The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 25 intent is historically dubious. For a couple of centuries one of Britain’s two fundamental interests was preventing the emergence of a single dominant power on the European mainland. Britain used diplomacy, trade and military power on the mainland to pursue that objective. Its intentions were not predatory; it sought to maintain a balance of power. Was the Monroe Doctrine inher- ently predatory? Most Americans would presumably say no, although there are probably several Latin American states that would say, at a minimum, that the United States has used the doctrine at times to justify predatory behavior. In Georgia and Ukraine, Russia used means that were appropriate to the achieve- ment of limited objectives in support of its national inter- ests. Since there are many who will find every element of that statement objection- able, some clarification is in order. First of all, to say that means are appropriate to an objective is not a moral judg- ment, but rather a statement that the means were right-sized to achieve the objective; they were necessary and sufficient, neither too large nor too small. In neither case was the objective to occupy the country or overthrow the regime in power. Rather, the objective was to force a re-evaluation, both in the country concerned and among the Western powers, of the costs involved in pursuing NATO and E.U. membership. By recognizing Abkhaz and Ossetian independence and by annexing Crimea, Russia imposed an immediate cost on the countries concerned and also sent a message that there could be further costs if its interests were not taken into account. This is hardball international politics, and we do not have to like it; but it falls well short of evidence that the Putin regime’s ambitions extend to the re-creation of the Soviet Union. In fact, our differences with Russia on Georgia and Ukraine are not fundamental. The Russian interest in not having those two countries in NATO should be shared by the United States. It is not in the U.S. interest to provide Georgia and Ukraine the kind of security guarantees entailed in NATO membership, and it is difficult to understand why the idea even received consideration. Clearly disabusing them of the idea will pro- vide an incentive for them to work out a mutually acceptable relationship with their much larger neighbor. The economic relationship among the E.U., Russia and the countries Russia calls the “near abroad” is not inherently zero-sum. There is no fundamental reason why an arrangement ben- eficial to all sides cannot be found—which is not to say that finding it will be easy. The Case of Syria At the time of writing, the September ceasefire in the Syr- ian civil war has broken down, resulting in cruel attacks on aid convoys, civilians and medical facilities in Aleppo. These attacks occurred with, at a minimum, Russia’s acqui- escence and assistance, and possibly with its direct partici- pation. Is there any basis left for finding common ground on this civil war? It appears to me that Rus- sia’s Syrian intervention has served a number of its foreign policy objectives: 1) attack- ing Islamic terrorist groups where they live, rather than waiting for them to attack Russia; 2) avoiding the takeover of Syria by a terrorist group, which it believes would be the most likely outcome of the violent overthrow of the Assad regime; 3) supporting a regime that has allowed it a military presence; 4) supporting the principle that regimes in power should not be overthrown by outside forces; 5) expanding its role in the Middle East; and 6) challenging U.S. unilateralism in the inter- national system. We have common interests with Russia on the first two of those objectives; on the remainder our attitude may range from indifferent to opposed. Turning those shared interests into joint action has been extraordinarily difficult because we do not always agree on which groups are terrorists, and because terrorist and non-terrorist groups are often inter- mingled on the ground. Moreover, Russia’s client—the Assad regime—sees them all as threats to its rule and, thus, equally subject to attack. For our part, we have not been able to per- suade the moderates (our clients, in Russia’s eyes) to separate themselves physically from the terrorists because the moder- ates, the weakest militarily of the combatants, fear that such a move would leave them more vulnerable to attack from both the Assad regime and Russia. The Putin regime will continue to be assertive in pursuit of its international interests, believing that the alternative is that its interests will be ignored.