Just over a week into Putin's war in Ukraine, there seems to be general consensus that it hasn't gone very well for the invaders. Russian forces have still failed to take the capital; their confused and unwilling troops have been plunged into a war they did not choose; they have bombed and shelled civilian targets from the skies while still failing to establish effective aerial dominance over the country; their outdated equipment and methods of attack have been matched by a smaller but fiercer Ukrainian resistance...
Yet, for all the gloating some have felt at the ineffectiveness of the Russian war effort, and the genuine inspiration others have taken from the Ukrainian defense, every sober analysis still indicates that Putin can win the war. However poor and incompetent his strategy, he has the firepower, the numerical advantage, and the apparent indifference to and contempt for the fate of his own conscripted soldiers to eventually—emphasis on eventually—seize the entire country and decapitate its government.
Since the Ukrainians will continue to resist all the while, therefore, the most likely scenario is one in which Putin steadily lays siege to the country, starves and bombs cities one by one until they eventually crumble and fall to Russian forces, and marches into the capital to seize control, with all the risk of reprisals, massacres, purges, public executions, political murders and assassinations that would follow (and of which Putin has shown himself more than capable time and again).
Given that that is a likely scenario at this point, it seems just about any sacrifice of face or conscience would be worth making to avoid that fate. Just about any conceivable deal with Putin that would preserve a scrap of Ukrainian sovereignty, prompt him to withdraw his forces, and stop the invasion seems worth making. The question being: is there any possible such agreement that he would sign on to? Or is he committed at this point to the annihilation of the Ukrainian state and overthrow of its leadership?
This is what everyone's asking, and plenty of IR theorists feel certain they have the answer. Putin's government, after all, has indicated before that they would back off in exchange for permanent Ukrainian "neutrality" (barring any future NATO membership), a recognition of the separatist regions of eastern Ukraine, recognition of Russia's annexation of Crimea, and an end to Western military aid to Ukraine. Some submit that the West should take Putin at his word, and put some of these offers on the table.
There are a couple serious objections to this proposal. First of all, if Putin really just wanted Ukrainian neutrality and to annex the quasi-autonomous regions in the East, he could have gotten them without all this trouble and bloodshed. A cagier and more propagandistically-savvy method of attack—and one more in keeping with the Russian president's prior methods—might have enabled him to hive off the eastern territories and rendered the possibility of Ukrainian NATO membership moot. Indeed, he seemed to be on the verge of accomplishing both as of Wednesday of last week, before he suddenly and recklessly went even further by invading the country from multiple directions.
When one party escalates unilaterally, beyond their stated initial goals, it is usually a signal that their originally-stated demands were pretextual. Putin could have had Donbas and Luhansk if that's really all he wanted; much as Hitler could have stopped at the Sudetenland if all that really worried him from the start was the fate of the Sudeten Germans.
Then there is the fact that Putin's actions not only exceeded his original demands; they even actively set back many of his purported goals. If what Putin really wanted all along was to halt the expansion of NATO membership, after all, he certainly has made the opposite of progress on achieving that end.
Prior to the invasion, he absolutely could have negotiated Ukrainian neutrality. Western European leadership was even signaling that, for all intents and purposes, Ukrainian membership was "not on the agenda." Now that he has invaded, by contrast, Putin is likely to emerge from this in a significantly worse geopolitical position. NATO is not only more united than it was a week ago; it is likely to add several new members before this conflict is done.
So I think it's overly optimistic—at the very least—to conclude that Putin is looking for a way out of this invasion or that he really just intended for it to be a pressure tactic in order to advance more limited war aims. Yet, I also think—as I said above—virtually anything is worth a try if it has a chance of averting the scenario in which Putin achieves total victory over Ukraine. So what could the West and its Ukrainian allies do to at least explore the possibility of ending the conflict by de-escalatory means?
Arch-realist Stephen Walt took to Twitter the other day to give some advice along these lines that many in the IR community have been giving for months. He wrote: "I am reminded of Sun Tzu's dictum that one should 'build a golden bridge for your enemy to retreat across.' Unity, resolution, and continued pressure on Russia are necessary, but saving Ukraine also requires making it easier for Moscow to reverse course."
I was annoyed at first by this comment for at least two reasons, one more petty than the other. First, as discussed last time, Sun Tzu never said that. Thomas C. Schelling offers the correct attribution in his Arms and Influence. While the Chinese general made a closely-related point about not boxing your enemy in too closely, allowing them a way to exit and thereby encouraging their flight, the line about a "golden bridge" does not come from him; to the contrary, it's attributed in Latin sources to the Roman general Scipio.
Second, for the reasons stated above, it is by no means clear that Putin would take an opportunity to leave Ukraine if handed one. After all, he has every option of withdrawing right now—it's what everyone wants him to do. Just pick up and leave. There are golden bridges in every direction where there's a Russian border. Of course, Walt's point is that he needs a way to withdraw in which he doesn't lose face, and can claim a partial victory. But does he even want that? Reasons for skepticism were already given above.
