Gradual Sanctions Against Russia are a Loser

February 27, 2022

This article appeared in The New York Post on February 27th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

The Biden Administration has been explicit that it is pursuing a strategy of “graduated escalation” in imposing sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine. This approach is virtually certain to be less effective in imposing economic hardship on Russia than a more robust effort, thereby prolonging Ukraine’s agony and postponing Russia’s isolation. Gradual escalation in economic warfare carries precisely the same risks as in kinetic warfare; the enemy has a say in both cases. Biden could be introducing us to to the Vietnam of economic sanctions.

Indeed, to all outwards appearances, Biden’s graduated-escalation policy is motivated largely by domestic American political considerations, especially regarding Russia’s energy sector. With U.S. inflation high and rising, economic pain at home is the last thing the White House wants, especially soaring oil and gas prices. Consumers feel the squeeze not only when they fill their gas tanks, but in their other purchases that require transporting good to stores or front porches, especially food.

A little history on sanctions and recent U.S. foreign policy. It says something about today’s Democratic Party that Woodrow Wilson’s views are too hard-line to contemplate. Wilson, amidst his prolonged reveries about the League of Nations, strongly advocated using economic sanctions in lieu of military force to resolve international disputes. He called sanctions “a peaceful, silent deadly remedy,” and “a hand upon the throat of the offending nation.” Too much for the Biden Administration.

America’s experience with sanctions has been mixed, and suggests several conditions for effectiveness. First, sanctions should be imposed swiftly and by surprise if possible, to prevent targets from taking precautionary or protective steps to mitigate the sanctions’ impact. That obviously did not happen with Russia, international sanctions having been threatened for months, and even if not known in precise detail, easily imaginable. If Russia is not prepared for the measures already imposed so far, the Kremlin is guilty of governance malpractice.

Second, sanctions should be as sweeping and comprehensive as possible, since no sanctions will be completely effective. Lesser measures produce lesser results. Phrases like “targeted sanctions” sound good in diplomatic communiques, but broad-gauge sanctions are far more likely to cause sustained pain. Even history’s most-extensive sanctions, the UN Security Council measures against Iraq after invading Kuwait, did not ultimately succeed in forcing Saddam Hussein out. Concern for second-order impacts of sanctions on America’s economy is warranted, but sanctions should maximize harm to the target, with other measures separately protecting the domestic economy. Dialing down sanctions to protect the sanction-imposer does far more to shield the target than Biden realizes.

Finally, sanctions should go for the jugular. With Russia, its very existence as a major threat relies on the revenues from its oil and gas production and exports. As some wags have said, it’s more a big gas station than a real national economy. Russian earnings from hydrocarbon sales internationally totaled 60% of its export revenues in 2019, and forty percent of its national-government budget. Russia’s dependence on oil and gas revenues has grown steadily over the last eight years.

The Biden Administration argues that blocking Russian hydrocarbon sales would not immediately damage Russia because of currency reserves accumulated in anticipation of just such sanctions. Of course, many more non-hydrocarbon sanctions are also required than currently announced, also hastening expending the reserves. The aggregate effect of more robust and comprehensive sanctions, including particularly oil-and-gas sanctions, would strangle Russia’s government and broader economy.

The Administration’s misguided graduated-escalation strategy and failure to strike Russia’s energy sector unfortunately reinforce one another, providing Putin a lifeline. Postponing any sanctions now, especially against energy, only sustains Moscow’s war machine. If Biden wants to keep U.S. hydrocarbon prices down for political reasons, he should consider the supply side: U.S. production increases, quickly available through already-existing horizontal-drilling and fracking infrastructure, could substantially mitigate price rises on American consumers.

Europeans may have a harder time, entirely through their own fault, and contrary to U.S. warnings dating to Ronald Reagan against depending on Russian energy sources. And what better opportunity or higher motive for Germany and other governments to force their economies toward green energy than supporting the courageous Ukrainian people. No one is asking for unnecessary sacrifice, but no anti-aggression policy in Ukraine is cost free. That is the reality of a globalized economy. Otherwise, the West’s policy is simply, “we support Ukraine, but not when it is inconvenient.”

It’s time to squeeze the Kremlin hard, not engage in semiotic warfare, gradual escalation, and pearl clutching. Drive a stake through Russia’s energy sector. Now.

Putin’s effort to split NATO may depend on Germany

February 03, 2022
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This article appeared in The Hill on February 1st, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

Make no mistake, Russia’s fundamental strategic objective in coercing Ukraine is to undermine NATO. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, a weaker NATO directly correlates with a stronger Russia. Long-festering policy differences within the alliance, self-inflicted vulnerabilities to external pressures and weak political leadership in key Western states are already on full display. Ponderous rhetoric about NATO solidarity, endlessly repeated by the Biden administration, only underscores rather than conceals these problems.

Putin well understands these phenomena. He is actively seeking to exacerbate existing tensions and weaknesses, and create new ones, and has already made significant progress in undercutting the alliance. Today, these divisions eviscerate the credibility of threatened post-invasion sanctions against Russia, no matter how serious the West might be. If Russia remains undeterred, the long-term damage to America’s global position, compounding the corrosive effects of the Afghan withdrawal, could be incalculable.

NATO’s problems are hardly new. Not for nothing was Henry Kissinger’s pathbreaking mid-1960’s analysis entitled “The Troubled Partnership.” Nonetheless, the undeniable Soviet Cold War threat; America’s sustained, vitally important perception that ensuring Europe’s security enhanced its own; and U.S. leaders like Ronald Reagan, determined to defeat communism not merely “manage” or contain it, ultimately prevailed. NATO members’ collective-defense commitments held, and the USSR collapsed. The story becomes vaguer from there, with upticks after 9-11 and during the ensuing war on Islamicist terrorism.

During the 1990’s generally-shared Western euphoria (remember “the end of history”?), NATO’s expansion was both inevitable and beneficial to all involved. But Washington failed to think through how far NATO should grow. There was talk of possibly including Russia at some point, although that opportunity, not nurtured seriously during the Clinton administration, died through inattention. Spain’s former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar proposed making NATO a global alliance, including members such as Japan, Australia and Israel, but Europe’s burghers were uninterested.

Unfortunately, and critical here, NATO’s eastern European flank was left unfinished, with many former Soviet republics isolated in an ambiguous, clearly dangerous grey zone between NATO and Russia. In 2008, with bipartisan support, President George W. Bush proposed fast-tracking NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Germany and France blocked the move, and now assert tautologically that not being NATO members means they are of no special concern to the alliance. Contemporary criticisms that Ukraine is not ready for NATO membership because of corruption and an unsteady democracy overlook Bush’s prior initiative. They also conveniently ignore that eastern and central European states admitted after the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union collapsed were hardly clones of Luxembourg or Canada.

But who determines the strategic status of the grey-zone countries? Ukraine exemplifies this issue, struggling to shed its communist past and create durable representative government. While key national territory has already been annexed or subjugated by Moscow, Ukrainians nonetheless still believe they should decide their international future. Russia believes it should decide, and many Europeans and Americans seemingly agree: Russia is powerful, borders Ukraine and there are historic antecedents. Perhaps we should ask China’s neighbors how they feel about that logic. Not long ago, we could have asked that question of Germany’s neighbors.

