The New Cold War is Boiling Over Syria - Dimitri Trenin

The New Cold War is Boiling Over Syria

Dmitri Trenin

Director
Moscow Center

António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, recently said the Cold War was back with a vengeance but also with a difference. This is correct but belatedly so. The new confrontation between Russia and the United States started already in 2014 and has been intensifying ever since, culminating in Friday evening’s U.S.-led strikes on Syria, which the Trump administration blamed on the Syrian government and its Russian allies and vowed to sustain indefinitely, if it deemed necessary. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded, in turn, that the attacks were an “act of aggression” that would “have a destructive effect on the entire system of international relations.”

Dmitri Trenin

Director
Moscow Center

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@DMITRITRENIN

The new confrontation between Russia and the United States has thus reached its first “missile crisis” moment. The way it is handled — whether it produces a direct military collision between the armed forces of the United States and Russia — will matter gravely for the entire world.

The original Cold War was very different from today’s confrontation between Washington and Moscow. There is no longer symmetry, balance, or respect between the parties. There is also no heightened fear of a nuclear Armageddon, which has the paradoxical effect of making it far easier to slide beyond the point of no return.

Taking on Russia, for many in the West, has become a continuation of the war on terror, with Putin cast in the role of Saddam Hussein. Thus, unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is dealt with as a rogue state. In this very unequal contest, the United States has essentially excluded the possibility of a strategic compromise with its unworthy adversary: For U.S. leaders, to compromise with Russia means to compromise oneself. This raises the stakes for the Kremlin to the absolute maximum.

Professional military and national security officials in the United States probably realize the dangers of the situation far better than politicians and public opinion leaders. In Syria, deconfliction between U.S. and Russian military forces has worked rather successfully. The chief of the Russian General Staff has had regular contacts, including face-to-face meetings, with the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, and is about to meet with NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe. At the beginning of the year, the heads of Russia’s principal intelligence agencies — the Federal Security Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and the Main Intelligence Directorate — made an unprecedented joint visit to the United States.

In the atmosphere of rampant hysteria and bluster, these channels of communication look much more solid than the famous back channel in Washington between Robert Kennedy and a Russian intelligence operative that served to relay messages between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Yet, unlike in the original Cold War, which was mostly a war by proxy, the new confrontation is a more direct engagement. In the fields of information, economics and finance, politics, and the cyberdomain, the U.S.-Russian fight is already direct. In the military sphere, Russia and the United States are for the first time since World War II fighting in the same country, but now their goals and strategies are vastly different, if not opposed to each other. The military leaders on both sides can do much to avoid incidents, but making policy is above their pay grade.

What has just played out is the least bad scenario: a series of U.S. and allied strikes that are largely symbolic, targeting some Syrian military facilities but sparing the main command and control centers and avoiding any potential Russian targets — not just Russian bases or forces but the Russian personnel and civilians who are widely spread throughout the Syrian military and government infrastructure. Such an attack would send the Russian-Western relationship to a new low point and lead to even more recrimination, sanctions, and countersanctions, but it would not endanger peace.

The worst scenario, by contrast, would do precisely that. Many people may have missed the warning by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, who, a few weeks before the alleged chemical attack in Douma, painted exactly the scenario of a staged chemical attack in the then-rebel-held enclave, which in his scenario would have served as a pretext for massive U.S. strikes against the Syrian leadership in Damascus. Should Russians be targeted in such an attack, Gerasimov said, the Russian military in the region would respond by intercepting the incoming missiles and firing at the platforms from which they were launched.

Some commentators have since dismissed these warnings as bluff. They point to Russia’s clear inferiority in advanced conventional weapons in comparison with the United States. Should the Russians try to implement what Gerasimov has outlined, the argument goes, their entire military contingent in Syria would be wiped out in minutes, and Moscow would have to accept a humiliating defeat, which might as well be the end of its ill-conceived challenge to America’s dominant might. Perhaps. But there is a chance that the regional conflict may not stop there and instead escalate to a wholly different level.

Even if the current standoff in Syria does not lead to the worst-case scenario becoming a reality, the U.S.-Russian situation will remain not only dire but essentially hopeless for the indefinite future. America’s approach toward Russia will likely consist of a methodical mounting of pressure on it in multiple domains — in anticipation that, at some point, the pressure will become unbearable for Moscow. The Kremlin, for its part, is adamant that it will not surrender, knowing that the adversary will be merciless even after its victory.

