Putin and Syria: Siloviki Realism in Geopolitical Strategy
We, who have a wealth of resources to employ, have squandered them ineffectively and navigate the ship of state with our heads in the clouds. We forced a vote in the UNSC on Syria, ignoring all signals that the end result would be failure. Syria shoots down a Turkish warplane intruding in it’s airspace (likely at our request) and we had no plan to capitalize on the incident. We gratuitously leak information or disinformation about covert operations that serves more to make us look amateurish than to intimidate our opponents. We do not even appear to be well-informed about the Syrian opposition we are aiding inside Syria, as opposed to expatriate organizations. Some of the fighters in the opposition are as morally objectionable as Assad’s militia thugs and secret police killers.
We play at tactical geopolitics while the Russians do strategy.
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L. C. Rees:
July 12th, 2012 at 3:47 am
Prosperity is the mother of tactics while necessity is the mother of strategy.
zen:
July 12th, 2012 at 3:57 am
Well said, LC. agreed.
J. Scott Shipman:
July 12th, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Hi Zen,
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Good post. Not sure the Russians “do strategy.” While they have elections, their foreign policy apparatus is more centralized than ours. We’ve discussed this, but our system of government makes grand strategy difficult unless there is an inarguable threat (the beginning of the Cold War—and agreement slowly dissolved as we approached the end) to our existence). Relatively speaking, our systems are more open than the Russians; thus open to more scrutiny/debate.
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Hi L.C., I believe your aphorism could be considered in reverse, too: Prosperity is the mother of strategy [wealth allows reflection and planning] and necessity the mother of tactics [the “we have to do something now” line of thought].
L. C. Rees:
July 12th, 2012 at 7:32 pm
Scott: Your comment reminds me of Clayton Christiansen’s Innovator’s Dilemma thesis: good businesses are destroyed by good management. His favorite example, Digital Equipment Corporation, was once the most successful minicomputer manufacturer but is now an easily missed accounting identity on Hewlett Packard’s books. DEC management was so effectively at profitably meeting needs of its customers that they had no incentive to build a “disruptive innovation” like a microcomputer (now called a PC) that 1) none of its customers wanted 2) would cannibalize its existing revenue 3) suffered from lower engineering quality than DEC’s existing products 4) had no coherent constituency inside DEC to support it. When the PC came along, it was cheap enough that a broader customer base than DEC’s existing customers could afford to buy it. Eventually, even DEC’s most loyal customers moved to PCs because of their lower cost. Revenues at DEC and fellow minicomputer manufacturers simultaneously went off a cliff. They all either went bankrupt or were bought out (like DEC was in 1998).
Poverty may not lend itself to much reflection and planning. But it can impose greater discipline and focus in follow up to the reflection and planning that it does allow. Less than optimal strategy consistently executed often trumps more than optimal strategy inconsistently pursued. Poverty is deathly efficient at culling the essential from the superfluous since the margin between success and disaster is so narrow. Those making the initial transition from poverty to prosperity often manage the latter in a disciplined manner because they retain the lessons beaten into them by the former. Those raised in prosperity without a memory of poverty’s lessons are liable to assume that their prosperity is the natural order of things rather than a highly contingent outcome bred from blood, sweat, and tears. Leaders in prosperous times are judged by their ability to keep the existing wellsprings of prosperity flowing to their existing constituents. Those trying to shift the sources of their prosperity to new unproven sources in times of prosperity are forced to do so carrying the weight of their existing prosperity and the suspicions of the currently prosperous. Poverty, even the transitory poverty of passing crisis, is far more amenable to such efforts than prosperity.
Contemporary American leaders are rewarded for reinforcing the status quo that prevailed after 1945. That status quo was defined by one blessing and one curse. The blessing was the greatest bubble in human history, the prosperity we enjoyed when we emerged undamaged by war or ideological excess from World War II. The second was the Cold War and the expedients taken to wage it. The result of the first is an expectation that the prosperity of 1945-1974 and the excesses it allowed are not only the natural but inevitable order of things. The result of the second is foreign and defense policies governed more by demands to ritually reenact the fossilized liturgy of Cold War expedients than by their usefulness to citizens of the United States.
