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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How to handle Russia? This question has become ever more prominent as the Euro-Atlantic community's relations with Russia languish in systemic crisis, with dialogue suspended, reciprocal sanctions in place and proxy wars raging. The wars in Ukraine and Syria, accusations of Russian interference in domestic politics and the attempted murder of the Skripals on UK soil have all contributed to soaring tension in the relationship. Yet faced with this array of serious challenges, Euro-Atlantic thinking about Russia remains stuck in twentieth-century rhetoric, trapped by misleading abstract labels and unsure whether to engage Moscow in dialogue or enhance deterrence and collective defence. Instead of thinking in these terms, leading Russia expert Andrew Monaghan argues that we must devise a new grand strategy for dealing with the Russians. Examining the ongoing Euro-Atlantic debate over Russia and framing Moscow's own position towards the West, he sets out the foundations of a forward-looking strategy; one that can accommodate the many complex challenges presented by this new era of competition between Russia, Europe and the United States.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Abbreviations
Preface and Acknowledgements
The ‘Decline of the West’ – and the Emergence of a Russian Challenge
Acknowledgements
Notes
1
:
The Predicament
Russia's Emergence as a Peer Challenger
The Dual Dilemma
The Book's Argument
Notes
2
:
(Mis)interpreting the Russian Threat
Returning to Cold War Relations?
The Abstraction of the Russian Threat
Recalibrating the Russian Threat and the Need to Refresh Thinking
Notes
3
:
From Dialogue to Deterrence
‘Not Back to Business as Usual’
The Shift to Deterrence
Deterrence or Reassurance?
What is Deterrence?
The Challenges of Dialogue and Deterrence
Notes
4
:
Dealing with the Russians: Pillars of a Twenty-First-Century Strategy
From the ‘New Cold War’ Trap to Strategy-Making in a Post-Iraq War World
The Need for Grand Strategy for the New Era
Towards a Strategy?
The Fifth Pillar: Challenging Groupthink
The Sixth Pillar: Russia in the Wider and Longer-Term Context
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dealing with the Russians
Andrew Monaghan
polity
Copyright © Andrew Monaghan 2019
The right of Andrew Monaghan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2761-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2762-5 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Monaghan, Andrew, Dr, author.
Title: Dealing with the Russians / Andrew Monaghan.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043365 (print) | LCCN 2018054118 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509527656 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509527618 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509527625 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Western countries–Foreign relations–Russia (Federation) | Russia (Federation)–Foreign relations–Western countries. | Russia (Federation)–Strategic aspects. | Russia (Federation)–Military policy | National security–European Union countries. | National security–United States. | Security, International.
Classification: LCC D2025.5.R8 (ebook) | LCC D2025.5.R8 M64 2019 (print) | DDC 327.470182/1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043365
Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Abbreviations
A2/AD
Anti-Access/Area Denial
ABM
Anti-Ballistic Missile (Treaty)
BMD
Ballistic Missile Defence
CAATSA
Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act
CCW
Changing Character of War Centre
CFE
(Treaty on) Conventional Forces in Europe
CJEF
Combined Joint Expeditionary Force
DASKAA
Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act
eFP
enhanced Forward Presence
EU
European Union
GDP
gross domestic product
GPV
State Armaments Programme
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INF
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (Treaty)
JEF
Joint Expeditionary Force
KGB
Committee of State Security
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NRC
NATO–Russia Council
RAP
Readiness Action Plan
SACEUR
Supreme Allied Commander Europe
START
Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
UN
United Nations
USSR
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
VJTF
Very High Readiness Joint Task Force
VPK
Voenno-Promyshlenni Kurier
WoTR
War on the Rocks
WPA
Website of the Presidential Administration of Russia
Preface and Acknowledgements
The ‘Decline of the West’ – and the Emergence of a Russian Challenge
Until 2014, the idea of major, great-power war in modern Europe had become so unthinkable that it did not feature in discussion, even in fiction. Events that year in Ukraine changed all that. The language of war has returned to European politics, and officials and observers have begun to reflect on what it might look like. Euro-Atlantic officials and observers began to talk informally of the ‘Eastern front’, and the ‘threat from the East’. In the media, documentaries have been screened debating the ‘return of old enemies’, even the eruption of World War III, and the conditions under which nuclear weapons might be used in the case of a Russian invasion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states.1
The war in Ukraine broke out at a time when the Euro-Atlantic community had long been suffering a crisis of confidence. The impact of the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent slow growth and prolonged economic austerity policies, the high-profile failures in Iraq and the problematic interventions in Libya and Syria have all contributed to an accelerating sense of weakness and an ebbing of the post-Cold War era, ‘End of History’ confidence.
