SIPR Huczok

In the Spring of 2014, the invasion of Simferopol by Spetsnaz in unmarked uniforms the worst face-off between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. Despite ’s repeated requests, the Obama administration decided not to lend lethal aid to Ukraine. Instead, it applied sanctions and trade restrictions on Russia in a coordinated effort with allies—an unprecedented display of economic statecraft. The United States’ response has been hotly contested. Was Obama too soft on Russia? What does Obama’s reluctance towards military intervention in Ukraine reveal about his world view? Could U.S. interests have been better served by a different, more offensive policy?  How did the Crimea Crisis impact the global balance of power? This paper attempts to answer those questions by placing the decision in the broader context of Obama’s grand strategy, analyzing the deterrence calculus under asymmetric stakes, and discussing the impact of U.S. economic statecraft as a form of coercive diplomacy.          

The response to the 2014 Ukrainian crisis was based on Obama’s grand strategy, particularly his view of U.S. national interests, his approach to the use of force, and his commitment to multilateralism.

Under the Obama presidency, the center of gravity of U.S. foreign policy pivoted towards the Asia-Pacific. Under this strategy, engaging with Asian countries was a primary way to address existential threats against the United States: pandemics, cyber threats, poverty, and most importantly climate change.[1] The relationship with Russia, though important, came only second to those goals.[2] The “Russia reset”[3] undertaken under Medvedev’s presidency had aimed to foster greater cooperation with Russia, mostly on nuclear arms control, through the New START Treaty in 2011. The effort also brought talks on non-proliferation in Iran and North Korea, Russian acquiescence to a humanitarian intervention in Libya, and support to peace operations in Afghanistan. It allowed for Russian cooperation over the destruction of Assad’s chemical arsenal.[4] Yet the relationship remained mostly transactional, falling short of the ambitious partnership George H. Bush had envisioned immediately after the Cold War.[5] In 2008, George W. Bush decided not to stop the Russian offensive in Georgia, setting a precedent. It must be noted that Ukraine (like Georgia, but unlike the Baltic States) is not a NATO ally, despite having signed a partnership agreement in 1997 and launched talks for full membership in 2005. Thus, the impetus to intervene in the post-Soviet periphery, a space less relevant to U.S. interests, for a country that is not a treaty ally, was lacking for the Obama administration.

Obama’s approach to Ukraine exhibited restraint in the use of force, as part of an attempt to reduce U.S. military “over-extension.” The Obama administration did provide significant security assistance to Ukraine, in addition to economic aid ($112 million in humanitarian assistance and $2 billion in loan guarantees). From 2014 to 2016, the U.S. government extended to Ukraine a bilateral security assistance package of over $600 million, including training of military forces, equipment, and advisers for key defense reforms.[6] In the Spring of 2015 alone, $120 million were committed in military assistance, as well as 230 Humvees and $75 million worth of equipment including UAVs, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices, and medical supplies.[7] Yet, despite Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s pleas in his 18th of September, 2014 address to Congress, the U.S. government did not provide lethal aid. The decision was consistent with the Obama administration’s motto of using force selectively, and only when it unambiguously promoted U.S. interests.[8] Crimea did not pass that test. Obama had personally expressed his concern at “forever wars,” in a 2002 Chicago anti-Iraq War rally. Afghanistan and Iraq, legacies of the Bush administration, were treated as cases in point of U.S. military “overextension,” conflicts in which the U.S. failed to fulfil its objectives, lost many men and much credibility, and ended up sapping its own power.[9] Instead, the Obama administration favored a “light footprint” approach.

