When Secretary of State John Kerry called Russia’s seizure of Crimea “a 19th-century act in the 21st century,” it was clear his end-of-history concept of the world ignored the realities presented by regimes like Vladimir Putin’s.
But as Ukraine further deteriorates, we can see Kerry wasn’t even correct to place Putin’s tactics in the 19th century.
A recent article by David Patrikarakos in Politico Magazine aptly explains how Putin is waging a “21st century-style war” in Ukraine. For example:
“Across eastern Ukraine, city centers are now deserted; checkpoints and barriers control the central thoroughfares while shops and bars are closed. In the industrial town of Sloviansk, the center of the crisis, ATMs are running out of cash and the people wait in line for bread. Gun-toting men mix with bored youths and old women while armored personnel carriers perform tricks in the road — skidding around in circles — for cheering crowds and a man can go from anonymity to self-appointed mayor in the space of a few hours.”
Patrikarakos summarizes Putin’s strategy as “destabilize, destabilize, destabilize.” Police are afraid to protect — or side with the dissidents. Ordinary people, Patrikarakos writes, have been intoxicated by the lawlessness:
“Poor, unemployed East Ukrainians reveling in their rebirth as armed ‘revolutionaries’ told me they were ready to resist the ‘fascist junta’ in Kiev and that Putin was ‘strong’ and Russia ‘great.’ These emasculated men and women, all yearning to be part of a greater, dimly conceived whole, told me endless stories about attacks on the Russian language but nothing about how their lives might substantively be improved through alliance with Moscow.”
If this is vaguely familiar, consider that is sounds like a nation-state version of the decentralized, shadowy type of war waged by al-Qaida and other terrorists.
Disrupt everyday life in the target country; sow fear and panic, inflicting psychological and economic damage. Exploit the rigidities and tensions within that country’s institutions, using them against the country (see the demands by terrorists captured overseas to enjoy the same due process rights as common U.S. criminals, or Russia’s manipulation of election processes in Ukraine).
Use militants who wear unmarked uniforms and refuse to declare their allegiances until after the fact, if then. Undermine the rules of war under the Geneva Conventions, then demand their protections. And all the while, blame the West’s hypocrisy and moral depravity.
A 21st-century war it is. Yet we have responded with such 20th-century remedies as sanctions and foreign aid.
Russia is ripping Ukraine apart in much the same way Islamic terrorists have done in Iraq. Putin’s governing apparatus obviously differs from al-Qaida’s. But it seems he has learned from and adapted their tactics to use by a nation-state.
It also seems no one in the West anticipated such a development.
This is a bigger failure than one country, or one president, bears the blame for. But the U.S. alone has the capacity to find ways of countering these new tactics, and Barack Obama is our president.
Obama has adhered to a dated, Wilsonian concept of foreign relations, to poor effect. He has a little time left to find a new approach, before these new tactics are used elsewhere and spark an old-fashioned war.