The outcome, for now, is wide open. What’s clear is that periodic tests of will and resolve will continue to lead to international crises, whether in Syria, Ukraine, or elsewhere. Policymakers need to learn from their military subordinates: They should keep their heads cool and think of the consequences of their actions, both intended and unintended. Allowing the new U.S.-Russian global confrontation to run its course is much preferable to a sudden head-on crash.

This op-ed was originally published in the Foreign Policy

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O mundo de Fukuyama e os tropecos da Historia, na Ucrania, na Russia - Ross Douthat

 

The New york times, FEBRUARY 24, 2014, 1:28 PM 

Huntington’s Conflicts, Fukuyama’s World

My Sunday column, on Russian grand strategy and Ukrainian turmoil, doubles as the latest installment in my semi-recurring series dedicated to the idea that ours is still essentially a Francis Fukuyaman world — that is, a world in which the West’s combination of liberal cosmopolitanism and democratic capitalism has no ideological rivals worthy of the name. To elaborate a little on that theme and its significance, let me quote from a Walter Russell Mead essay that ran in the Journal late last week, under the Fukuyama-invoking headline “Putin Knows History Hasn’t Ended”:

… this episode is confirmation that the problem that has haunted Western statesmanship since 1989 is still with us. Both President Obama and the many-headed collection of committees that constitutes the decision-making apparatus of the EU believe that the end of the Cold War meant an end to geopolitics.

….This is not so much an intellectual error as a political miscalculation. For American and European policy makers, the 1989 geopolitical settlement of the Cold War seemed both desirable and irreversible. Powers like Russia, China and Iran, who might be dissatisfied with either the boundaries or the legal and moral norms that characterized the post-Cold War world, lacked the power to do anything about it. This outlook is Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” on steroids: Humanity had not only discovered the forms of government and economic organization under which it would proceed from here on out, it had found the national boundaries and the hierarchy of states that would last indefinitely.

There are many things that Vladimir Putin doesn’t understand, but geopolitics isn’t one of them. His ability to identify and exploit the difference between the West’s rhetoric and its capabilities and intentions has allowed him to stop NATO expansion, split Georgia, subject Washington to serial humiliations in Syria and, now, to bring chaos to Ukraine.

Mr. Putin is a master of a game that the West doesn’t want to play, and as a result he’s won game after game with weak cards. He cannot use smoke and mirrors to elevate Russia back into superpower rank, and bringing a peaceful Ukraine back into the Kremlin’s tight embrace is also probably beyond him … But as long as the West, beguiled by dreams of win-win solutions, fails to grapple effectively in the muddy, zero-sum world of classic geopolitics, Mr. Putin and his fellow revisionists in Beijing and Tehran will continue to wreak havoc with Western designs.

Though this analysis may give Putin’s Ukrainian strategems a little too much credit (he’s not exactly winning this crisis so far), I think it has a lot of merit. Nobody would look at the last decade and a half in U.S. foreign policy and say that we’ve played the great game particularly well, and a naive Fukayama-on-steroids view of post-Cold War geopolitics has arguably been a problem under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama — taking the form of an overestimation of American military power in Bush’s case, and an overestimation of the influence of global norms and institutions in Obama’s.

But perhaps the issue isn’t just that our policymakers have overread their Fukuyama. Maybe it’s that in an essentially Fukuyaman world, where liberal democracy has few intellectually-credible challengers, the stakes of geopolitics are considerably lower than they used to be …. and so our policymakers drift into a kind of laziness that empowers figures like Putin on the margins … but only on the margins, so our laziness is never really fully punished, and so it perdures. In other words, we keep getting outmaneuvered by authoritarian regimes because in a world where the liberal-democratic world has the only attractive model going, the stakes are much higher for illiberal governments than they are for us: They have to be successful in their gambits, because they have so much more to lose, whereas we can afford drift and error, because our underlying mastery is unlikely to be challenged.

Thus, for instance, has Western strategy toward the Russian near-abroad been particularly wise or well-conceived? I would say not: From Georgia to Ukraine, the U.S. and the E.U. and NATO have made repeated efforts to draw former Soviet satellites into the West’s orbit without reckoning fully with potential Russian countermoves, and without being prepared to make the kind of commitment that would be required to fully back our would-be allies and clients in those regions. (And to be clear, I think making that kind of commitment — a military guarantee to Tbilisi, for instance — would be a reckless mistake.)