Indeed, it has been a commonplace for some years to argue that the international liberal order is under threat from internal and external challenges. Sustained domestic political and economic uncertainty, combined with resurgent authoritarian powers, have meant that Western liberalism is seen to be in retreat, even ‘under siege’ – not only are the countries that built the liberal order weaker today than they have been for seventy years, but, according to the Financial Times's Edward Luce, since the year 2000, twenty-five democracies have failed, ‘including three in Europe – Russia, Turkey and Hungary’. The ‘West's crisis is real, structural and likely to persist’, he lamented.2
This is part of a wider debate about a ‘post-American world’, the decline of the West, the ‘rise of the rest’ and the shift of power to the East.3 Richard Haass, a former diplomat and now the president of the influential US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, is among those who have argued that ‘centrifugal forces’ are gaining the upper hand, and there is a shrinking American ability to translate its considerable power into influence.4 And as one prominent journalist put it, the West's ‘centuries long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close’, and with the growing concentration of wealth in Asia, the West is losing its ability to function as a pole of stability and power imposing order on a chaotic world. Thus Gideon Rachman stated that the ‘crumbling of the Western dominated world order’ has increased the chance of conflict not just in East Asia but in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.5 This discussion has provided fertile ground for other debates about the decline of US and Western power and the challenges it faces, the rise of other powers and the possibility of this leading to war.6
The loss of confidence has two main roots. First, as John Bew, Professor of History and Foreign Policy at King's College London, put it, there have been ‘profound failures’ in the Anglo-American world's ability to anticipate, understand and come to terms with the complex problems it has encountered in other countries and regions. These ‘shortcomings have contributed to a sense of loss of control, of being at the mercy of events and a general loss of authority in world affairs’.7 Reminding us that concerns about world order have permeated Anglo-American foreign policy thinking for over a century, Bew argues that they are simultaneously forward-looking, aspirational expressions of the desire to give the international system a destination point made in one's own image, and yet riddled with inescapable ‘Spenglerian angst’, the sense of ‘civilizational vulnerability, sharpened by periods of technological change, fiercer international competition or confrontation with “The Other” from different parts of the world’.8
And ours is indeed seen as a state of permanent crisis, an ‘age of anxiety’, an ‘unprecedented condition of vulnerability’ and connectedness that makes the United States and its allies increasingly open to violent threats. Patrick Porter, Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham, has argued that the US, which ought to be one of the most secure states in history, is perpetually insecure, due to fears about the revolutions in communications, transport and weapons technology that have served to reduce frontiers and make the world dangerously small. US security is thus implicated everywhere, and this notion of insecurity in a shrunken world has lain behind the development since the early 2000s of a series of policies including pre-emptive war in the name of anticipatory defence, and other measures such as the development of the Ballistic Missile Defence programme (BMD).9
The second root is quantitative, reflecting concern about a sense of loss of material power. If China and Russia are seen to pose the main challenges to the ‘relatively peaceful and prosperous’ international order, the ‘combined military power’ of the US and its allies has served as the ‘greatest check’ on their ambitions.10 But as the BBC's Mark Urban argued in 2015, a series of long-term trends, including declining defence spending (from 2012 to 2014, thirteen of the twenty fastest-declining defence budgets were in Europe), mean that there is a ‘qualitative as well as quantitative erosion’ of Western superiority. ‘The edge, the Western advantage and along with that the ability to deter people in parts of the world from doing desperate things, is going – if it has not already disappeared.’11 A year later, a leaked British Army report suggested that, on the basis of lessons learnt from the war in Ukraine, Russia ‘currently has a significant capability edge over UK force elements’, and NATO allies were ‘scrambling to catch up’.12
Then in 2018, launching the new US National Defence Strategy, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis used much the same language when he stated that ‘our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare – air, land, sea, space, and cyber space – and it is continuing to erode’. He argued that fast technological change and the long-running wars the US had waged had diminished US military capabilities: US armed forces had to cope with ‘inadequate and misaligned resources’. Mattis emphasized that great-power competition was now the main focus of US security, and that the ‘unipolar moment in which the US was the only superpower is no longer with us’.13
