Greater Eurasian Co-Prosperity Sphere

The trigger for me to reactivate this blog was the Crimea crisis, and that is not yet over at time of writing.  A number of people have been impressed by how PM Harper is sticking it to the Russians over this, but I don't see the value of it.  I'm pretty sure Putin realises that this posturing (authentic as the feelings may be) is political in nature, but it doesn't look to have made any difference on the ground whatsoever.

Putin continues to play his cards close to his vest and my appreciation of the Donetsk basin as the next potential flashpoint is still in play.  As the US tries to figure out what Putin plans, I will put out there what I suspect is happening in his head on this.

As stated previously, Russia needs Russians, and there are a lot of them in the eastern Ukraine.  That is the grand plan, recreation of as much of the Russian Empire as they can without getting in a (big) shooting war to do so.  Second factor, Putin has proven himself a highly adept geopolitical opportunist, which plays into the empire building as well as general manoeuvring.  When faced with such inept (America) and beholden (Europe) opposition as Russia is right now, Putin is king of the hill.

Canada is making a principled stand against the annexation of Crimea, but principles are cheap when you have no skin in the game.  Crimea is not going back to Ukraine barring force majure and that's not happening.  It didn't work so well last time either.

My question is whether the Kremlin's threat assessment of international action in case of "assistance" to Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians comes up plus or minus.  If Putin gains more than he loses, he'll probably go for it.  The sanctions we can/will bring to bear are limited in effect on a country as large and endowed with resources as Russia.  Equally important, the Chinese and the Indians, as well as most of Central Asia will continue to trade and otherwise work with Russia, China more so if it discomfits the US.

It has also been said that Ukraine had better show some willingness to fight for its' territory, and I think this an excellent point.  Russia would beat them handily, but just because you will probably lose isn't sufficient reason to not fight in this case.  What does get drowned out in all of this is the political/social mess that Ukraine is, so I have no real faith in their ability to put an effective military force in the field even if they are inclined to do so.

 At this point I think military force is the only credible deterrent to Putin, and even then only when it will actually be used.  An armed, contested invasion of Ukraine is an undeniable act of war and contravention of international law, and that was enough to get people to defend Kuwait 24 years ago.  Ukraine doesn't have the oil of Kuwait, but it does occupy a strategic buffer position in Eurasia, so you'd think the Europeans might take some issue with carving it up.

I suspect that most Europeans consider Ukraine not worth the bones of a single Swabian Panzer Grenadier, so it's up to the Poles and other border countries to stand up and conduct some "exercises" of their own in Ukraine.  An attack on the troops of a NATO member would force NATO to act, and forcing NATO to act is in the "minus" column for Putin.  As a side note, if NATO isn't prepared to act to counter Russian territorial aggrandizement, it might as well pack it in, as that's what it was set up to do!

Putin could over-reach himself, but under current conditions taking the Russian-majority areas of east Ukraine wouldn't be stretching too far, so consider that.   I think the decision on what to do will come in the next few days, and will depend heavily on what the US does.  On past performance, I'll bet on Putin having effectively a free hand, whatever that portends. 

Exit, Stage Right

As I write this, the last of Canada's mission to Afghanistan are back home.  At 12+ years it is our longest war, even though the intense period (2006-2011) puts us in the same ballpark as WW2. 

Is Afghanistan better off than in 2001? Without question. The questions come in when you look at the prognosis for stability, and that isn't great. We did what we could, more than Afghanistan has ever done for us, and anyone who expects more than that can do it themselves. Hopefully enough Afghans have something to lose now and will fight to keep their gains, but time will tell.

What separates Afghanistan from our previous expeditionary wars is the casualty rate.  We lost 158 dead and several hundred (unpublished) seriously wounded: that's one bad Battalion attack in either World War and a large fraction of our losses in Korea over a much shorter period.

Each of those losses is a tragedy for individuals, but the scale makes a negligible impact on the fabric of Canadian society; the Army was at war, the Country wasn't.  The frequent question is "Was it worth it?".  I don't know the calculus of nation-building, so I can just hope that more people were helped than were hurt.  Some will regret going due to injuries or loss of friends, but the CA is a professional volunteer force, and nobody was forced to go.  It was, for lack of a more sensitive word, an adventure for many of us, and indeed what we signed up to do.

