In the US, the ruling crisis in the Ukraine has triggered a series of accusations against the Obama administration from its political rivals– once again, the lack of resolve of the Obama Administration to use the considerable power of the US to deter aggression is destabilizing world order and damaging the reputation of the USA as a world leader. As House Intelligence Committee chairman, Mike Rogers, recently said: “I think Putin is playing chess and I think we’re playing marbles.” To some, the handling of the Ukraine matter is just one in a long line of missteps or appeasements to tyrants that, in comparison, makes Jimmy Carter look like a veritable strong man. Given the potential importance of how others in the international system perceive the words and actions of the leaders of the US, I want to take closer look at the evidence underlying a few competing hypotheses on what best explains the causes of the current crisis in the Ukraine. Do the causes lie in the weak resolve of the Obama administration? That is, are the current aggressive actions of tyrants a function Obama’s failures to clearly deter their prior aggression? Or are the likes of Putin, Assad and the Iranian leadership simply irrational actors who are unable to be deterred short of war; i.e., ‘playground bullies’ only know one response – equal and opposing force? Or are there structural forces at work that involve the inevitable balancing of power in the international system that any one country – even a superpower – can only hope to limit its worst effects?

Any one or more of these hypotheses could be in play all at the same time but for analytic purposes I think it is helpful to pull them apart to better understand how the real causal mechanisms are at work. I see the world – and especially great power politics in the 21^st century – not as black and white as some Athenians did in the 5^th century BC. There are a variety of lenses through which one can translate the inner workings of the international system and neorealism is but one of them. There are others that account for the role of ideas and international institutions as well as mankind’s primal nature. Consequently, I am inherently suspicious of the Manichean and often reductionist claims of self-interested politicians who seek to maintain or gain political office. While there is always a kernel of truth in what they may offer as an apparently convincing argument, I am concerned that they do not pay enough attention to the pitfalls of their own confirmation bias. You are hereby invited to check me on that in these and any other posts. Silly of me perhaps, but I actually believe that there is an objective truth out there somewhere.

Approach – Multiple Posts

Over the course of a few posts I will lay out three hypotheses and then unpack some findings (albeit fewer at this time) for each and, in the final post, I will attempt to draw some conclusions based on the overall available evidence. This analysis is done from the viewpoint of a political scientist versus an individual voter or political strategist for a candidate in the 2016 presidential election. I realize that some of the statements being made in the media are motivated by the political aspirations of candidates and/or a desire to demonize an enemy and deflect blame for any actual or perceived policy mistakes. I am less interested in that conversation than I am about the underlying causal mechanisms at work as it relates to the political science of international relations. What can we learn from this set of experiences that can better explain the true causes of Russia/Putin’s actions?

Hypothesis 1: The ‘Wages of Weakness’[1]

The first hypothesis states that the primary explanations for the aggressive actions of Putin in the Crimea are to be found in the weaknesses of Obama and his administration. As Rumsfeld once said: “Weakness is provocative.” Obama’s naïve sense of how the Hobbesian world of geopolitics really works has led him to foolishly appease known aggressors such as Putin and Assad and made the world less safe for itself, its allies and democracy in general. Hard-nosed authoritarians like Putin and Assad have taken his measure and see him as indecisive and lacking the resolve to bargain hard or ‘stand and fight’ for important ideas and long-term allies. They perceive that he is both easily duped by ‘cheap talk’ and, based on his actions/inactions, lacks the resolve to back up his commitments to aid his allies or to forcibly respond to breaches of key international norms or agreements (e.g., the use of chemical weapons in Syria) or how to deal with revisionist powers like Iran as it maneuvers its way to becoming a nuclear power. The authoritarian leaders translate these signals and perceive Obama and the US as ‘all hat and no cattle’.

A good example of those that line up with this hypothesis include notable Republican Senators (McConnell, McCain, Rubio, Cruz) and prominent public intellectuals such as Charles Krauthammer who has been one of Obama’s more stern and persistent critics. He is proponent of the neorealist school of thought in international relations. Along with John Mearsheimer, I see Krauthammer as one of the primary spokesman for the role of realpolitik in the conduct of international affairs.[2] Krauthammer recently noted that the ‘wages of weakness’ of the Obama administration is what allowed Putin to be so bold as to invade and occupy the Crimea within days of the collapse of the Yanukovych government. Krauthammer specifies a set of missteps that the Obama administration has made since 2009 that demonstrate the weakness and lack of resolve by the President  – and which, he believes, led to Putin’s aggressive actions in the Ukraine. Lets take a look at a couple of the more compelling data points in the Krauthammer piece see if there is any credible alternative explanation to the way that Obama’s critics have framed them.

