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Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 08:01:52 -0500
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Subject: L-I: Stratfor on Russia; Putin
From: Macdonald Stainsby <[log in to unmask]>
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STRATFOR.COM Global Intelligence Update
January 17, 1999


The Putin Doctrine: Nuclear Threats and Russia's Place in the World


Summary

Russia's acting president, Vladimir Putin, last week reversed his
country's vow never to use nuclear weapons first. The announcement
sent shock waves around the world. And it should have. Russian
nuclear warheads are not about to rain down on the United States
but Putin is doing more than rattling sabers. A new Russian
national security doctrine has emerged over the last few months and
Putin's announcement is intended to round out that doctrine,
affecting the war in Chechnya, and re-ordering relations both with
Russia's neighbors and the United States.


Analysis

Until a few months ago, Russia had no clear-cut national security
policy. Since the end of the Cold War, Russian security doctrine
had devolved into Russian economic policy. Russian economic policy
consisted of intensifying relations with the advanced industrial,
capitalist world in order to create the financial structures and
relationships needed to jump-start the economy. Russian national
security doctrine consisted primarily of doing nothing to disrupt
those economic relationships while, within the framework of the
first imperative, maintaining the territorial and institutional
integrity of the Russian Federation.

Thus, the most important aspect of the new Russian national
security doctrine is that it exists at all. Putin's announcement on
first strike has as its primary purpose the elevation of national
security issues to the same level as national economic issues. In
other words, Putin's announcement on nuclear weapons represents the
death of the preceding national strategy, which relegated national
security issues to a distant second place behind national economic
concerns. It was intended to stun a number of audiences into
realizing that the post-Cold War world is gone.

The choice of the nuclear issue served a number of purposes and
spoke to a number of audiences. The first audience was the United
States and its allies. As our readers know, it has been our view
that the West's decision to bomb Iraq in December of 1998 -
followed by the war in Kosovo, both in direct opposition to Russian
wishes - generated a revolution in Russian policy. Those two
actions convinced the Russians that the United States intended to
reduce Russia to the status of a tertiary power. Washington's
systematic indifference to Russian wishes convinced the Russian
national security community that without leverage against the
United States, Russia would have no traction whatsoever. Economic
relations with the West had effectively collapsed in the financial
crisis of August 1998, so the Russians felt they had little to
lose.

Putin's announcement is perfectly designed to drive home the price
and risks of U.S. economic and strategic policy. It systematically
accomplishes what Yeltsin tried spasmodically when he reminded
Washington that Russia had nuclear weapons and was prepared to use
them. First, the Putin doctrine reminds the United States that
Russia is the only nation in the world with sufficient nuclear
weapons of sufficient range to conduct an annihilating attack on
the United States. To put it bluntly, Russia could choose to kill a
large percentage of the American public if it is prepared to endure
the same.

Second, Moscow's new stance poses a practical problem for the
United States, which must now at least consider Russian responses.
No matter how unlikely a Russian first strike is, there is a huge
difference between a negligible threat and a non-existent one,
particularly at the orders of magnitude involved. During the Cold
War, the threat of a Soviet nuclear response was in the back of
every policy maker's mind when dealing with issues from Nicaragua
to Angola to India. That threat disappeared with Glasnost. Putin
intends to resurrect it.

Third, this is a meaningful threat because of the relative weakness
of Russia's conventional forces. Consider Western nuclear strategy,
particularly during the Cold War. The United States and NATO never
renounced a possible first strike; indeed, it was explicitly
understood that a massive Soviet attack on Western Europe would
trigger the use of tactical nuclear weapons and, if necessary,
higher levels of nuclear response. Russia, on the other hand, had
long called for a no-first-strike commitment by the West and in
fact adopted that stance in 1997. Russia, with a conventional
weapons advantage, was always more interested in exploiting that
advantage and saw the use of nuclear weapons as undermining it.
Nuclear weapons were the critical equalizer to the superior numbers
of Russian conventional forces.

But to create strategic parity beyond the battlefield, doctrine had
to be married to unpredictability. It was never clear to anyone
that the United States would in fact launch a first strike against
the Soviet Union upon the invasion of Germany. No one knew what the
U.S. president would order at the critical moment. That was
precisely the advantage. The very uncertainty of the American
response limited the Soviets' room for maneuver and imposed severe
limits on Moscow's willingness to take risks. Putin is now trying
to reverse the equation. Russia now has a substantial disadvantage
in conventional forces. By renouncing the no-first strike rule,
Putin has placed Russia in the position of the United States during
the Cold War.

