This book is a premortem: an examination of a failure that has not yet happened. It focuses on one of the most difficult problems that statesmen face: how to anticipate and avoid a war that no one wants and that few believe is likely or even possible but nonetheless arises because of a combustive mixture of clashing ambitions, new technologies, misplaced fears, entangled alliances and commitments, domestic political pressures, and mistaken assumptions about how adversaries might react. In other words, it is about diagnosing and defusing a nascent “World War I problem” with Russia.
What was then called the Great War produced what was arguably the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history. It ended a century of a relatively peaceful balance of power among Europe’s leading states. It destroyed the Ottoman Empire and laid the basis for a century of war and terrorism in the Middle East. It hastened the demise of the British Empire and led to Hitler’s rise, the destruction of World War II, the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the development of nuclear weapons. It paved the way to Soviet Communism and decades of Cold War that spanned the globe. It decimated a generation of Europeans and left in its wake a nihilistic philosophical legacy that has had devastating consequences for societies across the Western world. And almost no one saw it coming.1
World War I resulted more from miscalculation and ineptitude than from design. Historians have long debated which of the combatants bore the most responsibility for the conflict, but few dispute that “each of the major powers contributed its quota of shortsightedness and irresponsibility” to the disaster.2 Germany feared encirclement by France, Russia, and Britain, but ham-handedly threatened each in ways that encouraged them to unite in an unprecedented alliance against Berlin. That alliance, in turn, cemented Germany’s dependence on Austria-Hungary and ultimately made it a hostage to its southern neighbor’s actions. Britain believed the alliance would contain Germany’s growing military and economic might, not lock London into a set of rigid commitments that made diplomatic resolution of a localized conflict all but impossible. Austria-Hungary’s fear that nationalism could tear its empire apart from within blinded it to the dangers that a limited war in the Balkans could spin quickly into a catastrophic European conflagration. Tsar Nicholas II assumed that a limited mobilization against Austria-Hungary could deter aggression against Russia’s friend, Serbia, only to learn that his general staff’s war plans mandated a full mobilization against both Austria-Hungary and Germany. The spread of railway technology, in turn, meant that any state that did not mobilize its army quickly in response faced the near-certain prospect of a rapid military defeat. The result was a potent mix of volatile ingredients that fueled what Henry Kissinger called “a political doomsday machine,” susceptible to any number of potential triggers.3
Few people in Washington today believe that our tense relations with Russia pose this type of challenge. Rather, the dominant paradigm for understanding and responding to the Russian threat is the “World War II problem.” American editorials and op-ed columns about Russia abound with disparaging references to Munich, where British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made his tragic bid to appease Hitler’s territorial ambitions in 1938 and achieved his ill-fated “peace in our time.” During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton explicitly warned that Moscow’s claims that it must protect Russian minorities in Ukraine echoed Nazi Germany’s arguments that it “had to protect German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia.”4 Similarly, Senator Lindsey Graham and many other Republicans have likened Russian president Putin to Adolf Hitler,5 while newspaper columnists refer to him as “Putler.”6 Like Hitler, Putin is perceived as an authoritarian leader harboring deep resentments over lost territory and unfair treatment. Like Hitler, Putin is believed to regard calls for diplomatic compromise as signs of weakness that he can exploit. Like Hitler, Putin is thought to harbor expansionist designs that will be curbed only by pushing back now before he grows too strong.
For those who see the Russian threat through this prism, the chief danger is the Kremlin’s aggressive intentions, and the imperative is to deter aggression through strength. Wars often happen because those who start them think they can win. Disabusing an aggressor of that belief, therefore, is critical to preserving peace. For intelligence analysts, this translates into a focus on studying Russian war plans and weapons systems while looking for signs of impending attack. US and NATO military experts analyzing Russia’s preparations for its large Zapad (“West”) military exercise in 2017, for example, issued warnings that the event could be “a Russian Trojan horse” masking preparations for occupying Belarus or invading one of the Baltic states.7 British intelligence officials caution that Russian cyberoperators have acquired the ability to shut down power plants, hijack air traffic control, and even turn off air-conditioning systems.8 US Intelligence Community leaders sound alarms about Moscow’s desire to undermine Western democracies and destroy the “post–World War II international order.”9 Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman, sponsored by a committee that includes former director of national intelligence James Clapper, solemnly warns Americans in a viral social media video that “we are at war” already with Russia and must fight back or suffer defeat.10
For policymakers, these warnings lead to a focus on demonstrating the will to fight and the ability to triumph. Diplomacy plays a minor role in dealing with World War II–type aggression. One does not strike deals with aggressor states—one punishes and isolates them.11 Failure to resist Russia’s aggression in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and the cybersphere only invites more aggression. Strength and resolve, on the other hand, prompt the would-be aggressor to back down and look elsewhere for easier conquests. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy largely reflects this broad consensus: “Experience suggests that the willingness of rivals to abandon or forgo aggression depends on their perception of US strength and the vitality of our alliances.” To paraphrase the old Roman aphorism, if we want peace, we must show ourselves ready and willing to fight a war.