Another feature of the Obama administration’s strategy, which the Ukraine decision exemplified, is its emphasis on cooperation and international norms. A major concern was that any military engagement with Russia would fail to garner the support of European allies, thus jeopardizing joint U.S.-EU economic sanctions or other courses of action. Germany, the key decision-maker in the EU, was staunchly opposed to the use of military force. This attitude had further sedimented after the 2003 War in Iraq, with politicians across the spectrum wishing for Germany to be a Friedensmacht, a “force for peace”—in contrast to the unwavering support to the U.S. which had prevailed in the 1990s.[10] Even economic sanctions were a feat of multilateral cooperation, given that EU-Russia trade volumes, including gas imports and engineering exports, are fifteen times greater than U.S.-Russia trade.[11] The deal was built in large part on the notion that territorial integrity, the first of international norms, must be upheld. In her visit to Washington D.C. on the 10th of February, 2015, Angela Merkel claimed: “if we give up the principle of territorial integrity, we will not be able to maintain peaceful order in Europe.”[12] The Obama administration would have been particularly amenable to the defense of international law, as Obama’s 2015 speech to the U.N. assembly shows: “unless we work with other nations under the mantle of international norms, we will not succeed.”[13]

The 2014 Ukraine decision also speaks to the Obama administration’s deterrence calculus, based on a spiral model in a context of asymmetric stakes.

The Obama administration refrained from using force in Ukraine out of a concern for escalation, in a reasoning borrowed from the “spiral model.” The assumption was that lending lethal aid to Ukraine would lead to an escalation of reprisals and counteractions between the U.S. and Russia, culminating in a destructive outcome neither party wanted. The crux of the model is the uncertainty of war: unpredictable circumstances may lead events to spiral out of the control of rational actors."[14] Here, the major risk is that the adversary, i.e. Russia, might behave in erratic and unpredictable ways. On March 26th, 2014, in Brussels, Obama declared: “The United States and NATO do not seek any conflict with Russia (…) Now is not the time for bluster.”[15] (The Guardian, 2014) This interpretation of the deterrence balance was heavily criticized. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers claimed: “Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles.”[16] Other Republican figures in Congress, from Newt Gingrich to Jim Inhofe to John Boehner, expressed similar views. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dempsey claimed in March 2015 that Washington should consider arming Ukraine, reflecting the U.S. military support for a deterrence model, throughout the Crimean crisis.[17] It is rumored that Secretary of State Kerry himself was in favor of lethal aid.[18] (Bloomberg, 2015). Yet Obama ultimately remained unmoved, as he subscribed to Walt’s view that declining power like Russia was more likely to be on the defensive, and its reaction to an aggressive military response was likely to be driven by paranoia.[19] In this context, the most rational choice was to mitigate fear and reassure adversaries of benign intents, hence the choice to limit aid to Ukraine to non-lethal matériel.

Some have argued that deterrence was made inefficient because of Obama’s overtly rational and prudent leadership. Perception of the adversary’s intentions is paramount in foreign policy game theory and it is largely borne by heads of state.[20] (Drezner, 2013) In the Crimea crisis, Obama’s cautious decision-making was deemed detrimental to the advancement of U.S. interests, because it removed the uncertainty from the bilateral relationship, making it costless for Russia to provoke the U.S.. Obama underscored it in an interview with Goldberg in 2016: “He [Obama] doesn’t maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy.”[21] According to the detractors of the Obama doctrine, the Kremlin could rest assured that the United States would react with a sense of measure proportional to its interests no matter the circumstances—and would therefore never inflict significant damage. This unambiguous and rational leadership style made U.S. deterrence ineffective, according to Obama’s detractors.

Others have mistakenly blamed the lack of credibility of U.S. threats on the Syrian “red line” episode. On August 20, 2012, Obama claimed that “seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized […] would change my calculus.”[22] A year later, in August 2013, the Syrian government was accused of using toxic gases in attacks in Eastern Ghouta and the Moudamiy at al-Cham suburb of Damascus. Yet instead of striking the Assad regime (which his constitutional powers allowed him to do), Obama delegated the decision to Congress. In so doing, his some claim he set the motion up for failure, betraying his pledge and damaging U.S. credibility. Hillary Clinton, among others, is reputed to have claimed, "If you say you're going to strike you have to strike.”[23] A strict reading of deterrence mechanics that the lack of "red line" enforcement in Syria implicitly "allowed" Russia to aggress Ukraine. However, this is disputable for three reasons. First, one could argue that the threat that the U.S. might launch airstrikes was, in fact, credible after the 2013 attacks, and that it concurred to the disarmament of Syria’s chemical arsenal.[24] Second, there is no evidence that “America’s resolve in one context will give it greater credibility everywhere.”[25] North Korea and Vietnam are examples of unsuccessful attempts at bolstering U.S. credibility versus the U.S.S.R. Because reputation for resolve is in the eye of the adversary,[26] there is every reason to think that American credibility was perceived very differently by Assad and by Putin. Finally, one might argue, with Drezner (2013), credibility may not matter as much as the national interests at stake for adversaries, and those stakes were profoundly asymmetric.[27]