But at the same time, from the West’s perspective, the stakes in these disputes are relatively low. The struggle for influence is taking place on Russia’s very doorstep, and there’s no real possibility that a Putinist victory in Kiev or the Caucasus would inspire copycat right-wing movements to seize power in, say, Italy or France or Germany, the way Communist movements nearly did in the early 20th century. A true “new Cold War” scenario, in other words, remains entirely fanciful — which means, in turn, that no matter how many hands Putin wins with weak cards we’ll still be playing with house money.

You can tell a similar story about a lot of the places where lesser powers have frustrated American policymakers in the last decade — the Iranians in Iraq, Pakistan (or various Pakistani factions) in Afghanistan, Assad and Putin recently in Syria. We make a botch of things, they outmaneuver us, the world becomes marginally more dangerous and our influence marginally declines … but at the end of the day they’re still tinpot thugs presiding over basket-case economies with the mob always potentially at their throat, and there’s still no equivalent of the Comintern or the Axis (or the Holy Alliance, further back) in sight.

Or to put it yet another way … there’s a sense in which Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, touted as an alternative to Fukayama’s liberal triumphalism, has been vindicated by geopolitical events: There really are major civilizational faultlines in the post-Cold War world, and crises keep irrupting along the rough borders that Huntington sketched — where what he called the “Orthodox” world overlaps with the West (the Balkans, the Ukraine), along Islam’s so-called “bloody borders” (from central Africa to Central Asia), in Latin American resistance (in Venezuela’s Chavismo, Bolivia’s ethno-socialism, and the like) to North American-style neoliberalism, and to a lesser extent in the long-simmering Sino-Japanese tensions in North Asia.

But at the same time, Huntington’s partial vindication hasn’t actually disproven Fukuyama’s point, because all of these conflicts are still taking place in the shadow of a kind of liberal hegemony, and none them have the kind of global relevance or ideological import that the conflicts of the 19th and 20th century did. Radical Islam is essentially an anti-modern protest, not a real alternative … China’s meritocratic-authoritarian model has a long way to go to prove itself as anything except a repressive Sino-specific kludge … Chavismo and similar experiments struggle to maintain even domestic legitimacy … and what Huntington called the Western model is still the only real aspiring world-civilization, with enemies aplenty, yes, but also influence and admirers in every corner of the globe.

None of this means that geopolitics somehow doesn’t matter anymore, or that events from the Iraq War to the current Ukrainian troubles are just minor detours on a march to an inevitable destination. Liberal democracy’s current status as the only ideological game in town need not prove permanent, tensions still abound within the liberal project, and one can buy the “end of history” thesis as a description of our era without believing that it represents an actual definitive End.

But where the challenges we’re facing right now are concerned, from Kiev to Caracas, the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the context in which geopolitical maneuvering takes place still leaves our would-be rivals at a permanent ideological disadvantage, which even the wiliness of Vladimir Putin is unlikely to soon overcome.

USA and the Syria question: much ado (from Obama) about nothing - Max Fisher (WP)

Why Obama’s big U.N. speech on Syria was so awkwardly inconsistent

By Max Fisher, The Washington Post Blog: September 24, 2013

In his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Obama did his best to rally the organization to action on Syria. His case was forceful but, at moments, the logic seemed strained, even contradictory. And it was all made a bit awkward by the fact that Obama's urgent call to action came more than two years into the war, after two far milder U.N. addresses.

There were two contradictions in Obama's comments to the United Nations on Syria. The first was with the Obama of General Assemblies past, who espoused a very different view of the war and how to handle it. Previously, Obama had not advocated any of the military and diplomatic actions that, today, he declared so vital that failing to pursue them could undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations itself. The second contradiction was in Obama's two goals in Syria – punishing Assad for his chemical weapons and ending the war – which he framed as complimentary even though they would appear to work at cross-purposes.

This gets to the bigger, underlying contradiction: Obama has a habit of conflating his case for punishing chemical weapons use with his case for ending the war, and says we can do both at the same time. But he advocates contradictory actions in pursuit of those two goals.

