Back to Containment: Dealing with Putin's Regime

By David J. Kramer

In his first book, “Back to Containment: Dealing with Putin’s Regime,” David J. Kramer traces the rise of Vladimir Putin and the U.S.-Russia relationship over the course of the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He argues that the Putin regime is a serious threat to the United States and the Western world and that the United States needs to develop a tougher policy of containment and pushback. Indeed, he writes very nature of Putin’s regime makes real cooperation between Russia and the United States virtually impossible, except perhaps on arms control and non-proliferation, though even there cooperation is far from automatic. Putin’s aggressive, bloody responses to perceived threats, internal and external, make him an unsavory interlocutor, to say the least. Under his rule, Russia does not fulfill the agreements it signs and frequently violates international norms. Putin and his regime perpetuate the narrative of an enemy from outside to justify his way of ruling at home, and they seek to discredit the West even as they exploit its openness and financial systems. Accordingly, Putin bears the bulk of the blame for the current state of affairs in U.S.-Russian relations.
Kramer is the former Senior Director for Human Rights and Democracy at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, and was previously President of Freedom House, and Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He is currently a Senior Fellow in the Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David J. Kramer
• Release date: Aug 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370363766

Book preview

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Foreword

Few bilateral relationships over the years have generated more debate and controversy than the one between the United States and Russia. The end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union gave many Americans and many Russians hope that better days were ahead. Ups and downs during the Boris Yeltsin years in the 1990s, however, were followed by the emergence of an unknown leader in Russia, Vladimir Putin, and uncertainty about the future of the relationship.

Named prime minister in 1999 and tapped to succeed Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000, Putin represented a sharp contrast from his predecessor: a young, sober, decisive leader who was determined to restore law and order within Russia, and Russia’s sense of pride and place on the global stage. Russians and Americans alike had great hopes. Putin was aided significantly by a sharply rising price of oil, which fueled Russia’s economic recovery, as well as his early takeover of nationwide television. His ability to control the means by which Russians got their news and information and the improvement in Russians’ standard of living established Vladimir Putin as the new Russian strongman.

Even as he succeeded to a degree in restoring Russian national pride, Putin also oversaw a vast crackdown on human rights inside Russia, launched military invasions against Russia’s neighbors, broke away parts of their territory, and became extraordinarily aggressive in launching cyber-attacks against western countries, including seeking to influence the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Putin’s actions made the much wished-for improvement in Russia’s relations with the West an impossibility, and instead ushered in the worst relationship between Russia and the West, and the United States in particular, in more than a quarter of a century.

Every American president since Putin’s rise to power has tried to work together with Russia. President George W. Bush launched a strategic dialogue that lasted right up until Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. Without any movement from Putin, President Barack Obama launched a reset with Russia that lasted until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Both presidents saw the bilateral relationship with Russia at the end of their terms in much worse shape than when they started. President Donald Trump entered office in 2017 also ready to improve the dynamics with Russia. But has Russia changed in such a way that would permit a better relationship with the United States? Early indications are, in fact, the opposite – even in the short time since President Trump took office, Russia has buzzed U.S. navy vessels in the Baltic Sea, ramped up fighting inside Ukraine, and allowed Syria to launch chemical weapons attacks from a Russian-controlled military base.

David J. Kramer’s book looks at the long sweep of U.S.-Russia relations and concludes that Putin’s leadership in the Kremlin makes an improvement in relations impossible. Indeed, the maintenance of an adversarial relationship with the West – and particularly the United States – is essential to Putin’s retaining his grip on power. He needs to perpetuate the myth that the West, NATO, the European Union – and the United States especially – pose a threat to Russia. This means that Putin’s Russia shares very few interests with the United States and certainly does not share the same values. That suggests that overtures by any American administration to improve relations will be seen as weakness and met with derision and opportunism.

Kramer draws upon a wealth of experience, both in and out of government. We worked together in the U.S. Department of State, where as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Kramer had responsibility for policy toward Russia and Ukraine for nearly three years. Both before and after serving in government, Kramer has followed Russia closely, and led efforts in the NGO community to analyze trends in Russia and recommend courses of U.S. policy action. It was during his time at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, as Senior Director for Human Rights and Democracy (2014-2017) that Kramer put together his reflections on Russia and wrote this book.

Consistent with the mission of the McCain Institute, Kramer takes a values-based approach to analyzing the situation in Russia and the challenges Putin poses for the United States and others. He does not mince words in his critical assessment of Putin’s leadership. Nor does he pull punches in reviewing mistakes made by both Republican and Democrat administrations. Just as importantly, he lays out a way forward that calls for a tough approach in dealing with Putin’s policies, while holding out hope for engagement with the Russian people.

Kramer’s book is both timely and insightful. It is must reading for those in government and for those who seek to understand more deeply the dynamics in U.S.-Russian relations. For U.S. policymakers, there are lessons to be learned from this book, mistakes not to be repeated, and well-argued recommendations worthy of serious consideration. As the Trump Administration becomes more firmly established, this book should generate intensive debate about the best way to approach this most challenging and dangerous relationship for the United States – the relationship with Putin’s Russia.

