Carlo Graziani

It seems to me that very few people appreciate how very remarkable it is that scenes such as the dreadful executions of civilians near Kyiv don’t occur all the time, in all wars, perpetrated by all sides. War makes people act in ways they never would in society. Brutal ways. It licenses brutal acts. It also generates a lot of adrenaline, a lot of anger, and a lot of loss and numbness and hate. It does this to all combatants, on all sides, irrespective of whatever justice there may be in their cause. There is an inevitable effect of war on the psychology of warriors, analogous to the effect of power on the psychology of leaders: just as power corrupts, war brutalizes.

The reason that many modern wars do not produce scenes such as the ones that we just saw in Ukraine has to do, of course, with the Geneva Conventions, and with what is known as the “Law of War”. But the connection is not actually that obvious, because the Conventions don’t enforce themselves.

The Conventions require that all signatories’ armed forces implement regulations respecting the provisions of the Law of War, and train military personnel in those regulations. The principal facilitator and monitor of compliance is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). One can find evidence of compliance from most major militaries, even Russia’s. The level of compliance matters a great deal, however.

The United States Institute of Peace published a resource manual on Law of War Training in 2008 which explains some of the necessary elements for such a training program not to be a perfunctory formality. For a nation with a large military that is frequently deployed abroad, the requirements get quite complex and demanding, involving, for example, support from an internal judge advocate corps and/or civilian legal institutions, substantial budgetary commitments, annual refresher training at all ranks, and extensive scenario-based field training.

That last point is significant, as the report notes: “Experts stress the importance of field exercises for law of war training—unlike lectures, situational exercises force troops and officers to practice and model correct responses over and over until they become automatic.” You don’t want soldiers figuring out difficult legal/ethical Law of War issues under the stress of combat, because that’s just asking for trouble.

The second part of the report is a country-by-country directory of Law of War Training Program summaries. The US entry states that all military personnel receive training annually as well as prior to deployment on all operations, reported to chain-of-command, consisting of the following:

Accession or entry level—basic training for enlisted personnel, officer training, and Reserve Officer Training Corps. Follow-on training builds upon the basic principles taught during entry-level training. Midlevel and senior-level training takes place at various schools throughout a career, such as at war colleges and schools involving major command, prospective commanding officers, prospective executive officers, specializations (e.g., aviation, submarine, surface warfare, and amphibious warfare), and department head training. Judge advocates receive appropriate training throughout their careers in order to facilitate law of war training and to fulfill their duties as international law and operational law advisers.

Components of US training include “Classroom; distance learning; training manuals; practical scenarios; pre-deployment, mission-specific training”.

In all, 27 country training programs are also described in the directory, from survey data returned by National defense ministries—all nations in the UN got a survey, but only these responded. Russia Is not on the list, because they didn’t bother to respond to the survey. They can put on a good enough snow job to satisfy the ICRC—it’s an international organization, and the reality is that its job is not really to make powerful nations uncomfortable—but it seems clear that the Russians were not enthusiastic about having their Law of War training program compared to other nations’.

It should be clear where I’m going with this: the US invests major resources to Law of War training, and commits major concomitant resources to the judge advocate corps: there are senior officers whose job it is to see to it that the entire US Military stays on the right side of the Law of War. And even with all that, we can still be shamed by episodes such as the Abu Ghraib prison guard misconduct, or that Navy Seal psychopath, Eddie Gallagher’s exploits in Afghanistan. The system is not foolproof. But at least we try.

And very clearly, the Russians don’t, and never have. They’ve never seen the point. War is what it is, to them, I guess. They don’t go to more than perfunctory effort to restrain Law of War violations. And therefore the brutality of war naturally evokes those very violations.

I want to be very clear about what I’m saying here. I am saying that the Russian Army’s criminal behavior against civilians in Kyiv’s suburbs is almost certainly not the product of a deliberate policy of terror. I am not saying that the Russian Army, or the Russian government, should not be held responsible for these appalling crimes. Of course they should.

Because there’s worse news yet: the Russians probably couldn’t stop their Army from committing war crimes if they wanted to. Stopping such things requires the kind of Law of War training that they don’t practice. They could try shooting a few privates to make examples of them, if international pressure made them uncomfortable, but they cannot implant a culture that suppresses Law of War violations that way. So there will, I am afraid to say, be more scenes like last week’s, elsewhere in Ukraine.

