What the Next President Must Do About Putin

By Evelyn Farkas

Madam/Mr. President-to-be-elected, you will enter office facing Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a potential geostrategic threat to the United States. You will need a strategy to counter and resist this threat, which is only growing. 

At the moment, Putin appears to be closer to prevailing in Syria and holding steady in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. 

His use of force to protect despots and to render governments hostage to Moscow’s will is working to some extent, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford tacitly acknowledged last week when he told reporters that because of Russia’s military intervention in Syria, the Assad regime “is in a better place” ahead of scheduled peace talks in Geneva this week. 

Putin may have helped Assad regain control of enough of Syria to potentially retain power and in Eastern Europe the states with uninvited Russian forces continue to experience limits on their territorial and political sovereignty.

What precisely is the threat from Russia? Putin’s two main objectives—to keep himself in power and to rebuild Russia as a great power—do not in themselves endanger U.S. national interests. The threat lies in the fact that Putin is trying to achieve his goals by rewriting international rules and norms that are critical to U.S. security. 

Specifically, he seeks to inaugurate a new international order that permits human rights abuses by despotic leaders and invasion, occupation and political subversion of sovereign states. Not to mention assassination: Only last week, a British inquiry led by retired high court judge Robert Owen found that the murder of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was “probably” directed by the Russian president.

To permit this behavior to go unchallenged would mean the end of the post-World War II Westphalian, post- Cold War world order, which simultaneously enshrined territorial state sovereignty and human and minority rights. And we certainly can't let Russia weaken or destroy NATO, our most effective operational alliance, and our solidarity with Europe our biggest trading partner.

If Russia wins its aims outright—Ukraine remains ungovernable and territories in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova remain occupied, and Assad remains in power—Putin’s Kremlin will be emboldened to use military force again and again to achieve its foreign (and domestic) policy objectives. 

Your administration will need to do more with our allies and partners to prevent a resolution to ongoing or “frozen” conflicts that runs counter to the wishes of the people of those countries. This is not to say that we should not compromise in order to put an end to conflict and human suffering (especially in Syria), but we must structure our compromises so that they contain the path to, or at least, the possibility for future exercise of democratic political and territorial sovereignty.

The United States must counter and resist Russia’s actions though a combination of deterrence, strengthening our allies and partners and communicating the truth about the Kremlin’s actions to the international community. 

Your administration must strive to convince Russia that neo-Soviet adventurism on its periphery will not advance its interests; Russia cannot be allowed to prevail in Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, where its military occupations have led to so-called frozen conflicts that serve as a Russian veto on the policies of those countries. Russia can have influence on those countries, but it should be based on mutual sovereign agreement, not coercion.

This is a propitious moment to shift into a more forward-leaning posture. Despite Moscow’s apparent strength on the world stage, it is dealing from economic weakness. The international sanctions have hurt—last April Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said they had cost Russia $26.7 billion in 2014 and he expected that to rise to $80 billion by the end of 2015. But the real leverage the United States and our allies have is owed to the collapse of oil prices. 

Over half of Russian government revenues are derived from oil and gas. The Russian government budget for 2016 was predicated on an oil price of $50 per barrel, but the price is now hovering at about $30 a barrel and may fall further. The World Bank estimates that Russian GDP will continue shrinking by 0.7 percent in 2016.

Until now, Russian officials have insisted that the military budget takes priority and will not suffer significant cuts. But if Russia keeps up its military operations in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere, the accumulating costs may provide ammunition to Russian economists and other officials who are wary of, if not opposed to, the new Russian military adventurism. And if the economic situation worsens for the average Russian due to inflation and the falling value of the ruble, resource realities could, over time, rein in Russian military operations and lead Russia to a more accommodating policy. 

Former Russian Economic Minister Alexei Kudrin recently reminded Russians that the cost of supporting Crimea and the separatists in eastern Ukraine are far greater than military operations in Syria; these costs include infrastructure, and social support and are estimated to run into billions of dollars.

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