“Consider where Trump and Biden stand on three key issue areas the Kremlin cares deeply about: NATO, political leadership in Ukraine and undermining democracy. Under Trump, there was little daylight between Russia and the United States on these issues.
Even as Trump’s vocal criticisms may have inadvertently strengthened the alliance, Trump worked to diminish the influence of NATO, reportedly planning to withdraw from it in his second term. As a candidate, Trump had even remarked that, “Maybe NATO will dissolve, and that’s OK, that’s not the worst thing in the world.”
Trump also broke with longstanding bipartisan support of Ukraine. During the Trump administration’s first year, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was still a showman whose comedy troupe performed patriotic musical numbers with lyrics like “There’s fog over Brussels and frost in Washington” and used a MeToo leitmotif comparing Ukraine’s treatment by Russia and the West to a sexual assault. When Zelenskyy beat an incumbent president in a landslide, Trump actually withheld military aid to Ukraine, sending personal emissaries to Kyiv to try to pressure and undermine Zelenskyy in the eyes of Ukrainians by asking him to “do us a favor, though.”
And both while in office and since leaving it, Trump worked tirelessly to cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections, going to great yet unsuccessful lengths to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential contest. Trump makes assertions about American elections that echo the Kremlin’s, even reciting a trope about voting by “dead souls” that comes from 19th century Russian literature. At rallies Trump repeats the same claims he made the day of the January 6 attack on the Capitol: “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”
The truth is that during his administration, Trump’s policy alignment with Putin advanced the aims of Russia’s political elites, who could imagine that the United States was on their side. Their comfort with Trump was evident from the start; Americans may remember that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was warmly received in the White House and photographed in the Oval Office, while Russian parliament members toasted Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
This comfort evaporated with the election of Biden. And for good reason: from the start, the Biden administration has been at odds with Putin on the issues Putin needs to care about to preserve his own rule. After Biden’s election, Russian political elites once again articulated profound, existential anxieties about a renewed United States projecting its power abroad. State television in Russia emphasized the Kremlin will not allow American influence in Ukraine, “regardless of the cost to us, and regardless of the cost to those responsible for it.”
The Biden White House has taken positions opposite those of the Trump administration on NATO. Biden has insisted on principles of state sovereignty, reaffirming and rebuilding the United States’ trans-Atlantic relationships, including strengthening NATO.
Biden took meaningful steps to support Ukraine in defending itself. Far from undermining Ukraine’s democratically elected government, the Biden administration has tried to create roadblocks for the Kremlin by getting inside Putin’s decision cycle, declassifying and broadcasting intelligence about Russia’s plans to attack Ukraine. Biden exhausted diplomatic channels trying to come to a peaceful resolution and worked with allies to prepare a sanctions package in advance of a Russian invasion.
And Biden has worked to protect democracy. Unlike Trump, rather than questioning the integrity of contests his party lost, Biden has spoken forcefully about the close legal scrutiny and fairness of all the 2020 elections. And he has supported congressional efforts to protect the franchise in the United States.
In Trump, Putin had a fellow-traveler. Far from ensuring world peace, the Trump years instead offered Putin a useful pause he utilized to further military readiness and prime the Russian population for a hot war. Earlier this month, the Russian state adopted new standards for mass graves — not because of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia, but for situations that involve “urban destruction.””
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“Far from deterring Putin, Trump did the opposite. Thanks to Trump, Putin was able to take advantage of a period of apparent detente during which Trump actually pursued Putin’s own policies of weakening NATO and democracy and destabilizing the West — leaving Putin free to prepare his war against the free people of Ukraine and their democratically elected government.”
“The logic of mutually assured destruction that defined the Cold War still works, to some degree: Russia’s arsenal makes any direct intervention in Ukraine riskier than any rational American leader could tolerate. In a sense, then, Russia’s nuclear weapons make it less likely that the conflict will kick off World War III.
But in another sense, Russia’s nuclear arsenal also helped create the conditions where Putin’s invasion could happen in the first place.”
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“Russia can be relatively confident that the United States and its allies won’t come to Ukraine’s defense directly, because such a clash carries the threat of nuclear war. This could make Putin more confident that his invasion could succeed.
Putin himself has suggested as much. In his speech declaring war on Wednesday night, he warned that “anyone who would consider interfering from the outside” will “face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” — a thinly veiled threat to nuke the United States or its NATO allies if they dare intervene.”