Letting loose a powerful modern army on an adversary without proper Law of War training is criminal negligence of the most depraved kind, akin to arming a kindergarden with assault weapons. For that, the Russians should pay. But we have a moral duty to be careful about apportioning blame.

Those Russian soldiers have done terrible things. But most people who are comfortable in the moral certainty that they would never commit such acts in their place don’t know what they are talking about. Most of us have never been tested in that way, and we should be grateful to have been so spared. Without significant training and preparation, almost everyone would fail that test.

The Full Post

Recently, I was trying to boil down the problem with the realist outlook on international relations when I was suddenly reminded of a joke from the mid-2000s:

Why do Prius drivers have higher accident rates than other drivers?

Because it’s hard to drive while patting yourself on the back.

That actually captures a great deal of how realism is failing as an analytic framework as applied to the war in Ukraine. Its most prominent practitioners are busy congratulating themselves on their prescience while scolding their critics for mushy thinking, while their intellectual blinders prevent them from noticing that their policies are crashing into unpredicted realities at staccato cadences.

Since the onset of the Russian onslaught against Ukraine, there has been a noticeable patter from the self-validating back-patting of the realist school of international relations, which has not been slow to set up its customary contrast between, on the one hand “formal”, “process-based”, “hard-headed” calculation of invariant national interest, and on the other, “moralizing”, “emotional”, “irrational”, “impulsive” action leading to inevitable national self-harm.

John Mearsheimer never went away, of course, and lately has been articulating oddball theories stating that Russia and the US ought to really be natural allies against China, as a background lament in support of his thesis that NATO expansion caused the war in Ukraine. Tanner Greer, writing in the Opinion pages of the New York Times under the headline “Realism Must Guide Our Reaction to Russia’s Invasion” (paywalled) delivers himself of chin-strokers such as “Americans should be particularly sensitive to the dangers of moral fervor and intuitive judgment overwhelming the slower, more bureaucratic processes behind most foreign policy”; decidedly odd historical analogies such as one between Western sanctions on Russia and…some kind of unspecified pressure on Hitler that apparently drove him to launch Operation Barbarossa so as to “…forestall decline”; and builds to a peroration in which he…no, I can’t. Read it yourselves:

This is not a simple problem. Our desire to punish Mr. Putin for the evil he has unleashed in Ukraine must be carefully balanced against the lives that will be lost the longer this war lasts, the real risks of military escalation, the long-term security needs of Europe and the second-order effects a new iron curtain might have on other parts of American foreign policy—such as U.S. security commitments in East Asia and the health of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. To meet this challenge, we must keep our policy firmly rooted in the “logic of consequence.” Americans living generations from now will be grateful that in this moment of crisis, our policy was guided by careful calculation instead of emotional reaction.

Got all that? In that one paragraph we go from a perfunctory acknowledgment of “lives that will be lost” to the core of realist concerns, not least among which is the the dollar’s status as a reserve currency—which, incidentally, if you should catch some sideband noise from shouty financial market pundits, as I happen to occasionally for reasons not worth belaboring, is a hot topic among people who believe that Chinese open and transparent institutions of governance ideally position the Renmimbi to displace the US dollar as the global reserve currency because inflation, or irresponsible Federal Reserve policy, or some other crisis du jour. And he fondly anticipates the gratitude of future American generations for this wise counsel.

I should break off from this intemperate screed, because I don’t actually think that the realist program as a whole is worthless. Of course there is a place for calculation of rational self-interest in international relations. And there are some academic realists who have been capable of articulating more nuanced discussions of the Ukraine crisis. Emma Ashford is one example—she gave a good interview on the Ezra Klein show recently.

Also, with that kind of lead-off, I may be giving the impression that my problem with realists is their smug and patronizing tendency to view any dissent from their outlook as being somehow overwrought and irrational. That is annoying, but for the most part ignorable (although Mearsheimer is a such a flagrant case of academic backpfeifengesicht that I personally know a few people who have met him whose fists he has caused to itch).

Realism is a framework in which nation-state actors act efficiently on the basis of rational choices to further their strategic interests and protect their national security. It is a structural theory, which makes it amenable to analysis and policy choice for defusing conflict. There’s an unacknowledged problem here, though, that realists always glide right past without slowing down. The realist program buries an unexamined assumption in plain view, right in its definition: how do we know what strategic interests or national security considerations are? How can we be sure that different nation state actors will define them in the same way, or that they will define them consistently for themselves and for their rivals?

