With the war in Ukraine by all accounts going against him on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin is adopting a strategy long familiar to theorists of deterrence: namely, to behave so erratically that you manage to convince your adversary that you are capable of anything. Many of Putin's recent actions can be interpreted in this light. There was the attack on a natural gas pipeline widely suspected to be the work of Russian operatives. There are the blatantly fraudulent votes he is conducting in Ukraine's eastern provinces in order to formalize his attempted annexation by conquest, in violation of international law. And there are his increasingly open threats to use nuclear weapons.
Of course, Putin explicitly only threatened nuclear retaliation if Russia itself is attacked. But this is a red line the Western powers have themselves drawn in their own support for Ukraine, and the coalition in support of them would quickly crumble if the war turned into an aggressive incursion across Russia's borders. Putin knows this. So why is he suddenly talking about the possibility of resorting to nuclear weapons? The fear on the part of many analysts is that—after converting Ukraine's conquered territories into nominally "Russian" land, he will speciously portray any attempt to wrest them back (or even to continue the war in the parts already held by Ukrainian forces), as an "attack on Russia" legitimizing a nuclear response.
Would Putin really be so out of touch with the strategic and moral realities of his position as to do this—in short, to unilaterally violate a nuclear taboo that has held for more than seventy-five years? Perhaps not. But it is at any rate in his interest to make other powers think he is capable of it. This is the essence of the "madman" strategy of deterrence. As Thomas Friedman describes it in a recent op-ed (let it never be said that I will refuse to cite from someone when they make a relevant point, just because I generally find them annoying), the point is to "always outcrazy your opponents" so as to leave them so unsure of the possible consequences of provoking you that they will never dare to risk it.
Friedman rightly attributes this theory to Thomas Schelling, who discusses the strategy of deliberately trying to cultivate an appearance of unpredictability and madness as a method of deterrence in his Arms and Influence. Schelling does not purport to be the sole originator of the theory, however. He also finds it in the utterances of the "Professor" in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. This character—a failed chemist and anarchist concocter of explosives always on the hunt for "the perfect detonator"—attributes his success in avoiding police capture to the fact that every officer in the city believes him to be so unhinged that he might be willing to blow himself and them sky-high rather than be taken to jail.
As Schelling quotes Conrad's character: "In the last instance it is character alone that makes for one's safety... I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That's their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly." The lesson Schelling takes from this is that "it does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, cool-headed, and in control[.]" In order to effectively deter others, it is necessary not only to have the technical means of destruction at one's disposal, he maintains, but to cultivate an appearance of being mad and self-destructive enough to actually use them.
It was a theory that Trump—likely without any knowledge of its theoretical underpinnings and august literary provenance—knew by a bully's instinct to apply. During the nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea that marked the first year of his presidency, he liked to describe himself as occupying a strategically advantageous position because it is best to seem "unpredictable" to one's opponents (Though Trump also—notoriously—described himself as a "very stable genius," perhaps contradicting this theory—though locutions like this, it must be said, served more to confirm rather than undercut his reputation as an unhinged madman in most people's eyes). And now Putin seems bent on adopting the same strategy.
Such a theoretical framework can help us to find a kind of rationality amidst apparent unreason, and thereby diminish its value to Putin. So many of his actions this past year—the unprovoked invasion, when a more devious and roundabout strategy might have allowed him to hive off a smaller range of territory without so much bloodshed and global opprobrium; the acts of unilateral escalation he has taken in recent days—appear to be acts of willfully self-destructive madness, serving no rational purpose. But perhaps they are intended to look this way precisely because madness can be a strategic asset. It has the power to terrify into submission.
A Russian state that is simply working to advance its geopolitical interests, by contrast—to expand its "sphere of influence" in Great Power terms, as realist IR theorists persist in interpreting Putin's actions—would be in so many ways less frightening—even if Putin were going about it by the same underhanded, immoral, and unlawful tactics he usually employs. But a Putin regime that is motivated by ideas, figments, ravings about national grandeur and the legacy of the czars—rather than interests—is infinitely more dangerous, because then rational self-interest can provide no upper limit on the steps he will take to win the war, and there is no room to bargain. As another character in Conrad's novel puts it: "Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes."
But the point is that perhaps Putin knows that it is in his interest to cultivate an appearance of "madness" for this reason, and we should not fall into the trap. After all, the ruler who manages to establish a reputation as a "madman" will tend to elicit one of two responses. On the one hand, their adversaries may roll over and submit, in the manner of the policemen in Conrad's novel who refuse to arrest the bomb-wielding "Professor." Alternatively, though, they many conclude that precisely because of the "madness" of the adversary, they are entitled to do the opposite: to escalate alongside him. Everyone knows what has to be done with a "mad dog," after all, and an adversary convinced that Putin is simply beyond reason or incapable of bargaining may conclude that any use of force is justified to oppose him.