This is one reason for the differences between the energy of President Putin’s remarks and the woodenness of Secretary Clinton’s: Putin is attempting to motivate apparatchiks beaten down by twenty years of “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” while Clinton is a high priestess performing the highly formalized rituals of Cold War foreign policy for congregations at home and abroad that remain fanatically devoted and highly sensitive to the correct observance of those forms. Given their roles as challenger and challenged and the different incentives offered to each role, they’re playing their parts as expected.
J. Scott Shipman:
July 13th, 2012 at 12:53 am
Hi L.C.,
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Excellent points, all. Agree with most of your points. I made a mistake in my presumptions (which admittedly will paint me an idealist); namely, nations with wealth were inclined to look past the status quo. I know from experience, in reality, this is not true.
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I know about poverty and planning. I’m currently trying to bootstrap a $100M business with marginal-to-no capital; so I squeeze old Ab until he has a permanent wave in his beard. I know exactly what you mean and agree with the premise.
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Your use of the word energy in Putin’s remarks reminds me of a couple of close synonyms I use frequently in my consulting practice: vigor and rigor—we don’t have enough (vigorously rigorous). Another word that creeps in company of these is “conviction.” I’m an old Southern boy, and “conviction” implies a level of competent passion sadly lacking in our public discourse. Too many are about as deep as thimble, and reading lines written by staff who are treading water, and trying to keep their boss as unremarkable (out of trouble) as possible—anything to avoid controversy or a day as a headline in the news.
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That said, your response makes sense, and I’m a bit embarrassed I allowed the idealist in me peek out in public:)) Your comments always force me to think—sometimes rigorously, and for that your comments improve the quality of the site’s discourse. Thank you.
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I contend Putin is probably not doing strategy as much as he’s attempting to consolidate his power and get a “rudder with a bit of speed” into the Russian foreign ministry bureaucracy–and the remainder of his gov’t. While he may have been “motivate apparatchiks” he was also striving to avoid the loss of Syria—much like the miscalculation on Libya. As Zen and I have discussed in email correspondence, Putin won’t be “rolled” again. Syria is not our fight, and there doesn’t seem to be a gov’t in waiting that will improve their lot over their current despot—just another despot. The neocons and progressive R2P types clamoring for intervention are lost on me. We’ve left too much blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan—and war with Iran looms. Syria is not our fight.
L. C. Rees:
July 13th, 2012 at 2:38 am
The problem of contemporary American idealism is one of degree not kind. My grandparents, born between 1905 and 1914, were idealists but it was tempered because they’d had to live life closer to the metal. Their standard of living growing up was higher than most of their contemporaries around the world but it was never as extravagant as that enjoyed by their 33 grandchildren born between 1953 and 1979. The postwar boom allowed those that grew up in it to live lives of perfectly abstract idealism without the cold shower of hard knocks earlier generations of Americans received.
The R2P mindset is the sort of idealistic treacle that modest prosperity discourages but extravagant prosperity enflames.
J. Scott Shipman:
July 13th, 2012 at 2:48 am
Of course, the fig leaf is our supposed “extravagant prosperity”— a chimera, not base on our fiscal reality. We’re operating on fumes and our reserve currency status—both are on life support.
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Thoughtful response; I grew up close to the “metal” and should know better.
Madhu:
February 6th, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Zen and crew, I thought you might be interested in the following comment that I left at SWJ:
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Searching for something else on the topic of contemporary NATO, I came across the following transcript:
(Diane Rehm Show)
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http://tinyurl.com/azzflqv
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I want to “vet” ideas, I have no interest in personalizing any arguments based on any of the people mentioned in my comments.
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Regarding the pivot to Asia, some pundits and scholars caution that the US and its allies may be creating an unnecessarily provocative posture toward China. However, is that sort of thing embedded institutionally within the NATOist “mindset” already?
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By using the NATO alliance as a way to “get around Russia and China” are we creating problems for ourselves and are we blinded to what may be the reason for some friction?
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Forgive my sarcasm, but poring over maps of MittelEuropa and obsessing over relations with the MidEast may not be the only intellectual background a person needs in this, the early twenty-first century….