In typical potted-history examples drawn from great-power conflict that are used for realist case histories, these issues always seem very clear-cut. Interest is about territorial acquisition, or access to resources, or to convenient littoral real estate; national security is about territorial defense, or alliances, or integrity of national boundaries. The picture always seems to be something out of Metternich’s Concert of Europe, or very like. All the powers basically agree on what their values are, and on priorities: they just disagree a bit on which rivers should constitute national boundaries.

But what happens when the powers in question violently disagree on what constitutes their own interests and those of their rivals? What if their controlling historical narratives are so incompatible as to preclude a common calculation of rational interest in the cold, realist mode? This is, after all, the situation as it exists in the Ukrainian conflict. The Putinist narrative conflates a Romantic and quasi-Messianic view of Russian exceptionalism colored by overtones of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and racial intolerance and a sense of Russian imperial destiny with deep grievance born of coerced post-Cold-War Russian retrenchment in the face of dominant Western economic power. The Western narrative, on the other hand, is embedded in a reality where such a mentality does not even register on any part of the broadest spectrum of mentally healthy views of how the world works. I’m sorry? In 2022, we’re in an international security dialog with a character who thinks he’s the second coming of Peter the Great?

The point is not that “true strategic interests” don’t exist, or that nations that ignore them don’t eventually come a cropper. The point is that the entire reason for being of the realist framework as a structuralist program is that it simplifies the analysis for defusing conflict. But if the entire analysis is based on grotesquely incorrect premises, shouldn’t we at least re-examine the implications of the framework for policy?

Here we come to the real problem with the realist approach to the Ukraine war. You hear a great deal about what a bad idea it is to “poke” or “trap” a bear—in implicit contradistinction to what a great idea it is to make some kind of a deal with the bear. But the realists who make the bear-poking-or-trapping analogy are usually careful not to be specific about the deal that they propose to make. And there are very good reasons for that caution. That deal does not exist.

In Ukraine the deal does not exist, because nobody has the right to concede to Putin the territorial gains that his 19th-century mentality has prepared him to feel entitled to, but which the entire Ukrainian nation, with a unanimity that cannot be gainsaid in academic colloquia, has risen up to deny him. Even were some great-power deal made behind the back of this heroic resistance—I do not believe for a moment that this is possible—the resulting Russian occupation of Ukraine would, I believe, receive a rougher handling than was meted out to the Wehrmacht by Yugoslavian partisans in World War II. And those guys could have taught the Afghan resistance a thing or two.

Outside Ukraine, in the West, and in the US in particular, we have been actually dealing with Putin and Putinism as a direct adversary for over a decade. We have been slow to understand the challenge, and to rise to it. But re-read the Mueller Report now. Understand the challenges that Putin has been issuing to our democracy, and the admittedly brilliant low-cost investments that he’s made in people like Trump, or Manafort. Vladimir Putin, and the Idea that he represents, came very close to ringing down the curtain on American democracy with the January 6 shitshow. That was his investment working its way nearly to the core. Trump can only get partial credit for that. Trump doesn’t really have the cognition to understand what he did—in the larger picture, he’s a glove puppet with Putin’s hand up his ass. Why would we make a deal with the Bear that allows Putin to regroup, and invest in another Trump, or perhaps in a newer, shinier, later-model Tucker Carlson, now that too many people can see the puppet strings stretching up from the current, somewhat soiled one?

I have no idea what the likes of Mearsheimer were doing, or thinking, on January 6, but they clearly were not doing intellectual due-diligence, or taking the trouble of marking their beliefs to market. If they had been doing so, they would have behaved in a much more chastened manner when the Ukraine war began. It seems completely clear to me, in any event, that realist counsel in this war is to be totally disregarded now. There can be no compromise with Putinism. Vladimir Putin started this fight. Whatever it takes—weapons and intelligence aid to Ukraine, sanctions piled upon sanctions for Russia, containment or rollback for international Putinism—we, in the West, had better finish it. The correct framing is not coming to an understanding with Putin over Ukraine: It is coming to an understanding with Russia over ending Putinism. Even another Cold War would be worth gaining that end.

Thank you, Carlo, for the terrific posts!

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So far as I can tell, the most serious counter-argument (I’m going to ignore the unserious ones) is based on a critical analysis of the current Russian nuclear strategic posture. That posture was described in 2020 in an official Russian government decree, and analyzed cogently here.

