Tag: Russia
Stevenson’s army, October 19
Colin Powell: WaPo has several articles, including a valedictory interview by Bob Woodward. Fred Kaplan discusses how Powell was outmaneuvered by Rumsfeld & Cheney. Spencer Ackerman criticizes him over the Iraq war.
Chinese missile: The DBrief cites some who see it as similar to Russia’s FOBS. Politico’s NatSecDaily cites the worriers.
Treasury releases its sanctions review report.
Former SecDef Gates warns of extreme polarization.
Senate appropriators support 5% boost in defense spending.
Ian Bremmer says big tech companies should be treated like states.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to 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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A serious nomination that doesn’t guarantee success
The Biden Administration has announced its intention to nominate Chris Hill as ambassador in Belgrade. This is a clear break with other recent appointments, which have put career officers still in service in Pristina and Sarajevo. Chris is a career officer who retired more than a decade ago, but he is also someone well-known to President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken from his service as ambassador in Iraq, South Korea, and Poland, if not also Macedonia. Chris is a heavy, that is more akin to a personal or political friend of the President and Secretary of State than all the other ambassadors serving in the Balkans currently or Gabriel Escobar, the recently named Deputy Assistant Secretary for the region. If anything, Belgrade is a step down for Chris from his previous positions.
This nomination signals a serious intention on the part of the Administration to try to resolve the remaining war and peace issues in the Balkans, which I would define as the still not universally recognized sovereignty of Kosovo and the dysfunctionality of governance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both quandaries will require Belgrade’s positive contributions.
This won’t be easy. Today’s clash betweeen Serbia and Kosovo at the UN Security Council was awful. The two countries are pointed in different directions.
Serbian Foreign Minister Selakovic repeatedly accused Kosovo President Osmani of lying, claimed she represented no one but herself, and asserted she was somehow affiliated with World War II Albanian Fascists. Serbia has in recent years aligned itself far more with Russia and China than with the US and Europe, including through economic cooperation, arms purchases, increased powers for its president, and reduced space for free media, an independent judiciary, and anything but an ethnic nationalist opposition.
The 39-year-old Osmani displayed a map of Albanian mass graves in Serbia and demanded an apology for the Milosevic-era depradations against Kosovo, during which she was displaced and fled to Montenegro before getting degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. Kosovo has a new Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, committed to cleaning up corruption and maintaining the relatively free media and increasingly independent judiciary that he inherited. Kosovo aligns itself entirely with the US and Europe.
The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is even worse, as the division splits the country internally. The leader of its Serb entity and member of the tripartite Presdency Milorad Dodik is freezing his loyalists’ participation in the country’s institution, trying to nullify its national laws, and threatening to take command of the Serb soldiers in its army. With Russian and Serbian support, he is inching towards the independence he has declared as his goal, hoping not to provoke an effective American or European reaction before the process is irreversible. He remembers what most Americans have forgotten: even during the unipolar moment, it took NATO 3.5 years to intervene in Bosnia and Herzegoina. The international community High Representative in Bosnia, German Christian Schmidt, is doing nothing visible to fulfill his mandate to protect the Dayton accords.
Neither situation is propitious.
But an ambassador who arrives in Belgrade with ready access to the President and Secretary of State has advantages. He can more effectively claim to speak for his bosses. He can far more easily mobilize all the resources of the US government and even the private sector than less weighty appointees. Chris was a protege’ of Dick Holbrooke, who was particularly effective at pulling all the levers of American power in the same direction at the same time. Chris is also well-known in Europe, which can bring far greater civilian resources to bear than the US. And he will have enormous leverage with Kosovo, for which he served as Special Envoy in 1998 and 1999, when the Rambouillet negotiations failed and NATO attacked Serbia.
I’m not predicting success. Chris knows as well as anyone that failure is a real possibility, as he has experienced it not only in the Rambouillet negotiations but also in negotiations with North Korea while he was an Assistant Secretary of State. His tenure in Iraq during a difficult period was not crowned with glory. But if he is able to solve either the Kosovo/Serbia conundrum or the Bosnia and Herzegovina Rubik’s cube, there will be good reason to applaud. Solving both would mean a standing ovation.
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Syria: what’s missing is more important than doing what was done before
Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the Secretary of State’s Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS until November 8, 2020, posted the following comment on peacefare.net, responding to my post on Syria yesterday. I am repeating it here, hoping it will be easier to find and more widely read:
Dan, you are right about the statement being the most extensive of the thin gruel we have gotten from Team B on Syria, and what they have announced that they will keep doing, what I will call operational activities “1,2,3….X”, is pretty much what we were doing up to a year ago (and with some minor mods what Kerry was pursuing). But I’m not sure we have a real policy towards Syria, or at least a policy similar to the one Pompeo and Kerry followed.
First, what the statement says is, we are doing all these operational things. Those cited and others we are doing have immediate purposes–help refugees, implement UNSCR 2254, support UN-led negotiating effort, fight ISIS, deal with CW threat, react to Iranian deployments, etc., but there is no clue to how these all fit together into a larger policy, especially one that deals with the underlying reason we have all the above problems to deal with–the Assad regime’s war on its own people supported by Iran and Russia including for their own regional expansionist goals. What the real US policy is in the larger sense remains under question, either it’s still being debated or the White House understands what they have decided on will be so unpopular best to conceal it.
There is thus no known ‘whole’ that is greater than the ‘parts,’ and what we have are just those ‘parts,’ “1,2,3,….X”. To illustrate what I’m driving at let me cite what I think (and drew on when I was doing Syria) is an analogous situation, one where the Biden administration is much clearer: Ukraine. Any policy has various elements (everyone has her/his own, I have four): (1) national interest in play; (2) specific goal to serve the interest, (3) operational strategy to achieve the goal, and (4) specific operational activities in support, i.e., the “1,2,3….X”. The Ukraine specific operational activities are remarkably similar to those being done with Syria: work through an international coalition, push for ceasefire, implement UN resolutions and support negotiations (in Ukraine case Normandie Process), provide arms to local partner, deal with humanitarian fallout.
But with the Ukraine policy there is a superstructure (elements (1)-(3) above) that explains and guides the specific operational activities. The national interest is preventing a major deterioration of European security through a Russian victory over and possible assimilation of Ukraine. The specific goal to advance that interest, given geography, balance of forces, other priorities, is necessarily limited: avoid a complete Russian victory, as opposed to rolling back or defeating the Russians or even the status quo ante. The operational strategy given the interest and the goal in the context of limited means is to create a stalemate, inflict costs on the aggressor with clarity that further aggression will generate more (hopefully counter-balancing) costs, while holding out a compromise resolution. Such a resolution is the best case scenario but a stalemate is ‘good enough.’ The operational activities, the “1,2,3,….X” are fluid, can be dialed up or down to signal resolve, and further the stalemate while holding open the chance for a compromise resolution.
This is essentially what our strategy was with Syria: national interest was preventing an Assad, Iran, Russian victory, the specific goal as our means were limited was to ensure through a stalemate that they could not win, the operational strategy was to increase costs, signal resolve and hold out a compromise solution, and the operational activities were geared to advance that operational strategy. This is what is now missing–we don’t know the larger purpose, i.e, the (1), (2) and (3) of the administration’s approach to Syria. As we have (4) we can through inductive reasoning postulate that they have some (1)-(3) and that it might be like the Trump or late Obama administrations’, but that’s just speculation. Jim
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Syria: no attractive propositions, so Biden is staying the course
Secretary of State Blinken at a press conference with the Israeli and UAE foreign ministers today said more about Syria than I remember since the beginning of the Biden Administration, in response to a question about normalization that other countries are indulging in:
…let me talk about Syria first and then come to the second part of the – the first part of the question second.
First, to put this in focus, these initial nine months of the administration we have been focused on a few things when it comes to Syria: Expanding humanitarian access for people who desperately need that assistance, and we had some success, as you know, with renewing the critical corridor in northwestern Syria to do that; sustaining the campaign that we have with the coalition against ISIS and al-Qaida in Syria; making clear our commitment, our ongoing commitment to demand accountability from the Assad regime and the preservation of basic international norms like promoting human rights and nonproliferation through the imposition of targeted sanctions; and sustaining local ceasefires, which are in place in different parts of the country. So this has been the focus of our action for these last nine months.
As we’re moving forward, in the time ahead, keeping violence down; increasing humanitarian assistance and focusing our military efforts on any terrorist groups that pose a threat to us or to our partners, with the intent and capacity to do that. These are going to be the critical areas of focus for us, and they’re also, I think, important to advancing a broader political settlement to the Syrian conflict consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2254.
What we have not done and what we do not intend to do is to express any support for efforts to normalize relations or rehabilitate Mr. Assad, or lifted [sic] a single sanction on Syria or changed [sic] our position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution, which we believe is necessary and vital.
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-israeli-alternate-prime-minister-and-foreign-minister-yair-lapid-and-united-arab-emirates-foreign-minister-sheikh-abdullah-bin-zayed-al-nahyan-at-a-joint-press-availab/
This is a restatement of well-established US priorities: humanitarian assistance, reduction in violence, counter-terrorism, and irreversible progress toward a political solution before reconstruction or normalization.
So nothing new. What’s missing? should always be the next question.
Tony fails to deal with the threat of a serious military clash between NATO ally Turkey and the Kurdish-led forces that are conducting the campaign against both terrorists and the regime in northeastern Syria, with American support. He is silent on concerns about Iran using Syrian territory to threaten Israel. Nor does he indicate that the United States opposes normalization by others, in particular Jordan and the UAE. And he is silent on brutality-laced Russian and Iranian support for the Syrian regime, which in due course may become capable of challenging the Kurdish presence in the northeast and the Turkish presence inside Syria’s northern border. So yes, continuity of a policy that is silent on important issues and has so far failed to produce substantial results.
Is there a better approach? We could certainly tighten sanctions so that jet-setting scions of the Syrian elite don’t roam Los Angeles in Ferraris, but that won’t change anything in Syria. We could help the Germans mount a “universal jurisdiction” case against President Assad himself, in absentia, but that would set a legal precedent that might boomerang on prominent Americans. We could try harder to mediate some sort of accommodation between the Syrian Kurds and Turkey, as we did once with a modicum of success between the Iraqi Kurds and Turkey. Or we could try to negotiate autonomous status for the Kurds within Syria in return for US withdrawal, though the regime would be no more likely than the Taliban to stick to the terms of a withdrawal agreement. The Kurds would likely revert to attacking inside Turkey as well as Turkish-controlled Syria in order to curry favor with Assad. It suits the Kurds and Turkey to have the Americans remain in Syria.
I won’t even bother with military options against the Russians or the regime. The Americans take some shots against the Iranians and their proxies in Syria, but they aren’t going to risk war with Russia or the civilian casualties that taking on the regime would entail.
So no, there are not a lot of attractive propositions in Syria. Especially after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Administration can ill afford a comparable mess in Syria, never mind an influx into the US of tens of thousands Syrian Kurds and Arabs who helped the US during the past decade and have legitimate claims to asylum. No wonder Biden is staying the course.
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So far so good, but we’ll need to wait and see
I’ve gotten more praise than criticism for yesterday’s piece on Serbia under President Vuvic, but my friend Ylber Hysa, Kosovo’s former ambassador in Macedonia and Montenegro, is super talented at posing questions. Here go my answers:
1. Do you see the EU really ready and open for any enlargement soon towards the Balkans?
No, I don’t, but I don’t see any aspirant that will be ready any time soon, especially given the tightened criteria. Under its previous government, Montengro might have been ready before the end of this decade. Kosovo has the legislation mostly right, but not the implementation. Macedonia is better, but also suffers from a lag in implementation. Bosnia and Herzegovina can’t get it right because its constitutional system is faulty. Albania is making progress, even if it has not yet opened accession negotiations, but it isn’t quick or easy.
2. With Merkel gone, and Macron with a tough election ahead, is there any leadership there for “Europe One and Free”?
No, but entry of Western Balkan states into the EU and NATO should not depend on that. Enlargement should now be seen in the context of strengthening the European counterweight to Russia and China. There too leadership has been lacking and it is not clear Biden will be able to mobilize Europe to the kind of efforts required.
3. Do you believe that Trans-Atlantic unity is better with this administration, or much better than we all hoped for…?
It’s better, as illustrated in the agreement between Serbia and Kosovo on license plates. The Americans and Europeans acted in unison and got a reasonable result. Now they need to extend that practice to bigger issues. Gabriel Escobar and Miroslav Lajcak need to be joined at the hip.
4. Do you really see the Biden Administration seriously engaged in the Balkans after Afganistan?
The Biden Administration has the right approach to the Balkans: strengthening the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and democratic legitimacy of all the states. But it has not yet developed detailed plans for how to do that. That requires hard work and serious engagement that they are now pursuing. I wish them success.
I didn’t see the Biden Administration engaged at a high level in the Balkans before the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Certainly the messy withdrawal has made pulling US troops out of Kosovo less likely. What is needed now is a clearer program that will advance the European perspective.
5. Do you see any progressive, liberal and serious opposition in Serbia?
No, and that’s what I said in the piece. I know lots of individual progressive liberals who are in opposition, but they have failed to construct a viable alternative to Vucic with mass appeal. We should be helping them do that, but the time before next year’s Serbian election is short. I expect Vucic will win another 5-year mandate as a committed ethnic nationalist and friend of Russia and China.
6. Do you believe that in the last “licence plates war” in Northern Kosovo Kurti demonstrated any strategic thinking (or that he picked the right time for war games)?
I can’t say I saw strategic thinking, but Albin applied the principle of reciprocity and got a reasonable outcome that I hope will lead to a satisfactory final agreement on license plates. That’s not strategic, but it’s not a bad start in the right direction.
Now he needs to show some of the same grit inside the dialogue and produce results he can vaunt. Doing that will give him what he needs to get the Europeans to give Kosovo the visa waiver. That would be closer to strategic: opening Europe to young Kosovars without a visa would put his country on a far clearer European path. So too will asking for Kosovo membership in NATO’s Partnership for Peace and ensuring that the Kosovo army is fully functional by 2027, which will open the question of NATO membership.
7. Do you really believe that Kurti is a real liberal, democratic and visionary leader?
Albin has at least for now what a good prime minister needs: strong support in the population, which is tired of the nepotism, ineffectiveness, and corruption of the more established governing parties. In my experience, he is a vigorous proponent of individual human rights and an opponent of the group rights dear to ethnic nationalists, including Kosovo’s Serbs. But he also enjoys strong support among Albanian ethnic nationalists, many of whom want union with Albania. That’s a vision, but it is not a liberal democratic one or even a Kosovo patriotic one.
We’ll just need to wait and see whether Vetevendosje sticks with liberal democratic ideals or falls victim to the temptations of power and the Balkan tendency towards default ethnic nationalism.
PS: Ylber asks in addition:
8. Do you believe regional initiatives can substitute for EU Enlargement: Open Balkans, Berlin Process, Partition and border changes i.e “Jansa nonapaper” etc.
I am dead set against border changes, which will lead to mass displacement and likely death and destruction. We know this from the experience of the 1990s when Milosevic tried to change the borders of Serbia. I see no reason to believe the consequences would not be bad also today, not only for Kosovo and Bosnia but also for Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, all of which have minorities who will want union with a neighbor. Not to mention the negative consequences for Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, where border changes in the Balkans would be regarded as a license for Russia to annex more territory.
The Berlin Process in my way of thinking is part of the process of preparing the Western Balkans for EU membership, in particular by encouraging neighborly relations. Open Balkans is not clearly defined for me yet, but if it can remove non-tariff and tariff barriers to trade that would be a good thing, provided it is done on a reciprocal and equal basis. Certainly a more prosperous Western Balkans would have a greater stake in peace and stability. But the devil is in the details, and I haven’t seen a lot of details.
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No one should be fooled: Serbia is lost for now
Colleagues I know and respect think that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic aims a) to get neighboring countries to treat their Serb populations correctly, and b) thereby avoid any mass migration of Serbs, as occurred in the 1990s when they left Croatia and Kosovo.
I beg to differ. I see no evidence of these two claims and lots of contrary indications.
Let us count them:
- In Kosovo, Vucic controls the Serbian List, which occupies all the Serb seats in the Kosovo Assembly. The Serbian List does not cooperate with other political parties to improve the lot of the Serbs but instead has conducted itself as a spoiler, boycotting parliament often. Belgrade has threatened and harassed Serbs who join Kosovo’s nascent army, and recently deployed army units, as well as the Russian ambassador, to the boundary/border with Kosovo in response to a dispute over license plates (sic).
- Vucic has toyed with the idea of trading Albanian-majority municipalities in Kosovo’s south for Kosovo’s Serb-majority municipalities in the north. But the majority of Serbs in Kosovo live south of the Ibar river. This “border correction” scheme would end the viability of those communities and lead to their eventual, if not immediate, abandonment.
- In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the now Vucic-allied Serb member of the tripartite presidency (Milorad Dodik) has tried to undermine the state institutions in preparation for secession and independence of Republika Srpska (RS), which occupies 49% of the country’s territory. Dodik objects to any strengthening of the state’s judiciary, police, army, and parliament.
- Vucic has taken up the cudgels in favor of a “Serbian Home,” that is a state that would annex the Serb populations of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Montenegro. The idea is indistinguishable from “Greater Serbia” and “all Serbs in one country,” the slogans that led Milosevic to four wars in the 1990s, all of which were lost and led to the mass migration of Serbs to Serbia.
- In Montenegro, a new Vucic-aligned government dominated by people who identify as Serbs is welcoming Russian and Serbian dominance and undermining the independence and sovereignty of NATO’s newest member, while also mistreating the country’s minorities.
It is hallucinatory to think that the Serbian Home and the behavior of Vucic-allied Serbs in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Montnegro is intended to improve the lot of Serbs in neighboring countries or to avoid mass migration. This is no doubt a line Vucic uses with Westerners, as he knows what they want (and don’t want) to hear. But that doesn’t make it true.
In addition to threatening his neighbors, Vucic is taking Serbia in a definitively autocratic as well as Russia- and China-focused direction. Belgrade’s foreign policies are only 60% or so aligned with the European Union, the lowest ratio in the Western Balkans. Serbia has joined the free trade area of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, which is incompatible with EU membership. Belgrade has declared itself “neutral” with no intention of joining NATO (unlike all its neighbors). Its media are not free, its judiciary is not independent, and its economy is largely state-directed, with big investments from Russia and even bigger ones from China. Belgrade’s recent arms purchases are likewise largely from Moscow and Beijing.
Vucic faces an election, albeit not a free or fair one, next year. There is no viable liberal democratic alternative. The only current threat to his dominance comes from ethnic nationalists. He sees no hope of joining the European Union within his next five-year mandate and is behaving accordingly: grab what you can from Russia and China, promise to protect Serbs in other countries, look for opportunities to bring them and the land they occupy into Serbia, and stave off the the Europeans and Americans by telling them that you are anxious to avoid mass migration and improve the lot of Serbs in neighboring countries.
No one should be fooled. It is time for Washington and Brussels to wake up and smell the coffee. The geopolitical challenges from Russia and China have dashed hopes for early realization of a Europe “whole and free.” Serbia is lost to the liberal democratic world so long as this Vucic is president. He is a chameleon. For now, he has surrounded himself with autocrats and ethnic nationalists. Courting his favor won’t get us anywhere. Supporting serious liberal democrats inside Serbia and in the region might get us something. But we’ll still need to wait six years or more for a serious alternative.
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