Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

We have seen that even America’s most iconic presidents chose between war and peace based largely on what was good for them rather than whether it was good for “We, the people.” In doing so, they always had to face the difficult calculation of the personal and national expected costs and benefits of war and, as is too often overlooked, the costs and benefits of peace. War, after all, is neither inherently always the wrong course to take, nor is it necessarily the right way to solve foreign—or domestic—crises.

Our central concern continues to be an effort to foster an understanding that even as extreme a policy as deciding to wage war—or to live with an uncomfortable peace—is shaped by calculations of personal political interest above any notion of a national grand strategy or national interest. Here we shall further illustrate these ideas with two examples that did not lead to war: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Ukraine crisis of 2014, each a dispute involving the United States and Russia. Comparing these events will help to nail down the realization that war avoidance—sometimes wisely and sometimes dangerously—follows the same logic that entails all the concerns James Madison so eloquently set forth about the dangers of executive authority over questions of war and peace. Madison, wise man that he was, expressed a clear and compelling judgment of politicians, of which, of course, he was one: “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”1

Setting the Stage: Cuba and Crimea

RUSSIA’S OCCUPATION OF CRIMEA IN 2014 WAS FOLLOWED BY A pro-Russian insurrection in East Ukraine that by all appearances was fostered by the Russian government. The 2014 actions by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin had many of the same causes and the same motivations as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1962 decision to place nuclear weapons and missile delivery capabilities in Cuba. In each instance the Russian leadership justified its actions in terms of its concerns about US/Western encirclement and expansion against Russian (read: Khrushchev’s and Putin’s) interests. In Cuba the worry followed from efforts by the US government to depose Fidel Castro’s regime, the one government in the Western Hemisphere that was aligned with Russia. In Ukraine Putin was similarly concerned about the deposition of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, who, from the Russian perspective, was overthrown in a US-inspired popular uprising and coup. While war was avoided in each case, nevertheless these two crises had radically different results with, we contend, quite different consequences for the prospects of future peace. In that way they offer two quite different tales of how personal political incentives shape efforts to avoid war and how those efforts shape the peace that follows.

The Cuban missile crisis had the potential to become the most destructive war in human history. President Kennedy observed at the time that “the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”2 Instead of leading to a nuclear holocaust, the Cuban missile crisis became a source of restraint in the dangerous interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the remaining nearly thirty years of the cold war era. It produced an uncomfortable but sustainable peace. The Crimea crisis and the broader Ukraine crisis hopefully will be an event that fades from memory, a regrettable instance of needless but short-lived border strife, but there is also a chance (small, we hope and believe) that it was an early salvo in an extremely deadly future war in Europe! For now it seems to have led to a fragile, unsettling, unsettled, and uncomfortable peace. Unlike the Cuban crisis, the “peace” in Ukraine today, under the Minsk Protocol of February 2015, which calls for a ceasefire, monitoring, and other conditions, each of which is violated as often as it is respected, seems like the foundation of a peace that “passeth understanding” and that may come back to bite all those who hope for sustained peace and justice in the world.3 We begin our exploration of these two similar and yet also importantly different events with the more recent Crimea crisis and its broader implications for the future of Ukraine and European peace.

The Crimea/Ukraine: Core Voters vs. National Security

TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIA’S OCCUPATION OF CRIMEA AND ITS SUBSEQUENT fostering of a broader civil war in Ukraine, we must realize that whenever a national leader makes declarations about matters of war and peace, there are always at least three sets of ears listening on each side of the dispute: rival leaders, domestic backers, and enemy allies. The parties each interpret what the signals mean for them. What were the messages sent by Vladimir Putin when he promoted crisis in Ukraine? What was heard by Barack Obama, by American and European voters, and by Putin’s own core backers; that is, the small group of insiders whose loyalty to Putin has been cemented by their fulfilled opportunities to become men—they are just about all men—of power and great wealth? Likewise, we must ask, what are the messages that Barack Obama sent to Vladimir Putin, to Obama’s core constituents, and to Putin’s key supporters? What did each of these sets of ears hear and what did they try to make heard in return?

To understand the Russian decision to invade and annex Crimea, we must start with the earliest signals that then presidential candidate Barack Obama sent out to the ears of the world regarding the sort of foreign policy he would follow. In interpreting those signals, we rely on analysis done back in 2008, when one of the authors, teaching an undergraduate seminar called “Solving Foreign Crises,” worked with students who applied game theory to work out the likely implications of the withdrawal (or nonwithdrawal) of US troops from Iraq, paying particular attention to its consequences for internal Iraqi politics and for Iraq-Iran relations. At the time the study was done the students did not yet know who would be elected president in 2008. Therefore, they did not analyze whether troops would or would not be withdrawn but rather what the consequences of each decision was likely to be. What we report here is a summary of the findings as reported in detail elsewhere and published before any of the important decisions were actually made4—which means Vladimir Putin and other world leaders might just as readily have anticipated the subsequent developments as did undergraduate students using a simple political forecasting model. It is important to our argument that this student analysis and the forecasting model that turned their data into projections shows that the subsequent impact of Obama’s policies was predictable.

During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama, appealing to his antiwar electoral base of support, promised that if elected, he would withdraw American troops from Iraq within sixteen months. Later, however, in February 2009, President Obama stretched his preelection withdrawal timetable to August 2010, creating chagrin among the Democratic Party’s loyalists who, hearing that there was not a firm commitment to full withdrawal before 2011, complained that he was moving too slowly on what they believed was his firm policy commitment: to pull US forces out of Iraq altogether. Then, too, the possibility remained that the 2011 deadline could be extended indefinitely.

The student assessment indicated that if the United States withdrew its troops, then Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, would be challenged by the leading political representatives of Sunni interests in Iraq and that in response, Maliki would shore up his political position by aligning his government with Iran. The student analysis indicated Maliki would not take this latter action if US troops remained in Iraq. The game theoretic analysis indicated that such a security arrangement between Iraq and Iran would help defend the Iraqi regime against a Sunni-led insurgency or civil war, while bolstering Iran’s political position in the region. This is, of course, what we have since seen with the growth of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its seizure of Iraqi territory, followed by the Iranian military presence in Iraq intended to defeat ISIS while keeping other Sunni interests at bay.