Friends,
The following is, to my mind, a brilliant strategy on the part of the powerful Carnegie Corporation. They are getting involved in the rapidly escalating war in Ukraine. They have given cover for 25 major academic specialists in the international relations to speak out individually and collectively on American foreign policy vis a vis Ukraine and Russia.
These 25 have an opportunity to present their views to the American public––and to the White House. Most likely on their own, they wouldn't have been able to get attention or to be printed in US mainstream media––but as a group effort, Carnegie can't be ignored. As stand-alone academics, if they stated views different from the accepted government point of view, they could have been ostracized for opinions "outside the box" …. or worse, concerned about their coveted positions at major universities.
Read first Carnegie's intro piece which follows, then if you have time scan the first four articles submitted. The slants are somewhat different, but all contend that a different policy toward Russia is critical––which hopefully will be a signal to the Obama administration.
Sharon
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rebuilding US-Russia Relations
http://perspectives.carnegie.org/us-russia
August 2014
Introduction
United States and Russia: A Relationship to Manage
By Deana Arsenian, Vice President, International Program and Program Director, Russia and Eurasia, Carnegie Corporation of New York
For those of us with longstanding interest in U.S.-Russia relations, the current state of affairs is as distressing as it is alarming. By all accounts, this critical relationship has reached a point of rupture. What led to it can be endlessly debated by policy officials, experts, the media, and the public in both countries and beyond. And, indeed, it is, with varying perspectives on what led to the present situation and what should be done about it.
In the United States, much of the discourse is centered on how to push back against Russia and President Vladimir Putin in light of what is happening in Ukraine. The answers that are offered react to Russia's actions in Ukraine, but they also stem from a set of narratives about Russia's domestic trajectory, foreign policy objectives, and Putin's personality.
The dominant U.S. narratives tend to stress the anti-democratic features of Russian politics, Vladimir Putin's heavy-handed leadership, and aggressive foreign policy. The picture drawn has harshened during the Ukrainian crisis. The narratives point to a Russia that stands apart from the international community and to a president who cares little about this isolation and its political, security, and economic ramifications for his country.
Because prevailing narratives impact foreign policies, it is imperative to get the basic narratives right and subject them to continued scrutiny. The dire consequences of an escalation of conflict between the U.S. and its allies and Russia call for a debate in the U.S. that examines the basic assumptions that shape our ideas about, and policies toward, Russia. It is no less important that Russians examine the assumptions that underlie their views about the West. But that task is largely up to them.
As a foundation with an historical commitment to improving the U.S. ability to understand Russia and interpret its policies, and to fostering dialogue with Russia experts in the think tank and the academic communities, Carnegie Corporation of New York asked a group of specialists to address some critical questions regarding Russia and, given the centrality of Ukraine to the current state of affairs, Russia's policy toward Ukraine.
The questions are formulated to highlight what should be discussed and debated, but is often neglected in the quest for explanations:
* Are dominant U.S. narratives about Russia and Putin accurate, sufficient, and useful for guiding policy toward Russia?
* What are Putin's objectives toward Ukraine and other post-Soviet states?
* What interests and assumptions are driving Russia's policies toward the region?
* Are there ideas that would help end the crisis that have been obscured by a hardening of attitudes in Russia and the U.S.?
In the spirit of Carnegie Corporation's mission to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding, the perspectives offered on this site aim to shed light on issues that are likely to significantly impact the state of international relations for the foreseeable future.
