By Peter Rough
& Tim Morrison
Monday, June 14,
2021
On April 13, as tens of thousands of
Russian military forces deployed along the Ukrainian border, U.S.
president Joe Biden picked up the phone and called Vladimir Putin, the
president of Russia. According to the White House readout of the call, the two leaders discussed a variety of issues before
Biden made a request: Would Putin meet him in a third country in the coming
months? To sweeten the pot, Turkish media reported the next day that U.S.
officials had rescinded the planned deployment of two U.S. warships into the Black Sea.
There was just one problem: Vladimir
Putin. Instead of placating the Russian leader, Biden had emboldened him. Days
after the U.S. decision to recall its warships, Moscow announced that it
was closing parts of the Black Sea for six months, imperiling Ukraine’s access
to its own ports in the Sea of Azov.
In late May, the story repeated itself.
Two days after Putin’s proxy, President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, forced
an Irish airplane carrying a dissident blogger to make an emergency
landing in Minsk, the White House made the Biden-Putin summit official: Wednesday, June 16th in Geneva,
Switzerland. Once again, Moscow slapped away Washington’s outstretched hand,
temporarily blocking several European airlines that had planned to circumvent
Belarussian airspace from landing in Russia.
Even more egregiously, Microsoft disclosed
that as the summit details were being finalized, the same Russian
foreign-intelligence agency that had perpetrated the SolarWinds hack had continued a brazen attack on at least one U.S. government agency. So much
for the president’s rationale, offered in April, that he “chose to be proportionate” in response to
SolarWinds in order to avoid “a cycle of escalation.”
To make his contempt unmistakable, Putin’s
courts last week shut down the political network of Alexei Navalny, the high-profile
opposition figure languishing in jail, on the very day that Biden boarded Air
Force One for Europe. As any observer can see, a pattern is developing: What
Biden thinks is prudential diplomacy, Putin reads as weakness. In both word and
deed, the U.S. is chasing cooperation with Russia that will never materialize.
It’s time for the Biden administration to realize that Putin isn’t interested
in cooperation — he views the bilateral relationship in zero-sum terms, and
he’s intent on winning. The U.S. should adjust accordingly.
Alas, the Biden administration has hardly
showcased the type of strength that might impress the former KGB colonel turned
president-for-life sitting in the Kremlin. Just a week after his inauguration,
for example, Biden gifted Putin a full extension of the New START agreement, dismantling
American leverage in the hopes of kick-starting additional arms-control talks
in the future. More recently, in Vienna, Russian negotiators have watched U.S.
officials pursue sanctions relief for the very country, the Islamic Republic of
Iran, whose proxies launch rockets into Saudi Arabia and Israel, two of
America’s top security partners in the Middle East. Late last month,
Russia deployed three nuclear-capable bombers to its base in Syria for the first
time. Now, it is reportedly preparing to sell Iran an advanced satellite system with military
applications.
At home, the story hasn’t been any better.
The Biden administration has failed to deter Russian groups from launching
ransomware attacks on America’s critical infrastructure. Less than a month
after hackers paralyzed the United States’ largest fuel pipeline, Colonial
Pipeline, disrupting services up and down America’s East Coast, a ransomware
attack hit JBS USA, temporarily shutting down the country’s biggest beef
producer. It is unlikely that such attacks could have taken place from Russia
without the Kremlin’s knowledge, or even approval. And yet, in between these
cyberattacks, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, announced that he
was waiving, on national-interest grounds, congressionally mandated sanctions
against Russia’s Nordstream 2 natural-gas pipeline.
It is difficult to overstate the damage
this particular project, Nordstream 2, would wreak on Europe. Far from an
energy system, Nordstream 2 is an economic stratagem designed by Putin to
weaken, subvert, and split the countries of Eastern Europe from their Western
neighbors. It is a tool of Russian revanchism thinly disguised as an energy
project. Upon completion, Nordstream 2 would deliver gas from Russia directly
to Germany across the Baltic Sea, bypassing existing routes in Eastern Europe.