Afghanistan has profoundly changed both the Canadian Army and the public's relationship with us, and I hope that goodwill remains.  The public is fickle however, and there is nothing new about it:

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

RIP to my comrades fallen in Afghanistan, and the best possible recovery to those who came home wounded in body and/or mind. Lest we forget.

Peninsular Peril

The votes have been cast (by those who didn't boycott the referendum) and Crimea has seceded from Ukraine and wants to go back to Russia. I regard this as a done deal as will any realistic observer, despite the protestations of illegitimacy from Western leaders.

That most people living there would prefer to go with Russia is obvious, even if the fact that Putin continues to gather Russians continues to elude people looking for motivation. It is known that Putin continues to use the immediate recognition of Kosovo after we'd bombed the Serbs out of there as licence to annex his own "self-determining" majority areas back to the Rodina, but not acknowledged by most of the media, let alone Western politicians.

So what? Sure, some people will be unhappy, and Ukraine is out some income from Sevastopol rental to the Russians, but what does that mean to anyone else? Ukraine has had a sequence of corrupt governments since independence from the USSR and I sure as shit don't want to get dragged into another war in Europe. Certainly not over an Anschluss like this, and I see the geopolitical cost to North America to be nil from the Crimea changing hands. The damage from puffing up and making vague threats of sanctions against Russia is potentially great.

A lot of people really didn't like G.W. Bush, but most of them were either lefties for whom realpolitik-clueless Obama can do no wrong, or people GW decided to take some action against, like, say, the late Saddam Hussein. One thing which definitively separates Bush II and Obama is that nobody who counts takes the latter seriously. Even in a no-win situation like the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008, Bush made a point of having American assets in the capital (Tbilisi) to present the Russians with an unspoken "red line". It must be noticed that as sub-optimal as things may have turned out for Georgia, the Russians took the hint and pulled most of the way back.

The lost Georgian territory is a lesson to them not to poke the bear, no matter if you're provoked. The lesson to us is (again) Talk - Action = Zero, Action - Talk = >Zero. I don't know what "we" would do if Russia had another crack at Georgia right now, but somebody had better be taking some proactive steps to dissuade Putin from cooking something up in Eastern Ukraine to take that also. After that? Belarus? The Baltic States?

The Balts have less to fear, and more potential European support than Ukraine due to ethnic/national/cultural connections to Europe vice Russia. I may have read The Clash of Civilizations too much, but birds of a feather do flock together and it makes sense to me to draw our lines along those natural fault lines.

I keep talking about action, so what should be done? In practice I don't see a lot of potential for the sort of thing that I think would send the right message, but if Europe still had any armies, it'd be a good time to start scheduling boots-on-the-ground joint exercises with what's left of Ukraine and put some bases in the Baltic States. Physical assets, preferably those which can shoot back, will do the job. Putin doesn't want a war as it's not in his interest to lose more than he'd gain. He will walk into as many places with a Russian majority population as he is permitted to, sanctions be damned.

Whatever. For my money, the next flashpoint is Donetsk, but it's not exactly crystal ball territory to come up with that. This is NOT a fait accompli but if Putin pushes for it he has enough support on the ground to pull it off in some fashion if there is no physical response from "our side". As long as Obama/Kerry are running the US show and the Europeans are beholden to Russia for their heating fuel, it's Putin's geographical and demographic prize to gain, and Ukraine's to lose.

But the cat came back...

It's been over a year since I last posted anything here. I felt I had nothing left to say about what was happening in the world, but recent events have caused me to re-evaluate that.

The immediate catalyst for this is the current stand-off in the Ukraine, Crimea specifically at this point, and the kaleidoscope of ideas about what should or should not be done. I have some definite ideas, and they are along the lines of, well, drawing some lines.Brzezinski's article of 3 March 14 is in the ball park, and his background is such that he's familiar with how Moscow does business, pay no attention to the President he worked for.