One of its features is a “purposeful ambiguity”, thought to have been deliberately built in to the policy to enhance its effectiveness. The policy decree declines to distinguish between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, and has a concomitant lack of clarity regarding deterrence of conventional or nuclear conflict, creating uncertainty about where the exact trigger points for nuclear response are in case of a conflict.  The analysis at the link points out that the Russian concept of “nuclear deterrence“ that frames the decree is distinct from launching nuclear missiles, and encompasses “…a complex, multi-layered set of measures, such as declarations, exercises, demonstrative deployments, and a number of other steps which fall short of actually firing a nuclear missile, but may already have the desired deterring effect.“

Western advocates for muscular NATO intervention in Ukraine believe that this posture is not credible: they assert that it is certainly a ruse designed to create doubt in the mind of NATO should it be necessary for Russia to fight NATO. In this view, it is madness to accept Russian threats of nuclear escalation, because those threats amount to so much shadow-puppetry, deployable at will to mess with our minds while cashing in on their conventional military adventures.

I believe that the Biden administration has struck the right balance, for two logically separate reasons. The first is almost obvious—many others are currently pointing it out—and is concerned with the world’s (or at least Ukraine’s, and a good part of Europe’s) chances of not being plunged into an immediate and easily-foreseeable thermonuclear catastrophe. The second is a longer-term concern, and not one that I have seen articulated publicly: it has to do with whether Ukraine or NATO is perceived to have “won” the war, in the event (likely, in my opinion) that Russia is defeated. I believe that the distinction is extremely consequential for the kind of world that we will inhabit when the war is concluded.

Here are those two reasons.

Cold-War Versus Hot-War Escalation

It seems to me that too often debates on nuclear strategy tend to use the sorts of tools created in the 1960’s by people like Herman Kahn (“Thinking the Unthinkable”). Judging from some of the debates that Russian strategists have been having, leading to concepts such as “ambiguity”, the Russians appear to have absorbed the same intellectual tendency to view the choice to initiate a nuclear exchange as something that can be deliberated, and reserved to government leadership as an option of national strategy.

In my opinion, it is important to understand that this is a view that might have been defensible during the Cold War—during, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Berlin Airlift, or the Able Archer ’84 exercise, when it was imaginable that national leaders would be given time, and notice, to make the kinds of consequential choices associated with thermonuclear warfare.

When we discuss a NATO intervention in Ukraine, however PR-ed up as “humanitarian”, we should not bullshit ourselves about what the immediate consequence would be: conventional military engagements with the Russian Armed forces are unavoidable. A hot war, not a cold one. That really changes the context in which decisions are made, the command level at which they are made, and the timescale on which they are made. All these changes can drop the safety margins from nuclear exchange thresholds to zero, with essentially no notice to national leaders.

It is easy to illustrate the principle in the case of the “no-fly zone”. The Ukrainians have been pleading for NATO to clear their skies of Russian air threats, invoking the model that NATO has used repeatedly (Yugoslavia, Iraq), and one cannot blame them for asking, given the dire threat that they face. But Russia is not Serbia, or Iraq. The Russian Air Force is ranked the third most powerful in the world after the US Air Force and the US Navy, and it would certainly fight back. It is backed by deep infrastructure, including AWACS-type aircraft and electronic jamming aircraft, and many relatively near-by airfields.

All of these would have to be attacked by the NATO air forces to clear the skies over Ukraine, or even over a limited portion of its territory. This would have to be done in the teeth of capable long-range SAM systems, controlled by ground-based radar, which would also have to be attacked. There would certainly be serious losses to NATO aircrew. All of this would be essential — NATO aircraft would be nothing but targets in Ukrainian airspace, otherwise. And as if this is already not sounding like the kind of easy cat-and-mouse game the US public is accustomed to having its military play against hapless third-rate powers (and call by bloodless PR names like “no-fly zone enforcement”) it actually gets much worse.

Because at this point, not only would NATO be pouring ordnance into Russian territory, but it would also be cutting holes in Russian air-defense radar coverage and damaging other Russian air-defense assets. Try to imagine what that looks like from the Russian side in the middle of a hot war on its border. We might feel sure that NATO would never exploit a radar gap to run nuclear-armed bombers up to Moscow. Do you think the Russians would believe it? Any Russian Air Force Chief of Staff who even suggested such a thing to his Minister of Defense would probably wind up in a prison cell within minutes. He wouldn’t even try, because he wouldn’t believe it himself. I don’t want to spin out the rest of this scenario, because I don’t want to write a bad novel. The point is that very plausibly, the pressures of war would, by this point, result in release authority for nuclear weapons use devolving to lower-echelon commanders, because perceived first-strike risk is now higher than it was at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

Note also that the 2020 Russian nuclear posture document asserts explicitly that a trigger condition for Russia to launch a nuclear strike is in the case in which an enemy “…were to target those elements of Russia’s military infrastructure in a way that would endanger Russia’s nuclear second-strike capabilities.” Where is “ambiguity” now?