To be clear, this is not to argue that Obama is hypocritical or somehow dishonest. But he's got a very tough needle to thread: he's trying to rally an action-resistant United Nations into very difficult and unpopular action; he's also trying to push it toward two very different forms of action. Those are really difficult goals. That Obama is back-bending through some less-than-consistent rhetoric is a sign of just how difficult.

Still, the shift in Obama's position is revealing. Just one year ago, in his United Nations General Assembly speech, Obama said of Syria only that "we must stand with those Syrians who believe in a different vision." The war, at that point, was already horrifically violent; President Bashar al-Assad's forces had not used chemical weapons but they had committed plenty of the slaughter that Obama cited today as cause for action. Yet, in his previous addresses, he'd made no call for action, no declaration that the "legitimacy" of the U.N. was on the line, as he argued today.

If the United Nations Security Council failed to pass a sufficiently tough resolution to force Assad to give up his chemical weapons, Obama warned, "then it will show that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing the most basic of international laws." Those are pretty high stakes, after two years of relative U.S. inaction on Syria, despite tens of thousands killed. Obama's prior U.N. addresses since the war began, in 2011 and 2012, somewhat undermined his big call to action today. In those two speeches, he did not demand U.N. action – nor pledge any concrete U.S. steps.

You could argue that Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 changed all that, justifying Obama's radically different approach. But Obama, in making his case for action today, cited not just chemical weapons growing sectarianism, the danger of regional destabilization, extremism and the larger human costs of the war. Those were all present a year ago. And Obama argued for specific action not just to end chemical weapons but to end the war itself – which did not seem to merit the same sort of response for him last year.

On paper, Obama's two overriding goals in Syria are actually pretty straightforward. First, he wants to uphold the international norm against the use of chemical weapons, which he believes Assad violated by using chemical weapons against civilians on Aug 21. Second, he wants for Assad to step down voluntarily as part of a negotiated peace deal with the rebels that would also leave elements of Assad's government intact.

The problem comes when Obama explains how to achieve those goals. He told the United Nations today that the threat of force could compel Assad to give up his chemical weapons, but that actual military force could not end the war. He argued, on the one hand, "I do not believe that military action by those within Syria or by external powers can achieve a lasting peace." On the other, he said that only the threat of military strikes had compelled Assad to accept the chemical weapons deal.

One might reasonably conclude, taking Obama's arguments at face value, that the world would have to pursue these goals separately. At one point, it would have to pick: threaten and maybe use force to get rid of the chemical weapons, or instead of force pursue a diplomatic peace deal.

The problem, though, is that Obama has linked his two pursuit, saying that the one complements the other. "Our agreement on chemical weapons should energize a larger diplomatic effort to reach a political settlement within Syria," he said. That's a bit of a contradiction: military force would undermine a peace deal, but it would force Assad to give up his chemical weapons and thus "energize" a peace deal.

How do you square that circle? Some hawkish analysts argue that Obama should use a credible threat of military action, or military action itself, to compel Assad to the negotiating table, just as that action compelled Assad to volunteer his chemical weapons. More dovish analysts would say that strikes should be off the table in both cases. Others might suggest that the goal of ending the war is simply out of Obama's reach and that, if he were brutally honest, he would drop it from his speeches. Those are all reasonable and internally consistent cases. But perhaps they're not what Obama believes can sell at the United Nations this year.

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger. He has a master's degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University. Sign up for his daily newsletter here. Also, follow him on Twitter orFacebook.

