Putin may discover to his surprise that it is in many American parties interests to have Russia as an enemy.\u00a0 It is not overly cynical to point out that, for many interests in Washington, there is a great need to have a clear enemy.\u00a0 Of course there are real threats to the United States.\u00a0 However, the kinetic conflicts of the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan have all but ended.\u00a0 And the war on terror is being dialed back.\u00a0 Into this environment (call it a partial vacuum) steps Vladimir Putin.\u00a0 He might ask the question whether more parties have a stake in his being treated as an enemy or as a competitor, or some other categorization. And what does that mean for him or Russia.<\/p>\n
Compared with China, the US economy is not very dependent upon Russia.\u00a0 Sure many companies have linked interests with Russian companies. Exxon has extensive arrangements with Roseneft for example.\u00a0 But I don’t Exxon is going to be going public in defense of Putin.<\/p>\n
Moreover, Russia as an enemy could satisfy a lot of needs for the defense budget, political debates, etc.\u00a0 Who is going to say a good word about Russia during the next election cycle?\u00a0 On the contrary, there is likely to be a competition to be tougher on Russia.\u00a0 There is even a nostalgia for the US-Soviet days among defense analysts.\u00a0 A unitary enemy was easier to analyze and construct a defense posture and strategy.\u00a0 The past decade has only offered a very messy and difficult to quantify terrorist threat.<\/p>\n
Putin may be calculating that the US will behave as a unitary actor that will maximize its interests.\u00a0 But that analysis could crumble on two fronts.\u00a0 One, politics causes the US to not act as a unitary actor.\u00a0 And, it may cause the US to act in ways that are not in its self-interests (assuming you know what metric to measure self-interest–economics may be only one element).<\/p>\n
Putin may have walked into a position where he satisfies a broad need for an enemy and that will make it very hard to reverse a trend of animosity from the US.\u00a0 Watch in next few months how rationales for all sorts of things will be linked to new Russian threat.\u00a0 Aircraft carrier and F-35 procurement, oil and gas development, space launch capacity, mid-term election speeches, arctic issues, the list could go on.<\/p>\n
Of course, maybe this trend would work well for Putin domestically.\u00a0 We’ll see, but I suspect we may be witnessing the beginning of a negative feedback loop that will be very expensive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Putin may discover to his surprise that it is in many American parties interests to have Russia as an enemy.\u00a0 It is not overly cynical to point out that, for many interests in Washington, there is a great need to … Continue reading