What may be less obvious to some theorists is that in either of these two scenarios, Putin wins. In the first, he can simply achieve his war aims without substantial opposition. In the second, he dupes the West into delegitimizing themselves in the world's eyes and confirming the line of attack he is seeking to push against them in his public speeches (namely, that they are just as bullying and neo-colonialist as he is). After all, there is another possibility that the "Professor" contemplates in Conrad's novel, apart from being either lawfully arrested or left to concoct his destructive wares unimpeded: and that is that the police might arrange for his assassination or extra-judicial murder. But this, the "Professor" says, would be a victory for him as well:
"To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim," says the Professor. "Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple." Much the same is true for Putin's regime. What he resents most in the West is its high-handed preaching of liberal democratic values, which he sees (not always untruthfully) as disguising a hypocritical record in practice. If he could bring the West down to his own moral level, he would not only satisfy his own longing for vindication; he would also earn the sympathy of many people around the world who have good cause to resent U.S. hegemony.
One of the themes of Conrad's novel—also explored in his other great political novel Under Western Eyes, published a few years later—is that autocracy and anarchism are two sides of the same coin. Both set up as their enemy the ideal of democratic legality.
Thus, in the Secret Agent, the representatives of the Russian autocratic state who use spies to infiltrate radical networks and incite incidents of terror in fact have the same end in view as the anarchists. Mr. Vladimir (aptly named)—the ambassador of the czarist autocracy in Conrad's novel—seeks to provoke anarchistic terrorism for the same reason as the "Professor"—both want to see Britain introduce repressive laws that would destroy its constitutional order and moral standing in the public's eyes. Mr. Vladimir would benefit because such measures would introduce a lawless despotism similar to the Russian autocracy he serves; the Professor gains because the mask of "legality" would slip from the liberal democratic order and justify the violent revolution he seeks to bring about.
In much the same way, the team that wants to submit to Putin's tactics wholly and sell out the Ukrainian cause—as some right-wing protesters in Europe would like to do, as part of a Faustian exchange for lower gas prices—is merely the obverse of the team that would respond to Putin's acts of unilateral aggression by escalating to meet them. Both would serve Putin's fundamental objective of bringing his adversaries down to his own moral level and thereby undermining the ideal of a liberal global order (an order against which—it need hardly be said—the United States and the West also frequently sin; but—as should be equally obvious—the goal of the world community should be to level up to approximate this ideal, not level down to mirror Putin's lawlessness and aggression).
The only way to defeat his strategy, therefore, is to recognize the construction of "madness" as a trick and refuse to play along. In this regard, the Biden administration has been admirably restrained. When Putin throws around his madman's talk of nuclear war, the administration rightly does not counter with the "fire and fury" rhetoric that the Trump administration deployed. They do not lower themselves to the same ignoble level by threatening to unleash unspeakable and equally lawless destruction on innocent Russian civilians in a hypothetical tit-for-tat, as Trump implicitly did with regard to the innocent civilians of North Korea.
Instead, they have clarified that there is almost no scenario in which a nuclear attack by Putin would be met with a nuclear response. They recognize that such a response would be a victory for Putin's underlying goal of delegitimizing his opponents. Therefore, a far more effective deterrent threat would be to force Putin to contemplate—as they are attempting to do—the moral, strategic, and diplomatic situation he would create for himself if he actually resorted to such measures. If he unilaterally violated the nuclear taboo, and the West did not retaliate in kind, he would likely forfeit the tacit support even of powers like India and China that have so far refrained from criticizing his actions.
As I've said from the beginning of this conflict, I think the West and Ukraine could go further toward calling Putin's bluff in these matters and putting him in an even more untenable moral position. Doing so requires compromising with injustice and unfairness, which is a hard thing to ask of any country, let alone one that is justly fighting for their own territory in the face of naked and unprovoked aggression. But if Putin's goal really is to bring the rest of the world down to his level and to thereby unmask the "hypocrisy"—as he sees it—of the Western moral position, then it would defeat his aim best to publicly commit to making territorial concessions in exchange for peace and security guarantees for Ukraine's sovereignty.
If Putin continued the war beyond that point—as he might very well do—it would force him once again into the position of being the unilateral escalator, and it would isolate him even further in the world's eyes. Or, if he is a more rational actor than he appears, and is only using the "madman" device as a deliberate deterrent strategy, as discussed above, then he might very well take the deal. Ukraine would lose some territory, but gain in lives saved. It would provide Putin with the off-ramp or "golden bridge" the IR theorists are always talking about, and which they still claim he is seeking.
The alternative approach of escalating to meet Putin's aggression, of "refusing to blink" or of "treating a mad dog the way a mad dog must be treated"—as the hardliners would prefer—can only serve his objective. These approaches are the equivalent of the lawless assassinations and despotic repressive measures that both Mr. Vladimir and the Professor in Conrad's novel would like to see the liberal West introduce. They make Putin's argument for him and destroy the moral position of a liberal democratic order that ought to be founded in legality and the pursuit of peace. We should refuse to step into such an obvious trap. Such is my advice, for all it is worth, and I offer it once again here for the world to act on as they see fit.
No comments:
Post a Comment