In turn, the threat will force the United States and Europe to
reconsider the risk of adventures like Kosovo. Obviously, the
Russians are unlikely to use nuclear weapons. but the term
"unlikely" does not mean impossible. It means low probability, or
possibility. The mere possibility that another Kosovo could trigger
a nuclear response changes the calculus of Western intervention.
Since the direct benefit to the intervening powers is minimal, the
corollary must be equally low cost and low risk. Since no nation is
entirely predictable, the risk of a nuclear response can easily
shift the decision from "go" to "no-go."

This is particularly true for European members of NATO and for
Japan, whose proximity to Russia and appetite for risk-taking is
substantially less than that of the United States. At the very
least, the mere threat of a nuclear reaction makes it impossible to
treat Russia with the contemptuous indifference shown during the
Iraq and Kosovo affairs. With this announcement, Putin has bought
himself not only a seat at the table, but, in all likelihood, the
demand by U.S. allies that Russia buy into future military
intervention.

There is a second audience: the other members of the former Soviet
Union, many of whom are members of the Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS), which, not coincidentally, is holding a summit one
week from today. One of the outcomes of the collapse of the Soviet
Union was that, with intense U.S. urging, all nations other than
Russia gave up their nuclear weapons. Whatever the wisdom of that
policy, the result was that Russia is the only former Soviet
republic with nuclear weapons.

Russia has always been first among equals in the CIS, but Putin's
announcement will immediately help Moscow re-order its
relationships closer to home. First, the war in Chechnya will be
affected. With some reason, Russians are convinced that outside
forces - backed by the United States - are supplying Chechen rebels
through neighboring Georgia. The situation in Chechnya reminds many
Russian military men of Afghanistan, where a great power created
logistical support systems and sanctuaries in a neighboring
country, bleeding Moscow's forces. Putin is now reminding the
United States that the survival of the Russian Federation - intact
- is a fundamental national interest. Therefore, any aid to the
Chechens threatens an interest so profound that the use of nuclear
weapons might be rational. This must trigger a re-evaluation of
U.S. policy.

Second, the Georgians themselves, who have felt relatively secure
as an American partner, are being reminded that forces are at play
beyond their control. If the Georgians' entire calculus has been
that the war would be one of conventional force on conventional
force, the Georgians should guess again. The willingness of the
Russians to use tactical nuclear weapons to disrupt lines of supply
into Chechnya cannot be discounted. By doing this, the Russians are
transforming the war, putting Georgia's security - instead of
Russia's territorial integrity - in jeopardy.

Third, the Russians are delivering a message to the Chechens. The
Chechens are seeing this conflict just as they did during the
1994-1996 war. They are fighting on their terrain and are prepared
to take serious losses for national independence. Russian
conventional forces cannot seal off the lines of supply from
Georgia, nor can they occupy the mountainous terrain south of
Grozny. Indeed, given the costs of urban warfare, they cannot
easily take Grozny itself. Therefore, the theory goes, extended
warfare favors the insurgent nationalist group. Time is on the side
of the Chechens. Putin just indicated, however, that he has the
means to sharply increase Chechen casualties without increasing
Russian ones. That is a sobering thought, to say the least.

This is a matter of general concern for all the countries
surrounding Russia. So long as the security equation is stated in
purely conventional terms, the West can help neighboring nations,
from the Baltic Sea to Central Asia, pose a serious problem to the
Russians. Once nuclear weapons are introduced into the equation, a
very different outcome occurs. First, the conventional supplies
provided become unimportant. Second, the risks involved in
providing or accepting conventional weapons soar.

The final audience for this announcement is perhaps the most
important: the Russian public. Putin has been enormously popular
for taking vigorous action to end his country's declining world
status. The announcement intrinsically satisfies Russians and helps
boost Putin's popularity on the verge of his campaign for the
presidency. As winter grips Chechnya and large-scale military
operations, particularly air operations, become more difficult, the
emergence of the nuclear threat suggests an end to the war even if
conventional forces fail.


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