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Participating Organizations
* Brookings Institution-Steven Pifer
* Carnegie Endowment for International Peace-Andrew S. Weiss
* Carnegie Endowment for International Peace-Eugene Rumer
* Center for the National Interest-Paul Saunders
* Center for Strategic and International Studies-Jeffrey Mankoff
* City College of New York, CUNY-Rajan Menon
* CNA Corporation-Dmitry Gorenburg
* Columbia University-Timothy Frye
* Emory University-Thomas F. Remington
* Financial Services Volunteer Corps-J. Andrew Spindler
* George Washington University-Henry E. Hale
* Harvard University-Dmitry Gorenburg
* Harvard University-Mark Kramer
* Harvard University-Sergei Konoplyov
* Johns Hopkins University-Robert Hunter
* Kissinger Associates-Thomas Graham
* Monterey Institute of International Studies-William Potter
* The National Academies-Glenn Schweitzer
* Stanford University-Siegfried S. Hecker & Peter E. Davis
* University of Michigan-William Zimmerman
* University of Maryland-John Steinbruner
* University of California, Los Angeles-Daniel Treisman
* U.S. Naval War College-Nikolas K. Gvosdev
* Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars-Matthew Rojansky
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(I sent Tom Graham's article a couple of days ago, not realizing it was part of Carnegie Corps' group.)
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rebuilding US-Russia Relations
http://perspectives.carnegie.org/us-russia
August 2014
A Russia Problem, Not a Putin Problem
By Thomas Graham, Kissinger Associates
The Ukraine crisis has put an end to 25 years of U.S.-Russia relations. The swiftness with which they collapsed, and the absence of any influential forces in either country actively working for their repair, is evidence of how much pretension and frustration had infused relations in recent years. It also suggests a deep-seated anti-American bias in the Russian elite, mirroring a Russophobia of comparable depth on the American side.
It may remain true that there is much the two countries could do together, on WMD nonproliferation, counterterrorism, regional balances, energy security, and climate change, among other things, that would advance the interests of each country and benefit the world as a whole, particularly over the long term. But shared interests will not be enough to bring the two countries together again. For the problem in relations is grounded in each country's sense of itself and its role in the world-in the American belief that it should be the global leader and in Russia's conviction that it should be a major independent actor. That reality creates major obstacles to cooperation even on shared interests.
Under these circumstances, there can be no new reset in relations. Seeking to repair them by returning to an earlier set of assumptions about them is a dead end. Those assumptions no longer hold. Rather, relations need to be rethought in light of the realities in both countries, including the huge divide in worldviews.
The first step in rethinking relations on the American side will require that we ask some fundamental questions, such as:
How important is Putin?
He is the dominant figure in Russia today, and he makes the final decisions on foreign policy. But we need to remember that he operates in a political context and does not have a free hand, as he must balance the competing factions around him to maintain his own position. Moreover, he is a product of the Russian elite, and he gives voice to its consensus on Russia's role in the world, which has deep roots in history and strategic tradition. His departure might lead to a change in style, but it will have little impact on the substance of Russian foreign policy. In short, we have a Russia problem, not a Putin problem.
How does the Russian elite think about world affairs?
Russian strategic thinking falls within the broad outlines of the realist school: Sovereign states are the central actors in world affairs; competition among states is inevitable; power, especially the hard variety, is the coin of the realm; and the goal of foreign policy is to create the optimal geopolitical balance for advancing one's interests. In such a world, only the great powers have the wherewithal to pursue genuinely independent policies; they are the few countries that determine the substance and structure of world affairs. Russian pride dictates that Russia must do all it can to sustain itself as a great power. The first task is guaranteeing Russian security.
What are the essential requirements of Russian security?
First, modern Russia has seen its security as dependent on creating strategic depth, as it emerged on the almost featureless great Eurasian plain. To that end, it has pushed its frontiers outward until it met the resistance of well-organized and powerful states. Over centuries, this dialectic of expansion and resistance came to define Russia's geopolitical zone of interest as the heart of Eurasia, which encompasses all of the former Soviet space (and most of the former Russian imperial space minus Finland and Poland). Today's Russia believes that Russian primacy in-not necessarily control of-this region is vital to its own security. Ukraine is critical in this regard, since it creates strategic depth against potential aggression from the West; in particular, it precludes Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO and bringing that organization's infrastructure within a few hundred miles of Moscow.
