By Michael F. Duggan
Last night the Russian political scientist and nationalist, Sergey Karaganov, was the remote guest on the BBC program, HARDtalk. What could have been an interesting interview quickly became an exercise in condescending badgering by the program’s host Stephen Sackur. If you can get past Sackur’s abysmally conventional interpretation of events, you can glean some insights on Russian thinking from Mr. Karaganov’s answers to the questions thrown at him.
In crises, diplomacy, and war (and especially in the run up to wars), it is imperative to try to see events as your opponents see them (what the Quincy Institute called “strategic empathy” in a discussion that aired a month before the Russian invasion). This does not make you an agent or a “dupe” of the other side. It makes you a sensible, honest broker who is far more useful to your team than zealots and true believers mouthing cliches while dehumanizing and demonizing the opponent and ignoring the possibility that the other side has legitimate security interests too.
Reflecting Russian suspicion of the West and a sense of betrayal, Karaganov compared NATO to a spreading cancer and said that to date “persuasion,” “therapy,” nor “surgery” have worked. His implication was that a more aggressive kind of surgery was soon to be at hand. He hoped that a “radiological” approach would not be necessary but that nothing was off the table. He said that NATO was “ramming the doors of “Hell.” The implications could not have been clearer.
Sackur saw this as mere saber-rattling and pointed out that previous Russian threats of escalation had not been actualize. In other words, rather than acknowledging Russian restraint to date, Sackur was taunting his guest over what he characterized as bluff and bluster (can we presume that Sackur would he have preferred a disproportional Russian response to Western escalations?). Rather than acknowledging the danger of the situation, the host seemed to shrug off the possibility of a wider war as an irresponsible but ultimately empty threat. This is exactly the kind of dismissive attitude that could trigger a wider war.
Karaganov repeated a number of times that Russia will not lose the war under any circumstances. This statement and the by “all means” implication of a nuclear threat lends insight into how Russia sees NATO expansion and the escalating proxy war. They see the latter as the inevitable consequence of the former, an effort to surround European Russia for the purpose of degrading and humiliating it (as Jeffrey Sachs, recently observed, NATO’s long-term strategy against Russia is essentially akin to that of Palmerston and Napoleon III during the Crimean War). The Russians see NATO expansion as aggression, and since the Bucharest Accords of 2008, have been on the record saying that movement toward Ukrainian or Georgian membership in NATO would be regarded as an existential threat, i.e. tantamount to an act of war.
Taking these observations at face value, how does all of this play out from here? We know from Karaganov’s statements, as well as those from the speech given by Putin on the anniversary of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, that they will not accept defeat and are willing to resort to nuclear weapons. At this point, it is unlikely that they will negotiate short of an agreement of unconditional surrender by Ukraine. In other words, Russia is committed to victory, whatever it takes. The danger is that the neocons and allied liberal interventionists in the foreign policy Blob may be similarly committed.
Suppose that the anticipated Russian winter offensive is launched sometime this month. What will happen if the brave Ukrainian Ground Forces are eventually defeated and Russia has secured its territorial ambitions in the east, leaving a Ukrainian rump state? Suppose also that Ukrainian generals inform their government that the war is over and overthrow the Zelensky administration if it does not acknowledge defeat.
At that point, what would the United States do? Rationally there would be nothing it could do. And yet if the Biden administration does nothing, the defeat will be characterized by the Republicans as a Democratic foreign policy debacle. If the administration does not commit the U.S. and NATO to an all out war against Russia, the Democrats could face defeat in the 2024 election. And yet if the U.S. does intervene directly in the war, it will be a world war that will most likely end with the use of nuclear weapons. Some choice, huh?
Ironically, some Republicans have shown a more sensible and realistic understanding of the conflict and the massive spending that has kept the Ukrainian in the fight to date. Is a right-wing House of Representatives the only possible brake on events whose momentum appears to be pushing the world toward a nuclear war, or will cooler heads prevail without them?