Undeniably, Ukraine is now under brutal pressure, including the palpable risk of further Russian military invasion. In response, President Biden has not solidified the alliance. He has in fact increased its divisions through his soon-to-be-historical banter about “minor incursions,” desperate efforts to concede something to Moscow to halt the march toward military hostilities and public disagreement with Ukraine itself on the imminence of a Russian attack. Observers watch daily for more signs of Biden going wobbly.

Europe’s reaction is mixed. Despite domestic political turmoil, Great Britain has been firm, even ahead of the U.S. by some measures. Eastern and central European NATO members need no lectures on the Kremlin’s threat, and they are wholly resolute, notwithstanding reliance on Russian natural gas. More “distant” NATO countries are less visible, but at least not obstructionist. France is being France, with President Emmanuel Macron, facing a difficult reelection race, pirouetting around the international stage searching for attention.

Then there’s Germany. Basing its reluctance to do much of anything on its recent history, Berlin has it exactly backwards. Precisely this history should impel Germans to be the most steadfast and resolute opponent of efforts to change European borders by politico-military aggression. Of all European countries, Germany owes this to its neighbors, in concrete deeds not just words. Instead, it has been passive at best, and frequently unhelpful. This is NATO’s core weakness, and Putin is pounding on it for all he is worth.

Germany led Europe in ignoring Reagan’s 1980’s admonitions not to become dependent on Russian oil and gas. Incredibly, Russia’s Gazprom hired former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to help complete the first Nordstream pipeline, begun during his tenure. Schroeder’s successors effectively did nothing to mitigate Germany’s vulnerability and now act as if terminating Nordstream II is unthinkable. Maybe the devil made them do it.

Germany has not come within sight of meeting NATO’s 2014 Cardiff agreement that members spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. It has long refused to provide Ukraine with lethal military aid, and recently barred Estonia from sending German-origin weapons to Kyiv. Berlin’s offers to send 5,000 military helmets and a field hospital were greeted with well-deserved mockery and incredulity. To top it off, the commander of Germany’s navy was recently fired for all but supporting Russia’s position.

Newly-installed Chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet Biden in Washington on Feb 7. They have a lot to talk about. Germany was delighted to shelter under Cold War America’s nuclear umbrella and NATO’s European fastnesses. We will soon see if Germany is ready to do the right thing by Ukraine. Putin is watching closely.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.

Putin’s playing chess in Ukraine and Biden steps in as pawn

January 25, 2022
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This article appeared in The New York Post on January 23th, 2022. Click here to view the original article.

President Biden’s first press conference in 10 months, on the eve of his inauguration’s anniversary, made news. But not the kind he wanted. Asked about Russia’s possible invasion of Ukraine, NATO’s lack of unity and the likely failure of economic sanctions to deter Vladimir Putin, Biden answered that “the idea that NATO is not going to be united, I don’t buy . . . It depends on what [Russia] does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera.”

In a stroke, Biden demonstrated he didn’t understand his own Ukraine policy, undercut Kiev’s government and people, and handed Moscow an engraved invitation to make a “minor incursion” into Ukraine.

That was bad enough, but further answers made his position even more unintelligible. He said, “and so, I got to make sure everybody is on the same page as we move along . . . But it depends on what [Putin] does, as to the exact — to what extent we’re going to be able to get total unity on the Rus — on the NATO front.”

Biden was correct that Putin “was calculating what the immediate . . . and the long-term consequences of [sic] Russia will be.” Right now, Putin has the initiative and a broad range of options. America and the West are reactive and disunited, as Biden all but admitted. Putin is following a strategic playbook encompassing the entire former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact “allies,” grounded on his 2005 precept that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” The United States and NATO are answering this strategic threat only tactically. The West focuses on avoiding imminent hostilities, whereas Putin is seeking enduring hegemony over former Soviet territories. The White House still fails to comprehend that Putin need not conduct all-out invasion of Ukraine to win significant new advantages. Seizing “pro-Russian” areas, leaving a rump independent Ukraine or installing a Moscow-friendly government might be Putin’s real goal. Or he may make political or military moves elsewhere, in Belarus, Georgia or Kazakhstan for example, for which the alliance seems completely unprepared.

Even worse, Moscow is now suckering Washington into negotiations over “security guarantees” that weaken and divide NATO itself. Biden said, “NATO is not going to take in Ukraine anytime in the next few decades,” an astonishing unforced error. George W. Bush was ready in April 2008 to fast-track Ukraine and Georgia as NATO members, but Germany and France objected. Four months later, Russia invaded Georgia and in 2014 invaded Ukraine, annexing Crimea and seizing control over the Donbas. NATO has never admitted a country with unwanted foreign troops on its soil because that would effectively put NATO in a state of war with the occupying country. Of course, Russia is the aggressor in every case, with its “minor incursions” not just in Georgia and Ukraine but many others.

Russia creates an artificial crisis, then graciously accedes to resolve it by “accepting” precisely the objective it sought in the first place. Biden’s response is totally backwards, signaling willingness to discuss restrictions on Ukraine’s NATO candidacy and limitations on missile and troop dispositions near Russia’s borders, all key Kremlin demands. This is a major error, which will only prompt further demands. Russia, a consistent violator of international commitments, is the aggressor, not NATO, which has always been a purely defensive alliance. Geographic restrictions on NATO deployments endanger its members and benefit Russia, as Poland, the Baltics and other central Europeans fully grasp, even if Germany and France don’t. Russia has always feared violating a NATO member’s border, but weakening NATO resolve undermines even its historically successful defensive purpose, as Moscow clearly understands.

Playing small ball with Putin, as Biden is doing, will not durably protect Ukraine or other endangered states. Biden’s inadequate and now incoherent policy is not deterring Russian military action, and timidity simply incentivizes Putin to increase his demands. We risk a downward spiral of NATO concessions to avoid military conflict today, but which will only increase its likelihood soon thereafter.

Indeed, the situation may be so far gone Putin inevitably emerges the winner. The last hope is that Biden immediately reverses course and seizes the initiative and insist the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline never operate until Russian troops leave any country that does not want them. Urgently required are more weapons and more NATO troops, not to fight but to train and exercise with Ukrainians, thereby increasing Moscow’s uncertainty and risk. So doing, of course, requires strength from the Europeans, especially France and Germany, that they may well lack.

This is Putin’s calculus, which Biden’s statements and last week’s negotiations did not change.

Time is on Putin’s side.

John Bolton was national security adviser to President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019 and US ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006.

Biden’s weakness is a danger. The West needs Britain to keep him in check

January 03, 2022
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This article appeared in The Telegraph on December 29, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

As 2022 nears, Joe Biden and his party are in political trouble. Elected largely to restore pre-Trumpian normalcy, Biden campaigned as a safe pair of hands, promising effective Covid-19 programmes, a more-complete economic recovery, and a leader who could remain quiet at times. Pandemics, however, have no political favourites. Delta and omicron have Americans frustrated and irritable, economic recovery still feels inadequate, and we face 30-year-high inflation.