Yet, as I've thought more about it over the intervening days, I've come to see that Walt and the other "realists" have a valid—if limited—point. Namely, that if there's any possibility—however slim—of Putin claiming a partial victory and going home without decapitating the Ukrainian government, it seems worth trying. And the Western powers and Ukraine put themselves in the stronger moral position if they state clearly that they are open to such a deal that offers compromise.
What certainly does not help—to Walt's point—is boxing Putin in to a position in which he becomes desperate and sees no way out but total victory. That would be violating the "golden bridge" advice to a T. And—sadly—this is precisely the direction Western policy seems to be headed at present. Sanctions and other imposed costs proceed on a straightforward theory of coercion, after all: make the consequences of his invasion painful enough, the thinking goes, and Putin will bail and reverse course. But this is at best a limited view of human psychology.
There are several other psychological factors that have to be weighted. First, the sunk-cost fallacy. The more that Putin feels he has been forced to sacrifice for this invasion, the more he will feel the need to press on with it to total victory, no matter how much blood is shed along the way.
Second, the golden bridge principle again. What Sun Tzu actually said (with no mention of a bridge) does in fact apply here: "do not press a desperate foe too hard." Because if you do, then they have nothing to lose.
Sanctions are, after all, aimed at isolating Putin and turning his advisors against him. But if Putin comes to feel that the only realistic alternatives are to win this war quickly or to risk being purged in a palace coup—with no possible compromise in between—he will of course do all in his power to ensure the former outcome. (In this respect, comments from a certain U.S. senator calling for Putin's assassination at the hands of his henchmen are definitely not helping.) This is what the New York Times recently called "the dangers of cornering Putin."
And none of this is even to mention the grave humanitarian and moral concerns with the kind of broad-based sanctions that the West has imposed on Russia in recent days, which will almost certainly harm innocent civilians more than anyone else—people who are after all themselves victims of Putin's autocracy, and who had no part in choosing this war.
What can the West and Ukraine realistically do to offer a "golden bridge" to Putin, though, when they are already at a disadvantage? As we stated above, there is no good reason to think Putin would take any such offer. Above all, he probably won't take it because he doesn't have to. He is going to be able to win this war—slowly and torturously and at incalculable human cost, but win it nonetheless—and he can choose to do so. NATO will not and should not intervene directly to stop him, at risk of sparking an even more ruinous conflict.
But note that we said probably. And if there's any chance that Putin might still withdraw if granted a compromise, let it not be on the West's conscience that we foreclosed that option through taking an overly stubborn bargaining position. Instead, the West and Ukraine should articulate publicly and clearly what version of a compromise they would be willing to live with. If that means Ukrainian sovereignty but also neutrality (specifying the terms on which such neutrality would be acceptable, ensuring that it would not amount to effective Russian dominance or veto power over the Ukrainian government), as well as the loss of the eastern regions, that seems better than the alternative of a total Russian victory.
Again, there's no guarantee or likelihood Putin would take that offer. But if they do make it and Putin rejects it, then the world will see that the choice was on him. It was his aggression and intransigence alone that led this war to a hideous conclusion.
Of course, there are a number of potential objections to taking such a course. There is justifiable pride in not yielding an inch in the face of bullying and aggression. There is legitimate fear that offering concessions to Putin might motivate him to seek still more. A sacrifice of the eastern regions, for instance, would be a reward for lawless and iniquitous behavior, and therefore might only incentivize more of it. And this leads us to the biggest consideration: justice and equity. It is wrong for someone to win through bullying and aggression; such an outcome is the very definition of injustice, and therefore should not be allowed to stand.
But these objections, while sound, are not final. Pride can be swallowed. Fears, as Arthur Hugh Clough once wrote, "may be liars." Ceding certain territories to Putin (ones, moreover, over which he already exercises effective state control) would not inexorably prompt him to gobble up still more terrain. The line separating NATO countries from non-NATO territory would still make a difference—which is of course precisely the reason Putin has been so intent on preventing that line from being moved.
And justice and equity, at last, can be set aside in part when the consequences of insisting upon them become too grave. When the price of insisting on justice is the slow strangulation of Ukraine and the murder of children and innocents, it is worth a partial compromise to avoid paying those costs. As a character says in William Faulkner's novel Pylon, you "reach a time when you can bear so much and no more; that nothing else is worth the bearing; [...] that nothing is worth anything but peace, peace, peace! [....] I dont want equity or justice, I dont want happiness; I just want peace."
Where that point is found is not for me to say; I am not the relevant decision-maker, nor the one who has to live with the worst consequences, one way or the other. But I fear that Putin has the military power and the will to push people beyond that point of endurance. If there is a partial loss that staves off the worst of those potential outcomes, it seems to me worth accepting. And what does anyone have to lose from the attempt?
No comments:
Post a Comment