Ukrainian servicemen walk in a trench on the front line with Russia-backed separatists in the Donetsk region on December 18, 2021. (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

The Kremlin’s latest military build-up on the Ukrainian border is an attempt to extort the U.S. and Europe into abandoning the continent’s post-war security architecture. President Biden’s recent comments indicating that the U.S. would acquiesce to a Russian invasion likely emboldened Putin to push his advantage, and have sent a dangerous signal of weakness to allies and adversaries.  

How should the U.S. respond to Putin’s latest gambit? Earlier this week, Hudson national security experts Peter Rough, William Schneider, Bryan Clark, and Marshall Billingslea discussed the economic, political, and military measures that could counter Russian aggression and restore deterrence in Europe. See below for key takeaways from their discussion.

Key Quotes

From the Hudson event, "Countering Russian Aggression: US Policy Options"

It’s a major fallacy of Western diplomatic thinking that deescalation is considered the height of diplomacy. Putin preys on that mindset by essentially manufacturing a crisis and then pricing the cost of deescalation. We then fall into that rut and essentially make concessions. Sometimes, in the West, we [behave in ways that we] consider prudential and cautious, which is interpreted as feckless and weak elsewhere. It doesn’t just matter how we perceive things, it matters how our opponents see things.

China has made a lot of infrastructure investments in the Russian Far East so they have access to the raw materials there: the oil, the gas, the minerals. And those investments have not gone very well. [China and Russia have] not actually come out with necessarily the improvements they wanted; so they still get a lot of that material via the sea.

There’s an opportunity here to show Russia that we can choke off access to the sea that they enjoy via Vladivostok, because it’s trapped inside the ‘first island chain’ of Japan. Russians have been very aggressive in their gray-zone warfare against Japan. This is not a European phenomenon only; they’ve been doing over-flights and taking actions against Japanese forces for decades. So Japan would be potentially willing to help the United States demonstrate to the Russians that we have this access to close off, or the ability to close off their access to the sea.

If we’re going to talk about conventional arms control, let’s remember that the Russians violated the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty from day one. They continue to illegally occupy parts of Georgia. They continue to illegally occupy parts of Moldova. Those kinds of demands should be issued before any return to conventional arms control in Europe is seriously considered. 

Russia is pushing for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty moratorium [INF], because for decades they cheated on the INF treaty and clandestinely developed and then deployed multiple battalions of intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles. Of course, now they want a moratorium on these missiles and that’s the last thing on earth that we should give them. 

Since the end of the Cold War, China and Russia have had a shared interest in undermining the capacity of the U.S. and its allies to maintain democratic societies. We can see the way in which they are working together. For example, the China and Iran Strategic Agreement is now about to be coupled to a Russia-Iran agreement, which will have many of the same characteristics of the China-Iran deal and will take advantage of the Biden administration's decision to abandon U.S. security interest in the Middle East.

China now will be able to control entry and egress to both the Straits of Hormuz and the Arabian Sea. So there’s a lot of things going on that have been a consequence of how the Biden administration has acted with Russia, and the way it shifted its security focus to the Pacific, and has neglected the fact that we have a worldwide threat, and not just a Pacific threat.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.

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