marginalize the United States and the West in order to achieve regional hegemony and global power. And his plan is working.
While many observers are now waking up to Putin’s single-minded hostility in Europe and the threat he poses to security on the continent and around the world, no one has yet documented and analyzed Putin’s far-reaching plan, why it is so dangerous, and why the United States and its allies must take decisive steps to roll back his agenda. Putin still has defenders in Europe and America, some of whom are bought and paid for by Kremlin petrodollars and others who simply don’t believe that Putin is an existential threat to the West. In this book, we intend to make it clear just how pernicious Putin’s plan is, and why he must be stopped.
American and European leaders have failed to respond adequately or forcefully to Putin’s challenge. They propose weak half-measures—like storing American tanks in Polish warehouses18—while Putin builds more nuclear missiles19 and opens military bases on conquered Ukrainian territory.20 Indeed, Russia is set to double its strategic nuclear arsenal, in direct violation of the 2010 New START Treaty naïvely negotiated by the Obama administration.21 No less of an authority than former US national security advisor and grizzled Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski says flatly that “we are already in a Cold War” with Russia.22 Yet our politicians equivocate and explain away Russia’s blatant pattern of internationally destabilizing military aggression.
This book is the first comprehensive attempt to systematically explain Putin’s global strategy, which could lead to the breakup of the NATO alliance and potentially to war with the West. The West currently has no strategy, no plan, and no tactics to confront Putin’s offensive other than limited economic sanctions and token gestures.
We are neither alarmists nor alone in our concern over Putin’s aggression and the damage he has done to Europe’s future. Thomas Friedman, remarking on how quickly the situation in Europe has deteriorated, asks rhetorically, “Did someone restart the Cold War while I was looking the other way?”23 The Economist goes further: “Nearly a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West faces a greater threat from the East than at any point during the cold war.”24 Edward Lucas provides a chilling laundry list of Putin’s most egregious behavior: “The Kremlin provokes and intimidates its neighbors with aggressive espionage, corruption of political elites, propaganda onslaughts, cyberattacks, economic sanctions, coercive energy policies, surprise military exercises, and violations of airspace, territorial waters and even national borders.”25
There is no shortage of evidence that Russia poses a clear and imminent threat to the West and its allies, to Western values, and to liberal democracy in general. To be sure, the Poles and Lithuanians—along with the Estonians, Latvians, Bulgarians, and Romanians—understand this threat, which is why they’re urging America to station heavy military equipment on their territory.26 We can and should do much more. It can’t be reassuring that Yevgeny Lukyanov, deputy secretary to the Russian Security Council, recently made it clear that if the Baltic States voluntarily host NATO missile defense sites, “they become our targets.”27 No warehoused battle tank or unused artillery piece will deter a Russian strike on these countries. Only real consequences for Russia, a more robust American presence in Eastern Europe, and clearheaded, decisive Western leadership can halt Russian aggression.
Unfortunately, Western leaders haven’t gotten the message. The European Union has shown no spine, failing to stand by its Eastern neighbors or to take on Putin. Indeed, the European Union has grown so weak that it now faces the prospect of disintegration, driven by the ongoing refugee crisis and the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum to leave the EU. Both the refugee crisis and Brexit are wins for Putin that increase Russia’s power in Europe. America has little better than Europe. Walter Russell Mead is right when he observes that “the Obama administration failed to understand just how important Europe is to the United States, and it has never appreciated how important the United States is to Europe . . . not since the 1930s has America been this absent when its vital interests were this critically engaged.”28 Whether by intent, ignorance, or incompetence, Western leaders have simply failed to understand or address the storm clouds gathering over Europe. Scholar Stephen Blank correctly diagnoses “a continuing Western and U.S. failure of nerve” when it comes to recognizing, confronting, and defeating Putin’s master plan.29
THE PLAN
By fracturing the transatlantic relationship between America and its European allies, undermining or even destroying the NATO alliance, dividing the European Union, and establishing Russian hegemony in Europe both within and beyond the former borders of the Soviet Union, Putin seeks to usher in a new world order that recalls the bipolar rivalries and tensions between political systems during the Cold War. It is an order in which America will be unable to defend or promote, either rhetorically, diplomatically, or militarily, our core Western values of human rights, liberal democracy, and free markets. If left unchecked, Putin and his network of loyalists will wield enormous power within Russia and continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the Russian people and the economies of neighboring countries; Russia will continue to collaborate with the worst authoritarians and tyrants, from Iranian theocrats, to Chinese bureaucrats, to Latin American autocrats; the global expansion of rights and commerce that followed the end of World War II and the Cold War will cease and even reverse; and America and the West, cowed into isolationism, will give up the global fight for a freer world.
Russia’s neighbors, especially Ukraine and Georgia, have been living with the reality of Putin’s master plan since at least 2008. The countries of the former Soviet Union, militarily weak and economically vulnerable, have been easy targets as well. But Putin has set his sights on larger prizes. NATO itself is under threat.30 The EU is growing more wobbly by the day, with the UK’s shocking Brexit vote an ominous harbinger of future European disintegration.31 Western values are under constant assault by the Kremlin’s “weaponized propaganda.”32 Russian submarines slip into Swedish waters33 as easily as Russian hackers crack into President Obama’s e-mail.34 It is vitally important to connect the dots and recognize the narrative that makes Putin’s pattern of outrages and provocations a carefully crafted plan, and not just repetitiously bad behavior. A thorough accounting of Russian aggression illustrates how dangerous Putin’s regime has become. Russia has purposefully provoked a series of wars and crises in neighboring countries, including Georgia, Ukraine, those in the Baltics, and Moldova. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, in the midst of the Beijing Olympics, with Putin peeling off the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, issuing Russian passports to their residents, and beginning a soft annexation of Georgian territory into the Russian Federation.35 In 2014, as previously noted, thinly disguised Russian forces seized Crimea and began an ongoing war against the Ukrainian government in the eastern Donbas region, where the breakaway people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk continue to fight and kill Ukrainians with Russian arms and assistance.36 The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania suffer frequent interference in the form of massive cyberattacks, airspace violations, and even the 2014 cross-border abduction of an Estonian Internal Security Service official.37 In Moldova, more than one thousand Russian combat troops prop up the tiny separatist state of Transnistria, which is unrecognized by any member of the United Nations.38 This arrangement has not benefited Moldovans or the residents of Transnistria, who must live under effective Russian occupation. As a leading Ukrainian businessman patiently explained in a private conversation: “Putin is the sole decision maker in the Kremlin, that’s for certain. He waits, he postures, and he looks for opportunities. And when he sees weakness he acts.” Certainly, Putin’s nonstop pattern of provocations and interventions bears this out. “Make no mistake,” the Ukrainian continued, “Putin has his eye on the Baltics, north Kazakhstan, wherever Russians are living in the near abroad. He will wait as long as it takes, and he will act decisively.”39 Westerners gravely underappreciate the seriousness of Putin’s regional ambitions.
Putin has also struck beyond Russia’s immediate borders, deploying the Russian military in Syria in support of his longtime ally Bashar al-Assad in October of 2015.40 The Russian air force pounded ISIS and rebel positions, bailing