I have no more privileged access to National Security Council discussions than any other opinion-haver on a blog, but for all that I feel pretty sure that these are the sorts of considerations that have informed the Biden Administration’s decision-making process in Ukraine. This is what Biden was saying, with “That’s called World War III”. No reasoning person would accept that kind of risk.

Who Will Own The Victory?

The second reason to keep NATO from direct intervention has to do with raising our sights to the world we hope will be brought into being when the war ends. As of this writing, enough is known to be cautiously optimistic about the final outcome of the war, despite its certain fearsome costs. Suppose for a moment that we take for granted Russia’s eventual defeat, and Ukraine’s eventual liberation. Nobody really seems to be asking a question that seems to me to be absolutely crucial to the aftermath of the war: Who will get credit for that victory, Ukraine, or NATO?

This may sound like silly, schoolyard bragging rights, but it’s not. It is a vitally important question to the kind of Russia that we deal with after the war. And it is essential that we should deal with a changed Russia after this war is over. We need to be done with Putinism.

There are two distinct narratives about the war that could emerge in its aftermath.

If NATO limits itself to supplying arms, intelligence assistance and covert aid, while the Ukrainian Army does all the fighting—and, let’s not mince words, all the dying—then the post-war narrative will unquestionably be that this smaller independent country rallied a courageous national defense against impossible odds to repel an invasion by its overbearing, larger and more powerful neighbor, led by its indomitable and charismatic leader. Even Russians would get this, eventually, from their own war veterans, and filtering through their long-standing cultural ties to Ukraine. This narrative, together with the catastrophic consequences of the war to Russia, would likely be lethal to Putinism as a political idea, and could create political space for political alternatives in Russia, which the West could engage positively and constructively.

On the other hand, if NATO were to intervene directly in the conflict and defeat the Russian military invasion (without somehow burning down the world), then a different, more toxic, Putinist-friendly narrative would likely gain traction in Russia: Russia was thwarted in its effort to bring back its unjustly-separated province of Russophilic people yearning to rejoin the Motherland by the usual Western cabal of Russia-hating nations controlled from Washington, acting through NATO. Even if Putin himself does not survive the war, such a narrative would ensure a healthy crop of worthy Putinist heirs, as well as continued pathological Russian political development.

There are plenty of “if only” examples of hindsight posing as lack of foresight when it comes to how wars end. If only the victorious WWI Allies had been magnanimous rather than punitive towards Germany. If only the US had recognized the danger of the Islamism it was encouraging to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. If only Roosevelt had been less naive about Stalin’s intentions. If only the US had refrained from using nuclear weapons against Japan. If only the West had managed relations with Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse more adeptly. If only, if only, if only.

Many—if not all—of those counterfactuals are nonsense, in my opinion, because they presuppose nonexistent knowledge, impossible understanding, and a preposterous political context for the people actually making the decisions at the time. In the present case, on the other hand, we may have been presented with a rare opportunity. Because of the peculiar circumstances of this war we can actually make a pretty clear choice with pretty clear consequences that are pretty clearly aligned with possible Russian post-war political contexts. By choosing whether or not to refrain from direct NATO intervention in Ukraine, in effect we also choose whether to undermine Putinism, or feed it.

I think it very possible that Putin has doomed himself by his reckless gamble. The “normal” Russian constitutional succession process—which is essentially a coup, not infrequently facilitated by the military—could easily relieve him of power one way or another very soon, because of the incredible sudden immiserating pressure on Russian life produced by international sanctions, because of the obvious dangerous international situation in which his idiotic decision has unnecessarily placed Russia, and because of the subterranean effects of the horror and self-loathing that we know Russian military personnel of all ranks are experiencing in Ukraine, in response to their orders in this fratricidal war. The one thing that the West could do to shore up Putin’s position is to appear to justify his rhetoric by intervening directly in the war. Even worse, such an action would certainly secure his political legacy in Russia for the foreseeable future.