Not everyone views Russia as offensive-minded, however. A smaller and less popular school of thought sees Russia under Putin as a weak and declining power fighting a defensive battle against NATO’s eastward expansion and Washington’s efforts to transform Russia’s internal politics. “Putin has been primarily reactive,” according to New York University professor emeritus Stephen Cohen.12 Realist scholar John Mearsheimer puts it even more bluntly: Russia’s actions, including its annexation of Crimea and proxy war in eastern Ukraine, “have been defensive, not offensive … motivated by legitimate security concerns.”13 Adherents of this school are wont to quote George Kennan, the father of America’s Cold War containment strategy, on the likely consequences of NATO expansion some twenty years ago: “There is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.” Russia is not, he said, “a country dying to attack Western Europe.”14 Russia is not Nazi Germany, nor is Putin comparable to Hitler. For these analysts, such analogies not only produce more emotional heat than analytic light, but they also lead to policy responses that are dangerous.
Those in the “defensive Russia” school point out that when a country’s hostile actions are rooted in fear and vulnerability, the unwavering resolve and military readiness that are so vital to dealing with a Hitler-type threat can be counterproductive.15 Rather than averting aggression by demonstrating the will to fight back, coercive steps against a state that already sees itself as threatened can magnify perceptions of vulnerability and kick off a dangerous escalatory reaction. The United States experienced this phenomenon in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008. Convinced that Russia harbored aggressive designs on its southern neighbor, Washington policymakers accelerated US military training of Georgia, openly advocated bringing Tbilisi into the NATO alliance, and issued multiple warnings to Moscow against military action, assuming this firm support would deter Russian aggression.16 In fact, it had the opposite effect. Russia grew increasingly alarmed by the prospect of Georgian membership in NATO, while Tbilisi felt emboldened by American support to launch a military operation in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, which produced an immediate and massive Russian military response that included a coordinated set of cyberattacks.17 The result was a readily foreseeable war that the United States failed to avert, leaving the White House with an unpalatable choice between ineffectually protesting Russia’s conquest of Georgia’s breakaway regions, or threatening nuclear war in response to Russia’s local conventional superiority.18
For those who perceive Moscow to be playing defense, the preferred policy response is largely Hippocratic and diplomatic: stop doing harm by threatening the threatened state, and start talking about compromise and conflict resolution. Cohen argues against reintroducing intermediate-range missiles in Europe and selling weapons to Ukraine, for example, and calls instead for cooperating against shared threats and reaching agreement on new rules to govern the relationship.19 Mearsheimer proposes ending what he calls the “triple package of policies”—NATO expansion, EU enlargement, and democracy promotion. The goal for Ukraine, and presumably for other states in the “gray zone” between Russia and the NATO alliance, he avers, should be to “abandon [the] plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War.”20 If we want peace with Russia, they reason, we need to stress common ground and compromise, not weapons and sanctions.
Neither of these contrasting schools for explaining and dealing with Russian behaviors is entirely wrong. There is little doubt that Russia sees itself as on the defensive in the face of NATO expansion and Washington’s extensive involvement in Russia’s domestic affairs in the 1990s. Moscow harbors deep resentments, misperceptions, and mistrust of American intentions, and its views of the United States have changed from partner to adversary over the course of the past twenty-five years, in part due to American actions that it perceives as threatening. At least some of the Russian behavior that appears to Americans as unprovoked aggression—such as interference in the 2016 presidential election—appears to Russians as a natural reaction to years of Western meddling in Russia and its neighbors.