Obama has made a complete mockery of himself world-wide with his "Red lines" and lack of response to them being trampled, and what Putin is doing right now is in full knowledge that the US (and consequently the EU) will do nothing concrete to stop him.

The problem actually goes all the way back to the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO into former Warsaw pact countries. Poland, Czech Republic and the Baltic States are hostile to Russia and a natural fit to NATO updated for Russia vs USSR. Likewise Romania and Bulgaria were never part of Russia but subject to the latter's pressure, therefore good candidates.

There is a bigger question here though; what is NATO's raison d'être in a post-Cold War world? Let's start with the name: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This suggests a geographical connection and a group of like-minded countries. Those are two separate criteria; I consider Australia and New Zealand to be like-minded countries but the geographical connection isn't there. There is another concept at work too though: the Sphere of Influence.

The US had a shit-fit in 1962 about the USSR putting nukes in Cuba, immediately in America's back yard. It is instructive that the solution to that stand-off involved the US removing the equivalent (already placed) missiles from Turkey, an analogous geographical threat to the USSR. In the labour relations field this is called "Interest-based Bargaining" and it works with human nature. The hypocrisy of the USA in this case is not to be overlooked, but all's fair in love and Containment.

Containment was the strategy of The West vs. the USSR/World Communism. My off-the-cuff assessment of Containment's contribution is that it was plausible in concept but flawed in execution. What success it had was basically attritional (Vietnam and Afghanistan the most significant episodes) with eventual economic exhaustion of the USSR from trying to out-produce us in war materiel. It is widely overlooked these days, but "collapse by arms race" was the basic Reagan strategy against the "evil empire". Gorbachev formally ended the "Red Menace" of World Revolution, thus obviating the need for Containment, or so you'd think. Inertia however is Newton's First Law for a reason, and huge organizations and the mindsets behind them are as subject to it as much as any minor planet zipping around the solar system. Flash forward to 2008...

Putin called NATO/G.W. Bush's bluff in Georgia then, partly to reabsorb South Ossetia, more to serve notice that Georgia was in Russia's sphere and NATO could sod off. This isn't a Human Rights blog so I won't argue rights and wrongs in a moral sense which are subjective in any event. We don't tend to think that way since we are so certain that we are morally superior, but moral superiority doesn't protect you from jackbooted thugs, and that's the real-world issue.

What then is my real-world prescription for the Ukraine thing? Draw some lines and then put troops on them. Ukraine is a Frankenstein nation which could be simply and logically partitioned into East (Russia) and West (Europe) with the consent of most people on the ground. West Ukraine could then join NATO if that seemed the thing to do, but it's an economic basket-case with a per-capita GDP somewhere around that of Egypt so I'm not sure the EU wants it, but not my problem. Not ideal in a lot of ways, as there are resources and industry involved as well as people, but you have to pick your battles.

The talk right now on our side is economic sanctions, but that's not the language Putin is using right now so it's not certain the point will be made. This does have similarities with the Sudetenland in 1938, and the remedy is the same: military force. The Czechs could have held the Germans off with any military backing at all from France, but the iron to do so was lacking. The level of war-weariness in France at that time far exceeded anything in the US and Europe right now, but the present level of hand-wringing will be as (in)effective as that of '38.

If the US is serious, it should land some Marines in the Ukrainian controlled parts of Crimea and dare the Russians to try something. Putin is, contrary to wishful thinking in the liberal media, an entirely rational actor and is unlikely to bite off more than he can swallow. The Crimea is bite-sized right now, the rest of the East is still too big. That can change in either direction based on the response from Ukraine and Europe/the US; making Crimea too prickly to swallow or folding completely and allowing the Russians to walk uncontested into majority Russian areas of east Ukraine.

Putin doesn't want a war, but he'll absorb as many Russians outside Russia's current borders as he can without a big fight. That's Putin's strategic objective and it would do well to remember it in order to interpret his actions. He (and most Russians) doesn’t want to be like "us" and it's pretty chauvinistic to presume that they should. Seeing what blowhard self-referential pretentious busybodies “we” are these days I can't say I blame them.