An important feature of the concern about the international order being in retreat is a widespread view that the post-Cold War goal of a Europe ‘whole, free and at peace’ is under threat. If the range of challenges is seen to be broad, from Brexit to migration, many see Russia to be one of the most prominent. As one US commentator has put it, Russia, ‘fresh from perpetrating the first violent annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II, forges on with a dizzying military buildup and casually talks about the use of battlefield nuclear weapons against NATO member states’.14 Along with many others, James Kirchick suggested that Russia was the most important of these threats because of the way that it supported and magnified the others. It is such a widely held view that he is worth quoting at length:
As Europe's political stability, social cohesion, economic prosperity and security are more threatened today than at any point since the Cold War, Russia is destabilizing the Continent on every front. … Fomenting European disintegration from within, Russia also threatens Europe from without through its massive military buildup, frequent intimidation of NATO members and efforts to overturn the continent's security architecture by weakening the transatlantic link with America.15
After many years of prolonged neglect in which Russia was not a priority, the shock of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine catapulted Russia to the forefront of the Euro-Atlantic policy agenda. Perhaps belatedly, the crisis emphasized for many that Russia was no longer a partner, but a challenger. It also generated much debate about what Putin would do next – was Crimea just the beginning of a new expansionist policy? – and the sources of Moscow's actions.
Some, such as Michael McFaul, an academic who also served as US Ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, frame the current crisis in immediate causes. Acknowledging that the questions of great-power competition and international order and US policies play a role, McFaul emphasizes instead the roles of Russian domestic policies and particularly the return of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency in 2012 as being the key factors in the current crisis.16
But there is little consensus. Others put it into a longer-term historical context of ‘typical Russian activity’. James Clapper, former US Director of National Intelligence, for instance, asserted that Russian interference in the US election was ‘just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’ (sic).17 Others point to traditional Russian imperialism: Russia is ‘following in the footsteps of its historical predecessors and will continue to do so because of similar ideological, cultural security and geopolitical drivers’.18
Still others highlight a different dynamic. If some frame the Ukraine crisis as being the result of a dynamic interaction between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, a negative-sum game,19 others have argued that the crisis erupted because of US policy failures that squandered an opportunity for better relations,20 and because Russia has begun to respond more forcefully to US policy. Though they do not all agree on the balance of blame, such observers place the current deterioration in relations in the post-Cold War context – one of a longer-term, deepening divide between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, and the failure to reach a lasting settlement after the Cold War. According to Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, therefore, the ‘competing narratives about the end of the Cold War are grounded in a profound interpretative gulf about the nature of the international system’, and there is a strategic impasse between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia.21
With the persistent deterioration in relations, each year seemingly showing a ‘new low’ in relations, the thrust of much of the debate has been about the emergence of a return to ‘Cold War type’ relations between the West and Russia. There has been much criticism about the failure of the Euro-Atlantic community to stop Russia and the specific policies that it could implement, with most emphasis on the need to deter and contain Russia.22
What does seem clear, however, is that the Euro-Atlantic community's relationship with Russia has entered a new era – moving beyond the ‘post-Cold War’ era of what could be called ‘Russian democracy embattled’ into ‘Russia as challenger’. The precise character of this shift has been obscured by an important ambiguity. On the one hand, there are numerous deeply entrenched questions that encourage a strong sense of only glacial movement in Russian politics, foreign policy and relations with the Euro-Atlantic community. There is much repetition in the debate about the relationship, with a strong sense of déjà vu about the core questions – the (un)sustainability of Putin's leadership and Russia's long-term decline, and the many disagreements about Euro-Atlantic security, particularly the debate about NATO's supposed ‘no-enlargement promise’. Officials and observers who have recently returned to Russia-watching after a substantial break occasionally lament how familiar the discussion all looks.