Biden’s presidency did not start from a position of strength. His Electoral College win rested on narrow margins in key states, the Democrats’ House of Representatives majority shrank markedly, and a 50-50 Senate came only after Trump criticised the November election’s integrity, thereby dissuading Republicans from voting and costing two Senate seats in runoffs.

While 2020 was thus not a wave election, Democratic “progressives” persuaded Biden otherwise. These forces pushed through massive economic stimulants (even above Trump’s stimulus spending), thereby fueling inflation. But progressives pressed for more and went too far; their latest multitrillion spending ideas will end 2021 gridlocked in Congress. House Democrats in large numbers, even in safe seats, are not seeking re-election in 2022, indicating pessimism about retaining a majority.

Worse, Biden’s approval ratings have tanked, dropping precipitously from roughly 8-10 per cent net positive to 8-10 per cent net negative. Significantly, Biden’s numbers went off the cliff this summer as the world watched America’s national humiliation caused by his withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. The withdrawal’s bungled execution was later compounded by Administration admissions that IS-K and al-Qaeda could be ready to launch terrorist attacks against the United States from Afghanistan in six to 12 months.

Biden’s approval dropped because of Afghanistan and stayed low over economic and Covid discontent. More bad news emerged in November’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, both believed safely Democratic. Voter dissatisfaction on law and order and education generated a Republican victory in Virginia and a near miss in New Jersey. Predictions of large 2022 GOP gains in the House and securing a Senate majority are now realistic.

Biden’s political prospects will undoubtedly impact his foreign policy. While he might prefer focusing on domestic affairs to fulfil his 2020 campaign pledges, the broader world will not be so obliging. The Afghan withdrawal’s catastrophic consequences continue to reverberate in foreign capitals. Moscow and Beijing almost certainly see US weakness and inattention, thereby encouraging their aggressive ambitions in places like Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively. Leaders in Kiev and Taipei are correspondingly concerned that further distractions in Washington will leave them in jeopardy.

The immediate risk is that Biden will seek to buy himself time at least until after November’s Congressional elections. That could spell bad news for Ukraine and other “grey zone” countries proximate to Russia but outside NATO, as Moscow and the alliance prepare for January “security” talks. Ukraine is worried that Biden will make significant but seemingly minor (and poorly understood) concessions to pacify Putin. Here, Britain could play a major role in checking any Biden giveaways, working with NATO’s Eastern and Central European members.

In the Indo-Pacific, Biden has prioritised making climate change deals with China, gravely concerning Taiwan and the wider Indo-Pacific, as do intimations that China and Russia are coordinating their actions. Diplomatic boycotts of Beijing’s Winter Olympics, as announced by Washington and other governments, hardly constitute a strong statement on human rights issues, let alone geostrategic threats. National security concessions now to avoid complicating Biden’s domestic problems may attract a hard-pressed White House, but the longer-term effects will endanger America and its friends.

A pivotal impending test of this proposition turns on the failing Perm-Five-plus-one minuet with Iran to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. The deal has iconic significance for Biden and other Obama Administration alumni, who see it as their foreign-policy apotheosis. Perilously, they still don’t recognise that Iran’s key demand – allowing uranium enrichment to reactor-grade levels – is one concession too far, a key enabler for Tehran to develop nuclear weapons. Biden seems desperate to avoid “failure” in the talks. Britain, and even Germany and France, could help persuade the White House that this dangerous gambit has run its course.

Obviously, Britain’s Covid and economic problems resemble America’s, and parliamentary politics for Boris Johnson are far from serene. None the less, now liberated from the EU’s arduous and ineffective policy-making process, London can proceed boldly in its foreign policy, especially within NATO. If there is an acceptable solution for Ukraine, Belarus and the other “grey zone” countries, it will come from NATO, not the EU. And, as the Aukus partnership to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines proves, Britain’s role in the Indo-Pacific is also critical.

While America struggles along with Biden for three more years, the stage is set for a bigger UK role in safeguarding Western security.

John Bolton is a former United States national security adviser

 

Now Is The Time For NATO To Stand Up To Russia

December 30, 2021
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This article appeared in 19FortyFive on December 28, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

Thirty years after the Soviet Union dissolved on December 31, 1991, events in its former space seem headed in the opposite direction. Despite initially remaining passive as the USSR split into fifteen independent states, Moscow has more recently steadily pursued a hegemonic agenda, increasingly bold and increasingly successful. It provoked hostilities (notably Ukraine) and exploited weaknesses (as in Belarus) possibly leading to outright re-annexation. Existing “frozen conflicts” (Armenia versus Azerbaijan, Moldova/Transnistria, and Georgia) remained frozen or became more severe. Less-visible Kremlin economic and political initiatives are afoot across Central Asia, and in Tajikistan, Moscow’s largest military base in the former USSR outside Russia itself, its border forces never left.

How and why the West misjudged what was brewing inside Russia following the USSR’s demise is already vigorously debated. After a widespread but sadly erroneous 1990’s optimism Russia would embrace Western institutions and values, hopes for constitutional, representative government are in retreat. Despite the collapse of Europe’s Communist regimes, communism and its ways persisted.  The Cold War’s winners could not impose anything comparable to post-World War II denazification, so authoritarian memories, habits, and methods endured even without their prior ideological veneer. Outsiders collectively failed to appreciate that profoundly deep Russian sentiments of revanchism and irredentism persisted below the surface, seeking opportunities to make Russia’s “near abroad” much less “abroad.” History had not ended, notwithstanding the “peace dividend” bled from the U.S. and other NATO militaries.

We can’t say, however, we weren’t put on notice. Vladimir Putin said in 2005, “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.  As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.” Just days ago, Putin called the breakup “a tragedy as for the vast majority of the country’s citizens. After all, what is the collapse of the USSR?  That’s the collapse of historical Russia called the Soviet Union.”

The West made two fundamental mistakes in the years since Russia’s new flag was first raised over the Kremlin. In an understandable rush to add to NATO states escaping the defunct Warsaw Pact and resuming their rightful places in the West, America, in particular, failed to delineate where the expansion would end. One can debate where that endpoint should be, but by failing to decide the question explicitly, we created a “grey zone,” an ambiguity Russia is now exploiting. Today, we and grey-zone nations like Ukraine, are paying the price.

Moreover, too many Europeans believe the continent’s relative post-1945 peace is due to the European Union rather than NATO. “This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans,” said Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jacques Poos in 1991, as the EU presided over Yugoslavia’s catastrophic breakup and continuing Balkan instability. Intense EU navel-gazing, such as focusing on “deeper” rather than “broader” European integration, implicitly downgraded the concerns of “New European” members and aspirants. The EU’s bizarre apotheosis came in winning the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. But this is all fantasy. Europe was bound together for security purposes by NATO. Germany’s political readmission to the West came via NATO long before an EU superstate appealed to anyone but its theologians and altar boys.  There was no remilitarization, as after World War I, because from 1945 forward, not a sparrow has fallen in Europe’s military-industrial complex unknown to NATO. The EU did not win the Cold War, and its disproportionate role in dealing with Russia today hinders the West’s resolve.

