arab Army retook Palmyra, it proved that Putin had reenergized Assad, beaten ISIS, and was now a global actor of broad influence and historic importance. Putin surely didn’t mind that in rescuing Palmyra from the clutches of ISIS, he and Assad had deeply embarrassed the United States and Europe. Over the course of the Syrian campaign, Putin mortally wounded Assad’s moderate opposition; became a global leader in the fight against ISIS terror; deepened his relationship with Iran; and promoted Russia’s own military, political, and even commercial interests in the Middle East. No Western military action in the last two decades can boast anything comparable to this degree of success. It is critical to understand just how brilliantly effective Putin’s intervention in Syria has been. As one columnist starkly puts it, “Putin has attained all that he wanted.”45
Putin’s power play in Syria has advanced his agenda in Europe as well. By arming Assad and aggressively deploying Russia’s own forces, Putin has prolonged the Syrian conflict, made it considerably bloodier, and driven millions of refugees into Europe. Europe’s struggle to deal with the social, political, and security ramifications of the mass Muslim migration has not only distracted the world from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but also strengthened Putin’s hand against an increasingly fractured European community—and further weakened the EU as an institutional force. Indeed, the EU’s failure on Muslim migration was a direct cause of the Brexit vote, which threatens to unravel the entire European system. Independent of these developments, Western and Central Europe are learning just how expansive Putin’s plan might be, as he fans the flames of Euro-skepticism and backs radical Far-Left and Far-Right parties that have become “Putin’s fifth column in the EU.”46 The parties he supports go from the National Front (France) and the Northern League (Italy) to the National Democratic Party (Germany) and Jobbik (Hungary). “Pro-Russian parties currently hold 76 of 751 seats in the European Parliament,” according to a report in the Ukrainian magazine Novoye Vremya.47 A senior Western diplomat frankly admitted that “the Russians are looking for ways to break the unity of Europe, and they are targeting the weaker states.”48 Just as worrisome as Putin’s growing political influence is the situation of Europe’s economy having proven unable to free itself from its addiction to Russian oil and gas. Indeed, Europe has inadvertently bankrolled much of Russia’s military expansion and rearmament. Separatist bullets and artillery shells in Ukraine are paid for by Germans and Italians heating their homes.
Europe has also become less committed to the fundamental premise of NATO: mutual defense. A Pew Research Center study conducted in spring of 2015 finds that “at least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia. . . . Americans and Canadians are the only publics where more than half think their country should use military action if Russia attacks a fellow NATO member.”49 These public attitudes demonstrate how close the NATO alliance is to becoming a paper tiger that will crumple if Russia strikes. Indeed, Edward Lucas warns ominously that we must “fix NATO or risk WWIII.”50
The victims of Putin’s aggression understand just how underprepared the West is to respond to Russian aggression. In a private conversation, a Ukrainian industrialist explained: “There’s a simple way to analyze this that you Westerners don’t understand. Putin is ready for war and nobody else is. And he’s not going to stop until he is rebuffed. So far no one and nothing is standing in his way.”51 Another highly positioned Ukrainian agreed that Putin was ready for war, and that unless “the West comes to grips with that reality, it will never be able to develop a workable plan to stop him.”52 It’s astonishing that Putin has gotten away with such flagrant disregard for international norms and the sovereignty of neighboring countries. But save for the outright invasion and annexation of Crimea, Putin has gone to great lengths to avoid directly implicating the Kremlin, thereby maintaining at least a veneer of deniability when it comes to conducting plainly Russian acts of interference and violence. He has only recently conceded that Russian intelligence operatives are in Ukraine, but he continues to deny the full extent of Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, and he has signed an order “making the deaths of Russian troops lost during ‘special operations’ a secret.”53 Instead of overt military aggression, Russia unleashes an asymmetric arsenal of separatists, cyberwarfare, espionage, and special forces to disrupt and destabilize his neighbors. Some analysts have called this approach “hybrid warfare,” in which traditional hard power is married to misinformation, propaganda, and cybercampaigns that overwhelm not only a target country’s military capabilities but also its media, politics, and social cohesion.54 Chatham House’s James Sherr describes Russia’s hybrid wars as “a model of warfare designed to slip under NATO’s threshold of perception and reaction.”55 It worked in Georgia, and it’s working in Ukraine. Unless the West learns how to respond, it will continue to work the next time that Putin chooses to expand his growing empire.
At the same time that Putin targets his neighbors with hybrid warfare, he uses a deep and often-underappreciated soft power arsenal to keep the rest of Europe at bay. Putin- and Kremlin-loyal oligarchs leverage Russian oil, gas, and corporate assets to neutralize European opposition to Russia’s strategic goals, while giving European elites motive to accept absurd Russian denials of responsibility for events bearing clear Kremlin imprimatur. Much of Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe depends heavily on Russian energy to heat homes and power industry, a critical vulnerability that Putin keenly understands.56 Putin has shut off energy supplies to entire countries before, most notably to Ukraine in the mid-2000s, and no one doubts that he would do so again. Europe’s shaky economy would be crippled by even a weeklong shutoff of Russian energy to the Netherlands or Poland—let alone to Germany, Italy, or France. One shudders to think what would happen if Greece lost access to the 40 percent of the energy supply that Russia provides it for even a day or two.57 Putin understands the advantage Russia’s energy resources provide, and his bare-knuckle brand of petropolitics has dissuaded or co-opted more than a few European critics of Russian aggression.
Putin remains fixated on his ultimate goal: Russian hegemony in Europe, but not in the old Cold War sense. He doesn’t seek a Soviet-style, Moscow-centered megastate on the European continent, or even a Warsaw Pact–like formalization of Russian supremacy. Rather, Putin aims to neuter Europe politically, to make it concerned only with commerce and comfort, so that muscularly enforced Russian interests will dominate the political fate of the continent. By way of analogy, during the Cold War, Finland was compelled by its location between NATO countries and the USSR to remain neutral in the conflict and deferential to both sides, officially uninterested in the outcome, and at least in theory comfortable with either Soviet or Western victory. Today, Russia aims to “Finlandize” all of Europe to the point where it is simply uninterested in saying no to Putin—and where no Kremlin act of domestic oppression or international provocation would merit a European response. In Putin’s plan, European leaders will shake their heads, shrug, and sign another round of Russian energy–import deals. America, an ocean away, will watch dejectedly, its objections meaningless without committed European allies.
PROSPECTS
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