Second, the choice that faces countries in this region is not Russian domination or genuine independence; it is a choice among great powers vying for influence over them. Russians tirelessly point out that today's Ukraine is composed of disparate territories that were only united under Soviet rule. In their minds, much the same could be said of all the other former Soviet states, which assumed their current form in the Soviet period and most of which had no substantial history of independent statehood before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Such states can never be fully sovereign. If they are not in Russia's orbit, they will inevitably fall into that of another great power. As a matter of its own security, Moscow will always seek to limit the presence of other powers in the former Soviet space.
Third, Russian territorial ambitions beyond its traditional geopolitical zone have been quite limited historically. In this regard, the Soviet period stands out as an anomaly, born of the unique conditions of the mid to late 20th century: the power vacuum in the center of Europe created by the total collapse of Nazi Germany and the subsequent bitter ideological divide and revolutionary upheaval that produced a global competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. Those conditions no longer prevail, and Russia has reverted to its historical policy of creating a suitable balance of power on the European continent that takes into account the interests of the other great European powers.
Is an ideological divide emerging?
Since he returned to the Kremlin in May 2012, Putin has advocated a form of Russian nationalism that sets itself against the West. But his anti-Westernism does not mark an absolute rejection of the West and its values; it does not mark a return to the existential Cold-War struggle between two political systems with diametrically opposed views of human character and the relationship between state and society. Rather, Putin has positioned himself as the defender of traditional Western values against their post-modern, and he would argue decadent, interpretation in much of the West today. In his mind, he is not seeking to export Russia's values, as the Soviet Union did, but rather to rally other societies that also oppose the West's interpretation of certain values to create an international system that is more representative of the differences within a shared value system.
Despite much overblown rhetoric in Washington, Russia in fact poses a limited challenge to the United States. The appropriate response is not to return to the Cold War. But neither is it to speak of a return to cooperation if Russia realizes the errors of its ways and begins to conduct itself in a way the West finds more compatible. Rather, we need to abandon hopes of transforming Russia and acknowledge that it is one of many major powers in the world today. In dealing with Russia, we need to think in terms of competition and accommodation, that is, of great power diplomacy, refashioned to take account of the differences between today's world and the last period of great power diplomacy in the 19th century. We might also remind ourselves, that period was one of relative peace and security, of prosperity and progress.
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Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rebuilding US-Russia Relations
http://perspectives.carnegie.org/us-russia
August 2014
Nationalism and the Logic of Russian Actions in Ukraine
By Henry E. Hale, George Washington University
It is not very productive to interpret the current international situation as a new Cold War or to see Russia's Vladimir Putin as a Russian Hitler bent on reconstituting the USSR at all costs.
The Cold War was driven in substantial part by competing ideologies of world scope. Putin does not aim to take over Europe, much less the world, and has no ideology like communism that portends to global dominance.
Commentators often now refer to Putin as a "nationalist" leader and, to be sure, he is currently riding high on a surge of nationalist sentiment following the annexation of Crimea. These interpretations, however, are often overly simplistic and misunderstand major features of Russian nationalism.
Perhaps most importantly, there are different types of Russian nationalism and these types do not always fit together comfortably.
One type defines Russian very broadly to include all of the peoples and religious groups that have traditionally lived in the territory of the former USSR or before that the Russian Empire. The key call of these nationalists is to reintegrate the territory of the former USSR.
A second type of nationalism is a much more exclusive and even racist ethnic Russian nationalism, one committed to a pure Russia free of "polluting" peoples of other ethnicities, or at least those who are not Slavic. The key call of these nationalists is to prevent immigration of unwanted groups and, for some, to bring Russians or Slavs "stranded" abroad back into the Russian state's domain.
Both forms of nationalism have substantial support in Russia, but they are in deep tension with each other. The nationalism of restoring the USSR would mean bringing into Russia and its major cities many of the very people whom the ethnic nationalists want to kick out, especially Islamic non-Slavs from former Soviet countries like Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Moreover, some of the ethnic nationalists would even prefer a smaller, purer Russia to a larger more diverse one-for example, a Russia without the Islamic parts of the troubled North Caucasus region-a vision once famously articulated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Crimea hits the "sweet spot" for Russian nationalism: a territory with an ethnic Russian majority that would not integrate many unwanted non-Russians into the Russian Federation. Beyond this, territorial expansion starts to become more complicated politically for Putin, potentially inflaming ethnically exclusive Russian nationalists. Unrest in recent years has shown the latter can to take to the streets in substantial numbers, often violently.