Unfortunately, NATO’s inadequate end-state planning and EU delusions have hindered developing a coherent strategy against a resurgent Russia.  The Kremlin has suffered no such disability and now demands multiple security guarantees from NATO and the United States, embracing not just Eastern Europe, the current crisis epicenter, but also the Central Asian republics.  Moscow wants an agreement that NATO to not admit Ukraine or other non-members into the alliance; not deploy “offensive weapons” in countries (NATO members or not) adjacent to Russia; and not conduct military exercises near Russia’s borders above brigade levels. China has essentially endorsed Russia’s demand.

Despite a Putin-Biden virtual summit and threats of economic sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine, the Kremlin appears unimpressed.  That does not mean hostilities are imminent; Putin is likely doing a continuous, real-time, cost-benefit analysis to decide what he can get away with at what cost. Today’s crisis remains volatile and unlikely to recede meaningfully in the foreseeable future.  Yet again, Putin is outmaneuvering his Western counterparts.

So, as Lenin once asked, what is to be done?

Beyond doubt, NATO must finally decide which grey-zone countries it is prepared to admit, and which it isn’t. NATO should also reaffirm that all former republics, in Central Asia (since Russia has dragged them into the discussion) as well as Europe and the Caucasus, must be free to make their own decisions about their allegiances. While they decide, NATO should give Russia a general “hands-off” notice regarding them all.

The EU needs to get serious about Russia’s renewed threat which, after all, is on their border, not America’s. Nord Stream II should be canceled, with no prospect of resurrection until Russia withdraws its troops behind its borders, absent specific requests by grey-zone countries. European NATO members should meet their Cardiff commitments to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense by 2024. Additional allied weapons should immediately be surged into Ukraine, and nearby NATO members as Bill Schneider has suggested. U.S. and other NATO countries should increase troop rotations into Ukraine for joint training and exercising, not to engage in combat, but so Russian generals can contemplate the karma of being ordered to invade Ukraine in close proximity to new NATO deployments. Western ministers of defense and their joint staffs’ chairmen should be converging on Kyiv, Chisinau, Tbilisi, and even Minsk for consultations.

NATO has been history’s strongest defensive alliance. Neither the USSR nor Russia has ever dared confront it directly, which means its deterrent capabilities are as tested and proven as anyone could conceive. With this record and the enormous internal weaknesses of Russia in mind, this is no time for Washington, let alone the great capitals of Europe, to fear putting NATO front and center.

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.

John Bolton’s Guide for Containing Russia and China

December 20, 2021
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Drop the virtue signaling on democracy and put some boots on the ground in Ukraine. A Q&A with Trump’s former national security adviser.
By Tobin Harshaw

This article appeared in Bloomberg on December 18, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

Last month, I was in Honduras for its watershed presidential election. (OK, I was actually there to scuba dive, but it was during the watershed presidential election.) The result wasn’t a shock: The wife of a leftist former president with antidemocratic leanings beat the candidate of the right-wing ruling party with antidemocratic leanings. What was remarkable was how smoothly things went. The New York Times called it a “largely peaceful, orderly election” and reported that “the chief of the Organization of American States’s electoral observation mission, former President Luis Guillermo Solís of Costa Rica, called the vote ‘a beautiful example of citizen participation,’ noting the high turnout.”

Two weeks later, U.S. President Joe Biden held his Summit for Democracy, pledging “to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” Guess who wasn’t invited: Honduras. And guess who was: Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, all of which are rated “not free” in Freedom House’s annual democracy scorecard.

Political liberty, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. To make sense of the contradictions, I talked with somebody who has beheld many of them: John Bolton. Before his tempestuous tenure as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser — details of which can be found in his memoir, “The Room Where It Happened” — Bolton spent four decades in public service, including as U.S. representative to the United Nations under President George W. Bush. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:

Tobin Harshaw: Let’s start with Biden’s democracy summit, which I assume you don’t think was a smash success. What about the administration’s stated effort to put democracy promotion back at the center of foreign policy?

John Bolton: I would start from a different conceptual perspective. What we should be fostering in the world is not the abstraction of democracy, we should be fostering freedom, and those two things are not the same. Democracy has come to mean all things bright and beautiful, and that just obscures the meaning of what we’re after. What we want are constitutional representative governments, and, by definition, all constitutional governments are limited governments, which means they’re not fully democratic. People can live in freedom with different kinds of governments.

TH: It’s hard to understand why some countries were invited — Congo and Pakistan — and others weren’t, like Hungary and Bangladesh.

JB: When you get to summits like this, you inevitably end up making distinctions that are somewhat arbitrary. What we really ought to focus on is the threats to free government in the world, and invite people who may not meet a standard of perfection.

One reason not to hold this particular summit was the fact that it was virtual. Anybody who has ever been to major international meetings — the general debate at the United Nations every September, G-20 summits — will tell you that what’s important is not the plenary meeting, the speeches that all the leaders read and that nobody listens to, but the bilaterals, the pull-asides, the informal meetings. That’s where you can get into real substance. So the whole thing strikes me as an exercise in symbolism. I don’t believe in virtue-signaling.

TH: I like your distinction between democracy and freedom. Isn’t it true that many if not most nations exist in some sort of gray area between being free and being unfree?

JB: Trying to make this into a contest between democracies and non-democracies misses the point. The biggest threats we face are authoritarian governments, and you’re going to have governments that can be important allies but don’t live up to the standards that we live by. That may be unpleasant, but it’s the reality we live in.

TH: That was certainly a reality that we lived in during the Cold War.

JB: As Winston Churchill put it: If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. That’s not to say we don’t hope that these friendly nations will become better representative governments, and in some respects that has happened. We had Spain as a member of NATO while Franco was still the authoritarian leader, and yet now we have a functioning representative government in Spain and in Portugal. I think that shows progress.

TH: If we are in a new Cold War with China, what are the countries we should be looking for as allies, even if they don’t measure up to our highest ideals?

JB: I don’t think it’s a Cold War with China. Because it’s not ideological like it was during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It’s two different systems for sure, but the authoritarian party that runs China now is not communist, except in name. It’s classic authoritarian, domestically and internationally.

The point we tried to make during the Trump administration was that we wanted a free and open Indo-Pacific, and we’re happy to band together with anybody who opposes countries that try to make it less than free and open. Vietnam is hardly a free democratic society, but it’s on the border with China and has longstanding historical concerns about Chinese hegemonic ambitions. I have no hesitation whatever to work with the government of Vietnam; one day they may decide to adopt a more representative government, and that would be great.

TH: There are people who feel that Chinese authoritarianism is an ideology — and that Beijing is trying to promote similar authoritarian states in its image through the Belt and Road Initiative and other things.

JB: I think the Chinese are less concerned about transforming foreign regimes than about dominating their own people. It’s a powerful argument against their system when you have social credit scores, where they judge the performance of their own citizens. That’s something a free society should reject. But I hardly put it in the category of communism or fascism or the more identifiable 20th-century ideologies.

TH: Weaker countries are finding themselves more and more dependent on Chinese investment and economic help through Belt and Road and other things. Do you think that they are in danger of becoming a string of vassal states, or do you think they will react against efforts by China to bring them into the net?