But Russia’s behavior is not driven solely by defensive motives. It also sees itself as rightfully a great power, albeit one that was down on its luck in the 1990s, that should play a key role in international affairs along with the United States, Europe, and China, and that should dominate its neighboring states as it believes all great powers do. It is difficult to argue that Moscow’s military involvement in South America, a region far from Russia’s borders with only the most tenuous of connections to any vital Russian interest, is motivated by anything other than a desire to show Washington that Russia is a great power capable of stirring up trouble in regions dominated by the United States.21 Part of the resentment of the United States that has grown within Moscow’s political class over the past two decades stems from the belief that Washington treats Russia as a subordinate and has stood in the way of its return to great-power glory. Russia’s desire to dominate neighboring states has been a key factor driving their efforts to join NATO and seek American help, which in turn has fueled Moscow’s insecurities in a spiral of escalating hostility. This mix of offensive and defensive motivations is, in fact, an old theme in Russian foreign policy. Commenting on tsarist Russia’s behavior in the period leading to World War I, Henry Kissinger observed, “Partly defensive, partly offensive, Russian expansion was always ambiguous, and this ambiguity generated Western debates over Russia’s intentions that lasted through the Soviet period.”22
Further clouding this picture is the fact that Russia, unlike the Ottoman Empire in 1914 or China today, defies categorization as either a declining or rising power. The Soviet Union was jokingly described as a first world military perched atop a third world economy, an “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons.” Its collapse left Moscow with neither a capable military nor a functioning economy, and the subsequent plunge in Russia’s birth rate and surge in its death rate convinced many in the West that the country was on a long-term path toward decline and irrelevance. Russia’s birth rate and life expectancy have been rising since the early Putin era, however, and by 2013, the country experienced overall population growth for the first time since the Soviet period.23 Despite setbacks posed by Western economic sanctions and the decline in world oil prices, Russia’s economy has grown by an average of almost 4 percent annually since 2000. Russia’s confident intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, its first projection of military power outside the confines of Soviet borders since the 1979 Afghan War, demonstrated that its military reform program has made impressive progress.
Whether this recovery will continue is an open question. Russia remains plagued by corruption and heavily dependent on energy sales, but despite this, it has managed its energy earnings wisely, modeling its successful rainy-day investment fund on that of Norway, and it has risen steadily in world “ease of doing business” rankings.24 It has struggled to diversify its economy and compete in international commercial markets, but it has developed sophisticated cybercapabilities and advanced weaponry. Russia may never overcome the tension between its political preference for centralized control and its economic need to unleash the creativity and innovation of its people. But its history, geography, resources, and scientific talent suggest that Russia will nevertheless remain an important player on the international stage, punching above the weight class that its economic weakness might suggest.
The theme of this book is that the chief danger in the increasingly hostile US-Russian relationship is not primarily a function of the capabilities or intentions of either party, however. Rather, it is what scientists describe as a complex systems danger. Unsettled questions about Europe’s post–Cold War security architecture are fueling antagonisms. Starkly differing perceptions of the other side’s intentions have garbled the signals that each believes it is sending and reinforced mistaken assumptions about how the other will react to events. New and still poorly understood cybertechnologies, coupled with the development of advanced strategic weapons delivery systems, are providing enormous advantages to the attacker over the defender, reinforcing perceptions of vulnerability and incentivizing aggression. Changes in the global geopolitical order have simultaneously threatened US preeminence and provided tempting opportunities for Russia and other rival powers to advance their influence. Each side has increasingly tethered itself to unreliable proxies whose interests overlap with—but do not coincide with—those of their sponsors. And each side is struggling to cope with domestic political challenges that magnify its feelings of vulnerability and complicate its ability to formulate and implement effective foreign policies. Meanwhile, the old rules that governed the Cold War competition between Washington and Moscow have withered away, and new understandings that could contain and stabilize the renewed rivalry have not replaced them. All these factors are reinforcing each other in a vicious cycle of dynamic interactions.
