By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Earlier this month, media outlets using commercial
satellite data confirmed that Russia was once again amassing troops
and heavy equipment along its borders with Ukraine—both along the eastern
Donbas region and inside the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and illegally
annexed in 2014.
This isn’t the first time that Moscow has tested the
West’s commitment to Ukraine. But now, something was different.
In the West, political officials became vocally alarmed
by what NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg called the “large and
unusual” buildup of Russian troops. Rep. Mike Turner, a member of the House
Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said the buildup is “very different” from previous Russian efforts to strike a
provocative posture along the border, which suggests that Russia has “different
intentions this time.” Indeed, “the information we gathered so far is rather
worrying,” European Union spokesman Peter Stano admitted. British Prime
Minister Boris Johnson dispatched his minister of defense to Kyiv and pledged
the U.K.’s “unwavering” support to Ukraine “in the face of Russian hostility.”
French President Emmanuel Macron promised to support Ukraine’s “territorial
integrity” in the event of another invasion.
The American government, too, is engaged in the crisis. At least, diplomatically. But what
if diplomacy fails? According to Bloomberg News, the Biden administration is prepared to
leverage a suite of “fresh sanctions” against Moscow if it attacks Ukraine.
Washington might even provide “further security assistance” to a newly
dismembered former Soviet republic.
To call this a laughably unserious response to the crisis
in Europe doesn’t quite capture just how facile it is.
First off, the administration’s suggestion that it would
respond to another invasion of Ukraine only after the fact and in the meekest
fashion imaginable all but concedes that Ukraine’s days as an independent,
Westward-oriented republic are numbered. That is an unacceptable slip-up, but
it’s hardly the only way that Russian saber-rattling has exposed the White
House’s fecklessness.
Bloomberg further observes that the White House had
considered imposing new sanctions on Russia the last time Moscow engaged in
this kind of brinkmanship back in late March. The Biden administration didn’t have to
pull that trigger, in part, because the crisis was defused when the president rewarded
Russian President Vladimir Putin for sending 100,000 troops, tanks, and
artillery to Ukraine’s doorstep by granting him a bilateral summit. That event
produced little more than a variety of watery statements of principle. It did, however, prove that
Russian threats against European sovereignty get results.
Moreover, the Western sanctions regime against Russia is
already substantial. Every indication suggests that the Kremlin can absorb the
costs imposed on it by NATO.
Atop the sanctions regime that this president inherited
from Donald Trump and Barack Obama, Joe Biden imposed new sanctions on Russia’s central bank,
finance industry, and sovereign wealth fund in April in response to Moscow’s
invasion of Ukraine, its interference in U.S. elections, and the SolarWinds
cyberattack that targeted public- and private-sector entities. The
administration further sanctioned Russia in June—this time in a way that “would
impose real costs on Moscow,” per the New York Times—presumably, unlike all those other
sanctions.
The Biden administration has additionally imposed
economic costs on Putin’s catspaw in Minsk, Belarusian president Aleksandr
Lukashenko. Belarus was hit with sanctions in August amid widespread domestic
protests against what foreign observers deemed a fraudulent election preserving
the grip on power Lukashenko has maintained since 1994. As recently as last week, the Biden administration expanded those
sanctions against Putin’s proxy.
The primary effect of all these economic sanctions has
been to demonstrate the inefficacy of economic sanctions. None of these
punishments prevented the Lukashenko regime from brazenly forcing a commercial
aircraft to land on Belarusian soil to extract and imprison a dissident living
abroad in Europe. They did not stop Moscow from provoking a military crisis in
Europe not once but twice in the same year. They did not impede Belarus and
Russia from engineering a refugee crisis in Poland designed to destabilize the
country and the European Union (an episode U.S. officials believe Putin orchestrated).
That is, in part, because economic sanctions reliably
fail to change a rogue regime’s behavior. This should come as no surprise to
anyone who has kept abreast of the literature on economic sanctions over the last 30
years or so. The suggestion that more sanctions would be a sufficient
response to an act of naked aggression as egregious as a second invasion of
Ukraine is even more offensive given the fact that Biden is simultaneously
trying to bribe Putin into complacency.
The single most effective cudgel the president could have
wielded (short of force) to change the Kremlin’s calculus would have been to
prevent the completion of the Nordstream II pipeline. That project will provide
an avenue for Russia to transport gas directly into Germany, circumventing
Ukraine, denying the nation transit revenues, and rendering it helpless if
Moscow tries to squeeze Kyiv by denying its citizens access to energy. At one
point, Joe Biden called Nordstream II a “bad deal” for Europe, and he was right. But in January,
Russia restarted construction on that project after a two-year pause—operating,
perhaps, under the assumption that the new president would be more pliant than
the last. Russia was right. Joe Biden caved to Moscow—waiving
sanctions against companies that participated in that project,
effectively greenlighting a pipeline that will allow Russia to throttle Ukraine
into submission and preserve German complacency.
Joe Biden has not been wholly docile in the face of Russian threats, but nor
has he spoken with a clear and resolute voice on the matter. Instead, he’s sent
a series of mixed signals to Moscow—signals that the Kremlin could easily mistake
for permissiveness. Sanctions are no substitute for deterrence—genuine
deterrence backed by the credible threat of military force. Anything else is
just talk. We in the West have that luxury. But for the still young Ukrainian
nation, the time for talking may be coming to an end.
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