Stephen Kotkin on nuclear blackmail in the Russia-Ukraine War

Stephen Kotkin is a historian of Russia who is a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institute and its Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He’s generally conservative and takes a pretty jaded view of Russia’s past and present.¹

I don’t know how far he subscribes to the “realist” view of international relations. But he has a very informed and grumpily pragmatic take on how foreign affairs tend to work. In this discussion from this September, he describes his model of how countries make pragmatic calculations with particular reference to Russia (2:20:00 ff.):

So I've gotta figure out how to share the planet with countries that are not going away, that have a different model from me.

They're Eurasian land empires, they're a thousand, or in the Chinese case, more than a thousand years old. They have autocratic government, they have big land armies and fight land wars. They suppress consumption and other things that I could describe.

And they're called Iran, and they're called Russia, and they're called China and they predate us. And they don't think it's just that America, which just appeared on the planet recently is dictating the terms of how the world is organized.

And they're gonna push back against that. And they're gonna push back against it in the vulnerable places: Crimea, Ukraine, Israel, South China Sea, Taiwan. And it's been clear as day for 30 plus years that those places were territorially vulnerable. And we've been out to lunch about that, and here it is now.

But again, does that mean we blow the planet up? We end humanity? Does that mean that we capitulate and hand over Ukraine sovereignty? No, on both of those questions.

So there's this place in between, appeasement and holocaust, nuclear holocaust. There's this place in between which is called deterrence plus diplomacy. And deterrence plus diplomacy means, they're scared of me, but I talk to them. I don't talk to them just to talk and I don't scare them just to scare them.

I'm not a hawk and I'm not a dove. I'm a combination, I have deterrence and I have diplomacy. Because I want terms that are favorable to me and my friends. 'Cause I have to share the planet, but what are the terms of sharing the planet?

You know, deterrence in diplomacy, I mean, it is not a new thing, we can do it. We've done it before. Okay, our political class maybe has degraded. Okay, maybe we're not in the best of shape, right this current moment. Maybe we made some mistakes and we have a lot to answer for.

Maybe we misjudged who these people are and what they're up to. Maybe they misjudged us and they misjudged our will and our capacities and our resilience and our corrective mechanisms and our bounce back and our alliances - built on trust and relationships, not built on [indistinct]. Maybe they underestimated us.

Maybe it's not just that we made mistakes, but maybe they made mistakes. And maybe they're in trouble, and maybe we have to get on the front foot, and maybe we have to push back. Not just in the places where we're territorially vulnerable, but all sorts of other places where I see vulnerabilities with them. Maybe we can do this because we've done it before.

And they're not 10 feet tall and we're not basket cases. And deterrence and diplomacy works, and we know how to do it and we've done it, and we can do it again, and I'm in favor of it. And so, it's okay, we're gonna be okay.

Sure, things are - Ukraine is not on a good trajectory right now. We could go on, sure, I'm not Pollyannish, I know what the world looks like. But I also know the strengths. Tremendous strengths, unbelievable strengths and their vulnerabilities. [my emphasis]

I take Kotkin’s approach as expressed there as a reminder that foreign policy is based more than sound bites. And that decision-makers need to be realistic in understanding not just the personalities and ideologies of leaders in other countries but also be mindful of the practical considerations – from economic to military to sentimental attitudes – on which foreign leaders operate.

And also that countries need to be realistic about risks and possibilities in a field where certainty can be in short supply.

Listen to one of Donald Trump’s press conferences or speeches to get an idea of how much willingness or ability he has to weigh such considerations seriously. Being a blustery, cranky old man full of dumb prejudices who is primarily looking for ways to get other countries and power players to give him money in narrowly transactional arrangement is not conducive to the kind of pragmatic thinking on foreign policy that Kotkin describes. Given Trump own bad history of managing his own many makes one wonder how pragmatic he is with “the art of the deal” even on his private grifting.