“Europe does not need to be this reliant on Russian gas. A look back at the last 20 years reveals a series of decisions — notably by Germany, but also by decision-makers across the continent — that created the present-day vulnerability. While some of these choices can’t be undone, Europe can still learn from history to reduce its vulnerability to energy-market manipulations driven by geopolitics. Just as the United States during the 1970s invested in emergency oil reserves to insulate itself from the effects of Middle Eastern oil embargoes, Europe should do the same with natural gas. The lesson of that era is that it’s not just the amount of energy supply that matters; countries also need to invest in resilient systems to fall back on when a crisis occurs.
What’s more, energy security doesn’t have to come at the price of climate goals. Contrary to what some commentators have suggested, this isn’t the time for Europe to revert back to its own fossil fuels. Instead, by continuing to invest in renewable energy while prioritizing a system that can withstand shocks, Europe can do both: keep phasing out fossil fuels and weaken Russia’s hold over its foreign policy.”
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“Three critical decisions in recent years made Europe dependent on natural gas and, therefore, vulnerable to Russian machinations. The first was Germany’s momentous decision to phase out its nuclear reactors in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Eliminating nuclear energy, which does not emit greenhouse gases and has an impeccable safety record in Western Europe, put enormous pressure on the rest of Europe’s energy supplies. Had this choice not been made, Europe’s energy system — which includes the electrical grid but also other components, like the energy used to heat buildings and fuel transportation — would be less dependent on imported natural gas.
The second key set of decisions, by Germany and the EU, was to allow the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to be built. The natural gas pipeline, which connects Russia to Germany directly, is not yet operational, and the German foreign minister has explicitly threatened to block it if Russia invades Ukraine. Still, Scholz has yet to say the same, and Nord Stream 2 has some powerful backers, including former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who sits on the board of directors of multiple Russian oil and gas companies. Anticipating the pipeline’s completion, the rest of the German system has made investment and planning decisions that curtail the amount of other energy available.
Germany’s moves took place as the EU was trying to lower the cost of gas by increasing market competition. One tactic was to make it easier for global suppliers to compete by favoring “spot markets” with tradable contracts over long-term, fixed contracts. As intended, the policy lowered the average cost of energy in Europe. The unintended side effect, however, has been to make the natural gas system more fragile and vulnerable to manipulation.
The third key decision was a failure across Europe to invest sufficiently in natural gas storage and pipeline interconnections that could serve as a buffer in the event of an emergency. Storage tanks and pipelines can hold reserve energy to make up for a shortage, while pipeline interconnections can resolve shortages in some parts of the system by temporarily flowing natural gas from others. Both are expensive to build and maintain, though. True, some real progress has been made increase interconnections, as energy expert Andreas Goldthau points out. But the system remains vulnerable in case of emergency: In mid-December, Europe had roughly 690 terawatt-hours of gas stored, but one analysis suggested that under certain conditions such as an extreme winter, it could need more than twice that amount. (Fortunately, this winter has been relatively mild so far.)”
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“It is true that the gradual transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar creates more demand for “bridge fuels” like natural gas or nuclear power. But energy security is not at odds with climate ambitions, so long as a country invests in sufficient emergency supply capacity to ride out potential market manipulations like Russia’s.
How do we know that gas vulnerability could be solved this way? Because the same thing happened with oil in the 1970s. Then, the West was vulnerable to oil embargoes, just as Europe’s gas supply is vulnerable now. Before 1973, oil-exporting petrostates regularly used embargoes or boycotts to try to coerce target countries to make geopolitical concessions, with varying degrees of success, as I discuss in my book Partial Hegemony. But after the massive disruptions of the 1973 oil crisis, the United States and Western oil consumers got serious about oil storage. The United States created the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which still exists — in fact, the Biden administration released oil from these reserves to ease an energy crunch in the fall. Japan, Germany and the other members of the International Energy Agency (IEA) also created oil reserves in the 1970s and agreed to coordinate with the United States on how to use them. The effects were dramatic: Petrostates immediately stopped trying to enact embargoes, and major oil consumers have not faced import shortages ever since.”
“Behind the rude awakening on energy security lies an even more unsettling realization for many German elites: That a decades-long goal of bringing Berlin and Moscow closer together through mutually beneficial trade seems to have failed.”
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“The idea that growing trade links with other nations would help to gradually embed Western democratic standards in those countries has already taken a hit when it comes to China, which has only become more and more repressive despite growing economic links. Still, leading German politicians have long held out hope that “Wandel durch Handel” might still work with Russia, and defended Nord Stream 2 as a tool to also influence Russia for the better.
