Impact Defense – No US-Russia Conflict

Impact Defense – No US-Russia Conflict

As for Russia, a full-scale war between it and the United States now seems inconceivable. Given the desires for larger cuts in nuclear forces that Russia displayed in negotiating the 2002 Moscow Treaty, Russia hardly seems enough of a threat to justify the size and forward-leaning posture of America's present arsenal.

We don't want to go any lower because we need these weapons for nuclear deterrence, according to State Department spokesman James Rubin. But how many nukes do we need for deterrence to be credible? China, which President Clinton has talked of as a "strategic partner," has a grand total of 20 - count them - strategic warheads that could hit the United States. Nuclear wannabes like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq would have only a handful if they did manage to succeed in joining the nuclear club. Russia, which has 6,000 strategic warheads, is no longer an adversary. During the Cold War, it was not hard to envision a conventional war in Europe escalating into nuclear conflict. But today it is difficult to spin a plausible scenario in which the United States and Russia escalate hostilities into a nuclear exchange. Russia has no Warsaw Pact, and not much of a conventional force to speak of. Yet U.S. nuclear planners still base their targeting plans on prospective Russian targets, though no one will say so.

This narrative is devoid of strategic logic. Leaving aside nuclear weapons, which deterrence renders unusable, Russia is not a great power, and is incapable of threatening Western Europe, let alone the United States. The World Bank predicts that Russia’s economy will shrink by 4.5 percent this year, and its unemployment will hit 12 percent. Even close to the height of oil prices, Russia possessed a gdp only roughly at 60 equivalent to that of Italy and Portugal combined. Its stock market is down by more than half since this time last year. Its defense spending totals about $70 billion annually (less than what the U.S. spends on defense research and investment alone), for what remains a second-rate military. This is a country strong enough to pummel weak neighbors like Georgia, but one that shouldn’t worry Europe, which spends roughly four times more. Balance of power theory tells us that if Russia grows more threatening, the members of the European Union—now collectively richer than the U.S.—will respond by investing more on defense than their current average of 2 percent of gdp, and by further integrating their military capacity. No longer driven by a revolutionary ideology, Russia also lacks the Soviet Union’s ambitions. True, Russia does not like the democratic governments on its flanks in Ukraine and Georgia. But that is because these governments are pursuing policies that anger Russia, not because they are democratic per se. What Russia wants are pliant neighbors. That desire is typical of relatively powerful states: The long U.S. history of violent interventions in Latin America undermines whatever lectures we might direct at Moscow.

Impact Defense – Expansion Fails

Russian influence expansion ventures fail – Georgia proves.

Klitsounova 9(Elena, Centre for European Policy Studies “Russia’s Response: Sovereign Democracy Strikes Back” Oct. 30)AQB

Yet, while Russian soft power instruments may predominate on paper in a wide variety of policy areas, they seem to lack power in practice. The Georgian crisis of August 2008 clearly showed Russia’s limited ability to expand influence over its immediate neighbours by pulling only on the levers of soft power. And the situation is likely to become even more complicated in the near future. As a result of the crisis, the Russian cabinet has already announced budget cuts, so establishing and expanding new areas of external aid on a shrinking budget will be extremely difficult. At the moment, some institutional features of Russia’s political model seem to be attractive to quite a number of regimes in the post-Soviet region. Moscow’s impetuous rebellion against the “intervention of democracy promoters” seems to be viewed with some sympathy in many post-Soviet capitals. Nevertheless, it is important not to overestimate Russia’s political attractiveness. With a younger generation of politicians soon to come to power, Russia’s leadership is likely to lose a large part of its capital of personalised relationships with post-Soviet political elites. The ongoing world economic crisis may dramatically change the structures of interest and power in the region and thus undermine the effectiveness and attractiveness of non-competitive political regimes. And last but not least, the EU’s serious attempts at projecting its own political influence far beyond its borders may also change the expectations of political actors populating the EU-Russia common neighbourhood.

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