While Putin has not advocated reconquering former Soviet territory and in fact has said that anyone who wants to restore the USSR "has no brain," Putin has generally been closer to the first, more inclusive brand of nationalism than the second, ethnically exclusive sort.
Some have examined Putin's language (especially in his speech after the Crimea annexation in March 2014) and concluded that he has switched to the more ethnically exclusive variety, noting his calls to serve Russians by using the term "russkie" instead of the more inclusive term "rossiiskie" to refer to them. This shift in rhetoric should not be overblown. Even the term "russkie" can be used in an inclusive sense. A March 2013 survey organized by the University of Oslo's NEORUSS project thus found that when people used the term "russkie" (as in "Russia for the Russians"), only 39 percent actually meant just ethnic Russians. Another 30 percent had in mind certain other groups when using the term, and 25 percent interpreted it to refer to all citizens of the Russian Federation regardless of ethnicity. Putin is trying to walk the tightrope between Russia's two forms of nationalism, hoping he does not have to pick a side.
Mainstream Russian nationalism is also often misunderstood as being anti-European. Marlene Laruelle's research, among that of others, has shown that this is simply not the case. Putin reflects major strains of nationalism in which Russians see themselves as being part of Europe, just having a different vision as to what Europe is and represents, and what place Russia has in it.
In light of all this, Putin's actions in Ukraine are best understood through the lens of his domestic political considerations. Russia is not a simple dictatorship in which whatever he says goes, no matter what. Stability there depends heavily on public support for the leadership. (My new book, Patronal Politics, will make this case in detail when it appears in early October.) The USSR and eastern Central Europe show that control over media cannot by itself generate support for a regime.
This is why events in Ukraine posed such a danger to Putin. With his regime's popular support dropping since the 2008-09 global financial crisis, massive protests erupted in Moscow in late 2011 that he and his associates clearly perceived as a major threat to their political survival. They regrouped, found new bases of support, and went on the offensive against protest leaders. The protests faded. But suddenly, demonstrators in next-door Ukraine succeeded in toppling a leader openly backed by Putin, opening up the possibility that Russia's own protest movement could be revived. And there was also the possibility that Putin could lose the faith of his current supporters by appearing helpless to protect his ally, not to mention Russian-oriented populations in Ukraine's East who feared the revolution would not serve their interests. All this could have served as fodder for challenges from both the liberal and nationalist segments of society.
Putin's move in Crimea and the subsequent efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine can be seen as an attempt to overturn the chess board when the arrangement of pieces is no longer favorable, forcing a new game with different rules. By hitting the nationalist sweet spot described above with Crimea, and being fortunate in that it was pulled off largely without bloodshed, Putin benefited from a powerful rally-around-the-flag effect. That, and the destabilization of the rest of Ukraine, also nicely fit a narrative Putin has long been weaving that revolutions -and protests that might develop into them-are fraught with the danger of state failure and territorial dismemberment. These are messages that serve him well at home, at least, for now.
Nationalist surges and rally-around-the-flag effects do not last forever. Putin is currently in a very dangerous situation that could lead him in any number of directions. Failure to move further in expanding Russian territory will disappoint some nationalists who now support him their full-throated support. But actually attempting to bring unwilling populations under Russian control by force will cause other problems, including unrest within newly occupied territories and dissatisfaction at home among those who want an ethnically purer Russia. Even in Russia's North Caucasus, it cannot fully control its own territory and stamp out a stubborn insurgency.
None of this provides a clear recipe for what the international community should do moving forward. The annexation of the territory of an unwilling state does threaten to create a troubling new precedent that must be resisted and that cannot be allowed to pass without cost to the violator. But we must understand how Russian politics and Russian nationalism actually work before we can confidently recommend courses of action that impose appropriate costs yet create incentives for future cooperation.
