林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

How to change Putin’s Mind

Leon Aron, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-change-putins-mind-1448399297  accessed Nov. 30, 2015

l  「this is an in-depth analysis of how my “toughness abroad gains domestic applause” applies to Russia. However, his policy recommendation for the U.S. may lead to undesirable consequences for both Russia & the U.S. I am doubtful that this measure may succeed. Because the Weat also has domestic problem to solve, and is not without limit in coming up with resources.」 Chong-Pin Lin Nov.30.2015

The big surprise in Tuesday’s downing of a Russian fighter jet by the Turkish air force is that it hadn’t happened earlier.

Moscow already had ratcheted up its incursions into NATO airspace, especially over the Baltics, but also in Western Europe. When Russia recently established an air base in the Syrian region of Latakia, a mere 30 kilometers from a NATO member state, President Vladimir Putin took his long-running brinksmanship with NATO to a higher, more dangerous level. Now, as both Russia and NATO respond to the fallout from this event, it’s important to remember the powerful ideological, geostrategic and domestic political imperatives that have propelled Mr. Putin down this path.

Several tenets define Mr. Putin’s approach to foreign policy. Russia is never wrong, but is perennially wronged by the West. The end of the Cold War was Russia’s equivalent of the post-World War I Versailles Treaty for Germany, a source of endless suffering and humiliation. And the supreme duty of a truly patriotic Russian leader is to recover for the Russian state some of the key economic, political and geostrategic assets, both at home and abroad, lost in the Soviet Union’s demise. This is Mr. Putin’s master plan, his overarching strategic agenda, which he has pursued relentlessly since the first day of his Presidency in 2000. A few years back I called this the Putin Doctrine.

With the Russian economy recently mired in a seemingly endless recession, a potent domestic political consideration has been added to Mr. Putin’s foreign-policy mix. Unwilling to undertake vital institutional reforms, and with his popularity sliding inexorably downward in 2012-13, Mr. Putin shifted the foundation of his regime’s legitimacy from steady economic progress and the growth of personal incomes to patriotic mobilization.

This new legitimizing narrative postulates that the West has declared a war on the Kremlin. In this view, Europe-bound Ukraine is, in Mr. Putin’s words, “NATO’s foreign legion,” led by a CIA-installed “fascist junta.” Mr. Putin isn’t only capable of protecting the Motherland, he’s also capable of restoring the lost glory of the Soviet Union, making the world fear and respect Russia again.

There have followed the annexation of Crimea, the war on Ukraine and Russia’s participation in the Syrian civil war in support of Bashar Assad. Having saddled the tiger of patriotic fervor, Mr. Putin has deftly made it trot in the right direction. For millions of Russians, the pride at the sight of the Motherland besieged yet also victorious has made economic hardships bearable.

The problem with this mode of transportation is that it requires a constant diet of red meat, the bloodier the better. This is especially acute as the country’s gross domestic product is projected to decline between 3% and 4% this year and inflation could reach at least 13%. The ruble has lost half of its value since 2013, and $151 billion fled the country last year. The share of Russians with incomes below the poverty line of $154 a month almost doubled in the past two years, to 16%, or 23 million people.

In this context, the downing of the Russian jet by a NATO member is a powerful boost to the legitimizing propaganda narrative. What Mr. Putin has already called a “stab in the back” opens a range of options for the Kremlin to further escalate confrontation with his top target, the hated NATO, to be played before the appropriately scared domestic audience.

Is there a way for the West to stop playing catch-up with Russia and to start slowing the increasingly dangerous momentum of Mr. Putin’s activist, almost messianic foreign policy?

The only effective way to change Russia’s behavior is for the West to increase the domestic political costs and risks of Mr. Putin’s foreign policy. The regime’s sustaining political dynamic must be gradually reversed until foreign policy—now virtually the sole source of the regime’s successes, legitimacy and popular support—becomes a wellspring of doubt, embarrassment and regret, forcing Mr. Putin, for the first time, to undertake a cost-benefit analysis.

The higher the patriotic pitch, the greater the risk of disappointment at reversals. Russia’s modern history is quite unambiguous on that score. In the past 150 years, some of the sharpest regime changes have occurred following foreign-policy and military setbacks: the great liberal reforms of Alexander II after the defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856); the 1905 revolution in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905); the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 during World War I; Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster after the Cuban missile crisis; Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, in large measure prompted by the quagmire of the war in Afghanistan.

Mr. Putin knows this history and is loath to repeat it. But he is exposed to the same threat. Some immediate measures could press the point.

To start, the U.S., France and other allies could increase pressure on Mr. Assad’s regime to the point where Mr. Putin, in order to save face, might consider negotiating his way out of Syria. The West also should send such defensive weapons as antitank systems to Ukraine to increase the cost to Russian troops of supporting pro-Russian separatists.

NATO should bolster its footprint in the Baltics, the likeliest target of Mr. Putin’s next move and also the site of many recent airspace incursions. The goal should be to force the Kremlin to pause before undertaking Ukraine-like “hybrid” aggression in the region.

It’s also important to keep in place economic sanctions. Mr. Putin must be forced to choose between, on the one hand, spending an estimated $2 million to $4 million a day in Syria, and robbing 38 million retirees (Mr. Putin’s main political base) by indexing their pensions at about a third of the inflation rate. Sanctions also would force a choice between further cuts in health care and education, and supplying and defending the “people’s republics” in southeastern Ukraine at an estimated cost of $36 billion a year.

The policies that may lead to the first NATO-Russia military confrontation since the end of the Cold War are rooted deeply in the worldview and political calculus of the present Russian leadership. To be effective in changing Mr. Putin’s mind, the West must finally begin to appreciate this and target its response accordingly