JB: In many cases they are already reacting against the circumstances they find themselves in. Because their previous governments did not scrutinize the terms of Belt and Road projects, they didn’t see the debt trap that they were walking into. That’s one thing that we ought to try to work with like-minded countries globally to help prevent. The West believes in free and open economic transactions, and the Chinese have a completely different model that they have worked with enormous success, in part by subverting and undercutting things like the World Trade Organization.

TH: Many people feel that one of those opportunities was tTrans-Pacific Partnership, yet the Trump administration pulled out before it was finalized, and the Biden administration doesn’t seem any warmer to it. Do you think that’s a mistake?

JB: The trouble with TPP was not its concept — to use an economic organization to help combat Chinese hegemonic aspirations. The problem with TPP was it didn’t do very much; it just wasn’t a very impressive deal. Now we should re-look at how you take a notion that’s correct conceptually and make it more effective. The whole Indo-Pacific today is more receptive to doing something than it was before.

TH: How can you have another project with these friends and allies who feel that the U.S. snubbed them in the end?

JB: They are very concerned about an American retreat from the region as a whole, and would welcome other initiatives. I think this is true really on a global basis. Part of the problem, starting with Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and now Biden doing the same thing, is that every other region thinks we’re lessening our attention to them. We’re a global power, and the idea that pulling out of Afghanistan or the Middle East is somehow necessary to better deal with China is a completely fallacious argument. As we pull out of these regions, the Chinese move in.

TH: The question of the moment: Is Vladimir Putin about to start the largest land war in Europe since World War II, by invading Ukraine?

JB: I think Putin is doing cost-benefit analysis in real time, 24/7, and his objective is to get more and more hegemony in the space of the former Soviet Union — which may or may not include more annexation, a la Crimea — and to do it at a minimal cost.

Our threatened sanctions aren’t enough to deter him, and I think the U.S. and Europe have both suffered from a lack of strategic thinking. It’s not just a Ukraine question, it’s a question of what you do with the gray-zone countries: Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova in one clump, and then Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the other. NATO expanded east but it didn’t think through the logical end point: How much more are we going to expand and who are we consciously going to leave in a gray zone? So now Putin is forcing us to answer that question.

TH: The cliche is that he plays a weak hand well.

JB: I say that all the time.

TH: Like most cliches, it’s true. So how does the West play its stronger hand more effectively? Should NATO expansion be seriously on the table?

JB: Sure. President George W. Bush put it seriously on the table in April 2008, with respect to Georgia and Ukraine, and the Germans and the French said no. And four months later, the Russians invaded Georgia. You don’t get many laboratory experiments in foreign affairs, but there’s one of them right there, and I’m afraid we’re seeing another one here.

I would put more American and other NATO forces into Ukraine, exercising and training with the Ukrainians. Not because I expect them to fight, but because I want every Russian commander looking at that border to think, good grief, if I’m ordered to go across, there are going to be Americans a few miles away. I would send Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Kyiv right now to talk about greater cooperation. I would airlift more weapons into Ukraine, and into NATO countries that border on it, to say to Putin: Your cost-benefit analysis is changing right in front of you.

TH: Finally, let’s talk nonproliferation. You had an op-ed column the other day that did a good job of highlighting all the flaws in the 2015 Iran Nuclear Pact, but I don’t see much progress from arguing about the past. Biden and Trump both promised that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Is that even possible?

JB: Sure it is, but the problem is for 25 years we’ve had politicians of both parties who say it’s unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons, it’s unacceptable for North Korea to have nuclear weapons. I always took it to mean that if something is unacceptable, we wouldn’t accept it. And that means you have to take steps to stop it, including military force.

On Iran, I’m not sure the U.S. is going to have to do that, because Israel is prepared to act. North Korea remains a problem that successive American governments have failed on, and there’s nobody else in the world to blame for the success of the proliferators. We were the only ones who could stop them.

TH: What does success look like?

JB: You’ve got options for regime change in both North Korea and Iran. The idea that if we just negotiate a little bit harder, we’ll find a way to solve the problem, has been wrong for 20 years. It’s not just the threat that they might use the weapons, it’s that they would sell them or give them to others: to terrorist groups in the case of Iran, to anybody with hard currency in the case of North Korea.

TH: China, which long had a small and not particularly fearsome nuclear arsenal, has been expanding it like crazy. It’s building underground silos, it’s tested out this wacky space missile, and so forth: What happens if China really achieves nuclear parity with the U.S.?

JB: Then we’ve got a three-way nuclear standoff. During the Cold War, we were really in a bipolar nuclear environment with the Soviets, even if the U.K. and France and later China and other countries had some weapons. I think we’re past that bipolar point already, whatever China’s capability, because there’s no doubt they could scale up to the levels that Russia and the U.S. have under the New Start treaty. One of the things I said in the Trump administration was that any negotiation over New Start extension or replacement must include China.

TH: But there were good reasons that the USSR came to the table with President Ronald Reagan, and later Russia as well: The U.S. held all sorts of advantages. What reason would the Chinese have to come to the three-way table today?

JB: They feel they don’t have to, because the U.S. government through successive presidencies has failed to recognize the nature of the threat. We have far too long believed that the consequence of Deng Xiaoping moving toward more market-oriented domestic policies would mean a more democratic China internally, and a more responsible China externally. Those hypotheses have been proven completely wrong. I don’t think the Chinese fear us, and I don’t think they believe there will be any consequences for them becoming the third major nuclear power.

TH: So what is the strategy to bring them into talks?

JB: People have to wake up to the issue of how you want to deal with China overall. I think we’ve got to start imposing some economic costs. I’m not suggesting any military action, but because China’s approach is a whole of government, whole of society approach, we’ve got to respond in part the same way. It’s going to be economic retaliation with things we should have done already anyway — for example, penalize China for the theft of our intellectual property for the last three or four decades.

TH: Finally, you had a second op-ed piece this week on some of China’s other bad behavior — decrying its influence on international organizations such as the UN Human Rights Council. You were the American representative to the UN: Is there any chance of making it a useful tool in spreading the freedom you described earlier?

JB: No, I don’t think so. But it’s a place where you have to conduct the battle, to make the case. What happened with respect to the World Health Organization and coronavirus, what China has done to keep Taiwan outside the international system, what it has done to pervert the whole concept of human rights in the Human Rights Council, shows how it pretends to participate constructively in the international system. You have to expose that kind of behavior. It is part of the persuasion war that we are losing all around the world today.

 

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Russia Has Bigger Plans Beyond Ukraine And Belarus

November 30, 2021
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This article appeared in 19fortyfive on November 26, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, after learning Nikita Khrushchev had broken his commitment not to deploy nuclear-capable ballistic missiles on the island, John F. Kennedy called Khrushchev a “f*cking liar” and an “immoral gangster.” Hours later, JFK told his senior advisors, “we certainly have been wrong about what he’s trying to do in Cuba.”
So too with Vladimir Putin and Ukraine. Despite wide-ranging debate in the West, Russia’s objectives remain obscure, as do Putin’s and Alexander Lukashenko’s goals in next-door Belarus. In fact, Putin is pursuing a macro strategy throughout Russia’s “near abroad,” while the West’s approach is micro. Never forget Putin’s lamentation about the USSR dissolving, or that thirty years ago observers said of now-Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, “he’s not a Communist, he’s a czarist.”