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Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rebuilding US-Russia Relations
http://perspectives.carnegie.org/us-russia
August 2014
A Moral and Strategic Calamity
By John Steinbruner, University of Maryland
The situation in Ukraine is a moral and strategic calamity that is especially ominous because it is unfolding in small increments that command attention and induce some response but remain short of an acknowledged crisis that might force decisive action. The metaphor of the boiling frog applies.
There is ample blame to be apportioned and fundamental revisions of attitude and behavior that will have to be achieved if longer-term disaster is to be avoided. And not all of the burden can be imposed on those who speak Russian. Everyone implicated needs to reconsider their own contribution, and that especially includes the United States. We are strongly implicated for reasons we are not currently admitting, and changes of policy here would be necessary if there is to be an acceptable outcome. We cannot indefinitely avoid our own burden.
The first step toward realistic and constructive engagement is to accept that the current campaign of shaming and sanctioning is not likely to succeed and is very likely to backfire. Given their domestic political popularity, those actions are immediately unavoidable, but that fact is a good part of the problem. The shaming campaign ignores legitimate grievances and attempts to impose rules of behavior that Russia can plausibly say we ourselves have cheerfully violated under roughly comparable circumstances. The imposition of sanctions defies the clear historical record regarding their effectiveness. Analytic studies of prior instances have repeatedly documented that economic sanctions have failed to achieve their stated objective.
The only generally acknowledged instance of success is the termination of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and in that case support of sanctions from an ascending internal constituency was critical to the outcome. The judgment emerging from the detailed study of past use of sanctions is that they do impose economic hardship but inspire resistance to external demands considered to be illegitimate. They also have perverse effects. They inflict harm on civilian populations that do not have direct responsibility for the actions being sanctioned or the realistic capacity to change those actions. Sanctions also create the equivalent of tariff protection for inefficient internal industries which form organized lobbies against the concessions that might lead to their removal. Even more ominously, sanctions fuel corruption associated with inevitable efforts to work around them. It is not in the long-term interest of the United States to try to isolate the Russian economy or to degrade its productive development. It is decisively against the interest of the United States to stimulate corruption. That is already a massive problem in Ukraine and not a trivial problem in Russia.
The more difficult but nonetheless ultimately essential step is to acknowledge our complicity in the background circumstances out of which the current conflict arises. As the Russian Federation emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, security policy in the United States was also driven by domestic politics and the institutional inertia of Cold War policies against quite evident longer-term strategic interest. We should have subordinated the legacy policies of deterrence and associated confrontation to apply the very effective policies of reassurance practiced among the members of our alliance system.
The Russian Federation emerged with the greatest inherent need for reassurance with a large border area that is highly exposed to local conflict and is not assuredly protected by the redeployed and decimated conventional force establishment they inherited. Had we extended full alliance reassurance initially to Russia, it would have been much less contentious and much more efficient to include its former allies as well. Instead the United States extended its basic policy of deterrent confrontation against Russia and intensified its relevant military capability by extending alliance membership exclusively to the Central European countries and by developing highly advanced tactical air capability. That evolved capability operating through the extended NATO basing structure poses a threat to Russia they could not realistically defend against. We adopted more accommodating political rhetoric and have denied hostile intent, but under circumstances of continuing mistrust and de facto confrontation that are actually more problematic to the Russian military establishment than was Cold War candor.
In his initial years in the Russian leadership, Vladimir Putin followed a policy of political accommodation and did not react to the eastward extension of NATO or to the repudiation of bilateral strategic stabilization embedded and symbolized, as far as Russia is concerned, in the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. He is now belatedly reacting and doing it very problematically, but he has underlying reasons that cannot be ignored. We should have learned by now that localized insurgencies are the most immediate source of threat and that they are very difficult to contain. Any difficulty of imagination should yield to even cursory examination of current circumstances in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza. Unmanageable insurgency in Ukraine would be far more dangerous strategically than it has so far been in those places. In particular it presents the danger of a confrontation between Russian ground force operations and NATO tactical air operations. With nuclear force operations in the immediate background, such a situation could result in a truly catastrophic failure of deterrence, which all along has depended on credible reassurance far more than political discourse has acknowledged.
