The ‘Decline of the West’ – and the Emergence of a Russian Challenge

Until 2014, the idea of major, great-power war in modern Europe had become so unthinkable that it did not feature in discussion, even in fiction. Events that year in Ukraine changed all that. The language of war has returned to European politics, and officials and observers have begun to reflect on what it might look like. Euro-Atlantic officials and observers began to talk informally of the ‘Eastern front’, and the ‘threat from the East’. In the media, documentaries have been screened debating the ‘return of old enemies’, even the eruption of World War III, and the conditions under which nuclear weapons might be used in the case of a Russian invasion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member states.¹

The war in Ukraine broke out at a time when the Euro-Atlantic community had long been suffering a crisis of confidence. The impact of the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent slow growth and prolonged economic austerity policies, the high-profile failures in Iraq and the problematic interventions in Libya and Syria have all contributed to an accelerating sense of weakness and an ebbing of the post-Cold War era, ‘End of History’ confidence.

Indeed, it has been a commonplace for some years to argue that the international liberal order is under threat from internal and external challenges. Sustained domestic political and economic uncertainty, combined with resurgent authoritarian powers, have meant that Western liberalism is seen to be in retreat, even ‘under siege’ – not only are the countries that built the liberal order weaker today than they have been for seventy years, but, according to the Financial Times's Edward Luce, since the year 2000, twenty-five democracies have failed, ‘including three in Europe – Russia, Turkey and Hungary’. The ‘West's crisis is real, structural and likely to persist’, he lamented.²

This is part of a wider debate about a ‘post-American world’, the decline of the West, the ‘rise of the rest’ and the shift of power to the East.³ Richard Haass, a former diplomat and now the president of the influential US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, is among those who have argued that ‘centrifugal forces’ are gaining the upper hand, and there is a shrinking American ability to translate its considerable power into influence.⁴ And as one prominent journalist put it, the West's ‘centuries long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close’, and with the growing concentration of wealth in Asia, the West is losing its ability to function as a pole of stability and power imposing order on a chaotic world. Thus Gideon Rachman stated that the ‘crumbling of the Western dominated world order’ has increased the chance of conflict not just in East Asia but in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.⁵ This discussion has provided fertile ground for other debates about the decline of US and Western power and the challenges it faces, the rise of other powers and the possibility of this leading to war.⁶

The loss of confidence has two main roots. First, as John Bew, Professor of History and Foreign Policy at King's College London, put it, there have been ‘profound failures’ in the Anglo-American world's ability to anticipate, understand and come to terms with the complex problems it has encountered in other countries and regions. These ‘shortcomings have contributed to a sense of loss of control, of being at the mercy of events and a general loss of authority in world affairs’.⁷ Reminding us that concerns about world order have permeated Anglo-American foreign policy thinking for over a century, Bew argues that they are simultaneously forward-looking, aspirational expressions of the desire to give the international system a destination point made in one's own image, and yet riddled with inescapable ‘Spenglerian angst’, the sense of ‘civilizational vulnerability, sharpened by periods of technological change, fiercer international competition or confrontation with “The Other” from different parts of the world’.⁸

And ours is indeed seen as a state of permanent crisis, an ‘age of anxiety’, an ‘unprecedented condition of vulnerability’ and connectedness that makes the United States and its allies increasingly open to violent threats. Patrick Porter, Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham, has argued that the US, which ought to be one of the most secure states in history, is perpetually insecure, due to fears about the revolutions in communications, transport and weapons technology that have served to reduce frontiers and make the world dangerously small. US security is thus implicated everywhere, and this notion of insecurity in a shrunken world has lain behind the development since the early 2000s of a series of policies including pre-emptive war in the name of anticipatory defence, and other measures such as the development of the Ballistic Missile Defence programme (BMD).⁹

The second root is quantitative, reflecting concern about a sense of loss of material power. If China and Russia are seen to pose the main challenges to the ‘relatively peaceful and prosperous’ international order, the ‘combined military power’ of the US and its allies has served as the ‘greatest check’ on their ambitions.¹⁰ But as the BBC's Mark Urban argued in 2015, a series of long-term trends, including declining defence spending (from 2012 to 2014, thirteen of the twenty fastest-declining defence budgets were in Europe), mean that there is a ‘qualitative as well as quantitative erosion’ of Western superiority. ‘The edge, the Western advantage and along with that the ability to deter people in parts of the world from doing desperate things, is going – if it has not already disappeared.’¹¹ A year later, a leaked British Army report suggested that, on the basis of lessons learnt from the war in Ukraine, Russia ‘currently has a significant capability edge over UK force elements’, and NATO allies were ‘scrambling to catch up’.¹²