Nossos aliados no Brics: sobre Siria e Assange-Equador

O ministro Lavrov sempre foi, é um dos melhores amigos dos amigos dos amigos, se é que vocês me entendem, todos companheiros unidos numa mesma causa, em prol da soberania, do respeito à lei, da não intervenção nos assuntos internos dos outros Estados e essas outras coisas antigas, mas ainda válidas. Sua fala, abaixo transcrita, é de um realismo impressionante, o que só testemunha em favor de sua coerência lúcida e de sua adequação aos princípios consagrados do direito internacional, sem falar da lógica e do interesse próprio.
Como é que o regime sírio vai deixar de massacrar seus opositores, se estes pretendem massacrar o regime sírio, a começar por Assad e seus asseclas? Seria pedir que eles cometessem suicídio certo?
Por isso que Brasil e Rússia estão certos, desse ponto de vista: enquanto todas as partes não cessarem suas hostilidades, é irrealista pedir que apenas uma das partes renuncie à violência. Lógico, pois não?
Portanto, Assad está plenamente certo em continuar a destruir tranquilamente seu país, bombardeando bairros e cidades inteiras, lançando ataques aéreos contra seus opositores, enfim, massacrando alegremente aqueles que não concordam em que ele seja o único presidente legítimo da Síria. Quem não concorda com isso, não pode dialogar com o governo, certo?
O problema desses ocidentais é que eles não respeitam os direitos legítimos dos Estados soberanos, e ficam perturbando o cenários com demandas ilegítimas e ilegais relativas a democracia, direitos humanos e essas coisas incômodas. O Brasil está certo em defender a soberania dos Estados, e impedir a derrubada de governos legítimos pela força. O governo está certo ao se alinhar com a Rússia e a China no veto a essas medidas propostas no CSNU pelos ocidentais de intervenção nos assuntos internos da Síria. Onde iríamos parar, se isso fosse autorizado?
Quanto ao Equador, acho que o ministro Lavrov está ligeiramente equivocado: o que os bolcheviques fizeram foi justamente invadir o Palácio de Inverno, contra a lei e o direito. O ministro Lavrov está condenando agora os bolcheviques? Que gracinha...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

UN Security Council has no authority to support revolution in Syria – Lavrov

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Published: 01 September, 2012, 10:51
Edited: 01 September, 2012, 17:03

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (RIA Novosti/Eduard Pesov)

The UN Security Council has no right to support a revolution or foreign intervention in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned. Any plan to withdraw government troops while fighting continues is untenable, and naïve at best, he added.

The demand for President Bashar al-Assad to resign as a precondition to resolving the Syrian crisis is a completely unrealistic approach, Lavrov said during a public appearance at the Moscow State University of Foreign Affairs.

“There are different attitudes towards the Syrian regime. But while fighting in the streets continues, it is absolutely unrealistic to say that the only way out is for one side to unilaterally capitulate. It is not a matter of ideology, we don’t support any political figures in Syria. We just reason from what is realistic,” Lavrov said to the students of the diplomatic university.

Harking back to the summit in Geneva in June, Lavrov noted that despite differing opinions on the conflict, all the participating countries agreed to work for a “free, stable, independent and democratic”Syria. However, “our western partners and some nations in the region are almost openly pushing for outside intervention,” said Lavrov.

“Outside intervention should be positive. Every international player should push for both sides of the Syrian conflict to cease violence,” stressed Lavrov. “Saying that the government should be the first to pull out its troops from towns and then the opposition is not a viable plan.”

The Russian foreign minister added that those foreign players who insist on inciting the opposition forces “are not working in the interests of the Syrian people. They are motivated by their own geopolitical interests.”

Lavrov cited the fact the Security Council dismissed a vote on the Geneva accord as evidence that a number of countries were not working for the Syrian people.

Ecuador, Assange’s rights must be respected

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s rights as a political refugee must be respected, Lavrov said, adding that under international law, it would be illegal for UK police to storm the Ecuadorian embassy.

“As long as he is inside Ecuadorian territory, I think no one will try any rash actions, and the rights of the refugee [Assange] must be respected. No one can challenge the judicial process. But when the Ecuadorian embassy is threatened with being stormed, just like the Winter Palace was, I think it’s a little outside the rule of law,” Lavrov said in his talk to the students, alluding to the Bolshevik storming of the Winter Palace during Russia's 1917 revolution.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London since June. The whistleblower is currently in the center of an international stalemate insofar as Ecuador has granted him asylum but the UK has pledged to arrest him if he sets foot outside the building. 

Assange estimates that he could potentially get out of the Ecuadorian embassy in a year’s time if Sweden drops the extradition order against him. The 41-year-old Australian is wanted for questioning over charges of sexual assault and rape in Sweden.

Assange has said that if Sweden drops the extradition order against him he could potentially leave the embassy in a year’s time. The 41-year-old Australian is wanted for questioning over charges of sexual assault and rape in Sweden.

Commenting on the WikLeaks whistleblowing scandal that precipitated Assange’s asylum request, Lavrov said that the information in the WikiLeaks cables “brought to light how governments relate to their partners, and what they think of them.” The document dump hadn’t harmed or threatened the safety of any particular government, he said.

“It was curious,” Lavrov said. “But nothing more. Many of our impressions were simply confirmed.”