In the heat of the moment, the requirements of constructive engagement are not currently visible or viable in American political dialogue. But the resulting question is how long it takes us to learn and how much grief we have to experience before we do.
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Carnegie Corporation of New York
Rebuilding US-Russia Relations
http://perspectives.carnegie.org/us-russia
August 2014
It's All About Ukraine
By Matthew Rojansky, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
If you tried to form an understanding of the current crisis in U.S.-Russia relations solely based on TV coverage, you would come away with the impression that the crisis basically began earlier this year when Russia invaded Ukraine, seized its territory, and started a war. You might further glean that Russia denies its real responsibility for the invasion, instead working through reckless and dangerous proxies who have done many despicable things, including shooting down a civilian airliner with almost 300 innocent people on board. In varying degrees, all of the foregoing is true, yet it omits one exceptionally important foundational detail-namely that this crisis has its origins in the dysfunction of Ukraine itself-a situation that is very far from resolution and that poses serious risks of deepening the conflict between Russia and the West in the near future.
The Ukrainian dimension of the story is essential for Americans to understand for two main reasons. First of all, it explains more than anything else the motivations of Mr. Putin for intervening in a neighboring country despite suffering great harm to Russia's regional and global standing, and of a large majority of Russians in supporting that intervention. Second, paying attention to what happens in Ukraine itself is key to forging an effective U.S. policy response to the immediate crisis, managing the deterioration in U.S.-Russia ties to prevent irrevocable damage, and laying the foundations for future success.
To understand why Putin and his fellow Russians feel compelled to intervene in Ukraine, you must understand that the crisis in that country began from the deep anger of all strata of Ukrainian society toward the corrupt, incompetent, and increasingly authoritarian regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych . Yanukovych, who had been elected in 2010 in a contest seen as free and fair by the international community, including the U.S., basically stole anything he could get his hands on in Ukraine, such that after four years of his misrule, economic growth and investment were obliterated, standards of living for ordinary Ukrainians were among the lowest in Europe, and the public lacked any confidence whatsoever in the country's courts, police, ministries, and all other governing institutions. Yanukovych's predecessors had hardly done better-each one was dogged by corruption scandals and appeared over matched by Ukraine's vast problems-but Yanukovych added fuel to his own fire by consistently lying to the Ukrainian people.
Yanukovych's biggest lie by far was his promise to deliver Ukraine into an Association Agreement with the European Union-not exactly EU membership, but a consolation prize that most Ukrainians thought would lead to major reform, economic opportunity, and rising standards of living. When in November 2013 Yanukovych made clear he did not intend to fulfill that promise, Ukrainians exploded onto the Maidan (Kiev's central square) in protest, and when that movement was met by the authorities with new repressive laws and bloody violence, the protestors transformed into revolutionaries determined to remove Yanukovych from power. By the end of February 2014, Yanukovych fled the country, leaving opposition politicians to pick up the pieces, which included Yanukovych's broken promise to pursue integration with the West.
From Putin's perspective, Yanukovych's failure to hold it together in Ukraine created an existential crisis for his own government in Russia. Superficial similarities aside (both were duly elected authoritarian-leaning leaders of East Slavic former Soviet states), Putin and Yanukovych could hardly have been more different and could hardly have disliked one another more. Yet if by violently deposing their president, Ukrainians managed to bring change that would improve their standard of living while shifting their country's geopolitical orientation toward the West, the implicit message to Russians would be deeply dangerous for Putin and his own "power vertical." In fact, Putin was already convinced since at least 2011 that the West-mainly the U.S.-was behind "color revolutions" in Georgia (2002), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), and that Russia was next on the list.
