Zack Beauchamp · Thursday, April 14, 2016, 3:54 pm
On Monday and Tuesday, Russian planes and helicopters flew very, very close to the USS Donald Cole, a destroyer operating in the Baltic Sea.
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The Russian planes were flying at the US ship in the same way they would be if they were conducting an attack run. Thankfully, they were unarmed — but the act was needlessly, dangerously provocative. What's more, Russia has been doing this for years, even buzzing the Donald Cook roughly 12 times two years ago, when it was in the Black Sea.
Why does this keep happening? It's hard to know for sure, of course, without listening in on Russian orders (which unfortunately I have so far been unable to do). But given what we know about Russian foreign policy in the Putin era, these overflights make a lot of sense.
Putin, you see, has elevated aggressive geopolitical trolling to the level of doctrine. Needless provocations aimed at signaling "strength" have become a hallmark of Russia's foreign policy in the Putin years. These actions are buzzy and generate a lot of breathless coverage in the American press, but they often offer little in the way of actual strategic value for Russia — and indeed often risk scary escalation.
In other words, the USS Donald Cook overflights aren't an aberration. They're a perfect metaphor for much of Russian foreign policy under Putin: loud, buzzy, dangerous, and not actually all that great for most Russians.
Putin's trolly foreign policy
Examples of dangerous Russian provocations abound. In September 2014, Russian soldiers abducted an Estonian intelligence officer. Estonia is a NATO member; the abduction happened just two days after President Obama gave a speech vowing to defend Estonia and other Baltic NATO states from aggression.
That same year, Russian warships violated Latvian waters (another Baltic NATO member) 40 times. Russia has also made a habit of flying planes near or over the Baltics with their transponders switched off — making it hard to ascertain whether their intentions were peaceful. Some of those planes were nuclear-capable strategic bombers.
We've seen similar behavior in the Middle East. During Russia's intervention in Syria, Russian planes repeatedly violated Turkish airspace. This continued even after Turkey shot down a Russian plane in November 2015. Turkey is — you guessed it — a NATO member.
The point is that these sorts of low-level military provocations have become routine parts of Russian foreign policy — it's just something Putin does.
Why? Putin appears to see these provocations as a way to intimidate his adversaries in the West — namely, the US and NATO. The basic theory is that if he signals a willingness to risk conflict, the West will back down. Going to war with Russia would be objectively insane, so the idea is that if Putin seems crazy and eager to pick a fight, his adversaries won't be willing to risk it over, say, Ukraine or Syria — issues that are important but certainly not worth going to war with Russia over.
"His calculation appears to be that the scarier he seems, the more political traction he has," Mark Galeotti, a professor at NYU who studies Russia, wrote in a February piece for Vox. "What the Kremlin does have is the will to take risks, ignore the rules, and hope that the other side is more sensible, more cautious, more willing to make concessions than it is to call Russia's bluff."
According to Galeotti, this is an attempt to do as much as Russia can with what little it has. The Russian military is weak, despite a significant Putin-directed initiative to repair it. Its political institutions are deeply corrupt. Its troubled economy is oil-dependent and hurtling toward disaster.
Russia has very few tools to advance its interests, in other words — so Putin has decided that flashy trolling is a way to make the most of it.
Ukraine shows the limits of this strategy
When Putin's troll theory has been tested in practice, however, it has been left wanting. Ukraine is by far the clearest example.
The two highest-profile Russian foreign policy moves of late, the interventions in Ukraine and Syria, both testify to the limits of Putin's troll doctrine — albeit in different ways.
In Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in seizing effective control of Crimea, as well as creating a "frozen conflict" in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. But it's not actually clear why this is good for Russia. Retaking Crimea has been a longtime ideological goal of Russian nationalists, and controlling the territory theoretically helps secure the valuable naval base in the city of Sevastopol. But on the whole, these aren't exactly massive strategic gains.
And the eastern Ukraine conflict has turned into an outright debacle. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Russian soldiers have died; the Russian government spends $40 million a month on pensions alone for its proxy government in Donbas.
Maybe this would be worth it if Putin's intimidation campaign had convinced Western countries to roll over and cede Ukraine to him. But the opposite is the case. The US and its European allies responded with punishing sanctions, depriving Russian businesses of much-needed foreign capital. According to International Monetary Fund estimates, the sanctions likely knocked off somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of Russian GDP after they were implemented — a pretty hefty sum.
And more broadly, neither Putin's trolling exercises nor his Ukraine intervention has weakened Western military resolve. A new report from a consortium of European think tanks found that defense spending on the continent will jump 8.3 percent in 2016 — a break with a consistent post–Cold War pattern of declining European defense spending. The think tanks see "Russia’s aggressive posture epitomized by Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the crisis in Ukraine" as a direct cause of this spending hike.
The point, then, is that Putin's brinkmanship has not yielded a pliant Europe, one willing to bend to Russia's interests in Ukraine and elsewhere. In actuality, it has led to significant economic pain, a renewed anti-Russian alliance in the West, and little in the way of meaningful strategic gains.
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