On the other hand, since 2014 the pace of events has seemed to accelerate as the relationship has lurched from crisis to crisis, and from one panic about Russian action to the next. Not only does the debate become more partisan, it has also moved into new subjects, such as election interference and cyber security and Russian actions in Syria. Each new feature shapes the policy debate about Russia, driving it further into the realms of security.
The development of this book reflects this trajectory. When it was originally conceived in 2016, partly to respond to the repetitions and abstractions of yet another round of debate about a ‘new Cold War’ and the emergence of debate about so-called ‘Russian hybrid warfare’, and partly to emphasize the need to see dialogue and deterrence not as ends in themselves but as the consequences of a broader grand strategy, dialogue formed a larger proportion of the Euro-Atlantic community's intentions. And while it might reasonably be argued that with each crisis dialogue became ever more important, with each crisis the possibilities for dialogue simultaneously narrowed and receded.
The attempted murder, in March 2018 in Salisbury, of the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter appears to have had significant and ongoing consequences for relations between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia. It resulted not just in London accusing the Russian authorities of direct involvement, but in large numbers of expulsions of diplomats and intelligence officers from across the Euro-Atlantic community and beyond (with Russia reciprocating), and in a second suspension of high-level dialogue in four years. In August that year, the US imposed sanctions against Russia for using chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law or against its own nationals. For their part, the British authorities publicly named two men as suspects, charging them with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, causing grievous bodily harm and the possession and use of a nerve agent, novichok, contrary to the Chemical Weapons Act. Though the UK did not immediately apply to Russia for their extradition, the British authorities have obtained European Arrest Warrants and an Interpol Red Notice for the two men, believed to be Russian military intelligence officers travelling under the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. According to one northern (non-British) European politician, the events have resulted in a different atmosphere: ‘politically, all hopes of a better relationship stopped with Salisbury’.23
Not for the first time, therefore, there is a need to reflect on first principles, diagnosis of the problem and both the wider picture and the longer trajectory of relations with Russia. This book brings together history, politics, policy and strategy not so much to make specific policy recommendations about how to ‘deal with the Russians’ today and tomorrow, but to step back to make a bigger argument for a broader shift in terms of conceiving the nature of the challenge Russia poses. This requires returning to the roots of questions as much as setting out a path ahead.
Acknowledgements
If the idea of the book took shape in 2016, it was written in the first half of 2018, and many debts of gratitude have accrued, as I have benefitted from much support from colleagues, friends and family. My colleagues at the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre (CCW), particularly Robert Johnson, Liz Robson, Graham Fairclough, Melissa Skorka, Chris Holloway and Ruth Murray, have been patient and supportive, notably during the final months of finishing the book, and have throughout offered help and timely and constructive advice. Additionally, I would like to thank Pembroke College, Oxford, and the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit for their generous support of CCW's work, and especially the Russia and Northern European Defence and Security project.
At the heart of the book are the many interviews and discussions I have had with politicians, officials and military personnel in the UK, the US, across NATO and the European Union (EU), and Russia. Though such discussions must remain anonymous, I am grateful for the time you have spent with me. I would like to thank the audiences of three lectures at which I presented these ideas, including in Washington, Oxford and London, for their questions and insightful comments. I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for Polity who gave detailed and thoughtful comments on the draft. Likewise, friends have taken the trouble to discuss the themes of the book at length, even going so far as to read and comment on parts of, or all of, the draft. Among them are Nazrin Mehdiyeva, Richard Connolly, Julian Cooper, Silvana Malle, Dov Lynch and Robert Dover. They not only have offered constructive critique of this particular book, but are ever ready with their friendship and support. The thinking that influenced the book is also the product of many years of discussions with friends, including Florence Gaub and Henry Plater-Zyberk. Thank you. In Russia, as always, I would like to thank Boris Mikhailovich and Mikhail Borisovich and Ekaterina Vladimirovna for their kindness and support. The work of IA, PL, and, particularly during the writing of this book, IK, FEC and PAT has played an important role: you are remembered.
I am grateful for the help of several librarians, particularly Simon Blundell, and also David Bates and his team at Chatham House. Thanks are also due to Antulio J. Echevaria II and Nora Ellis of the Parameters journal for permission to reuse and build on material first published in the article ‘The “War” in Russia's “Hybrid Warfare”’.