Of course, regime preservation is not the most compelling argument for the majority of Russians to support intervention in Ukraine. For them, it is a potent combination of empathy for the perceived suffering of Russian speakers in Ukraine (underscored by relentless slanted coverage on Russian TV), resurgent nationalism cultivated by skilled Kremlin-backed propagandists, and deep anger that the West continues to expand its sphere of influence around Russia through deceit and disrespect. Ironically, a half century of Cold War enmity followed by a quarter century of American triumphalism and indifference to their concerns has primed even ordinary Russians to accept their own government's manipulation of events in Ukraine, while dismissing the West's stated support for Ukrainians' sovereignty and security as mere artifice.
This brings us to how important an understanding of the situation in Ukraine is to forging a more effective U.S. policy response. U.S. policy priorities can be thought of in short, medium and long term dimensions. In the short term, there is an urgent need to de-escalate the violence in southeastern Ukraine and prevent further deterioration of the political and security situation in the country as a whole. Here it is important to recognize that even though Yanukovych has fled, and Ukrainians voted in a new president in May, the revolution is far from over. The very center of Kiev is still an armed encampment, with soot-faced "self-defense" units manning roadblocks on all the major thoroughfares, and heavily armed, camo-clad volunteers surrounding key government buildings. Most of these Maidan veterans are without jobs and many are far from their homes in other parts of Ukraine. Together with the volunteer paramilitary units now fighting alongside the regular army in the southeast, they represent the "hard place" against which the fledgling Ukrainian government may be smashed at any time by the "rock" of Russian aggression.
In the middle term, as the United States and Europe develop and implement a sanctions strategy designed to pressure the Russian leadership into changing course, they should be certain about the goal of the sanctions being contemplated. If it is to force a Russian defeat in southeast Ukraine, then it will probably backfire simply because an outright defeat would be unacceptable to Mr. Putin, as it would exacerbate precisely the catastrophic, regime-ending precedent he fears most. If on the other hand the goal is to compel Russia to help resolve the conflict through negotiation and compromise, as U.S. officials have stated, then it is essential to ensure that both the willingness and the capacity to agree to and implement such a compromise exists on the Russian as well as the Ukrainian side-which suggests the urgent need for dialogue in addition to threats and warnings. Western policymakers should also consider whether the effect of "isolating the Russian economy" through sanctions might be to underscore most Russians' confidence in the Kremlin's paranoid anti-Western propaganda rather than weaken it. Even if it has decided to shelve the political relationship, Washington should tread carefully to avoid damaging the handful of vital institutions that underpin U.S.-Russia economic, scientific, cultural, intellectual, and social engagement, as these will be essential to weathering this crisis and restoring productive partnership in the future.
Finally, distinct from merely checking Russian moves in Ukraine, Ukraine's successful post-revolutionary development over the long term should be a strategic priority for the United States, since that success will strengthen U.S. power and influence and help secure U.S. interests in the region and beyond. To ensure that outcome will take a level of U.S. engagement with Ukraine that has been apparent only in fits and starts over the past quarter century. Engagement in this context must entail both a willingness to help Ukrainians afford the high costs of modernizing their defunct economy and brittle infrastructure, and tough conditionality to prevent a repetitio of the old post-Soviet story in which elites siphon off international assistance funds until the accounts run dry and the donors depart exasperated and exhausted.
Long term success will also demand deeper and more sustained attention to Russia and the region as a whole. Americans can hardly hope to exert influence, exploit opportunities or respond to threats effectively without a sophisticated awareness of the fundamental factors at work in the region-which is not provided by news coverage. Rather than cutting U.S. government investment in regional scholarship and exchanges (the Title 8, Title 6, and Open World programs have all been slashed over the past few years), how about announcing investments at least commensurate with the tens of millions the U.S. has promised to spend on body armor and night vision goggles for the Ukrainian army?
One of America's great strengths is that we are problem solvers, and the age of television has conditioned us to speak in sound bites and expect solutions before the commercial break. Yet experience has and will remind us that in foreign policy, there are no easy answers, just as TV's well-worn plot lines and convenient caricatures are seldom accurate in the real world. We can begin by recognizing that the current crisis is not just about Russia and the West, but about Ukraine-where tragic drama, heroic ambition, and even the occasional moment of comedy deserve our full attention.