In fact, deterrence is ineffective whenever stakes are clearly asymmetric, as they were in Ukraine for the United States and Russia. As Obama put it: “People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that.”[28] As Schelling argues, asymmetric stakes strengthen the bargaining position, not of the “more potent” actor, but of the “more desperate.”[29] Yet the U.S. has much small stakes in making Ukraine a fully independent, Western-facing country than Russia has in controlling Ukraine. The unique interest Russia has in Ukraine is centuries old, multi-faceted, and beyond the scope of this paper. Let us only mention that Ukraine has been strongly tied to Russia, at least since the times of Kyivian Rus, which encompassed a large part of today’s Western Russia from the ninth to the thirteenth century. It was home to 8.3 million self-declared “ethnic Russians,” or 22 percent of the country’s population, as per the latest census in 2001.[30] Ukraine is a keystone interconnector between Russia and Europe, particularly from a geostrategic standpoint– as demonstrated by the fact that the Druzhba pipeline network, which supplied Western Europe in Russia and Kazakh gas, runs through Ukraine. The Crimean peninsula, in particular, provides much-desired access to the warm waters of the Black Sea. As a result, “losing” Ukraine was one of the most traumatic consequences of the all of the USSR for Russian patriots. After the 2004 Orange Revolution, the Kremlin defended these interests by exerting all types of pressure: manipulation of political candidates,[31] blackmailing using gas supplies,[32] cyberattacks.[33] Thus, independently of the U.S. governments’ leadership, reputation or credibility, the disproportion in the interests at stake would have favored Russia in a game of deterrence.

Given that military involvement in Ukraine would have detracted from strategic priorities, and was deemed unproductive, economic sanctions stood out as a more adequate response. On March 6, 2014, the U.S. imposed travel bans and the freezing of assets for individuals believed to have undermined Ukraine’s stability, misappropriated Ukrainian assets, or conducted business in occupied Crimea. Canada and the EU followed suit on the 17th of March, the day the annexation of Crimea was signed by Putin. On the 24th of March, the Group of Eight summit scheduled in Sochi was canceled, and Russia’s membership in the group was suspended. On the 10th of April, a second round of measures prohibited seven high-profile Russian businessmen, including the chairman of oil-producer Rosneft, and seventeen Russian companies, from doing business with the U.S. In July, in response to the escalation in Donbass, a third round of U.S. measures extended a transaction ban to Rosneft, Novatek, Gazprombank and Vnesheconombank, while the EU introduced an embargo on imports and exports of arms and dual-use goods, restrictions on exports to the oil industry and on financial transactions.[34]

The set of economic measures against Russia were one of the Obama administration’s most notable displays of U.S. economic statecraft, and it succeeded in weakening the Russian economy. The measures included sanctions that restricted access to Western financial markets and services for designated Russian companies (mostly financial, energy and defense). They also featured two more innovative restrictions on U.S. trade to Russia: on exports of high-technology oil exploration and production equipment, and on exports of designated military and dual-use goods. The targeting of Rosneft and Gazprom demonstrated a trend in U.S. economic statecraft, i.e. “direct engagement with (…) non-U.S. non-financial companies, such as energy and high-tech companies.”[35] Combined with a drop in oil prices, the measures inflicted significant and lasting damage to the Russian economy. Inflation jumped from 6.5 percent in 2013 to 11.4 percent in 2014, the highest figure since the 2008 financial crisis.[36] The value of Russian foreign trade fell by 30 percent in the first two months of 2015 alone. The tumbling of the ruble from $0.03 to $0.015 by December 2014 precipitated a financial crisis. Russia entered a recession with a -2.2 percent GDP slump in the first quarter of 2015,[37] and remained in a recession until the end of 2016.