“Obviously, this policy has totally failed when it comes to Russia,” said Marcel Dirsus, a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. He argued that instead of influencing Moscow by making Russia more dependent on Germany, the policy had the opposite effect.
“Right now, when push comes to shove, Berlin is dependent on Moscow when it comes to energy, and that influences the way it positions itself,” he said, referring to Berlin’s initial reluctance to include Nord Stream 2 in potential sanctions against Russia in the case of further aggression against Ukraine.
It took weeks of internal bickering and harsh international criticism before Scholz’s Social Democrats agreed to put the pipeline on the sanctions table.
“Now, they are coming to this realization [that they are too reliant on Russia] and now they are also admitting it in public, but now it’s too late,” Dirsus said.”
“It may be easy to forget today that after Russia emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Europe spent years working to integrate it into a new post-Cold War order. Far from triumphalist vengeance (as the Kremlin would have the world believe) the West provided Russia with substantial financial and technical assistance. All European states, including Russia, as well as the United States and Canada signed multiple agreements pledging to uphold key principles, including refraining from the threat or use of force; renouncing any change of borders by force; and affirming the right of all states to choose their own political and economic systems and security alliances.
Notably, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity with the international borders in effect at that time, in exchange for Ukraine giving up the third-largest nuclear stockpile in the world. In 1997, NATO and Russia signed the “Founding Act” establishing a Permanent Joint Council and identifying a number of areas where the western alliance and Russia would work together to strengthen security — an “alliance with the Alliance,” as some of its architects in the Clinton administration put it at the time.
Things started to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Russia was not happy with the NATO-led war in Kosovo, nor with President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Putin became president of Russia in 2000 and declared his intention to restore Russian greatness. At the time, many Russians and international observers – including some in the Bush administration – welcomed his words. Coming on the heels of a decade of what many saw as wild-west capitalism, corruption, and breakdowns in law and order, Putin seemed poised to make a necessary correction that would strengthen Russian stability and modernization without doing major damage to its democracy.
In hindsight, however, we can see that what Putin meant by Russian greatness was not strengthening the rule of law and building up Russia’s economy and international stature in the world. Upon taking office, he methodically went about rebuilding the Russian military, modernizing and expanding Russia’s nuclear arsenal, reviving and expanding Russian intelligence services and activities. That in itself was not necessarily a problem, except that Putin also started dismantling the nascent Russian democracy: taking control of media outlets, consolidating state industries and undermining opposition to his United Russia party, including by assassination of political opponents. Putin didn’t just tame the oligarchs of the 1990s; he replaced them with his own. He was creating something resembling a Soviet system of Communist Party control, just without the Soviet ideology and a personal structure of rule in place of the old Party nomenklatura.
A clue to his thinking came in 2005 when he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Then, in 2007 at Munich, that shift in rhetoric became unmistakable.
Following the speech, Putin matched his words with actions, dismantling the structures designed to keep peace in post-Cold War Europe. Russia formally announced in July 2007 that it would no longer adhere to the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty. It continued to reject the principle of host-nation consent for its troop presence in Georgia and Moldova, and began ignoring Vienna Convention limits on troop concentrations, exercises and transparency.
In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, trading its peacekeepers in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for regular military personnel, and driving tanks toward the capital, Tbilisi. Six years later, Russian operatives took over Crimea and rapidly orchestrated its illegal annexation by Russia. Russia followed up with attacks in eastern Ukraine and continues to engage in low-intensity fighting and to occupy parts of Donbas to this day. Later, Russia violated the INF Treaty and began to deny overflights requested under the Open Skies Treaty.”
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“we must understand what Putin has been openly telling us. This requires recognizing that the playbook created in the 1990s, fitting and well-intentioned as it was at the time, needs to be replaced with a new approach that treats Putin’s Russia as a threat to peace and an adversary. And we must sustain such a new approach for as long as Putin remains in power.”
““You have to understand, George. Ukraine is not even a country.”
Those were the jarring — and, it would turn out, prescient — words uttered by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in 2008, during a meeting with then-President George W. Bush. It was an unambiguous assertion of ownership over a sovereign nation, an assertion that has particular resonance 14 years later, as Putin has just recognized the independence of two Ukrainian regions and sent troops to bolster Russian-backed separatists.”