Ukraine: “We’re no longer in a cold war.” (Obama) , but "the new model" is collapsing before our eyes. Putin is looking at three tactical options

Putin's tactical pause: 

Russia's president weighs three options in Ukraine

by Leon Aron

With Russia’s proxies in east-south Ukraine in retreat, there has been no word or deed from Vladimir Putin. But don’t expect a spectacular change in his strategy in response to the events on the ground. Only tactics are likely to be adjusted.

Because of Putin’s recent foreign policy successes – saving the Bashir al Assad regime in Syria, pulling off a Winter Olympiad in the subtropics and next door to a jihad, and annexing Crimea and getting away with it – he appears to have acquired a reputation as a great strategist. He is not. He is a judoka not a chess Grandmaster who calculates 10 moves in advance. In judo, if you see your opponent off balance, you go for it, hoping to throw him down on his back for an instant victory, ippon, or earn a waza-ari, or half-ippon.

Putin’s judo enthusiasm has shaped his political modus operandi. He is a quick and bold tactician, who has been supremely lucky in his opponents: be they Russia’s cowardly and disunited oligarchs, or the impulsive president Mikhel Saakashvili of Georgia, or President Obama, distracted and with precious little interest in Russia beyond nuclear arms cuts, or the European Union, tied to Russia by the umbilical cord of Gazprom pipelines and a thick fatty tissue of multi-billion investments.

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Read more: www.foxnews.com

Ukraine Reveals to Us How Vladimir Putin Sees the Middle East

by Michael Doran

Does the Ukraine crisis mark the beginning of a new cold war? The answer from President Obama is a firm no. “The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the cold war,” he told a Dutch newspaper.

The president is partially correct. Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia has neither the intention nor the capability to challenge the entire European order, and it is certainly not mounting a global revolutionary movement. Nevertheless, it is a revanchist power, and its appetites are much larger than the president cares to admit.

That Russian President Vladimir Putin sees Ukraine as a zero-sum game seems obvious. Somewhat less apparent is the fact that his revisionist aspirations also extend elsewhere, and most saliently to the Middle East.

Obama’s first-term effort to “reset” relations with Russia was rooted in the firm conviction that the main cause of Russian-American competition in the Middle East lay in the previous Bush administration’s war on terror, which was read by the Russian leader as a pretext for a global power grab. Bush’s freedom agenda, with its support for democratic reform inside Russia, only confirmed Putin’s worst suspicions.

Alienating Putin, the Obama White House believed, had been a strategic blunder, depriving the United States of a potentially valuable partner. Putin, whatever his faults, was a realist: someone who could cut a deal in situations—like those in the Middle East—where Russia and America shared many interests. Once Putin fully grasped our sincerity, demonstrated by our ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russian fears of American aggressiveness would dissipate and Russian-American cooperation would blossom.

Unfortunately, getting through to Putin proved harder and took longer than expected—though not for want of trying. Famously, during the 2012 American presidential campaign, an open microphone caught Obama making his pitch. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility,” he told then-Russian President Dimitry Medvedev. “I understand,” Medvedev answered. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Eventually, Putin did seem to grasp the concept. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stepped forward last September with an offer to strip Syria’s Bashar al-Assad of his chemical weapons, Obama saw the move as a breakthrough, precisely the kind of mutually beneficial arrangement that the Russian reset was designed to generate. Soon, working together on the chemical-weapons problem, Secretary of State John Kerry and Lavrov also conspired to launch Geneva II, a peace conference designed to find a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war.

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This article by Michael Doran was originally published on Mosaic Magazine under the headline “It’s Not Just Ukraine: What his actions in Eastern Europe tell us about how Vladimir Putin sees the Middle East” on Wednesday, March 26, 2014.


Read more: www.brookings.edu