Then in 2018, launching the new US National Defence Strategy, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis used much the same language when he stated that ‘our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare – air, land, sea, space, and cyber space – and it is continuing to erode’. He argued that fast technological change and the long-running wars the US had waged had diminished US military capabilities: US armed forces had to cope with ‘inadequate and misaligned resources’. Mattis emphasized that great-power competition was now the main focus of US security, and that the ‘unipolar moment in which the US was the only superpower is no longer with us’.¹³

An important feature of the concern about the international order being in retreat is a widespread view that the post-Cold War goal of a Europe ‘whole, free and at peace’ is under threat. If the range of challenges is seen to be broad, from Brexit to migration, many see Russia to be one of the most prominent. As one US commentator has put it, Russia, ‘fresh from perpetrating the first violent annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II, forges on with a dizzying military buildup and casually talks about the use of battlefield nuclear weapons against NATO member states’.¹⁴ Along with many others, James Kirchick suggested that Russia was the most important of these threats because of the way that it supported and magnified the others. It is such a widely held view that he is worth quoting at length:

As Europe's political stability, social cohesion, economic prosperity and security are more threatened today than at any point since the Cold War, Russia is destabilizing the Continent on every front. … Fomenting European disintegration from within, Russia also threatens Europe from without through its massive military buildup, frequent intimidation of NATO members and efforts to overturn the continent's security architecture by weakening the transatlantic link with America.¹⁵

After many years of prolonged neglect in which Russia was not a priority, the shock of the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine catapulted Russia to the forefront of the Euro-Atlantic policy agenda. Perhaps belatedly, the crisis emphasized for many that Russia was no longer a partner, but a challenger. It also generated much debate about what Putin would do next – was Crimea just the beginning of a new expansionist policy? – and the sources of Moscow's actions.

Some, such as Michael McFaul, an academic who also served as US Ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, frame the current crisis in immediate causes. Acknowledging that the questions of great-power competition and international order and US policies play a role, McFaul emphasizes instead the roles of Russian domestic policies and particularly the return of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency in 2012 as being the key factors in the current crisis.¹⁶

But there is little consensus. Others put it into a longer-term historical context of ‘typical Russian activity’. James Clapper, former US Director of National Intelligence, for instance, asserted that Russian interference in the US election was ‘just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favour, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique’ (sic).¹⁷ Others point to traditional Russian imperialism: Russia is ‘following in the footsteps of its historical predecessors and will continue to do so because of similar ideological, cultural security and geopolitical drivers’.¹⁸

Still others highlight a different dynamic. If some frame the Ukraine crisis as being the result of a dynamic interaction between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, a negative-sum game,¹⁹ others have argued that the crisis erupted because of US policy failures that squandered an opportunity for better relations,²⁰ and because Russia has begun to respond more forcefully to US policy. Though they do not all agree on the balance of blame, such observers place the current deterioration in relations in the post-Cold War context – one of a longer-term, deepening divide between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, and the failure to reach a lasting settlement after the Cold War. According to Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, therefore, the ‘competing narratives about the end of the Cold War are grounded in a profound interpretative gulf about the nature of the international system’, and there is a strategic impasse between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia.²¹

With the persistent deterioration in relations, each year seemingly showing a ‘new low’ in relations, the thrust of much of the debate has been about the emergence of a return to ‘Cold War type’ relations between the West and Russia. There has been much criticism about the failure of the Euro-Atlantic community to stop Russia and the specific policies that it could implement, with most emphasis on the need to deter and contain Russia.²²

What does seem clear, however, is that the Euro-Atlantic community's relationship with Russia has entered a new era – moving beyond the ‘post-Cold War’ era of what could be called ‘Russian democracy embattled’ into ‘Russia as challenger’. The precise character of this shift has been obscured by an important ambiguity. On the one hand, there are numerous deeply entrenched questions that encourage a strong sense of only glacial movement in Russian politics, foreign policy and relations with the Euro-Atlantic community. There is much repetition in the debate about the relationship, with a strong sense of déjà vu about the core questions – the (un)sustainability of Putin's leadership and Russia's long-term decline, and the many disagreements about Euro-Atlantic security, particularly the debate about NATO's supposed ‘no-enlargement promise’. Officials and observers who have recently returned to Russia-watching after a substantial break occasionally lament how familiar the discussion all looks.

On the other hand, since 2014 the pace of events has seemed to accelerate as the relationship has lurched from crisis to crisis, and from one panic about Russian action to the next. Not only does the debate become more partisan, it has also moved into new subjects, such as election interference and cyber security and Russian actions in Syria. Each new feature shapes the policy debate about Russia, driving it further into the realms of security.