Missile Shields

One of the more important pieces of evidence cited by Krauthammer and others involves the unilateral concessions by Obama on the ballistic missile shield agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic in 2009. To get a sense for the context of that decision I read Robert Gate’s[3] account of it in his recent book, Duty as well as a few other relevant sources that address the current status of missile defense in the EU. Gates is widely known as a hardliner when it comes to Russia and the former USSR but in 2007/2008 he saw the relationship with Russia as ‘badly managed’ since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. He viewed the absorption of many of the former Soviet countries into NATO on the heels of German reunification as unnecessarily provocative and dangerously dismissive of a weakened but proud old foe (more on that in the discussion of hypothesis 3 later). From what I can tell, Gates and other reasonable people disagreed at the time about the viability and wisdom of many aspects of the anti-missile agreements, including the commitment of the Polish and Czech governments to what the US was willing to offer. Apparently the Polish government was in a losing battle domestically with regards to the anti-missile deployment – the country was split on wanting it. This emboldened the Poles to ask for more than the Bush government was willing to give in security capabilities. Gates summarized the state of negotiations with the Poles and Czechs as: “Our presumptive partners for missile defense in Europe were stiff-arming us” (Gates 2014: 153 – 167).  The nature of the interceptors contemplated at the time would have been relatively useless against Russian missiles because they were to be geared for interception of Iranian weapons that would be detectable due to launches from greater distances (the Russians didn’t believe that story then or now – any anti-missile systems in eastern Europe were presumed to be there to weaken the Russian arsenal). As it turns out, however, it appears that the US maintained its commitments to the missile shield but in a different form and one that may have even been more stabilizing from a diplomatic standpoint. I am not a weapons expert but based on what I have read so far, the security commitment to Europe is intact with respect to the missile shields envisioned in 2008/2009 and there is chatter that suggests Russia believes the Iran narrative was a feint by the Obama administration to divert Russian attention. But who knows? And that is the point. There are all kinds of feints and disinformation that cloud the ability of any government actor to accurately perceive the intentions of any other government actor. The study of perception and misperception of signals was a Cold War staple. Political scientists have tried to understand how that phenomenon actually operates for decades[4] – given all the ‘snowflakes of data’ floating around, it can often be hard to tell the signal from the noise.

From my point of view, I also believe that it is appropriate and reasonable for a government to debate threat priorities (e.g., are Iran’s ballistic missiles more of a threat to us/our allies than Russia’s?) and place its scarce resources where it best meets the need. There are, of course, politics involved. It seems that Obama wanted to lower the appearance of a Cold War for a variety of reasons that include politics, economics and military logic (which sounds less like marbles and more like three-dimensional chess). The former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, seems to believe that Putin and the Russian leadership are ‘menaced’ by Obama and the EU – they see the nefarious meddling hand of the West – and maybe even more so the US[5] – successfully prying away the Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence. We can argue with the choices made by the government but, based on the limited evidence I have gathered (there is always more that could shift the conclusions) the argument would be less about Obama’s appeasement of the Russians and more about where you want to place your long term missile shield bets. This seems to be more about the limits of defense spending along with a differing set of views about where the greatest threats lie.

Cuts in Defense

Another important piece of evidence that is used to support this hypothesis is the Obama administration’s proposed dramatic cuts in the defense budget while Iran, China and Russia double down on their military investments. After a decade of war and pressing domestic challenges this is not necessarily a surprising development. In fact, given the commitment to a more technology-based approach vs. personnel-based approach for US security forces this may be the best outcome for the military. The paring of the US Army budgets at the expense of the other branches has been a long-term process since the advent of nuclear weapons. Tank battles are fewer and further between. Land wars with massive armies of occupation are fewer and further between. We will find out if this is the right move when we fight the next war. In the meantime, the reduction in military spending is inevitable – especially as it relates to personnel related costs (including training). It seems to me that our enemies would be hard-pressed to translate the new budget (still orders of magnitude larger than all of our rivals combined) as a lack of resolve. I am not sure where this will end up but the various chiefs of the military branches are masters at managing to maintain funding for important programs. This budget proposal seems to be more about managing scarce resources and retooling for a new threat environment that mandates force projection (naval platforms) and ‘stand-off intelligent killing platforms’ (i.e., drones) versus personnel-intensive land armies. It is a point of view about how to achieve the national security objectives of our country. Machines versus humans? Drones and floating ballistic missile launchers and special forces versus armies of occupation? To me, that is the heart of the argument versus glib references to head counts in the Army that will be below pre World War II levels.

Preliminary Conclusions

Based on this quick analysis, I remain unconvinced that hypothesis 1 best explains the causes of Russia’s action in the Ukraine/Crimea. There is too much ‘noise’ in the missile shield matter and defense matters to make such a bold claim. There are plenty of other decisions to look at more closely (e.g., Obama’s famous cheap talk on the ‘red-line’ for use of chemical weapons by Syria, Netanyahu’s claims about the weakness of Obama emboldening the Iranian’s nuclear ambitions) that could move me on this but I defer that for further analysis and discussion in future posts. For now, however, I think we move on to look at Hypothesis 2 (irrational actors).