This would provide Russia with an energy stranglehold over Eastern Europe and
threaten the region’s political independence. In particular, it would provide
Russia with powerful leverage over Ukraine, with which it remains at war.
There can be no doubt that, when it
chooses to, Russia will exercise this leverage just as it has in the past. The list of recent Russian aggressions is long. In
just over a decade, Moscow has intervened militarily in Georgia, Ukraine, and
Syria, and played a decisive role in propping up wobbly regimes in Caracas and
Minsk. Most recently, in April, Prague revealed that Russian agents had
even bombed an arms depot on Czech territory in 2014 that included weapons
destined for Kyiv. From assassinations and cyberattacks to poisonings and
crackdowns, Russia has rarely missed an opportunity to undermine the West.
The Biden administration claims to
understand this; the president himself has repeatedly denounced Nordstream as a
bad deal. But it issued waivers because it is loath to apply extraterritorial
sanctions against the citizens and companies of an allied country, a step that
German officials and analysts have warned would be unacceptable. As Biden explained recently, “to go ahead and impose sanctions now would be
counterproductive in terms of our European relations.”
Indeed, while those who know the president
best say he considers Russia a power in decline, he views China as a rising
challenge that requires the support of Europe and Germany. As one prominent
German observer summarized the waiver decision, “Biden apparently thinks the relationship
with Germany is more important than stopping Nordstream 2.”
We sympathize with the Biden
administration’s reluctance to sanction an ally. But by signaling to Germany
that improving ties is its top priority while blaming any transatlantic
turbulence on its predecessor, the president only encouraged Berlin’s obstinate
refusal to consider alternatives.
Just as bad, there are no indications that
the American climb-down on Russia will lead to levels of coordination with
Germany on China that would justify such a concession. Instead, it signals to
the world that the U.S. can be pushed off its policy, denting American
credibility, while undercutting the powers of Congress under Article 1 of the
U.S. Constitution. Most of all, it invites further Russian aggression.
By most estimates, Nordstream 2 may be
completed by as early as this summer, with a certification process to follow.
If the White House wants to establish a “stable and predictable” relationship
with Russia, as it often emphasizes, then it must reestablish its own
credibility. Truly “unwavering” American opposition to the pipeline, as
Secretary Blinken describes it, would delay the project past this fall’s election in Germany,
giving the U.S. an opportunity to achieve a better outcome with a new
government in place.
But even if it does not succeed, the U.S.
should be secure in the knowledge that it can afford a hard line on this issue.
Berlin’s dogged insistence on Nordstream 2 has isolated it across huge parts of Europe, including in the EU’s major institutions. Moreover, the present German government is skeptical of America’s
approach toward China yet remains reliant on the U.S. for its security. It is
Berlin, more than Washington, that should be wary of deteriorating ties, yet it
is Washington, not Berlin, that is ceding ground on Nordstream 2.
As a next step, the Biden administration
must bring Eastern Europe, and not just Germany, into its deliberations. “Our
American allies did not find time to consult with the region most exposed to
the consequences of that decision,” Poland’s foreign minister, Zbigniew
Rau, said of the sanction waivers last week. “What did Ukraine do to deserve
being locked out of consultations on Nord Stream 2 by the Biden administration?
Why did the Americans block a NATO-Ukraine summit ahead of the Biden-Putin
meeting?”
By now it should be clear to the White
House that Putin speaks only the language of strength. Just weeks before the
Biden-Putin summit, Russia announced the formation of 20 new military units along its western border
for the express purpose of countering the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Instead of offering concessions in “areas where our interests align or
certainly overlap,” as Secretary Blinken likes to say, Biden should use the summit to counter Russian posturing with American
strength. Better to rebuild American credibility by standing with our
front-line allies, targeting Nordstream 2, and confronting Russia than to
pursue an illusory agenda of bilateral cooperation underwritten by U.S.
concessions.
To date, the Biden administration hasn’t
settled into the tough policies it promised during the presidential campaign
last year. Let’s hope that changes before it’s too late, beginning in Geneva
this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment