Tag: European Union
China and Russia are friends but not equals
Professor Evan Medeiros of Georgetown University analyzed the Xi-Putin declaration this week on NPR:
The Washington Post comes to similar conclusions: there is less to the declaration than some think.
Craig Singleton at Foreign Policy looks also at the readouts and Chinese press coverage. He goes a step further to suggest that President Xi gave President Putin little in order to protect Chinese economic interests, especially in Europe. Those interests he suggests could provide the West with a wedge to separate China from Russia. Economic prosperity trumps authoritarian solidarity.
The good news
The combined military and economic power and geographic extent of a China/Russia alliance would be formidable. It is good news that the Putin’s Olympics jaunt did not solidify into a genuine defense pact. Unless more was agreed than we know, Russia cannot rely on China to help beat Western sanctions. The Chinese may not like NATO enlargement, but it is not a primary concern for Beijing. The flagging Chinese economy is far more important.
The bad news
Moscow and Beijing are both exercised over human rights. Their joint declaration declares their own countries democracies but denounces human rights as a nefarious concern of the West. This may sound illogical to liberal democratic ears, but it is consistent with their distortion of “democracy.” To them, it means any system that somehow expresses the supposed will of the people, even if the people have no rights and have never validated that will in a free and fair election. Xi and Putin, like many other autocrats, think of themselves as the embodiment of the people’s will, evident in their successful assent to power.
China and Russia may be friends but are not equals
For now, Russians and Chinese are putting up with that claim, which in a perverse way demonstrates the power of the democratic example. Chinese and Russians all know the consequences of contesting the power of their leaders. But there is a big difference. Beijing can afford to repress the opposition and buy off the rest. For now, they are doing it in grand style in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, as well as in more retail ways in other parts of the country. Moscow can afford to buy off a few oligarchs but is leaving the majority of the population in straitened circumstances with shortened life expectancies, low incomes, and few free means of expression.
Putin has reasons to invade
It seems likely Putin will go ahead with the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian deployment is not a Potemkin village. It has gotten him little so far that he could not have gotten for more polite asking. The Americans have offered to limit armaments in Europe, provided the agreement is reciprocal. Putin’s moves have also unified NATO in favor of drastic sanctions, including extinction of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and solidified Ukrainian support for the Alliance, precisely the opposite of what Putin wanted.
None of that however will make Putin hesitate. He wants to prove to the world that Russia is indispensable. “Nothing about Europe without Russia” is his motto. He is trying to reassert Moscow’s claim as a superpower capital, a claim that died with the Soviet Union. For someone for whom power is he be-all and end-all, only the successful use of force can revalidate it.
Beijing stands to lose little
Beijing won’t be happy if Russia invades Ukraine and disrupts the world’s economy, but it will be in his corner when he tries. If he succeeds, the Chinese will enjoy the outcome as a defeat for the Americans, NATO, and human rights. If he fails, the Chinese can walk away unscathed, comforted in the knowledge Putin will need to sell even more natural gas. China and Russia are friends, but not equals.
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Stevenson’s army, February 9
– WSJ touts US information warfare over Ukraine.
– Politico reports some intelligence officials think too much is being released.
– Russians deny promises to Macron.
– At FP, writer sees Xi-Putin statement as no big deal.
– Maybe hypersonic weapons can easily be defeated, but that technology is on the critical list.
– The FY23 budget was due yesterday, but the 2022 budget hasn’t been passed. Expect lengthy delays.
– Sanctions against Honduran president revealed.
– Updated version of WaPo report on Afghan evacuation gives more evidence supporting my view that a key factor was the organizational culture clash between a State Dept that always resists closing an embassy and was sympathetic to the destabilizing effects on the host nation government and a military that makes detailed, rigid plans without regard to diplomatic and psychological consequences — coupled with a White House that prefers hedging to binary choices.
CORRECTION: The stopgap spending bill runs to March 11, not April as I wrongly said yesterday.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Dialogue will work when people support it
Koha today published an interview I gave yesterday to Besjana Bajrami:
Q: Do you think that this year will bring the final recognition between Kosovo and Serbia?
A: No, I don’t. I don’t see any sign the leadership in either country is preparing for a final recognition agreement.
Why is it stuck?
Q: Where do you think the dialogue is stuck?
A: It’s stuck in the domestic politics of both countries. Neither President Vucic nor Prime Minister Kurti sees the benefit of agreements, especially a comprehensive one.
Mutual benefit is the way forward
Q: Emissaries from the US and the EU are staying in Kosovo for dialogue. The same after the meetings with Prime Minister Kurti and President Osmani have stated that a solution must be found for dialogue. Where do you think the solution should be sought in Kosovo or Serbia?
A: I think the way forward now is what worked in the past: focus on issues with real benefits to citizens in both countries. That worked before 2013. I also think there is a big need for monitoring of implementation of past agreements. The EU and US should do that together.
Q: Do you think that Kosovo is being pressured regarding the dialogue?
A: Of course. Serbia will also be pressured. But I don’t think pressure is the key. Mutual benefit is the key.
Missing persons should not be stalled
Q: The topic of missing persons has somehow stalled in dialogue. Should Kosovo continue the dialogue if the issue of missing persons is not resolved?
A: I do not understand why the issue of missing persons has not been resolved. It is standard procedure to resolve such issues after war. It is best done promptly. Twenty years is not prompt.
The Association depends on context
Q: Should the Association of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo be allowed? The answer to this question depends on context. If Serbia were prepared to recognize Kosovo and advocate its UN membership, an association consistent with the Kosovo constitution would not, I think, look as troubling as it does today.
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It’s not only about Ukraine
Negotiations with Russia went nowhere in this first week. The US, NATO, and the OSCE failed to budge Putin from his insistence on rolling back the NATO presence in Europe and blocking forever NATO membership for Ukraine. The Russians failed to budge NATO from its insistence that the door to membership be kept open (even if both NATO and the Russians know that Ukrainian membership is not in the cards for now). The odds of war, already high, have likely gone up, not down. What now?
Unity is strength
Above all, the US and European members of NATO need to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacity. Training and equipping should continue and expand. Stefano Graziosi and James Carafano are correct to argue that
Putin fears and respects strength. He exploits weakness. Europe must cease its dithering and give him what he fears, not what he wants.
Just today the Russians apparently launched a cyberattack on Ukraine. There are also indications they are planning a false flag operation as a pretext for invasion. Europe and the US made a pretty good show this week of unity in support of Ukraine. Let’s hope that show is backed up with real weapons and training.
Russia is vulnerable
There is still much more to be done. The Russians are more active today worldwide than the Soviets, who focused less on international presence and more on the strategic standoff with the US. In some of these places, Moscow is vulnerable. Witness what happened to the Wagner proxies in Libya, where Turkish drones forced them out of Tripoli. Some of these vulnerabilities are in Russian satellites. Witness what happened in Belarus and Kazakhstan, both of which had to rely on Moscow to protect their autocrats. And there are vulnerabilities inside the Russian Federation, where the economy is stagnant. The West needs to exploit these vulnerabilities when good opportunities present themselves.
Any Russian intervention will be limited
We also need to think realistically about what Putin is likely to do. An invasion aiming at taking all of Ukraine is unlikely. The 100,000 troops Russia has already massed are not adequate. Moscow would need to increase them by fourfold or more for that purpose. Ukraine has more and far better equipped and trained forces than when Russia first invaded in 2014. Turkey has provided its cheap but effective attack drones.
Kiev has also gained popular support. This report from Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, is telling:
The Russian Army cannot expect to be welcomed in most of a country where the Soviet-imposed Holodomor famine of 1932-33 is remembered as genocidal.
Putin presumably knows this and will keep any military intervention to limited objectives commensurate with the size of his forces. One of my more knowledgeable colleagues suggests this might be the canal that supplies water from the Dnipr to Crimea, or some expansion of the insurrectionist-controlled area in Donbas.
The US will need to lead the Western reaction
That kind of limited intervention will pose a problem for the US and Europe. Should they react with the full force of the financial and technological sanctions and military assistance to Ukrainian resistance fighters that they have threatened? Even those may not be effective. Some in NATO will want to modulate downwards to match the magnitude of any limited Russian intervention. Others will argue that a disproportionate response is appropriate, to deter further offensive efforts on Russia’s part.
The US will need to play the leadership role, whatever the Russians do. The Europeans are too fragmented and compromised to reach quick decisions and implement them with rigor. President Biden has spent a year building up credibility with NATO. He will need to draw down on those credits, especially if he reverses his own decision not to continue objecting to operation of the now completed Nordstream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany. The Germans have paused their own decision on the pipeline’s operation, but high gas prices in Europe are bringing pressure to go ahead.
Of course it would be best if Moscow backed off and accepted some of the face-saving propositions NATO is offering: limits on military exercises, missile deployments, and other classic OSCE-style confidence building measures. But hope is not a policy. The Americans need to continue to keep the Europeans in line and the Russians concerned about what an invasion of Ukraine might portend, not only in Ukraine but elsewhere as well.
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This is the Bosnia we should support
I have added my name to this appeal, published today:
We are writing to you on behalf of the friends of Bosnia and Herzegovina who have gathered on 10 January 2022 in Brussels, London, Ottawa, Toronto, Geneva, Oslo, Rome, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Vienna, Sarajevo and many other cities all around the world to express our utmost concern about the current political and security crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In October 2021 the ruling coalition in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian entity of Republika Srpska (RS) adopted a plan to create what it called “an independent RS within the Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina.” A seven-page long document laid out concrete steps for unilateral, illegal and unconstitutional takeover of state-level competences in fiscal, judicial, defence, security and many other areas. This plan is available in public and among other points, foresees use of force against any state-level institution that would try to defend the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The implementation of the plan will cause collapse of the constitutional and institutional architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It will result in terrible political, economic and security consequences. With several concrete steps already taken, the ruling coalition in the RS has made it clear that it intends to implement its plan.
On 10 December 2021 the RS Assembly adopted four conclusions on the so-called “transfer of authorities” and one so-called “declaration on constitutional principles” by which the RS legislative body has de facto and de jure decided to remove this entity from the state constitutional and legal system of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the sectors of judiciary, defense and security and indirect taxation. Moreover, the RS assembly has tasked and empowered the RS government to draft new entity laws on: the RS army, RS intelligence service, RS indirect taxation system and RS high judicial and prosecutor council as well as more than 130 other laws and necessary regulations in various sectors by which RS will abolish and replace the respected state laws and regulation with entity ones.
As neither the state or RS entity constitution, nor state or entity laws allow any possibility for the entity institutions to issue legally valid decisions or laws on matters which are already imposed and regulated by state constitution or laws, the above-mentioned actions and decisions of RS assembly from 10 December 2021 are an illegal usurpation of state power and a criminal act against state constitutional and legal order.
By October 2021 the RS adopted and published in Official Gazette the unconstitutional entity law, which abolished the validation of the state-level law prohibiting genocide denial in the scope of RS. On 28 December 2021, another unconstitutional law was published in the Official Gazette. This Law on the RS Agency for medicinal products and devices could, as the European Commission noted in its recent letter to the RS authorities, lead to a collapse of the medicinal market and deprive citizens of basic medicine.
This crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina has nothing to do with inter-ethnic relations; it is an artificial crisis provoked by corrupt nationalists and their partners. They do not have the support of the opposition in the RS Assembly, nor of the majority of the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, including those living in the RS.
The country has now been drawn into a political crisis that threatens peace and a meaningful, robust and coordinated response by the High Representative of the International Community, Christian Schmidt himself, United Nations, United States, the European Union and its NATO allies is required.
A lack of such response so far has only served to embolden Mr. Dodik’s and his ruling coalition’s ambitions. Particularly worrying are statements by government officials in Serbia, who have expressed their support for the plan of ruling coalition in RS. Alongside this, the RS secessionists enjoy the bolstering support of Russia, China and even some EU member states such as Hungary whose open nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment is very much rampant.
Instead of pushing back, some in international community are only encouraging Mr. Dodik’s aspirations for secession and desire to undermine and eventually destroy Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign state. However, there are very serious reasons why Bosnia and Herzegovina needs not only to be preserved as a sovereign state but also further strengthened.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is a specific cultural entity that has existed for more than 1000 years, where citizens of different ethnic origins and religious traditions have lived together for centuries.
Even today, despite the war in the 1990s, a large number of citizens accept the existence and legitimacy of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The 2019 European Values Study showed that 74 per cent of the population is proud of having Bosnian and Herzegovinian citizenship. This sentiment is the strongest in the Brcko District (88 per cent), while in RS 66 percent share this view.
Neither the peace agreement nor the constitution provide for the right of secession. It would be a disastrous historic precedent if the ‘entity’ whose political and military leaders (as well as its army and police) have been convicted for severe war crimes and genocide, with over one million people expelled, were ‘granted’ independence.
In the past 26 years, the EU and its Member States, the USA and other countries of the world, and many international organizations have invested a lot of political, diplomatic, human and financial resources in effort in maintaining peace and rebuilding the country. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens, Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, Jews, Romas, and all those Bosnians who do not identify themselves with a specific ethnic group, want to live in peace and harmony, nurtured by democracy.
On 10 January 2022, Bosnians and Herzegovinians of all ethnicities and religions, atheists and agnostics, together with their friends from all around the world will gather in Brussels, Geneva, London, Vienna, Oslo, Ottawa, Toronto, Rome, Stockholm, Sarajevo and many other cities across the world to stand for united Bosnia and Herzegovina, for its pluralism, coexistence and preservation and to issue following demands to the High Representative of the International Community, Christian Schmidt, as well as to the European Commission and the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, European Union Member States and NATO allies:
- The plan adopted and currently implemented by the ruling coalition in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian entity of Republika Srpska should be recognised as an attack on the long-lasting peace, constitutional order, sovereignty, territorial integrity and 30-year independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina and as a threat to peace, stability and security in the Western Balkans and Europe.
- A meaningful, robust and coordinated response should be developed and implemented as a matter of priority with a primary focus on deterring the local forces of destabilization and foreign mentors, and then focusing on constructive and reformative approaches. This response should include a mix of interventions, starting with sanctions and strengthening of the NATO/EUFOR military presence as a clear political signal.
- Support domestic institutions in their response to the attack on the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Foremost, by providing full support to the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina to review the two laws already passed, and all other that might be passed by the RS Assembly. Furthermore, by providing political and technical support for the state-level judiciary to investigate the attack on the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Recent statements and activities by high-ranking officials of the government of Republic of Serbia are violating the principle of good neighbourly relations, which are at the heart of the EU accession talks and a violation of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the EU and Serbia. EU Member States should consider suspension of accession talks with Serbia unless its government changes its position towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, including that related to the 1990’s war crimes and genocide.
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Stevenson’s army, January 8
[FYI, I’ll be away for a few days]
-SecState Blinken says US has two new security arrangements with Japan. There was more in his Friday news conference.
-WH denies report of troop cuts in Europe.
– Bloomberg reports on bureaucratic fights over cyber.
– Vox reports on former Trump officials.
– Atlantic Council has several reports on 2022 foreign policy issues.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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