The good news is that although Russia has few warm feelings for Washington, it is not trying to destroy American democracy and send the international order hurtling into chaos. The bad news is that “systems problems,” in which multiple factors interact and reinforce or diminish one another, are much more difficult to resolve than single-factor issues. Our various disputes with Russia represent not an aggregation of discrete problems but rather what management guru Russell Ackoff has called a “mess”—that is, “a system of problems. This means that the problems interact. Therefore, if we do the usual thing and break up a mess into its component problems and then try to solve each one separately, we will not solve the mess.”25 Focusing on either deterring or accommodating Russia, as suggested by the “offensive Russia” and “defensive Russia” schools of thought, will not solve the problem and could make it worse. Moreover, the interconnection between component parts of the US-Russia system means there is a high potential that accidents and incremental actions will produce unintended knock-on effects. Just as in Sarajevo in 1914, small events can cause ripples in this complex set of problems that produce large, catastrophic outcomes.
This book does not aspire to be an analysis of how the US-Russian relationship descended from nascent partnership to alarming hostility over the course of the past decade and a half; others have covered that ground in impressive depth.26 Neither does it grapple with the full range of costs and implications of the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Moscow, which include increased Russian-Chinese cooperation against American interests, as well as reduced opportunities to work together against such common threats as weapons proliferation, terrorism, and contagious disease. Its focus is narrower: to show how easily the US-Russian relationship could spiral unexpectedly from animosity to war and to consider what must be done to reduce the chances of that disaster.
This book is not, as Ebenezer Scrooge famously sought to confirm with the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, a glimpse of things that will be, as opposed to things that may be. No one undertakes construction of a premortem study without some faith that the anticipated bad outcome is avoidable. Unlike the cascade of events that led to World War I, the combustive mix of dangers in our relations with Russia need not become a political doomsday machine that will inevitably lead to nuclear war. Understanding the dangers posed by the system in which Washington and Moscow are operating, and examining the individual elements that it comprises, are important prerequisites for defusing the threat.
The first part of this book focuses on analysis of that threat. It looks at each element of the “wicked problem” between the United States and Russia in turn, with a view toward identifying the interactions that can amplify their effects and produce unintended consequences.27 Chapter 1 focuses on the ways our shadow war with Russia is playing out in the areas of cyberespionage, cybersabotage, and influence operations. Chapter 2 looks at the perceptual side of this war, examining the views that each country holds of the other’s intentions. Chapter 3 examines our disappearing rules of the game and the absence of mechanisms that could serve as brakes on dangerous escalation spirals. Chapter 4 looks at the roles that economic warfare, military gamesmanship, and proxy warfare might play in triggering an unexpected US-Russian crisis.
The second part of the book focuses on how to defuse the threat. It begins in chapter 5 with an examination of how Washington and Moscow might apply a “systems approach” to avoid missteps that might produce unintended escalation. Chapter 6 looks at ways to build shock absorbers into our system to lessen the impact of radical disruptions and new technologies. Chapter 7 looks at the ways we can use systems dynamics to our advantage to manage the competition between the United States, Russia, China, and other great powers and minimize the risks we face.
As a premortem, this book serves as a warning of impending Russian danger, but it is a call to mental—not military—arms. Had the protagonists who stumbled into World War I realized the consequences of their actions and the ways that events could spin disastrously out of their control, they undoubtedly would have handled their decisions differently. Today, mindful of the potential for producing unintended consequences, we should approach the Russia threat with the caution that we wish in retrospect those European leaders had demonstrated.
Avoiding their fate requires subjecting several popular conceptions that Russia and the United States hold about each other to deeper scrutiny. Americans who view Russia through the perceptual lens of Nazi Germany are prone to misunderstanding Russia’s governance and its intentions, with potentially tragic consequences. Similarly, Russians have misperceived US support for democratization in Russia and neighboring regions as an effort to encircle and ultimately overthrow the Russian government. Reluctance in both countries to think more deeply about these perceptions, and the rapidity with which those who question them are labeled apologists, constitute a cognitive trap—a Russia trap—that heightens the chances we will stumble unawares into catastrophe.
After years of unsuccessful post–Cold War efforts to forge a cooperative relationship, it is now clear that the United States and Russia have entered a period in which we will be competitors, not partners. But we need not become enemies. Amid the swirl of emotions and domestic political pressures in both Washington and Moscow, our approach to Russia needs dispassionately to balance firmness with accommodation, and military readiness with diplomatic outreach, without skewing too far toward either concession or confrontation. Failure to discern the nature of the danger looming before us is perhaps the biggest threat we face. The following pages are a humble attempt to bring that danger into focus.