Kotkin’s description there is a reminder of what concerns me about the seeming lack of pragmatism in the Biden Administration approach in the two war situations that currently dominate its foreign policy: Israel’s war with Gaza and the West Bank that has already spread in a limited way to Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen. and maybe soon to Jordan and Egypt, too; and, the Russia-Ukraine War.

There is little doubt at the moment that the Biden Administration has simply decided to back whatever the current government of Israel does militarily no matter how damaging it may be to American interests and to the lives of people in the Middle East. Whatever combination of bad assumptions, past dogma, ideology, lobbying pressure, and bureaucratic drift on the part of a President whose health appears to be badly in decline is producing that result, it is a high-risk policy that seems remarkably devoid of pragmatism and realism in that situation.

In Ukraine, the US policy looks like a mimetic repetition of the idea behind backing the Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan – we called the “brave mujahideen freedom fighters” back in the day, a process that spawned the jihadist movement as we later came to know it. Russia has a clear military advantage, however unjust and illegal their invasion of Ukraine and annexation of part of its territory may be. The benefits of that operation to the US were highly questionable compared to the short- and long-term costs. But the calculation in Ukraine seems to be similar: the US and NATO can back Ukraine in a war for years that will damage the Russians with relatively small investments on the part of the West. The primary victims will be Ukrainians, not Americans. The fact that the Ukrainians will pay severe costs for decades doesn’t seem to weigh heavily in that approach.

 Kotkin offers some explanation of why the sanctions that the US always touts as a super-weapon weren’t so effective as their advocates hoped (1:07:30ff):

So again, Putin. People think, oh, we'll put economic sanctions on him and we'll cause him economic pain. We'll shave two points off his GDP. And so Putin lost the private automobile industry in Russia. The sanctions destroyed the private automobile industry.

It was gonna eventually be displaced by the Chinese anyway, but Russians buy more cars now from China, they don't have a domestic automobile industry to speak of anymore because of the sanctions. And you know what Putin's response to that is?

Okay. I guess so, I lost my private automobile industry. And, you know, he's not a private equity mogul. He doesn't care if you shave two points off his GDP. Because he can enforce austerity, he can suppress consumption at home if necessary. He cares about cash flow.

Authoritarian regimes need cash flow, not GDP growth. This is a really important distinction. GDP growth is something you need if, for example, people have a choice in their election when they go to the polls, if elections are free and fair. If they can throw you out, then GDP growth is really important.

But if you have a choiceless election, if the election is a fraud, a sham election and the GDP growth goes down, well, that's why you have police, with truncheons. You have police with truncheons in case GDP growth goes down.

Yeah, but if cash flow goes down, then big trouble. Because you need the cash flow to pay off the elites. You know, that pulled coop, that paying off of the elites, and the elites is very expensive, right? The wife, the second wife, the third wife, the mistress, the dacha, the gun collection, it is just a fortune what these guys cost.

And so you need cash flow. Fortunately [for Putin], the cash just gushes out of the ground. [I.e., oil and natural gas] It's just like tap, tap, tap, it's just gushing cash. …

And so you're taking that cash flow into your pocket. You don't need to have foreign bank accounts abroad. Putin doesn't have any foreign bank accounts abroad, because the whole Russian economy is his bank account.

And when he needs to divert any money, by the way, if he had a foreign bank account, it would be a message to the elite that he didn't think he was gonna stay forever. It would be a message of weakness if he opened a foreign bank account. [my emphasis]

I don’t think Kotkin is excluding the possibility that Putin may have other kinds of assets abroad like real-estate with shadow owners. His basic point is that the advantageous side of being a petrostate is that, as long as oil prices hold at reasonably high prices, the rulers can get plenty of ready cash flow from it. Being a petrostate also has serious downsides, but that’s another story.

1. Prof. Kotkin: "Russia: Back to the USSR or Back to the Tsarist Empire?" Davis Centerfor Russian and Eurasian Studies YouTube channel 09/10/2024. <https://www.youtube.com/live/jJSDdCPpbto?si=oKgS3oNOFhQbzpTN> (Accessed: 2024-14-09).