Moscow is probing the entire “grey zone” between NATO’s eastern border and Russia’s western border: not just Ukraine and Belarus, but also Moldova and the Caucasus republics. Moldova’s “frozen conflict” with the Russian-created Trans-Dniester Republic; Russia’s ongoing occupation of two Georgian provinces; and Moscow’s recent pro-Azeri intervention in its conflict with Armenia, all demonstrate the Kremlin’s hegemonic or outrightly annexationist policies entangling the six grey-zone states. (The five Central Asian former Soviet republics face their own Russia problems, worthy of separate consideration.) Treating each conflict singly rather than strategically falls into Putin’s trap.

The Kremlin’s wider perspective is exemplified by its increases in Black Sea naval drills, and rising complaints about the U.S. Navy’s “provocative” presence there. Black Sea dominance would threaten not only Ukraine but also Georgia, intimidate NATO members Bulgaria and Romania, and induce angst in Erdogan’s increasingly erratic Turkey. Which of the several Russian threats are imminent and which less so is unclear, as in 1962 when Kennedy feared Khrushchev was holding Berlin hostage to dissuade a strong U.S. response to Russia’s Cuban adventurism.

The West’s collective inability to muster effective opposition policies underscores our nearsightedness. Confronted with widespread Kremlin misbehavior, Washington is responding by agonizing whether NATO exercises are the issue. Coming from Joe Biden, this is ironic, recalling Trumpian solicitude for Kim Jung-Un’s criticism of U.S.-South Korean joint exercises, while belittling Kim’s far more serious threats.

Meanwhile, Europe continues navel-gazing. Berlin’s new governing coalition’s agreement doesn’t mention NATO’s pledge that members spend at least 2% of GDP on defense, but strikingly supports more cooperation among EU militaries, a long-standing European chimera. The new Franco-Italian Quirinale Treaty similarly commits to strengthening EU defense strategy instead of stressing NATO.

This persistent inattention and introversion obviously give Putin substantial maneuvering room for hybrid-warfare tactics suiting Moscow’s interim objectives, particularly on sequence and timing, and setting the stage for future struggles. Today, new provocations may come sooner rather than later not because of Russian strength, but because it fears impending political or economic weakness. An aggressor can conclude it has only temporary advantages, thus encouraging striking before the balance shifts. Even worse, Putin could be coordinating with Chinese President Xi Jinping, with one regime’s rhetoric (say, China on Taiwan) intended to divert attention from the threat in Europe, in exchange for similar reciprocal aid from Putin to Xi later. Or vice versa.
Effective Western responses must recognize Moscow is pursuing a broader, more-interrelated, longer-term agenda than we have heretofore acknowledged. Even if Putin is improvising as he goes, and he almost certainly is, it is to seize targets of opportunity as they arise, manifesting Russia’s nimbleness, unfortunately, not strategic uncertainty. So, while increased military assistance to Ukraine, shutting down Nord Stream II, boycotting Russian oil, and other diplomatic and economic sanctions are all warranted, they will never be enough.

Washington must move beyond reacting to Russian provocations one by one, and through NATO, not the EU. Russia’s game, while whole-of-government in implementation, is far more politico-military than economic. NATO’s central geostrategic question is how to deal with the grey zone as an integrated problem-set. The Alliance’s eastern expansion never adequately considered where to stop, or the consequences for states left beyond NATO’s treaty guarantees, in the grey zone. The immediate task is not levying blame for this history, but deciding now which grey-zone countries are serious NATO candidates, loosening whatever grip the Kremlin has on them, and preventing new constraints from being imposed (such as a potential coup in Ukraine). Moscow must unambiguously hear both our intentions and our will to achieve them.

For those still not making the cut, NATO must decide how to protect our interests and deter Russia, while acknowledging that, by definition, the remaining grey-zone states are more vulnerable than NATO members (as all six are now at risk from unrelenting Kremlin efforts). While we grapple with these fateful decisions, NATO should tell Russia (yet again) that military changes to the status quo are unacceptable. After years of similar rhetoric, whether Putin will believe us is uncertain.

Once decided, NATO should begin unraveling the “frozen conflicts” and other entanglements Russia has imposed on prospective new NATO members. One case that should be a priority is eliminating the Trans-Dniester Republic, an artificial entity entirely dependent politically on Russia. Pressuring Moscow for the full reunification of Moldova would divert Putin’s attention from Ukraine. Another distraction would be increasing international attention to Georgia’s seized provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The West’s failure to stand up to Russia’s 2008 attack on Georgia led directly to Russia’s later seizure of Crimea and the Donbass. Returning the favor to Moscow would alleviate stress on Ukraine, and also highlight the pattern of Russian behavior NATO needs to reverse.

Obviously, there is much more to do. Clearly, merely assuming defensive postures against belligerent Kremlin moves is neither the grey zone’s road to peace and security nor NATO’s. Especially in the wake of the catastrophic U.S.-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, now is the Alliance’s time to show it is alive and well in its own heartland. The message to Moscow should be: there are no easy days ahead.

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Offering Lukashenko a graceful exit could be the best way to stop a Putin land grab in Belarus

November 15, 2021
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Western lassitude is enabling Russia’s possible total reabsorption of the former Soviet republic

This article appeared in The Telegraph on November 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
November 13, 2021

Short attention spans, willful ignorance, wishful thinking, and no strategic planning have preceded international debacles throughout history. That brings us to Belarus.

Thirty years after the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and dissolved, Western lassitude is enabling Russia’s possible total reabsorption of Belarus, the first former Soviet republic so endangered. Although Moscow’s goal elsewhere may be suzerainty rather than sovereignty, Vladimir Putin did annex Crimea from Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics are wavering under his relentless efforts to reverse three decades of their independence.

From Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Moscow had waged an increasingly successful campaign to assert hegemony. Books will be written about the West’s collectively feeble response.

Indeed, in present circumstances, both Belarus and Ukraine may be under assault simultaneously, although in different ways and for different reasons. Russia’s latest military build-up along Ukraine’s border, if it is a serious threat, could well be a precursor for annexing a significant part of the Donbas region, currently under the control of Russian-backed paramilitaries.

Belarus, by contrast, is now the schwerpunkt of Kremlin activity that might involve a total re-amalgamation of the entire country. Obviously by foreshadowing possible conflict in two theatres, Russia has expanded its possible options and confused its adversaries.

In Minsk, President Alexander Lukashenko is not yet fully under Russian control, and his unfolding efforts to flood Poland and the Baltic countries with imported Middle Eastern refugees (and threaten natural gas cutoffs) may be entirely his own plan.

Unfortunately, Turkey’s earlier success in transferring Syrian refugees into Europe (abetted by Germany’s unilateral open-borders decision) is being repeated, as the European Union loses sight of the forced Russia-Belarus reunion while it scrambles to handle a potential new influx of migrants. Incredibly, Warsaw is actually being criticised for violating the “refugees’ human rights” by not considering them for asylum, as if they trekked to Poland on their own.

