Foreign Policy: Understanding Russia’s Position, Justifications, and Inclinations

Through main street media a new enemy has been manufactured and precision-crafted to art form by gifted spin doctors; Americans have been repeatedly painted a very negative, cartoonish distortion of Putin: “Russia is aggressive” and “Putin is evil, Putin is a bully, Putin is Hitler,” etc. Putin has become the fulcrum for foreign policy optics and this meme has surpassed critical mass to the point of parity with “matter-of-fact” belief by Americans of the absolute presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the pretext buildup of justification for the Iraq invasion in 2003. But forget about that for a moment, what is crucial to understand is not just how America perceives Russia but how Russia perceives America and NATO and why.

Pre-1990 USSR and NATO versus Present-day Russia and NATO

There is widespread agreement among all political parties in Moscow, from the Patriots of Russia to the Communists to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, that the West broke its word and short-changed Russia when it was weak. In an interview with SPIEGEL at his residence outside Moscow in early November, President Dmitry Medvedev complained that when the Berlin Wall came down, it had “not been possible to redefine Russia’s place in Europe.” What did Russia get? “None of the things that we were assured, namely that NATO would not expand endlessly eastwards and our interests would be continuously taken into consideration,” Medvedev said. After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

(Source: Spiegel, Uwe Klußmann, Matthias Schepp and Klaus Wiegrefe, November 26, 2009, “NATO’s Eastward Expansion: Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?”)

Objectively, who is the aggressor: NATO or Russia? (Source: Spiegel)

Communications like these fall on deaf ears in the West. (Source: Inessa S)

What is important to know is nothing existed in writing between Russia and NATO in regards to the future of NATO operations or new NATO member states after the unification of East and West Germany and the dissolution of the USSR into Russia and its former territories. Russia’s position is that NATO has acted aggressively by expanding NATO influence easterly into former USSR territory along with military forces including nuclear weapons that could attack Russia with no warning. When Russia complains about these actions it falls on deaf ears in the West (like in the video above) both in official and media capacities. However, when Russia pushes back in any way, Russia is presented as a bully or aggressor by western media, all hands on deck, ruthlessly tarred and feathered out of context.

But this is not about right or wrong, ethical concerns will be left to erudite historians and philosophers in smoke-filled rooms. No, this is about perception, expectations, and changes in foreign policy: foreign policy is different between US/NATO and Russia, and trouble is brewing because these perceptions and understandings carry over to not just the Balkins and Poland but also influence actions in Syria, naval operation in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean as well as responses to economic sanctions. Given that Russia has intelligently applied the unassailable wisdom of Game Theory, Russia concluded there are no grounds to trust the West given the history of repeated NATO actions and broken promises. For this reason Russia quietly on a very limited defense budget relative to the US has reacted by developing several different classes of very advanced weapon systems (e.g. air defense systems, electronic warfare, hypersonic missiles, dramatically superior artillery and ordnance, and cyberwarfare) in response to this perceived aggression and, consequently, the threshold of escalation to dangerous military actions is much closer than Americans realize because: (1) the bar is lowered to escalation due to technical advances that accommodate desired foreign policy stances (discussed below); and (2) Americans only see one side (and it is badly distorted at that). There are two sides to deeply consider when it comes to military action and Americans are ignorant of the stakes — what are the risks and benefits of being in Syria? Are they in balance?

Cold War 2.0: The Foreign Policy Differences Between Strategic and Tactical Nuclear Weapon

“In 1942, physicist John Mauchly proposed an all-electronic calculating machine. The U.S. Army, meanwhile, needed to calculate complex wartime ballistics tables. The result was ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), built between 1943 and 1945 — the first large-scale computer to run at electronic speed without being slowed by any mechanical parts.” (Quote from the Computer History Museum | Image Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Archives)

Since the 1950s the world has operated in a world under the “MAD Doctrine” — Mutually Assured Destruction. Sanity has prevailed because the use of strategic nuclear weapons (i.e. hydrogen bombs, manyfold greater in destructive power than the fission nuclear bombs “Little Boy and Fat Man” used in Japan to end WWII) is unthinkable, the end of the world, etc. But the landscape has changed dramatically since the 1950s and the social hive mind is still stuck in MAD. Just like the first computer has miniaturized and proliferated from the room-sized ENIAC down to a trillion Internet of Things, so have nuclear weapons from the original 10,800 pound Fat Man to a panoply of highly-diverse nuclear weapons applications and forms; both of these technological revolutions have dramatically changed the world you live in very different ways except one of them you have never heard of until here and now in terms relative to your well-being. Nuclear weapons have been developed that scale-down to as little as 2% of the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb and these weapons can be deployed in cruise missiles, laser-guided munitions, bunker busters against hard targets or even as nuclear artillery*. These weapons are qualitatively not just different but are an entirely new genre of weapons that are not only not doomsday weapons but ones that can serve multiple military tasks — they just haven’t been used, yet.