As a display of coercive diplomacy however, the measures failed to achieve the stated policy objectives of U.S. negotiators. The U.S. response to the annexation of Crimea was clearly a diplomatic endeavor. The process fulfilled functions of representation and communication.[38] Kerry, then Secretary of State, represented the U.S. and its European allies, while his homologue Lavrov represented Russia. A dialogue took place via a series of addresses, communications, mediatized phone calls and meetings. Meetings often occurred in multilateral venues, such as the International Support Group for Lebanon on March 5^th in Paris, or the consultation of the Trilateral Contact Group on the 5th of September, in Minsk (the latter with OSCE participation). As shown by Nye, diplomacy does not preclude coercion, and the strategy was an exercise of economic “hard power” by the U.S. and its allies.[39] In this case, coercive diplomacy did not succeed in securing the two main U.S. demands, i.e. that Russian troops pull back from Crimea, and that a ceasefire be imposed in Donbass (with border monitoring by the OSCE). The U.S. strategy failed to exhibit any of the patterns for successful coercive diplomacy outlined by Art.[40] First, the economic sanctions did not include any positive inducements: there was nothing to gain for Russia in pulling back from Crimea or Donbass. The Western diplomatic effort focused solely on the “cost” side of the cost-benefit calculus. Yet, echoing Art’s second case for success, these costs were outweighed by disproportionate benefits for Russia in keeping Ukraine within its orbit, making the West’s demands unreasonable. The third case for success, according to Art, consists in building denial capability. Yet, as discussed above, the U.S. abstained from such demonstration by refusing to lend lethal aid to Ukraine. One could further argue that, as the leader of a hybrid, semi-autocratic regime, Putin is not directly answerable to the economic woes of its population, which limits domestic backlash. Thus, the coercive diplomatic approach, limited to economic statecraft, did not achieve its stated objectives.

Ultimately, the efficacy of U.S. response should be assessed in the light of a new type of U.S.-Russia competition. In a 2016 interview with Goldberg, Obama argued:

“Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on.”[41]

The Obama administration’s response to the Crimea crisis construed Russia as a regional power desperately clinging to its shrinking sphere of influence. To this extent, the annexation of Crimea was a necessary but temporary victory for the Kremlin. Indeed, Ukraine has moved away from Russia at a speed few would have predicted before the 2004 Orange Revolution, culminating in the annexation of Crimea. In 2019, 53 percent of Ukrainians wished for EU inclusion (versus just 46 percent in December 2011).[42] Also 53 percent, a first-time majority, supported Ukraine's accession to NATO in June 2019, versus 34 percent in March 2014.[43] This would suggest that the Western part of the former Soviet empire is irretrievably slipping out of Putin’s hands. If this analysis holds true, the annexation of Crimea did not greatly hurt U.S. interests, to the extent that it did not threaten stability in Western Europe, and even accelerated Ukrainian opinion's shift in favor of NATO. On the other hand, however, Russia has demonstrated unprecedented influence in international politics since 2014, with its rapid deployment in Syria in 2015, numerous cyberattacks against Western states, and intervention in the 2016 American presidential election. Yet Kathryn Stoner characterizes this renewal of Russian influence as that of a disruptor of international relations, rather than that of a great power.[44] If so, one could argue that Russia and the United States were plainly not playing the same game over the Ukraine crisis. In the words of David Baldwin: "Obama played bridge, Putin played poker."[45] The 2014 Ukrainian episode may not have a clear winner, but it does testify to the transformation of great power competition between Russia and the United States. 

Obama’s decision not to lend lethal aid to Ukraine in 2014 was based on the analysis that (i) Ukraine was not a primary theater of U.S. national interests, that (ii) whatever interests the U.S. may have in containing Russia could not be effectively defended in Ukraine, and that (iii) sanctions would achieve more by weakening Russia’s economy. Five years later, some, such as Ambassador Taylor, argue that economic statecraft have achieved their goals, and that the Kremlin would be willing to negotiate pulling out of Donbass in exchange for a relief of economic pressure, if given a chance.[46] Though that point remains unclear, the broader conclusions from 2014 are compelling: the Crimean crisis has opened a new chapter in international politics, one in which the United States and Russia compete fiercely, each in a game of their own.