Kurt Volker

Executive Director, the McCain Institute for International Leadership

June 2017

Chapter 1:

Introduction

Ever since the break-up of the Soviet Union, relations between Russia and the United States have gone through major ups and downs. By the end of the Obama administration, they reached low ebb, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the imposition of Western sanctions in response to that act of aggression, Russia’s military intervention in Syria, and Russian hacking aimed at interfering in the U.S. presidential election. With the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 have come many questions about the future of the relationship.

Will U.S.-Russia relations bounce back from their post-Cold War low point? Will newly-elected President Trump pursue a better relationship with Putin through cooperation with Moscow in the fight against ISIS or further reductions in nuclear weapons? Will Trump and longtime Russian President Vladimir Putin strike some kind of grand bargain? If so, what does that mean for Ukraine, Georgia and other countries along Russia’s borders? Will they be consigned to a Russian sphere of influence? Will the United States speak out amid the ongoing and ugly crackdown on human rights in Russia? Will the Trump administration reassure NATO allies that they can count on the United States?

These and other questions remain to be answered. In thinking about them, it is useful to learn from policies and approaches from the past. The policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, in particular, may offer insight into what is coming. By critiquing these past approaches in dealing with the Putin regime, I hope to suggest the way forward in handling the existential threat to the United States posed by Putin and his regime.

I come at this project having served all eight years in the George W. Bush administration, nearly three of those years as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for Russia and Ukraine, among other positions. I offer insights from my time in government, followed by my close observations of the Obama administration as an outsider. I also offer a roadmap for U.S. policy in Chapter Five.

Angela Stent’s The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014) is an excellent book covering the various resets the United States has attempted with Russia over the years. Her book ends with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I cover the entire period through the end of the Obama administration and the election of Donald Trump as the next American president. I also offer more of a critique of U.S. policy during the Bush and Obama administrations. Whereas no one from the Bush administration has written a book on this subject, I expect a few books on U.S.-Russian relations to emerge from people who served under President Obama. My goal is not to beat them to the punch but to offer a different, and I expect more critical, perspective.

This is not a book about Putin or Russia, but writing on U.S.-Russian relations requires starting with an understanding of the kind of leader we are dealing with in Moscow.¹ Accordingly, Chapter One begins with a description of how Putin became president after launching a brutal invasion of Chechnya as prime minister. This military operation followed four suspicious apartment bombings in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people. The brutality of the Chechen operation would become a hallmark of Putin’s approach to dealing with other security challenges along the way. These include the roughly 10,000 killed in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine starting in 2014, the Russian missile used to down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in July 2014, and his military intervention in the Syrian civil war in which some half a million have been killed.

Putin is not one to worry about collateral damage. Nor does he abide by peace deals, whether the one signed to end the fighting in Georgia in 2008, the Minsk agreements for Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, or various ceasefires in Syria. He deals decisively and brutally with perceived domestic and foreign threats to his grip on power. Maintaining that grip is his number one priority, and he has demonstrated a readiness to do whatever is necessary to preserve it. His foreign policy is an extension of Russian domestic politics. Whether Putin is a brilliant strategist or a skillful tactician is, to some extent, beside the point. The bottom line is that he poses a threat to his own people, to his neighbors, and to the West. Ways to address that threat come in the final chapter.

Chapter Two begins by examining President George Bush’s interest in getting relations with Putin off to a positive start. He famously got a sense of Putin’s soul and established decent cooperation on counter-terrorism and arms control in the first year or two of his first term. Putin’s need to portray the United States and the West as enemies, however, impeded better relations and created points of tension, as highlighted by Putin’s Munich speech in 2007. Russia’s role on the global stage has increased significantly during Putin’s reign, fed by the rise in the price of oil. Putin oversaw the return of an assertiveness that restored Russia’s international standing, albeit not necessarily its reputation as a problem-solver. Indeed, tensions grew between Washington and Moscow during the Bush administration, and by the end of his presidency, Bush saw the relationship crater after Putin’s August 2008 invasion of Georgia.

Yet that invasion didn’t stop President Barack Obama from seeking a reset with Russia and its president at the time, Dmitri Medvedev, as described in Chapter Three. Since the Bush administration hadn’t imposed any real consequences on Putin’s regime for what it did to Georgia, the Obama administration was loath to adopt a hard-line stance on Moscow. It instead extended an open hand, seeking Moscow’s cooperation on Iran, Afghanistan and, most importantly for Obama, arms control. The White House frequently oversold the policy’s success, and fundamental mistakes in the thinking behind the reset doomed it to failure after some initial success. By 2011, the reset was running out of steam, and in 2012 it came to an end when Putin formally returned to the presidency.

