As the Ukraine crisis unfolds, there has been much rhetoric devoted to questions of the West’s – and, in particular, Barack Obama’s – toughness and ‘credibility’. Be wary of this chatter, for in most cases it is nonsense, and in some cases dangerous nonsense.
In Sunday’s Washington Post, David Kramer, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, suggested that Ukrainian authorities had ‘used gruesome force against protestors’ because President Obama failed to bomb Syria after its use of chemical weapons. The Post itself, in an editorial published Monday, said that ‘while the United States has been retrenching, the tide of democracy in the world, which once seemed inexorable, has been receding’ – without even pretending to put forward a theory of connection between the two. Also on Monday, Senator John McCain told delegates to the annual AIPAC conference that Russia’s seizure of Crimea was ‘the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore’
The striking thing is that Obama’s critics give this game away at the start by conceding that there are no conceivable circumstances under which the US should engage the Russians in military conflict over Ukraine. McCain said as much to AIPAC, as did the Post in its editorial. These are reassuring nods to realism, but then please remind us: precisely who or what is the source of America’s credibility problem in facing down Russia on the Crimean Peninsula?
It is plausible that foreign antagonists will, at the margins, calculate a likely American response by assessing such intangibles as presidential character and resolve. But academic literature and common sense both tell us that a far more important measure is the perceived respective national interest in the outcome. And in Ukraine, the respective American and Russian interests at stake are gapingly asymmetrical. Ukraine borders Russia; its Crimea is the home base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet; it is economically intertwined with Russia; it has a large Russian-speaking minority with special affinities for Russia; and – on the more emotional realm – it is the birthplace of the Russian nation and the Orthodox Church. US interests are real but far less direct. The US has a general commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity stemming from Kiev’s 1994 agreement to surrender Soviet nuclear weapons that were based on its soil. It also has a general interest in European security and stability, and that stability is diminished if Russia can carve up a neighbouring country under any pretext.
What connects Syria and Ukraine is not that American restraint in the former has somehow triggered bad Russian behaviour on a separate continent. Instead, what connects them is that they both entail local fights involving countries and groups whose stake in the outcome is disproportionately, even existentially, greater than our own. Putin’s unquestionably thuggish assertion of Russian claims beyond its border would not have been deterred by US air-strikes retaliating for Syrian chemical-weapons use, because, to state the obvious, such strikes would have indicated absolutely nothing about American readiness to launch air-strikes against Russia. On the contrary, Putin would have added the US intervention in Syria to the Libya intervention and Iraq invasion in waving away, as ‘hypocritical’, American condemnation of his own Ukraine intervention.
The question of a US commitment to Ukraine is especially confused because the Clinton and Bush administrations – over a protracted period of triumphal, irrational exuberance – extended America’s victorious alliance to countries that bordered the loser of a half-century Cold War struggle. The reductio ad absurdum of this exuberance was the solemn declaration of NATO governments at their 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’. It was only a few months later that Georgia, after its reckless provocation of attacking separatist South Ossetia and the Russian peacekeepers based there, was invaded by the Russian troops who have never left.
His critics accuse Obama of living in a fantasy world, but where did his predecessor (and that predecessor’s NATO counterparts) reside when they failed to ask themselves the simple question – what do we do if the allegedly deterrent power of our pledge to these states fails? What are we really prepared to do?
That is the question the Obama administration has rightly asked about Syria for the past several years. Obama himself has spoken soberly, realistically, even wisely about this conflict and America’s stake in it. Where the administration has gotten into trouble is where its rhetoric has one or twice slipped the bonds of its actual policy, raising hopes of intervention in the face of the clear US determination not to over-engage in the conflict.
So the course of wisdom in approaching these two tragedies – the acute crisis in Ukraine and the chronic horror in Syria – is to think carefully and articulate clearly the extent of our interests and the lengths we will go to defend them. Normally, an interest would be considered vital if the threat to it endangered us militarily or economically, or if its neglect constituted the betrayal of a solemn moral or strategic commitment that we have undertaken. Russia has violated the sovereignty of Ukraine, and it is appropriate that the US and its allies do what they can to ensure that Moscow pays a price. But we need to be honest, first and foremost with ourselves, about the price we are willing to pay. If a gap opens up between our rhetoric and our real interests, then we will either overextend ourselves in a course of action that we cannot sustain, or fail to match our actions with our rhetoric. In either case, our credibility will suffer.
Dana H. Allin is Editor of Survival and Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs. Steven Simon is Executive Director, IISS–US, and Corresponding Director, IISS–Middle East. Prior to joining the IISS in 2013, he was Senior Director for Middle East and North Africa on the White House National Security Staff.