Similarly, much gratitude is due to Louise Knight, Nekane Tanaka Galdos, Sophie Wright and their colleagues at Polity for their patience, encouragement and editorial attentiveness throughout the process. Their positive approach from the early discussions through to the final text has been essential. Thank you!
Most of all, my thanks and love go to my family, Charles and Dorothy and Yulia, for their kindness, generosity, patience and encouragement. How lucky I am. With your support and love, this book and so much else has been and is made possible. So the book is dedicated to you, and to Lara Andreevna, whose happy presence continues as a guiding light to what is really important in life.
Andrew Monaghan, June 2018
Notes
1
‘The Return of Old Enemies – How Dangerous is the New East–West Conflict’,
Die Welt
, 18 June 2016,
http://www.dw.com/en/documentaries-the-return-of-old-enemies-2016-06-18/e-19287458-9798?maca=en
; ‘World War Three – Inside the War Room’, BBC, 3 February 2016,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2016/05/inside-the-war-room
2
Luce, E.
The Retreat of Western Liberalism
. London: Little, Brown, 2017. pp. 11–12; Niblett, R. ‘Liberalism in Retreat: The Demise of a Dream’,
Foreign Affairs
, January/February 2017,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-12-12/liberalism-retreat
3
Zakaria, F.
The Post-American World: And the Rise of the Rest
. London: Allen Lane, 2008; Solana, J. and S. Talbot, ‘The Decline of the West and How to Stop it’,
New York Times
, 19 October 2016.
4
Haass, R.
World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
. London: Penguin, 2017. pp. 10–12.
5
Rachman, G.
Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century
. London: Bodley Head, 2016. pp. 3, 247.
6
Allison, G.
Destined for War? Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
London: Houghton Mifflin, 2017.
7
Bew, J.
Realpolitik: A History
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. p. 294.
8
Bew, J. ‘The Pursuit of World Order in Anglo-American Statecraft’, lecture at King's College London, 22 May 2018,
https://soundcloud.com/warstudies/inaugural-lecture-professor-john-bew?in=warstudies/sets/events
9
Porter, P.
The Global Village Myth: Distance, War and the Limits of Power
. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015. pp. 2–5.
10
Kagan, R. ‘The Twilight of the Liberal World Order’, Brookings, 24 January 2017,
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-twilight-of-the-liberal-world-order
11
Urban, M.
The Edge: Is the Military Dominance of the West Coming to an End?
London: Abacus, 2015. pp. 39, 143.
12
‘Russia Has the Edge Over us in Battle, Army Admits’,
The Times
, 10 August 2016.
13
Cited in ‘Jim Mattis Warns US Losing Military Edge’,
Financial Times
, 19 January 2018.
14
Kirchick, J.
The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. p. 1. Kirchik's statement about Crimea being the first violent annexation of territory in Europe reflects a widespread view, but overlooks important examples of violence in Europe, including violent annexation such as that in Cyprus in 1974.
15
Kirchick, J. ‘Russia's Plot Against the West’,
Politico
, 17 March 2017,
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-plot-against-the-west-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-europe
16
McFaul, M.
From Cold War to Hot Peace: The Inside Story of Russia and America
. London: Allen Lane, 2018.
17
‘James Clapper on Trump–Russia ties: “My Dashboard Warning Light Was Clearly On”’,
NBC News
, 28 May 2017,
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/james-clapper-trump-russia-ties-my-dashboard-warning-light-was-n765601
18
Grigas, A.
Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. p. 4.
19
Charap, S. and T. Colton,
Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia
. London: Adelphi Press, 2017.
20
Mearsheimer, J. ‘Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions that Provoked Putin’,
Foreign Affairs
, September–October 2014,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault
; Cohen, S. ‘Cold War Again: Who's Responsible?’,
The Nation
, 1 April 2014,
https://www.thenation.com/article/cold-war-again-whos-responsible
21
Sakwa, R.
Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. p. 326; Menon, R. and E. Rumer,
Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order
. London: MIT Press, 2015.
22
Schoen, D.
Putin's Master Plan to Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence
. London: Encounter Books, 2016; Blackwill, R. and P. Gordon,
Containing Russia: How to Respond to Moscow's Intervention in US Democracy and Growing Geopolitical Challenge
. Council on Foreign Relations Report, January 2018,
https://www.cfr.org/report/containing-russia
23
Correspondence with the author, June 2018.