Whether Minsk’s idea or Moscow’s, this artificial refugee crisis, a form of “hybrid warfare” Putin has used adroitly, provides the distraction needed to justify both increased repression within Belarus and more serious provocations by Russia throughout its “near abroad”. Putin’s renewed troop build-ups and maneuvers along the Ukrainian border may be part of such a larger strategy.

Neither Washington nor Brussels has responded adequately to Belarus developments in recent years. America’s excuses for failure are Trump and Biden. Europe’s excuse is that the EU is still less than the sum of its parts; its primitive politico-military capabilities don’t match its rhetorical pipe organ.

No Western country responded strategically to the extensive protests against the regime in Belarus in 2020, nor to Lukashenko’s kidnapping earlier this year of the opposition leader Roman Protasevich, an act of air piracy indicating that “hybrid warfare” was already under way. Biden missed significant opportunities to confront Putin on Belarus at their June 16 Geneva summit, and over September’s quadrennial Zapad joint-military exercises in Belarus. Putin may think he has a green light.

Lukashenko’s clear preference is retaining authority in an independent Belarus. His Plan B is keeping power even if only as a Russian protectorate. The West’s problem is that sanctioning Minsk for suppressing its political opposition may not topple Lukashenko, but it may allow Putin in.

To paraphrase Lord Ismay, Nato’s first secretary general, our key objectives in Belarus should be to keep Russia out, a free Belarus government in, and Lukashenko down. Unfortunately, however, we are long past the point where we should have developed a coherent strategy to achieve these goals. Prudence therefore dictates being willing to accept what is probably the most we can get: a free, independent Belarus. At a minimum, we must avoid the worst-case outcome, with Russian bayonets keeping Lukashenko in power.

Virtue signalers in Europe and America would prize a successful “colour revolution” in Belarus, with Lukashenko and his fellow miscreants humiliated in court and ultimately imprisoned, but that is likely impossible. Menacingly, an entirely plausible scenario is that the opposition stages larger and larger protests; Lukashenko panics and requests Russian military support; and Putin all too happily complies, with Belarus suppressed not under Lukashenko but under Putin, followed by reabsorption into Russia.

If events took this turn, which might happen with sudden speed, Western capitals could do very little, other than engage in more useless virtue signaling about how unacceptable it all was.

Instead, we should find ways to make it attractive for Lukashenko, his family and top advisors to hand over power in exchange for a good life in exile (perhaps in a Gulf Arab country) and immunity from prosecution in Belarus.

Western threats have not succeeded with Lukashenko, sadly, because the threats are not credible. A golden parachute for Lukashenko is credible if Western leaders recognize the unpleasant correlation of forces they face.

If circumstances permit, Lukashenko can even be allowed to leave gracefully, pretending that his departure was his own plan. The key is getting him out of Minsk before Moscow can pretend to have heard an invitation to intervene.

In America, we call such a scenario “winning ugly”. But it beats losing, especially for the citizens of Belarus, not to mention Ukraine and the others.

John Bolton is a former United States national security adviser

Criticizing and sanctioning Lukashenko is no substitute for an actual strategy on Belarus

June 01, 2021
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This article appeared in The Washington Post on May 30, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 30, 2021

The United States and the European Union made a strategic mistake last summer by mishandling the unprecedented protests against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s autocratic regime. Now, after Lukashenko’s commission of air piracy on May 23 to kidnap an opposition critic, the West appears set on compounding its error by driving Belarus further into the welcoming arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Western capitals reacted with essentially unanimous condemnation when the Lukashenko government forced a Ryanair flight transiting Belarusian airspace to land and arrested passenger Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, and his girlfriend, Russian activist Sofia Sapega. Both kidnap victims were soon displayed in “confession” videos possibly obtained by threats or torture.

Rhetorical condemnation of the seizures came quickly, and E.U. and U.S. sanctions on the Lukashenko regime were announced. Lukashenko responded by accusing the West of launching “hybrid warfare” against Belarus.

Since Soviet days, Belarus and Russia have had an integrated air-defense system, leading to speculation about Moscow’s possible role or at least acquiescence in the kidnapping. Putin’s spokesman called such suspicions “obsessive Russophobia.” Putin pledged support to Lukashenko when the two met in Sochi, Russia, on Friday.

There is no question the West rightly concluded that Belarus committed air piracy, behavior entirely consistent with the regime’s autocratic methods. And as Alexei Navalny and many others could testify, it has the hallmarks of Putin’s equally authoritarian state next door.

Unfortunately, however, virtue-signaling, even accompanied by economic sanctions, does not constitute a satisfactory Western strategy to resolve a vastly more important issue: What is the future for Belarus as a whole? Will it be encouraged to follow the path of former Warsaw Pact states and at least some former Soviet republics into the West? Or will it be allowed to suffer full annexation into Russia?

President Biden needs to decide the answers to these questions and how to make them happen before his June 16 summit with Putin. There is no sign he knows what his answers are.

Last August, amid huge protests in Belarus prompted by a thoroughly rigged Lukashenko election, demonstrators said they were inclined toward neither Russia nor the West and did not want to be pawns in any international struggle. That view was supported by the lead E.U. foreign-affairs official. The Trump administration, consumed by the 2020 election campaign, said and did little. The protests failed. Lukashenko remained in power, and quiet returned. Until now. Will we repeat this strategic mistake?

It may be true that Belarus’s dissidents simply want to end Lukashenko’s oppression, without regard for the geopolitical environment in which Belarus exists. If so, it is touchingly — and dangerously — naive. No one in Moscow, certainly not Putin, sees Belarus’s fate as anything but closely tied to Russia.

Caught between NATO’s easternmost reach and Russia’s border, Belarus and other former Soviet republics are in a gray space that invites insecurity and Russian interventionism. Simply looking at the borders Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine share with Belarus, Western Europeans would see that Minsk’s future is intimately tied to their own.

Supporting Belarus’s political opposition is thus not simply about deploring the thwarting of human rights through corrupted elections or the kidnapping of dissidents, unpalatable as those transgressions are. The potential freedom of all 9.5 million Belarusian citizens is at stake, since integrating Belarus into Russia would all but extinguish the chance for real liberty.

The fact that the West’s attention turned away from Belarus after the unsuccessful anti-Lukashenko demonstrations last summer, and refocused only following the Protasevich air-napping, shows that ad hoc, piecemeal approaches to a strategic problem are unsustainable and unlikely to succeed. Nor does it advance the Belarusian opposition’s cause to ignore the larger strategic context.

One approach, undoubtedly distasteful to the high-minded, would be to develop a way out for Lukashenko. Secure exile for himself and a select few followers in some well-appointed venue might be attractive to him at the right moment.

But such an extrication doesn’t happen overnight. It requires complex planning, specifically in this case to deter any possible Russian military moves into Belarus, as in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine or its creation of other “frozen conflicts” on Russia’s periphery. One potential bargaining chip: Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany still isn’t complete, and it can be stopped at will, assuming the West and Germany in particular still have one.

Some may sniff at the idea of “impunity” for Lukashenko, but other former communist countries have decided that looking to the future outweighs a backward-facing, prosecution-at-all-costs strategy. Nelson Mandela’s South Africa did something similar, employing a post-apartheid “truth and reconciliation” policy.

