Theory and practice in international relations are normally kept even more separate than in economic policy. That is a mistake, as recent debates on Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its Ukraine policy make clear. German chancellor Angela Merkel seemed this week to be informed by the realist school of international relations when she repeatedly insisted there was no military solution to that conflict but only a political and diplomatic one.
The ceasefire, prisoner exchange and peace agreement she brokered in Minsk with French president François Hollande, Putin and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko follows this logic. It deals with separation of forces, peace monitoring, securing borders and regional autonomy. It is highly contingent on a long-term neutral Ukraine and on a short-term balance of battlefield power. But it also depends on the balance of ideas about what caused the conflict.
Putin’s objectives
JM Keynes’s famous remark is worth recalling: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
The eruption of political debate in Europe and Washington about Russia’s policy and Putin’s objectives bear him out. Is Russia a revisionist power intent on overthrowing the established international order in Europe? Does it want to restore the Soviet Union by an aggressive, expansionary strategy? Or are its actions better understood as defensive geopolitics, resisting western encroachments on its regional sphere of interest?
Put differently, should Europe and the US respond to Putin’s aggression with a “deterrence” policy by arming Ukrainians so they can resist Russia militarily? Or should they use a “spiral” policy of accommodation and appeasement better able to deal with Russia’s fear and insecurity?
Deterrence policy
Harvard realist international relations scholar Stephen Walt uses these terms in an illuminating article this week in
Foreign Policy
, drawing on a classic work by Robert Jervis published in 1976 entitled
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
. In it Jervis distinguishes between greedy, expansionary powers such as Hitler’s Germany, for which a deterrence policy is required, and weakening ones where insecurity is the taproot of a state’s revisionist actions. Here making threats just makes the situation worse.
If one type is confused with another, policy errors arise. As Walt writes: “Applying the deterrence model to an insecure adversary will heighten its paranoia and fuel its defensive reactions, while appeasing an incorrigible aggressor is likely to whet its appetite and make it harder to deter it in the future.”
He believes Putin’s Russia is not a rising, ambitious and revisionist state but “an ageing, depopulating, and declining great power trying to cling to whatever international influence it still possesses and preserve a modest sphere of influence near its borders, so that stronger states – and especially the United States – cannot take advantage of its growing vulnerabilities”.
Walt sharply criticises a group of foreign policy intellectuals in Washington who advocate arming Ukraine so it can defeat the eastern rebels. This is surprising because “few experts think this bankrupt and divided country is a vital strategic interest and no one is talking about sending US troops to fight on Kiev’s behalf”. He recalls that Strobe Talbott and a like-minded group successfully promoted Nato expansion under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. They are now supported by Anne Applebaum and others who say Russia is indeed a revisionist and aggressive power.
Potential aggression
That is easier said from Washington than from Berlin, Paris – or London, which all take the realist position. Kiev, Warsaw, Vilnius and Tallinn understandably see it differently and rely on Nato to deter potential Russian aggression.
Walt is joined in his scepticism by John Mearsheimer, another realist theorist, with whom he co-operated on a critique of US policy towards Israel. In a debate this week with a US general who co-ordinated the Washington foreign policy group, Mearsheimer argues that they completely misunderstand Putin's vital concerns (see www.democracynow.org ).
Putin is an authoritarian bully ruling Russia's capitalist economy through a bureaucratic, oligarchic caste. But Russia's policy is based on geopolitics and would not be that different if he were to go, as Elias Gotz argues in new European international politics journal Global Affairs.
Merkel’s judgment that it is illogical to arm Ukraine without being willing to go to war is sound. This messy deal is worth supporting. pegillespie@gmail.com