1 The Predicament
How to deal with Russia? This question has become ever more urgent since Russia's annexation of Crimea in early 2014. Senior Western politicians and officials frequently condemn Russian actions in robust terms, and states and international organizations have published official documents naming Russia as a rival, as aggressive and defining itself in opposition to the West.1 The USA and European Union (EU) sought to punish Russian actions and change Russian policy by suspending Moscow's participation in mechanisms for dialogue, such as the G8, and imposing financial and economic sanctions on Russia, whilst emphasizing their own collective defence and deterrence measures. Despite the rhetoric and the policies, though, Moscow has not altered course. Indeed, the Russian leadership has vehemently rejected Western accusations, introduced counter-sanctions and increased the number and size of its own military exercises, including near North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) borders.
A sense of the rapid emergence of competing, even opposing camps has become ever more explicit, with both sides emphasizing the loss of trust in the relationship and accusing the other of the responsibility for initiating and then escalating the tensions and increasing military activity both in specific areas such as the Baltic Sea and Syria, and beyond. Numerous close encounters illustrate the tension and concern about the possibility for accidental escalation.
The dangerous nature of the situation was made clear in November 2015, when Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24, an act which Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev claimed gave Moscow legitimate grounds to go to war. Noting that such direct attacks on states in the twentieth century led to war, he suggested that Turkey, through its act of aggression against Russia, had violated international norms, giving a ‘casus belli’. But in the present situation, he suggested, a ‘war is the worst that could happen’, and that's why a decision was taken not to give a ‘symmetrical answer to what the Turks had done’.2 Since then, there have been numerous similarly tense moments in Syria.
Russia's Emergence as a Peer Challenger
Russia is now seen by many in the Euro-Atlantic community to pose a significant threat to international security, and to be undermining the rules-based system. Many have argued, for instance, that Moscow uses so-called ‘hybrid warfare’ to challenge the cohesion and unity of NATO and the EU and the sovereignty of their member states, particularly Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. ‘Russian hybrid warfare’, which is examined in more depth in chapter 2, is understood as conflict-related insecurity, a strategy, according to one prominent Western thinker, to ‘confuse us and perplex us by not telling the truth’ and disorient us about Vladimir Putin's intentions.3 This has generated much talk of Moscow using ‘asymmetric means’ and ‘measures short of war’.
In this vein, many accuse Moscow of interfering in the domestic politics of Euro-Atlantic states, of funding anti-EU political parties such as the French National Front, of interfering in the UK's referendum on its membership of the EU, and of spending millions ‘to spread its version of reality in Europe, including sometimes fabrications’.4 Indeed, such accusations spread across Europe, including Germany, the Czech Republic and Spain, with some suggesting that Russian hackers and trolls tried to increase support for separatism in Catalonia in 2017. And most prominent of all, of course, are the accusations of Russian interference in the US presidential elections in November 2016.5 According to Joe Biden, US Vice President until 2017, therefore, the Russian government is ‘brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western Democracy around the world … it has sought to weaken and subvert Western democracies from the inside by weaponizing information, cyberspace, energy and corruption’.6
Numerous senior British politicians and officials have also pointed to what they see as a Russian threat. In a prominent speech in November 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May accused Russia of threatening international order, ‘fomenting conflict’, repeatedly violating the national airspace of several European countries and mounting a sustained ‘campaign of cyber espionage and disruption’.7 The UK's Secretary of Defence asserted in December 2017 that Russia was at war with the UK, and then in January 2018 that Russia was seeking ways to damage the UK's economy by attacking its infrastructure, which could create ‘total chaos and cause thousands and thousands of deaths’. He reiterated similar claims in February, noting that the UK had ‘entered a new era of warfare’ with Russian cyber attacks.8
Many also accuse Russia of indirectly and directly exacerbating the security challenges Europe faces. Philip Breedlove, then NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), accused Russia of deliberately bombarding civilian centres in Syria to exacerbate the refugee crisis to ‘overwhelm European structures and break European resolve’.9 Equally, others see Russia as posing a direct military challenge to NATO, and putting itself on a ‘collision course’ with the alliance, particularly in terms of a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic states.10