With Putin once again unambiguously in the Kremlin driver’s seat, relations were bound to suffer. Chapter Four describes in detail the deterioration in relations between the United States and Russia during Obama’s second term, marked by a worsening human rights situation inside Russia, Edward Snowden’s flight to Moscow and then, most notably, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The West’s response to this latter incident included the imposition of sanctions against the regime, and these were topped off by additional sanctions for Russia’s interference in the U.S. election in 2016. By the time Obama left office, relations between Russia and the United States were at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.

Many questions surround Donald Trump’s election and intentions toward Russia, and this book looks at Trump’s campaign rhetoric on Russia and Putin, as well as his first month in office. Amid questions about the future of sanctions, Trump had not yet lifted them when this book went to print, much to the chagrin of officials in Moscow. Instead, there have been conflicting statements from various senior-level officials, as well as a U.S. cruise missile strike on a Syrian airfield in April that elicited a negative reaction from the Kremlin. Against that backdrop, the book ends by offering a roadmap and concrete recommendations for what policy should be going forward, recognizing that these recommendations may be quite different from the policy pursued by the new American president.

In dealing with Putin, it is important to distinguish between his regime and Russia as a whole. Our problems are not with Russia or Russians, notwithstanding their seeming preference for strong leaders. Our problems are with Putin’s regime. We should stop seeing Putin as anything other than a paranoid, authoritarian leader who oversees one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. But we should not subscribe Putin’s thinking and actions to all Russians, even if he remains popular among them. There are many decent Russians struggling for a better future for their country. Not conflating them with the odious regime in the Kremlin is critically important. Moreover, recognizing them and their bravery offers hope for the future.

Nobody wants war with Putin’s regime, but calling for a strong stand against his egregious behavior is not tantamount to launching World War III. Pushing back against Putin’s threatening behavior and policies – against his own people, his neighbors, and others – is not only necessary but also the right, moral thing to do. Showing weakness or an over-eagerness for good relations creates openings that Putin exploits. We must stand true to our principles in dealing with the threat posed by Putin and demonstrate that there are consequences for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia’s neighbors, upsetting the order that has preserved the peace in Europe for most of the past seven decades, attacking civilian centers in Syria and interfering in elections in the West, including here in the United States. Failure to push back on such actions will only invite their recurrence. We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to Russians and others struggling under Putin’s repressive influence. Putin has gotten away with murder, literally and figuratively, and he must be made to understand that those days are over.

The very nature of Putin’s regime makes real cooperation between Russia and the United States virtually impossible, except perhaps on arms control and non-proliferation, though even there cooperation is far from automatic. Putin’s aggressive, bloody responses to perceived threats, internal and external, make him an unsavory interlocutor, to say the least. Under his rule, Russia does not fulfill the agreements it signs and frequently violates international norms. Putin and his regime perpetuate the narrative of an enemy from outside to justify his way of ruling at home, and they seek to discredit the West even as they exploit its openness and financial systems. Accordingly, Putin bears the bulk of the blame for the current state of affairs in U.S.-Russian relations.

American leaders can make matters worse, however, by approaching relations with Putin naively and by underestimating the threat posed by his regime. A clear-eyed understanding of the challenge Putin poses and a principled stand against his egregious behavior are essential if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

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¹ A number of books have been published over the last few years that offer excellent perspectives on Putin and Russia. For more than two decades, I have learned from the one of the best, Lilia Shevtsova. Her books, including one with Sir Andrew Wood of Chatham House, Change or Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Carnegie Endowment, 2011) and Putin’s Russia (Carnegie Endowment, 2010), combined with her numerous articles in mostly Western outlets such as The American Interest, make her one of the sharpest analysts on the subject. Other books worth noting include Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution Press, 2015) by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy; Mikhail Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (PublicAffairs, 2016); Walter Laqueur’s Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West (Macmillan, 2015); Arkady Ostrovsky’s The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War (Penguin, 2016); Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon and Schuster, 2015); Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Penguin Publishing, 2012); Garry Kasparov’s Winter Is Coming (PublicAffairs, 2016); and Steven Lee Myers’s The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (Simon and Schuster, 2015). In addition, Edward Lucas’s The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2009) remains a pathbreaking work for being one of the first to raise the alarm about Putin’s Russia.

Chapter Two:

Getting Away With Murder

The Rise of Vladimir Putin

During the first half of 1999, few people predicted that Vladimir Putin would be the next president of Russia. In fact, few people in Russia, let alone in the West, even knew who Putin was. Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s decision to choose Putin as his prime minister on August 9, 1999, left many observers scratching their heads. The two names mentioned most frequently that summer as the likely successors to Yeltsin, whose term as president was due to end the following year, were former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and then-Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. To Yeltsin and his close circle, both Primakov and Luzhkov were independent figures who could not be trusted to ascend to the presidency. Something needed to change.

Four bombings of apartment buildings in September 1999 did just that. The attacks on buildings in Buynaksk, Moscow (the location of two separate bombings),