Ett amerikanskt perspektiv

Jag har då och då återkommit till amerikanska perspektiv på Ryssland/Ukraina. En läsare tipsade mig om en artikel som nu är ett halvår gammal men som hade ett resonemang som kastade ett intressant perspektiv på frågan.

Statsvetaren Samuel Charap kommenterade den amerikanska politiken efter nedskjutningen i augusti av Malaysian Air flight 17 och delar av artikel är således tidsknuten. Men det mer principiella resonemanget är detta:

The outcome demanded by Western officials—and pursued on the ground by the Ukrainian authorities—entails an immediate halt in Russian aid to the insurgents that would allow the government forces to crush the insurgency, establishing full control over Ukraine’s sovereign territory. This outcome is both highly unlikely to come to pass and deeply problematic.

It is improbable because it requires Russia to sit on the sidelines and not take steps to prevent it from materializing. But for President Putin, this scenario represents complete strategic defeat and public humiliation. The insurgency in Ukraine for him is leverage to extract assurances about the country’s future geopolitical and geoeconomic course. If the rebels are crushed, the Kremlin believes it will have “lost” Ukraine to the West, an outcome it cannot accept under any circumstances.

For coercion—accurate shorthand for the Western sanctions strategy—to be effective in ending a conflict, the sides’ interests cannot be completely opposed. As Thomas Schelling, the international relations scholar, observed in his 1967 classic Arms and Influence, “Coercion requires finding a bargain, arranging for him to be better off doing what we want—worse off not doing what we want—when he takes the threatened penalty into account.” However irrational it might seem to the rest of the world, there is no feasible penalty that makes the desired Western outcome in Ukraine acceptable to Moscow. Under those circumstances, Schelling observed, escalation is inevitable: “If his pain were our greatest delight and our satisfaction his greatest woe, we would just proceed to hurt and to frustrate each other.”

Despite the tough new Western sanctions this week, Ukraine simply matters far more to the Russian elite and the Russian people than it does to the United States, the EU foreign-policy establishment or the American or EU citizenry. That is a reality that will not change with time. And it suggests that while Western governments will only take measures that have no significant impact on their economies, Russians—its leadership and people—are willing to pay a price to pursue their goals. In short, absent a negotiation process involving genuine give and take, the strategy of coercion will likely fail to change Russian behavior.