We cannot underestimate how difficult are the prospects facing Belarus. It is certain, however, that sanctions and one-off expressions of displeasure with Lukashenko will not change his behavior or regime. Merely driving him deeper into Putin’s embrace risks losing all of Belarus, essentially forever. Time was growing short after last summer’s rigged elections. It is even shorter today.

How Biden Can Turn the Tables on Putin

May 13, 2021
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He aggresses in a gray zone between NATO and Russia, so let’s remove it

This article appeared in The National Review on May 13, 2021. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
May 13, 2021

The Biden administration billed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s May 6 visit to Kyiv as showing support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression. Instead, Blinken served up only rhetorical pablum, retreating from what senior Trump officials (although not Trump himself) did to back Ukraine and re­turning to Obama-era blandishments. Vladimir Putin must be delighted.

Inexplicably, moreover, Blinken equated Russia’s belligerence with Ukraine’s admittedly substantial corruption problems, stating that there is “aggression from outside . . . and, in effect, aggression from within.” This moral equivalence is nonsensical. For both Washington and Kyiv, corruption is hardly as strategically important as Moscow’s threat. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky won election by campaigning against corruption, and while he is struggling to prevail, lecturing him publicly will not improve his performance.

More fundamentally, President Biden still has no policy to deal with Russia (or China) in Europe. During his April 13 telephone call with Putin, for example, Biden raised a long list of issues and ended by inviting Putin to a bilateral summit. Strategic coherence, however, requires allocating priorities and resources among national-security problems, not just listing them. Absent substantive policy direction, process steps such as summits are theater at best and often counter­productive, highlighting the vacuum that lies beneath public rhetoric.

Biden’s inherited problems, complicated by the passage of time, nonetheless increasingly require urgent solutions. After the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, NATO’s eastward expansion never reached a decisive conclusion. Six Eastern European and Caucasus countries were left in a gray zone between Russia and NATO’s new borders, thereby remaining vulnerable to Moscow’s desire to reestablish hegemony within the former USSR. (The five Central Asian states, having their own complicated relationships with Russia, deserve separate analysis.)

Following the USSR’s disintegration, Moscow vigorously sought to contest the gray zone: creating “frozen conflicts” in Moldova and Georgia through direct Russian military involvement, and manipulating Azerbaijani–Armenian hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh. Russia kept Belarus politically and economically close, still its strategy today but an increasingly difficult one after 2020’s popular opposition to the Minsk regime.

The Kremlin tried to mirror its Belarus policy in Ukraine, because both are central to its vision of “Russia.” Moscow initially succeeded in Kyiv, but the 2004 Orange Revolution brought such dramatic changes that, in April 2008, George W. Bush proposed putting Ukraine and Georgia on a sure path to NATO membership. Germany and France rejected Bush’s proposal, and four months later Russia invaded Georgia. Russia subsequently subverted the Orange Revolution through fraud and skullduggery but was in turn reversed by another popular uprising in 2014. In retaliation, Putin seized Crimea outright and created a new frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine.

However messy the history, Russian aggressiveness within the former USSR harms U.S. interests by destabilizing the region and, left unchecked, threatens instability across Europe. Virtually all the states of “new Europe” — the post–Cold War generation of NATO members — believe, with good reason, that blocking Moscow’s interference is critical to their growth and stability. Old Europe, especially Germany and France, is still somewhat tone-deaf here, so the diplomatic heavy lifting ahead for Washington should not be underestimated — par for the course even at the Cold War’s height.

Russia’s belligerence in Europe also shows its increasing, disturbing closeness to China, a relationship reflecting Moscow’s importance to Beijing for supplying hydrocarbons and high-tech weapons and the regimes’ perception of common interests in shielding the likes of Iran and North Korea from U.S. pressure. Breaking this emerging axis should be a high U.S. priority and is entirely consistent with thwarting Russian interference across its European borders.

China’s effort to purchase Ukraine’s major aerospace firm Motor Sich, successfully blocked by Kyiv after considerable American effort, exemplifies this point. Standing up to China’s existential challenge to the West as a whole will also require diplomatic heavy lifting in Europe.

As long as a gray zone remains be­tween NATO and Russia, instability will persist. Shrinking this inherently dangerous geographic space reduces potential Russian mischief, and ultimately confronts Moscow again with the question whether to join the West or oppose it.

Ultimately, inclusion in NATO is the only way for the endangered countries to minimize the inevitable uncertainty and instability between the alliance and Russia. Previously, NATO has rightly shied from adding new members with foreign combatants on their soil, seeing that as inheriting a war and thereby triggering Article Five of the Washington Treaty. Reducing the gray zone does not immediately require any new NATO memberships, but the alliance can surely devise an appropriate status to handle today’s European problem.

To get there, our primary focus should be to substantially augment Zelensky’s diplomatic and military efforts to expel Russia from eastern Ukraine, and then to impose steeply increasing costs on Russia if it fails to respond diplomatically. Succeeding will not solve Crimea, but it will clear the decks to do so. Critically, we must keep Europe focused on rolling back Moscow’s blatant cross-border military action.

Moldova, tucked between Ukraine and Romania, is a frozen conflict ready for melting. Purportedly independent Transnistria, a Russian invention, exists separately from Moldova only through Moscow’s continued military presence. Simply raising international attention to this post–Cold War anomaly would startle the Kremlin, and a determined new government in Chisinau now provides the opportunity for Washington to step up.

Similarly, in Georgia, it is time to push back against Russia’s presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with the aim of re-creating the April 2008 situation in which NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia was serious and feasible. Ukraine and Georgia remain the two most strategically important gray-zone countries. In turn, taken more seriously after Biden’s acknowledgement of Turkey’s genocidal campaign during World War I, Washington can then address the Azerbaijan–Armenian conflict. Real progress, however, will likely have to abide Turkey’s 2023 elections. If incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdogan loses, much will be possible. But if he wins, Turkey will be dangerously close to removing itself from NATO by spurning Mustafa Kemal’s post-Ottoman vision, and thereby badly undermining NATO’s position in the Caucasus.

Belarus is the hardest challenge of all, with alliance membership inconceivable for quite some time. Yet however difficult it may be, the U.S. cannot leave Belarus to Moscow uncontested. The map alone shows how geopolitically critical Belarus is for Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics, and how grave a threat an offensive Russian military presence would be. Ironically, rising pro-democracy sentiment increases the risk of Russian military intervention, and perhaps an outright Anschluss, even as the popular discontent demonstrates that moving Belarus westward may be more feasible than previously thought. NATO needs more outreach into Belarus, and its Eastern European members should play a major role. Belarus also implicates the related question whether Sweden and Finland will finally accept the inevitable and join NATO, thereby bolstering the Baltic republics and others.

Russia’s promises not to intervene in its former republics — and its protestations that its intentions are benign — carry no weight. Russia will stop meddling when it knows that it cannot succeed and that crossing a NATO boundary (of some sort) will bring inevitable and highly damaging consequences. The sooner we make that clear, the better.

June’s back-to-back G-7 and NATO summits in London and Brussels, respectively, afford President Biden an opportunity to prove he has more to offer than recycled rhetoric. If he fails to deliver next month, there is trouble ahead for Ukraine, America, and Europe.