Clint Eastwood, Fareed Zakaria, and Crimean Strategy

Someone with whom I grew up (who hopefully won't read this, as I'm essentially calling her out) recently said that an article by Fareed Zakaria "might be the best piece I've read" on Russia and the Crimean crisis - apparently unaware that Zakaria loudly pronounced in late February that Russia was unlikely to invade Crimea.

I'm reminded of a YouTube clip we watched in Strategic Nuclear Doctrine...


... in which Zakaria debates Norman Podhoretz, and delivers an aggressive argument for his view that deterring Iran is the best option. Zakaria states this view matter-of-factly, as if his suggestion is painfully obvious. He then misrepresents Iranian history, and advances a view of nuclear deterrence held only by those who haven't actually studied nuclear deterrence. I've known folks who have thought it was a good idea for Iran to get nuclear weapons, based upon a theoretical idea that more nuclear-armed states will minimize international aggression, rather than encouraging it. (The same theorists are less convincing when asked to explain why Iran would adopt the sorts of arms control and confidence-building measures that the international community has come to take for granted from the United States and Russia, but which are largely absent in peripheral nuclear regimes such as North Korea.) I've always been more convinced with the arguments of seminal nuclear theorist Albert Wohlstetter, who likened nuclear war to an "old-fashioned Western gun duel", and who wrote The Delicate Balance of Terror. (For a great discussion of Wohlstetter, check out this War on the Rocks podcast.) Let's look a bit more closely at the gun duel analogy.

If we liken the Clausewitzian contest of wills to a Wild West gunfight, the most stable situation is two gunfighters in direct opposition to one another. Add any more variables to that equation, and deterrence gets exponentially more complex, and inversely less secure. I'm a big fan of the Man with No Name Trilogy starring Clint Eastwood. My favorite film in the series is For a Few Dollars More, and the climactic scene - save for the intervention of "Manco" - involves a one-on-one duel between Colonel Douglas Mortimer and El Indio. More complex was the final gunfight in the series, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which featured a Mexican standoff between Blondie, Tucco, and Angel Eyes. The first film in the series, A Fistful of Dollars, gives yet another model to consider: two factions, plus a third player whose agenda is both vague and fluid. Accounting for a single armed adversary is difficult enough; accounting for two is far more difficult, and any more (not to mention those whose motives and goals are unclear) severely compromises the stability of deterrence. (The Man with No Name's steel chest plate from A Fistful of Dollars' climactic gunfight is also an apt allegory for ballistic missile defense, but that's another matter entirely.)

Now, let's get back to strategic terms. The most stable situation is one in which no states possess nuclear weapons - a situation which, contrary to the goals of nuclear disarmament advocates, ended forever in 1945. The second most stable situation is one with only two nuclear powers, which lasted from 1949 to 1952, and which will never take place again. At present, international strategy must account for five nuclear weapons states (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China), three declared nuclear-armed states (India, Pakistan, and North Korea), and one undeclared but likely nuclear-armed state (Israel). As if this deterrence environment wasn't challenging enough, Zakaria is comfortable adding Iran to the equation.

Unfortunately, his remarks ignore the fact that nuclear weapons would insulate existing Iranian adventurism from international consequences, and encourage more ambitious adventurism in the future. (For a primer on post-revolutionary Iranian-American relations, have a look at this post.) Making irresponsible comparisons of Iran to Mao's China, Zakaria ignores that China's nuclear arsenal insulated it from international consequences for its own adventurism in Mao's era and thereafter. Zakaria also fails to make appropriate comparisons between a notional nuclear Iran, and present-day Pakistan and North Korea. Even when he was debating with Podhoretz (as noted with that article, he was still advocating his "Deterrence!" solution in 2012), Russia's nuclear arsenal insulated it from international pressure - a situation made more poignant by Russia's invasion of Crimea. He also ignores the precedent of Iran signing, then circumventing and violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

So, why do I bring all of this up? Because just as Zakaria was wrong about Iran and nuclear deterrence, he's wrong about Crimea and Russian strategy. He repeats Secretary of State John Kerry's critique of Russia's "nineteenth century fashion". Secretary Kerry said:

"You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext."

From Zakaria:

"Almost all of these critics have ridiculed Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that changing borders by force, as Russia did, is 19th-century behavior in the 21st century. Well, here are the facts. Scholar Mark Zacher has tallied up changes of borders by force, something that was once quite common. Since World War I, he notes, that practice has sharply declined, and in recent decades, that decline has accelerated. Before 1950, wars between nations resulted in border changes (annexations) about 80 percent of the time. After 1950, that number dropped to 27 percent. In fact, since 1946, there have been only 12 examples of major changes in borders using force — and all of them before 1976. So Putin’s behavior, in fact, does belong to the 19th century."

The data cited by Zakaria is just flat out wrong. One could make a case that current trends in international relations make annexations difficult, but that's a far cry from the claims made by Zakaria by way of Mark Zacher. Let's just take one example, and look at the claim that "there have been only 12 examples of major changes in borders using force — and all of them before 1976". I can think of two examples of attempted annexations which were narrowly averted through military campaigns: the attempted Argentine annexation of the Falkland Islands in 1982, and the attempted Iraqi annexation of Kuwait in 1990/'91. Russia itself executed de facto annexations of the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008. We could debate whether or not the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan constituted an "annexation", but it's a shade of grey at very best. Zacher and Zakaria also write off the entire Cold War, in which few borders formally changed, but in which force was used to influence entire nations. The Cold War was also a massive contest of wills between the West and the Warsaw Pact; and although the two sides never fought directly, nuclear weapons pushed them into a series of proxy wars in which they fought one another indirectly - a fact which Zacher and Zakaria omit entirely. Their claims also ignore the role that force has played in conflicts between such nations as Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the Balkans. In fact, the idea that force plays no role in such matters at the present day is often a matter of linguistic nuance, rather than operational factors. As Ryan Evans notes in a recent article for War on the Rocks:

Due to its reluctance to launch military interventions, President Obama’s administration is often described as realist, but recent events have laid bare the pronounced anti-realist character of the Administration’s worldview. The litmus test for realism is not military intervention, but rather whether one views the world through the lenses of power and strategy. Decrying President Putin’s normative views of international relations as being mired in the 19th Century is the farthest one could get from realism during an international crisis.

I'm willing to give Secretary Kerry and the Obama Administration a bit of a pass, because even though their comments about "nineteenth century fashion" are questionable, they're being used as part of a wider strategic communications effort aimed at convincing Russia to withdraw its forces from the Crimean Peninsula. Unfortunately, I can't give Zakaria the same pass: as a member of the commentariat, he's not bound by the same policy limitations as the Obama Administration. Instead, Zakaria is responsible for informing and influencing the public based upon his alleged wealth of knowledge and experience in foreign policy. Based upon his aforementioned remarks about nuclear deterrence, and these comments about "nineteenth century politics", I find myself underwhelmed by the value of his commentary.

There's a reason why strategists double as historians: because historical lessons, even those going back thousands of years, are relevant to modern politics, to include modern war (the latter being a subset of the former). The Book of Ecclesiastes says that "what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun"; Clausewitz notoriously wrote that war "has certainly a grammar of its own, but its logic is not peculiar to itself" - a sentiment universally understood to mean that while warfare may change, war itself is unchanging. More reputable sources, such as Robert Kagan (The Return of History and the End of Dreams) and strategy doyen Colin S. Gray (Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare) describe the likely return of great power politics, and both are worth reading. (Kagan's book is a quick read; Gray's is excellent, but if you're pressed for time, the chapter summaries are very thorough.)