If a Red Line Is Crossed but No One Cares, Is It Really a Red Line?

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 14, 2023

 

We can only assume that the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft set out to accuse the West — and the United States, in particular — of recklessly antagonizing Russia to the point that Moscow might be compelled to finally respond to Washington’s vicious warmongering. That’s just a guess, however, because what the Quincy Institute produced demonstrates inadvertently but decisively that Russia’s saber-rattling is only that.

 

The problem is in the premise: “Russian hawks push Putin to escalate as U.S. crosses more ‘red lines,’” the institute’s headline read. The pluralization of “red lines” refutes the hypothesis. We could stop there, but that would make for an unsatisfyingly terse post.

 

The article authored by Responsible Statecraft reporter Connor Echols lays out a fairly comprehensive time line of events from Russia’s perspective. Indeed, the piece dispenses with the pretense that its perspective is anything other than sympathetic to Moscow by including a political cartoon published in Pravada identifying the “red lines” the Kremlin layers across European geography.

 

The first red line the West crossed occurred in June 2022 with the introduction of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Ukraine’s battlefields. The Biden administration was reluctant to provide

Kyiv with long-range rocket systems such as HIMARS in deference to Russia’s claim that doing so would amount to “crossing a red line.” But after a prolonged domestic debate and anguished hand-wringing in the White House, the Biden administration relented. The Kremlin was quite sour over the crossing of its red line, but the promised consequences failed to materialize.

 

Yet another red line was supposedly breached in January of this year following a protracted bout of self-doubt among Democratic power brokers. Handing over tanks from NATO stockpiles was said to be the stuff of nightmares, and not just by the self-professed practitioners of “responsible statecraft.” The president mused ignorantly and irresponsibly about the prospect of a nuclear exchange with Russia in October 2022 as his administration agonized over Ukraine’s request. Donald Trump later endorsed Biden’s trepidation. “Biden is doing what he said ten months ago would lead to World War III,” the former president said of Biden’s eventual acquiescence to Ukraine’s requests. Moscow huffed and puffed, but European armor has been a feature of Ukraine’s battlefields for months, and the first American M1 Abrams battle tanks were approved for shipment to Ukraine six weeks ago.

 

We encounter the first indication that the author is aware of the cognitive dissonance in his argument when he gets around to the question of F-16 fighter aircraft. But rather than acknowledge the obvious, Echols attributes to Secretary of State Antony Blinken the observation that “Russia has failed to back up any of its red lines so far.” Biden’s late-August decision to merely allow Ukrainian pilots to learn how to operate F-16s well in advance of their arrival in Ukraine at some indefinite point next year may compel Russia to attack NATO airfields — at least, according to Russian military bloggers and one “retired Russian general.” Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), too, have long been held in reserve in deference to Russia’s table-pounding. But Biden is expected to finally relent, perhaps informed by the long-delayed understanding that Russia’s bluster is, in large measure, just that.

 

Lastly, Echols cites Ukraine’s “attacks inside Russia” as the most ominous development in Russia’s war of conquest. If that development has crossed one in the panoply of Russian red lines, Moscow has been slow to treat it like one. Ukraine has responded reciprocally against the staging areas for the invasion of its territory and critical infrastructure inside the Russian Federation for months. That campaign has expanded to include symbolic targets, such as the Kremlin itself, and dramatic assaults on Russian naval assets in occupied Crimea. Not only has Russia not behaved as though these attacks are red lines in its interaction with Western powers, it doesn’t behave that way internally. Muscovites are not treated to air-raid sirens alerting them to incoming Ukrainian drones, and Russian media do not hype the threat of Ukrainian retaliation because to do so would undermine the Kremlin’s narrative about the scope of its “special military operation’s” failures.

 

Echols stopped there, but he needn’t have. Russia and the West’s Kremlin whisperers alike deemed the provision to Ukraine of Patriot missile-defense systems — which, as the name suggests, are not offensive platforms — a profoundly “escalatory” maneuver. Likewise, Switchblade drones, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and Javelin anti-tank weapons were, to the credulous or naïve, the stuff of which world wars are made. Even the provision of Soviet-era weaponry that had been collecting dust in the stockpiles of former Warsaw Pact states was enough to give the timid nightmares.

 

Russia does have a “red line” at which point it would engage in an existential struggle against the West — one it knows it would be likely to lose, though not before meting out apocalyptic devastation in the process. That red line is hardly unknowable; Western military planners have decades of experience deterring direct Russian aggression against NATO targets and studying the process by which deterrence breaks down.

 

It should be abundantly clear now, 18 months into Russia’s war of aggression, that it is hard for the regime in Moscow to escalate beyond the genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing it’s already waging without inviting risks it is unwilling to absorb. If providing for Ukraine’s self-defense was a red line, it would have been crossed by now.