Later this year (probably in May), Australia will be holding elections for its parliament. Similary, France will be holding its presidential elections in May and June. Meanwhile, West Virginia has a case that the Supreme Court heard this week challenging the EPA over potential power plant regulations. What do these two events have to do with the war in the Ukraine — everything.
The Russian-sympathizing Party of Treason want to blame the current Administration for the Russian attack on the Ukraine because we did not have a clear set of sanctions outlined prior to the invasion to deter the invasion. Aside from the fact that it is unclear that anything would have deterred the brutal dictator who currently governs Russia, this framing of the situation relies on the fact that a large number of Americans have no real sense of how politics or international relations work which brings us back to our starting point.
Even in the U.S. where we are supposedly one country with one national interest, there are still local interests. And so, state and local officials who face an entirely different set of voters than the national leaders find that the interests of their state and city are in opposition to what may be best for the nation as a whole. If that is true for different regions in the same nation, it is even more true for different nations. Potential sanctions that are relatively painless for the U.S. might be extremely painful for other countries and vice versa. And the governments in our allies have to face their voters too. If they want to be in office next year, they have to consider what the voters in their countries want. Agreing to a set of sanctions that merely protects the U.S. economy and not their own is not a viable option.
While many people see the assistance that we give to foreign countries and say that the assistance means that those countries should do what we want, that view of things is simply unrealistic. First, for many countries, we really do not give a large amount of assistance. Second, whether it is assistance to state and local governments or to foreign governments, that aid tends to be targeted and connected to specific programs. Just like we can’t insist that the West Virginia government support regulations that limit coal merely because we give them money for health care or law enforcement, we can’t insist that a country support sanctions on Russia because we give them money to discourage (for example) nuclear proliferation. It’s like insisting that a store should give you the milk for free because you purchased vegetables there last week.
The last reality is that the U.S. is not the global economy. While the U.S. may be the biggest player in the global economy, other countries play a significant role in the global economy. The impact of sanctions depends in large part about the degree of interactions which the sanctioned country has with the sanctioning country and whether somebody else can step in and fill the void. If the sanctiioned country does only a small amount of business with the sanctioning country, it is very easy just to deal with somebody else. On the other hand, if a large number of countries impose sanctions, and those countries did a large amount of business with the sanctioned country, then those sanctions have bite.
These realities mean that imposing meaningful sanctions requires a lot of diplomacy to get other countries to join in on proposed sanctions. And in a situation like the Ukraine, one impediment to getting countries to agree on sanctions is the unknown. Until Russia acted, there were a lot of opinions in the international community about what response would be appropriate. Additionally, what sanctions others would be willing to impose was somewhat dependent on what Russia did. And announcing a list of graduated sanctions would have implicitly given Russia permission to take certain actions by informing them that sanctions would be minimal. Ultimately, it is the fact that Russia went so far over the line that has led the vast majority of major economic powers to support a very high level of sanctions (and still Russia is proceeding forward in the Ukraine). Any realistic announcement prior to the invasion would have involved much more meager sanctions and, even then, the U.S. had no guarantees that the rest of the world would follow our lead. In the run-up to the invasion, it was more important that the U.S. continue to talk behind the scenes with our allies than to announce a set of potential sanctions with nobody joining us in that announcement.
Of course, that is the lead-up to the invasion. The important question is what comes next. It is clear that the sanctions imposed by the global community is imposing major pain on the Russian economy. But it seems like Putin does not care. He has vision of the need to reimpose Russian dominance over its neighbors including the Ukraine. He is willing to let others suffer to achieve this vision. But no dictator rules alone. No matter how much it may appear to the rest of the world, governing requires relying on other people to implement your plans. At some point, the pain on those people will cause them to quietly begin thinking about the need to remove their good friend from power by any means necessary. But it is impossible to guess how long it will take before the knives come out. And, while the Ukraine is doing a fantastic job of making Russia fight for every inch of territory, this is not an even fight. There is a good possibility that the active war part will soon be about Russia occupying the territory that they want and Ukrainians engaging in acts of resistance against the occupiers. Russia would probably like a cease fire during which the sanctions slowly disappear as the world implicitly accepts the results. What must not be on the table is the world accepting that Russia can dictate whether and when the Ukraine can join the European Union and NATO.
And what is happening in the Ukraine poses a real threat to nuclear nonproliferation. One of the things preventing the U.S. and NATO from intervening militarily is Russia’s nuclear arsenal (and one of the things that permitted the invasion is that the Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons in the 1990s). Would-be nuclear powers are seeing how possessing nuclear weapons (or not possessing nuclear weapons) changes the military part of the equation.
In short, we are looking at what could very easily become an extended stalemate. Russia will have military control over a substantial portion of the Ukraine (not counting the portion that it already controlled prior to this operation). The Ukraine will do what it can to resist that occupation but will probably not have the military capacity to engage in a counter-attack to dislodge the occupies (meaning that most of the operations will local resistance operations conducted by small units). Forcing a withdrawal will require the rest of the world keeping sanctions on Russia leading to Russia deciding that the continued occupation is too expensive for Russia. Of course, both the U.S. and Russia stayed in Afghanistan for over a decade each before deciding to withdraw, so that may take time which tends to lead to sanctions collapsing. The Russian decision to withdraw is more likely to come after Putin leaves office which is why many of the sanctions are aimed at Putin’s supporters to encourage them to encourage Putin to decide that it’s time to retire. Of course, somebody who has maintained power as long as Putin has is not the type to voluntarily retire (or live long after retiring). But only time will tell what will happen.
