A rigged referendum, threats to support Iran and outright defiance, Putin continues to taunt and confound President Obama. All Putin gets from Obama is empty threats and loud rhetoric – in other words, nothing. The problem for America is that when a politician like Putin who cut his teeth in the ruthless world of the KGB, faces off against a politician like Obama who has mastered politics in attention-deficit disordered, celebrity-obsessed, instant-gratification America, the empty, media-driven politician is going to lose. Obama has never been Commander-in-Chief. He has always been Politician-in-Chief.
If the West is to contain Putin real substantive leadership is necessary. Leadership is willing to risk popularity in the interest of long-term results. As long as Obama continues to act as a popularity-obsessed politician rather than as a leader, Putin will continue to win.
The real story on Putin: He’s looking out for Putin
Self-interest, not geopolitics, rather easily explains everything Putin has done starting with Georgia in 2008. If Putin wanted to recreate the Soviet empire, why not complete the invasion of Georgia and install a puppet government? A partly-occupied, cowed state of Georgia could be achieved at minimal cost.
Harassing the central Asian former Soviet republics to close American bases and constrict American supply routes to Afghanistan was another easy way to exert Russian authority and jab at America. Of course, Putin paid no price for attacking American interests.
Similarly in Syria, Putin got to establish Russia’s bargaining position on the world stage and diminish the United States for the minimal cost of a Security Council veto and a bit of posturing. Depending on what Russia is paid for its arms shipments to Assad, Putin might even be making a profit on Syria.
Ukraine is a very different and more dangerous animal for Putin. The ouster of Yanukovych is an existential threat, not to Russia, but to Putin. Putin likely looks at Ukraine and sees an echo of Russia: a weak economy riven by corruption with a cynical population who views their president as not quite legitimate. Putin and Russia are not in the parlous condition Ukraine was (and is), but considering the parallels a sharp politician like Putin would not take any chances to allow the revolutionary bacillus to spread.
Invading Crimea likely accomplishes two things in Putin’s mind. The first is the use of a foreign adventure to distract the Russian people from the corruption and stagnation at home. The second is that the invasion will intimidate Ukraine’s new leaders – just like the invasion of Georgia did and the pressure routinely applied to the central Asian states. If Putin can accomplish these two things: improve his domestic political situation and intimidate his potential enemies, he will have bolstered himself significantly.
President Obama’s political calculations
So, what is the source of Obama’s weakness? Obama learned how to profit within the media-driven American political system. He knows symbolism, spin, and optics. He has mastered rhetoric and artifice as the path toward the maintenance of power. And broad rhetoric is the least costly part of politics.
Consider his history, starting with his highly-disciplined run for president. When it was profitable to be the get-out-of-Iraq candidate, he was. When it became necessary to defer to the Pentagon on Iraq and Afghanistan, he deferred. When opposing Hillary Clinton’s health care mandate made sense, he opposed it. Once the mandate became politically necessary, he supported it. Every step of the way Obama’s political self-interest dominated his decisions.
Obama mastered the fundamental rule of campaigns: Be as vague about yourself as possible and trap your opponent into specifics. Just when you thought “Hope” and “Change We Can Believe In” were the most vacuous slogans ever, along came “Forward.” “Duck” or “Punt” would have been more accurate.
Governing has hardly been different for the President. Obama gives grand speeches gambling (correctly) that the press and public would heap accolades on him, and later fail to notice how little policy change was actually accomplished.
But this mastery is narrow. Obama is the perfect American politician and nothing more. For Obama, there is no profit to be had from foreign policy. What unifies Obama’s coalition is attacking conservative Republicans. As a result, Obama simply ignores foreign policy, restricting his initiatives to the same empty gestures he uses in domestic politics. The problem is that his empty spin only serves to undermine the credibility of the United States.
A case in point is his personal Olympic boycott. The idea that sending Billie Jean King to Sochi would be some kind of powerful rebuke to Putin is positively comic. It did serve Obama’s purposes of gaining the transient approval of the media. Of course, it didn’t change a thing. If anything, Putin saw Obama as running away from another fight. For a president who has made the most out of empty, symbolic politics and whose administration operates in a substance-free zone, he is simply not prepared for someone like Putin.
Feet of clay: Putin is vulnerable
Make no mistake, in the larger picture, Putin is a ham-fisted brute and a fool. Russia’s problems are not in Kiev, they are in Russia. A narrow economic base, poor infrastructure, corruption, and state institutions that are increasingly viewed as illegitimate are the real problems Putin should be addressing. Putin’s foreign adventures only serve as distractions from the far more difficult work of fixing the fundamental problems in Russia. As an ex-KGB officer with no education or training in economics or government, Putin does not even possess the skills or imagination to deal with these issues.
The tragedy for the Ukraine, our allies and our national security is that the president could contain Putin. Obama just won’t take the domestic political risk he needs to do it.
Putin’s power rests on a one-legged stool: Oil and natural gas revenue. Russia exports approximately 5.5 million barrels of oil per day. Using a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation, every dollar the price of oil falls, Russia loses about $2 billion in revenue. Because Russia is operating from such a narrow economic base, there is nothing that can make up for a fall in oil revenue. Even if Putin refuses to depart from the occupied territories, a revenue collapse makes future adventures unaffordable. That is if Putin is even around; the Russian premier might not be able to survive without oil revenues to subsidize the Russian welfare state.
America can work to bring down the price of oil. First, the United States needs to integrate itself into the world hydrocarbon market. The ban on crude oil exports, a relic from the 1970s, needs to be eliminated. America needs to allow for easier export and import of oil from both Canada and Mexico. Yes, that means approving the Keystone XL and any other viable pipelines. Natural gas export licenses and terminals need to be approved.
The second action is to raise supply. There are four major oil producing nations which are producing at levels far below potential: Iran, Iraq, Venezuela and Libya. Clearly, the United States has no influence over the incompetent socialists in Venezuela or the dysfunctional politics of Iraq. Giving the Iranians and their nuclear program a get-out-of-jail free card would be disastrous.
Libya is a different matter. The country is producing 1 million barrels per day less than it was when Qaddafi was in power. The problems in Libya mostly revolve around civil unrest and armed extortionate militias. Improving the status of Libya will not be easy. However, its neighboring states and Europe hardly want continued unrest and possible safe havens for militants. The ingredients are more favorable for some type of international intervention in cooperation with the Libyan government than any other state.
The problem with taking these actions to rein in Putin is that they require Obama to take political risks. They require him to anger his political coalition. And Barack Obama has shown time and time again that he simply will not accept such costs.
Shuffling military assets, visa restrictions and pinprick sanctions are cheap and easy for him. Sanctions are a nice little public relations gambit, but economic sanctions have proven themselves to be remarkably weak in forcing policy change. Assuming sanctions against Russia are as fast-acting as sanctions against Iran have been, we’re more likely to be cutting a deal with Putin’s grandchildren than Putin.
The problem for America is that Obama as Politician-in-Chief will always trump his role of Commander-in-Chief. Unfortunately, Obama’s fecklessness makes Putin more and more dangerous. The day will come when Russia’s structural weaknesses will ruin it. But, as we have seen with the former Soviet Union, that day may be far off. In the interim, the cost of an aggressive Putin will be borne by the United States and the world for years to come. But that’s not politician Obama’s problem, is it?