War May Loom, but Are There Offramps?

 

"Defusing Ukraine

It is possible that Mr. Putin’s bottom line in this conflict is straightforward: that he wants to stop Ukraine from joining NATO and get an assurance that the United States and NATO will never place offensive weapons that threaten Russia’s security in Ukrainian territory.

On those two issues, it would seem, there is trading space. While the United States says it will never abandon the NATO “open door” policy — which means that every nation is free to make its own choice about whether it seeks to join the Western alliance — the reality is clear:

 

Ukraine is so corrupt, and its grasp of democracy is so tenuous, that no one expects it to be accepted for NATO membership in the next decade or two.

 

On this, Mr. Biden has been clear.

“The likelihood that Ukraine is going to join NATO in the near term is not very likely,” he said at a news conference on Wednesday, giving voice to a previously unspoken truth. “So there is room to work if he wants to do that.”

It seemed an open invitation to offer Russia some kind of assurance that, for a decade, or maybe a quarter-century, NATO membership for Kyiv was off the table. But the Biden administration has drawn a red line at allowing Mr. Putin a right to veto which nations can join NATO.

More complex is negotiating the reverse problem: How the United States and NATO operate in Ukraine. Ever since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the United States and NATO nations have been haltingly providing Ukraine with what the West calls defensive arms, including the capability to take out Russian tanks and aircraft. That flow has sped up in recent weeks.

To hear Mr. Putin, those weapons are more offensive than defensive — and Russian disinformation campaigns have suggested that Washington’s real goal is to put nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Administration officials say the United States has no such plans — and some kind of agreement should be, as one official said, “the easiest part of this,” as long as Russia is willing to pull back its intermediate-range weapons as well.

Upending the European Order

Mr. Putin has made clear that he wants to restore what he calls Russia’s “sphere of influence” in the region — essentially a return to the Cold War order, before Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed in 1997 that former Soviet states and Warsaw bloc nations could choose whether to seek membership in NATO. Since then, the alliance has roughly doubled in size.

Mr. Putin also wants all nuclear weapons out of Europe, even though those weapons — mostly gravity bombs that have been stored in Germany, Turkey, Italy and Belgium — have been there for decades.

Asked on Wednesday whether he would take those weapons out or stop troop rotations through the former Soviet bloc, Mr. Biden said, “No, there’s not space for that.”

Rose Gottemoeller, who negotiated New START, the last major nuclear accord with Russia, said at the Center for the National Interest on Monday that Mr. Putin’s demands were partly “a temper-tantrum effect” after years in which his grievances have, in his view, never been taken seriously.

So is there room for negotiation? Perhaps there is, Ms. Gottemoeller said. She noted that Mr. Putin “cares about summitry with Biden,” which suggests that the two men might, ultimately, come to some kind of broader understanding about Europe’s future. At a minimum they could address the nuclear issues by reviving the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, which Mr. Putin violated for years and President Donald J. Trump scrapped.

And the United States has suggested reviving an old agreement that would limit military exercises, prescribe how far away from borders they needed to be and reduce the fear that an “exercise” turns into an invasion.

The problem with this approach is that it sounds a lot like continuing the kind of grinding, incremental arrangements that have marked the post-Cold War era. And that is exactly the era Mr. Putin is trying to blow up.

Cuban Missile Crisis Redux?

If all these sound like quarter-century-old problems, well, they are. Which is why any new accords with Russia, to be truly effective, would have to embrace Russia’s turn toward deniable, hard-to-detect cyberweapons. As the Department of Homeland Security reminded private industry over the weekend, American critical infrastructure, including the power grid, is laced with Russian-planted malware. So far, none has been triggered — and as a deterrent the United States has planted code in the Russian grid as well.

Such weapons do not lend themselves to arms control — they are hard to find and impossible to count. But no agreement with Russia that excludes them will address the constant, asymmetric battling that goes on between the two countries every day.

And then there is the problem that dominated the Cold War: nukes.

In the past week, Mr. Putin has been on the phone — not just to his old allies, but to the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Some Russian news organizations have said the topics might be what Mr. Putin likes to call a “military-technical” response to the Ukraine crisis.

 

There have been hints from Russian officials about what that means: Russia could consider placing nuclear weapons back in the Western Hemisphere, within easy, short reach of American cities. If that sounds familiar, it should. It was the core of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the closest the world came to annihilation during the Cold War.

 

Mr. Putin’s motivation is clear: If the United States won’t remove its weapons from Europe — even aging tactical weapons that need to be dropped from airplanes — he is determined to put American cities at similar risk. So far, there is no evidence that he is doing anything but talking. But even the suggestion of it has revived old fears.

 

“The last thing in the world President Biden would want is to engage us and Russia in a nuclear exchange,” said Thomas Pickering, a veteran of Cold War diplomacy who is considered the dean of retired American diplomats.

The fear, now as then, is escalation. “Many people have postulated how that might happen,” Mr. Pickering said. “Almost no one that I know has given a conclusive way to stop it once it starts.”"

The fact that Ukraine is so corrupt negates all these estimations. In Afghanistan we had supported a corrupt government. Even the pay of friendly to us soldiers has been taken by corrupt officers. That did not end well.