The technological evolution of nuclear weapons through miniaturization, engineering techniques applicable to weapon’s grade nuclear materials and their environmental impact, and extremely precise guidance systems has opened up surprising tactical applications; it is just that both Russia and US/NATO have different visions for their use. The difference between the old Cold War and Cold War 2.0 is that the unthinkable is not only thinkable but has moved into the utilitarian realm and, in a perverse way, according to some — “humane.” Ergo, Cold War 2.0 is no longer cold, it has thawed and the temperature is rising. We live in a different world now and the complacency that has been engendered about the use of nuclear weapons is a misplaced one and dangerously so in Europe and Syria given the technical complexities, policies, assumptions and historical nuances cited above. The new weapons make the old rules of engagement quaint and, resultantly, the new rules — mostly unwritten if assuming unforeseen real combat conditions — presently are an opaque, mercurial gray zone whereas before they were always distinctly black and white. Very quietly, leading-edge militaries have mutated a new species of warfare: where once there was only conventional kinetic or strategic nuclear war, now you have:

conventional kinetic warfare;

a network of conventional, electronic (EW), tactical nuclear, space and cyberwarfare in limited but highly-integrated use; and

strategic nuclear war.

But shouldn’t there be another quasi-step between the second and the third levels where there is a higher bar set for tactical nuclear and society-crippling cyberwarfare use? If so, what, in pragmatic terms, precisely defines that gradation? In reality, three levels is an oversimplification. Actually there is a new warfare continuum that scales up in a foggy blur from a peacetime background of constant cyberterrorism (surveillance, espionage and data theft that is purely informational) to conventional kinetic to elements of the in-between step on its way to full escalation terminating in strategic nuclear war. Once again, all of this has quietly snuck up on us, we are in uncharted territory without public admission or debate — but here we are.

The nuclear football travels wherever the President goes, 24/7. Is there such a protocol in-place for tactical nuclear use or full-scale cyberwarfare? These are vital unanswered questions. (Photo credit: Joshua Roberts (Reuters), source page)

*Note: Nuclear artillery no longer deployed but they did exist in large quantities on both sides.

Russia’s Perspective on the Use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Simply: Russia views NATO’s actions post-1990 as very aggressive and underhanded. Russia’s foreign policy has internalized these transgressions and fine-tuned proposed future scenarios and responses — as evidenced by their foreign policy in regards to the use of tactical nuclear weapons — and carries a categorically different footing with tactical as opposed to strategic nuclear weapons:

A second reason that nuclear weapons could be used is that both Russia and the United States are capable of employing these arms in limited and relatively controlled ways. Such more discriminate usage has long been recognized as a potential way to gain value from nuclear weapons beyond threats of general use, the implementation of which would likely be tantamount to suicide. Such limited employment can be contemplated for purely “tactical” or military purposes, for instance in order to redress a deficiency in conventional military capability. Such use can also be contemplated to seek to manipulate risk by communicating in the most credible way — through actual use — that one is prepared to move closer to general war, in the hopes of persuading the other side that further escalation or continuation of its course is too perilous.

(Source: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Elbridge Colby, February 26, 2016, “The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the U.S.-Russian Relationship”)

Russia would use tactical nuclear weapons in a defensive posture to hopefully de-escalate a situation to avoid escalation to strategic nuclear weapons use. In other words, let a small genie out of the bottle as a means to keep the big genie in the bottle:

The doctrine introduced the notion of de-escalation — a strategy envisioning the threat of a limited nuclear strike that would force an opponent to accept a return to the status quo ante. Such a threat is envisioned as deterring the United States and its allies from involvement in conflicts in which Russia has an important stake, and in this sense is essentially defensive. Yet, to be effective, such a threat also must be credible. To that end, all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes. De-escalation rests on a revised notion of the scale of nuclear use. During the Cold War, deterrence involved the threat of inflicting unacceptable damage on an enemy. Russia’s de-escalation strategy provides instead for infliction of “tailored damage,” defined as “damage [that is] subjectively unacceptable to the opponent [and] exceeds the benefits the aggressor expects to gain as a result of the use of military force.” The efficacy of threatening tailored damage assumes an asymmetry in a conflict’s stakes. Moscow reasoned when it adopted the policy that, for the United States, intervening on behalf of Chechen rebels (for example) might seem a desirable course of action for a variety of reasons. But it would not be worth the risk of a nuclear exchange. Russia, however, would perceive the stakes as much higher and would find the risk of a nuclear exchange more acceptable. Indeed, in the early 2000s, Russian military experts wrote that US interference in the war in Chechnya could have resulted in a threat to use nuclear weapons.

(Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nikolai N. Sokov, March 14, 2014, “Why Russia calls a limited nuclear strike ‘de-escalation’” | Background: The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation (pdf))

Russia has large stockpiles of tactical nuclear weapons:

These standards suggest, that including its operationally assigned stockpile of 860–1,040 [Ed. non-strategic “tactical” nuclear] warheads, Russia currently maintains an overall stockpile of approximately 1,900 non-strategic nuclear warheads not scheduled for dismantlement.

(Source: Royal United Services Institute, November 2012, “VIII. Conclusion”, p. 69, Atomic Accounting: A New Estimate of Russia’s Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons (pdf))

The US’ Perspective on the Use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons

The US clearly justifies the use of tactical nuclear weapons on technological and biological merits — they are simply better weapons for certain specific tasks, period. Like the present use of laser-guided munitions, tactical nuclear weapons would minimize collateral damage relative to conventional approaches under certain conditions. In other words — theoretically—the concepts of “nuclear weapon” and “surgical strike” perversely became bedfellows:

In an interview, James N. Miller, who helped develop the modernization plan before leaving his post as under secretary of defense for policy in 2014, said the smaller, more precise weapons would maintain the nation’s nuclear deterrent while reducing risks for civilians near foreign military targets. “Though not everyone agrees, I think it’s the right way to proceed,” Mr. Miller said. “Minimizing civilian casualties if deterrence fails is both a more credible and a more ethical approach.” General Cartwright summarized the logic of enhanced deterrence with a gun metaphor: “It makes the trigger easier to pull but makes the need to pull the trigger less likely.”

(Source: New York Times, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, January 11, 2016, “As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy”)

US wavelengths of thought relative to tactical nuclear weapons venture off the deep end, completely untethered to global circumspection…:

The great thing about nuclear weapons was that their use was supposed to be unthinkable and they were therefore a deterrent to contemplation of a new world war. Once they become ‘thinkable’ we are in a different, and much more dangerous, universe. It is a universe in which former vice president Dick Cheney has apparently lived for some time. The new biography of George H W Bush has served as a reminder that in the run-up to the first Gulf War, Cheney commissioned a Pentagon study to find out how many tactical nuclear weapons it would take to kill a division of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. The answer was apparently 17.

(Source: The Guardian, Julian Borger, November 10, 2015, “America’s new, more ‘usable’, nuclear bomb in Europe”)

Technically-speaking, small and accurate tactical nuclear weapons improve mission success rate while reducing damage and fallout to “acceptable” levels. Stated differently, given the inventory of conventional weapons available today, for specific mission classes a tactical nuclear weapon is (theoretically, sans sociological and political impacts) a more efficient, humane, less collateral damage-producing weapon:

Damage and fallout plumes are “manageable” with more technologically sophisticated tactical nuclear weapons like the proposed B61–12. (Source: Global Risk Insights)

The US is currently modernizing the old B61 weapons family and completed testing of the B61–12 in 2015 but are not yet deployed. Until then, the B61–4 and B61–7 are the most advanced in the arsenal. There are many places in Europe where they are stockpiled included around 50 in Turkey.

Yet, in contradictory fashion, the same unique technical qualities that make the B61–12 a more accurate, secure, and effective U.S. nuclear deterrent also conjure implied risks with the potential to negate any positive impacts. By significantly increasing accuracy and eroding the barriers to use previously presented by unintended casualties, the B61–12 does indeed increase the deterrent capability of the United States — but it also poses the contrary reality of an increased probability that nuclear weapons will actually be launched. This concept of greater usability entirely forgoes the core assumption of deterrence theory, which asserts that credible nuclear deterrents are always present but never utilized. In short, B61–12s will broaden the range of circumstances that U.S. military strategists might reasonably consider employing nuclear weapons, a move which in turn would naturally create an immediate possibility of escalation towards full-fledged nuclear war. In addition, the sheer expense and symbolism of creating a highly modernized, highly precise nuclear weapon like the B61–12 challenges the notions of nonproliferation and disarmament.

(Source: Global Risk Insights, Ian Armstrong, January 8, 2016, “The Pentagon’s New Nuclear Gravity Bomb”)