The development of this book reflects this trajectory. When it was originally conceived in 2016, partly to respond to the repetitions and abstractions of yet another round of debate about a ‘new Cold War’ and the emergence of debate about so-called ‘Russian hybrid warfare’, and partly to emphasize the need to see dialogue and deterrence not as ends in themselves but as the consequences of a broader grand strategy, dialogue formed a larger proportion of the Euro-Atlantic community's intentions. And while it might reasonably be argued that with each crisis dialogue became ever more important, with each crisis the possibilities for dialogue simultaneously narrowed and receded.

The attempted murder, in March 2018 in Salisbury, of the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter appears to have had significant and ongoing consequences for relations between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia. It resulted not just in London accusing the Russian authorities of direct involvement, but in large numbers of expulsions of diplomats and intelligence officers from across the Euro-Atlantic community and beyond (with Russia reciprocating), and in a second suspension of high-level dialogue in four years. In August that year, the US imposed sanctions against Russia for using chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law or against its own nationals. For their part, the British authorities publicly named two men as suspects, charging them with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, causing grievous bodily harm and the possession and use of a nerve agent, novichok, contrary to the Chemical Weapons Act. Though the UK did not immediately apply to Russia for their extradition, the British authorities have obtained European Arrest Warrants and an Interpol Red Notice for the two men, believed to be Russian military intelligence officers travelling under the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. According to one northern (non-British) European politician, the events have resulted in a different atmosphere: ‘politically, all hopes of a better relationship stopped with Salisbury’.²³

Not for the first time, therefore, there is a need to reflect on first principles, diagnosis of the problem and both the wider picture and the longer trajectory of relations with Russia. This book brings together history, politics, policy and strategy not so much to make specific policy recommendations about how to ‘deal with the Russians’ today and tomorrow, but to step back to make a bigger argument for a broader shift in terms of conceiving the nature of the challenge Russia poses. This requires returning to the roots of questions as much as setting out a path ahead.

Acknowledgements

If the idea of the book took shape in 2016, it was written in the first half of 2018, and many debts of gratitude have accrued, as I have benefitted from much support from colleagues, friends and family. My colleagues at the Oxford Changing Character of War Centre (CCW), particularly Robert Johnson, Liz Robson, Graham Fairclough, Melissa Skorka, Chris Holloway and Ruth Murray, have been patient and supportive, notably during the final months of finishing the book, and have throughout offered help and timely and constructive advice. Additionally, I would like to thank Pembroke College, Oxford, and the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit for their generous support of CCW's work, and especially the Russia and Northern European Defence and Security project.

At the heart of the book are the many interviews and discussions I have had with politicians, officials and military personnel in the UK, the US, across NATO and the European Union (EU), and Russia. Though such discussions must remain anonymous, I am grateful for the time you have spent with me. I would like to thank the audiences of three lectures at which I presented these ideas, including in Washington, Oxford and London, for their questions and insightful comments. I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for Polity who gave detailed and thoughtful comments on the draft. Likewise, friends have taken the trouble to discuss the themes of the book at length, even going so far as to read and comment on parts of, or all of, the draft. Among them are Nazrin Mehdiyeva, Richard Connolly, Julian Cooper, Silvana Malle, Dov Lynch and Robert Dover. They not only have offered constructive critique of this particular book, but are ever ready with their friendship and support. The thinking that influenced the book is also the product of many years of discussions with friends, including Florence Gaub and Henry Plater-Zyberk. Thank you. In Russia, as always, I would like to thank Boris Mikhailovich and Mikhail Borisovich and Ekaterina Vladimirovna for their kindness and support. The work of IA, PL, and, particularly during the writing of this book, IK, FEC and PAT has played an important role: you are remembered.

I am grateful for the help of several librarians, particularly Simon Blundell, and also David Bates and his team at Chatham House. Thanks are also due to Antulio J. Echevaria II and Nora Ellis of the Parameters journal for permission to reuse and build on material first published in the article ‘The “War” in Russia's “Hybrid Warfare”’.

Similarly, much gratitude is due to Louise Knight, Nekane Tanaka Galdos, Sophie Wright and their colleagues at Polity for their patience, encouragement and editorial attentiveness throughout the process. Their positive approach from the early discussions through to the final text has been essential. Thank you!

Most of all, my thanks and love go to my family, Charles and Dorothy and Yulia, for their kindness, generosity, patience and encouragement. How lucky I am. With your support and love, this book and so much else has been and is made possible. So the book is dedicated to you, and to Lara Andreevna, whose happy presence continues as a guiding light to what is really important in life.

Andrew Monaghan, June 2018