The rhetoric from Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Poland on Feb. 13 was part ritual solidarity to NATO and part warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin that any aggression in Eastern Europe will be met with a unified response from the 29-member alliance.
“Russia has grand designs of dominating Europe and reasserting its influence on the world stage,” Pompeo said during his tour of a NATO battle group in Orzysz, Poland. “Vladimir Putin seeks to splinter the NATO alliance, weaken the United States, and disrupt Western democracies.” This is precisely the kind of language the foreign policy elite in Washington love to hear. Outside of politics, however, this kind of talk reeks of desperation, not strength, and gives Russia far more credit than it deserves.
In the Beltway, U.S. policy on Russia is one subject that unites almost everyone. Putin is caricatured as half strategic genius, half big, bad wolf.
The reality is far different. Sure, Putin is not rooting for America’s success. A skepticism and cynicism of U.S. motives is ingrained in Putin’s mentality regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. On everything from Ukraine and Afghanistan, to election meddling and assassinations of Russian dissidents in the West, the Russian leader has no problem breaking international law and treaty commitments if it’s in Russia’s national security interest, and his self-interest, to do so.
But to equate the Russia of today to the Soviet Union of yesterday, as so many U.S. officials and lawmakers are quick to do, is absurd on its face. It is pure threat inflation. Is Russia a bully in its region? The answer is self-evident. But is Moscow getting ready to colonize the Baltics and Eastern Europe as Pompeo seemed to allege during his trip to Poland? Of course not.
Despite Putin’s machismo, Russia is a state resting on a brittle foundation. The Russians are still recovering from a three-year recession, driven in large measure by U.S. and EU sanctions and lower crude oil prices. Moscow remains beholden to selling its natural resources in order to raise cash for a budget increasingly weighed down by pensions, mandatory entitlements, and welfare. As the World Bank wrote in a December report on the Russian economy, “progress in export diversification is limited, with the share of oil/gas products still totaling a high 59 percent in exports of goods in 2017; about 25 percent of fiscal revenue.” Another World Bank report published in January finds that net capital outflows reached $72 billion, the highest they’ve been since 2014.
In a bid to save money, Putin signed a law that reforms the pension system by raising the retirement age by five years for both men and women. Protests inevitably broke out from Moscow and St. Petersburg to cities along the Black Sea.
Russia’s public infrastructure and social services are an embarrassment. Entire sections of the Russian countryside don’t have access to basic medical care. Putin’s Ukraine adventure, which the Washington establishment typically considers a Russian achievement, is a drag on Moscow’s finances as well; the separatists he supports have no economy to speak of, which means Russian taxpayers are required to pick up the tab and supply the area with everything from food kits to electricity. None of these expenses help Russia’s GDP, which at $1.58 trillion is smaller than Italy’s, the third largest economy in the European Union.
As far as that mighty Russian military we are supposed to be scared about? Turns out it’s not all that mighty. Russian military spending in 2017 was $66.3 billion, 7 percent of NATO’s total defense expenditures during that same year. Taking the U.S. share of the pot out of the question, the rest of NATO still spent four times what Moscow allocated on its military. If all NATO members actually met the 2 percent of GDP threshold each committed to, the ratio would be even more lopsided.
What this shows is that Russia is a weak state compared to the U.S., and in semi-desperate straits when compared to France, Germany, the U.K., and even Italy. Moscow is incapable of posing a real threat to Europe. Our allies, especially with U.S. military backing, can easily contain Russia, a declining power, even if it is able to cause mischief and act out in ways we don’t like.
Rather than deliberating over how many additional U.S. troops should be sent to Europe, whether the U.S. should build a permanent base in Poland, or whether Washington should add even more resources into programs that seek to deter Russian intervention in Europe, the Trump administration should continue to cajole and press its partners in Europe to take more responsibility for their own security. Some European countries are finally moving in this direction (although it took some browbeating from the U.S. president to set the trend), but they’re not doing nearly enough. The shifting of the defense burden should not only continue, but also accelerate. Europe is more than capable of keeping Russia in check and defending itself, thanks to decades of U.S. support. But the current path is a drag on the United States while weakening Europe’s political will to build up its own self-defense capability. The more U.S. taxpayer money spent on reassuring Europe, the less incentive European leaders will have to take their security more seriously.
The American public would be better off if their political leaders assessed Russia through clear eyes and appropriately shifted more of the burden of defending Europe to our wealthy European allies, especially at a time with greater strategic threats and $22 trillion in debt.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
