From Mideast to North & Central Europe to East Asia: Consequences of US-Russia Global Escalation

On Oct. 3, State Department spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau announced that the Obama Administration was suspending the US-Russian negotiations on a Syrian peace deal. Not coincidentally, the same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message to the Duma withdrawing from the US-Russia nuclear weapons deal, under which both countries had agreed to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium. 

Speaking for Secretary of State John Kerry about the termination of the talks with Russia over Syria, Admiral John Kirby charged that the Russians were not living up to their end of the bargain.

For their part, Kremlin officials leveled identical charges at the Obama Administration, arguing that Washington had lost influence over Gulf allies and Turkey and could not deliver on crucial parts of the ceasefire agreement.

In Washington, senior intelligence and military officials told the President that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had lost out to hardliners who outright rejected the Kerry-Lavrov deal in favor of pursuing Russian strategic interests militarily, with the ultimate goal of maintaining a permanent military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean.

At the Kremlin, the reverse assessment was dominant: Kerry had lost out to Pentagon and CIA hawks who sabotaged the deal from the outset, and who adamantly refused to engage in the intelligence sharing and operational coordination demanded under the terms of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement.

Now, the breakdown of Washington-Moscow cooperation will have global consequences, from Ukraine and the Baltics to the Far East. In fact, the stage had been set  even before the formal cancellation of the Syria agreements to wage joint military actions against the Islamic State (ISIL) and the Nusra Front.

A week before the Kerry-Lavrov deal came unglued, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter traveled to Minot, North Dakota, site of a major US nuclear weapons base, to announce an ambitious expansion of the program to modernize the US nuclear triad. That program, which involves overhauling the US land based ICBMs, the nuclear weapons submarines, and the strategic bombers, is expected to cost $1 trillion over the next three decades. 

In his speech, standing in front of a B-52 bomber, Carter said that the US was undertaking a long-overdue modernization of its thermonuclear deterrents, to catch up with Russia’s recent modernization program, and to deal with the danger arising from North Korea’s expanding arsenal of nuclear weapons and their improvements to their ballistic missile systems. Carter warned that the US was not just increasing its deterrent to keep pace with Russia’s recent breakthroughs.  The US, he declared, was prepared to use theater nuclear weapons if US allies were threatened with attack. In fact, the US is going through a rapid modernization of its B61 tactical nuclear weapons.  The new generation, the B61-12, will have advanced guidance systems and longer range capabilities, in effect making them into intermediate range nuclear weapons able to strike  targets deep in Russian territory. The greater range and accuracy will allow the nuclear weapons to have greatly reduced payloads, integrating them into conventional war-fighting units. Over the next three years, the new B61-12s will be deployed into the European theater.

Further adding to the escalating military maneuverings in Europe, Russia has deployed the new generation of Iskander missiles, capable of carrying small nuclear weapons, into a region of Russia bordering Poland.

In both Moscow and Washington, preparations are underway for a new level of head-to-head military shows of force, unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. On Oct. 6, General Joseph Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a speech at the annual meeting of the Association of the US Army, in which he gave a preview of the new US military doctrine. For the first time in decades, that document will be kept secret; only the bare outlines  will be made public. General Dunford made clear that the added secrecy is due to the growing strategic challenges posed by Russia and North Korea, especially Russia. It was reported that the document addresses the new form of “hybrid warfare,” also referred to as “hyper warfare,” which involves the integration of conventional forces, tactical nuclear forces, and cyber warfare.

The breakdown of the Kerry-Lavrov talks and the apparent ascent of hawks in both Washington and Moscow means that there is a growing likelihood that the US and Russia will be engaging in the kind of asymmetric confrontations that have not been seen in 25 years. NATO has expanded its deployments right up to the Russian borders in the Baltics, the Black Sea, and Central Europe, with the first combat battalions scheduled to arrive in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania in the coming months.

The collapse of the Syria dialogue has not yet impacted the ongoing Minsk II talks over Ukraine, involving Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine (the “Normandy Four”). The US and Russia had been negotiating a peaceful settlement of the eastern Ukraine conflict as part of the Kerry-Lavrov dialogue.t is increasingly likely that those talks will break down soon, as President Obama is considering new sanctions against Russia over the bombing campaign in Aleppo that began the moment the negotiations collapsed.

US concerns over the North Korean nuclear breakout have also raised tensions in North Asia to a level that has not been seen in years. Under tremendous Pentagon pressure, the South Korean government recently agreed to allow the deployment of US THAAD missile defense systems to South Korean soil, prompting sharp denunciations from both China and Russia, who argue that the missile defense system, in tandem with an expanded US “nuclear umbrella” over South Korea and Japan, is actually directed against Russia and China. Both countries argue that the THAAD system is ineffective against such short-range missile threats as those posed by North Korea against the South (Seoul is only 30 miles from the DMZ separating the DPRK from the ROK).

The former Chairman of the JCS, General Martin Dempsey, had prioritized the building up of close military-to-military ties among the United States, Russia, and China. He argued that there are more areas of common interest–anti-terrorism, anti-drugs, arms control, nuclear disarmament, peacekeeping and humanitarian support–than areas of conflict between Washington and Moscow. He told an audience in Norfolk, Virginia shortly before he retired that his goal with respect to China was to avoid the “Thucydides Trap,” by which he meant an inevitable conflict between static and rising powers.

That war-avoidance priority has been undermined by recent events, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa. The global crisis areas are now far more dangerous, given the breakdown of official communications between Washington and Moscow, thus posing  a huge challenge to the next president of the United States. While the danger of an immediate superpower war is remote, the prospects of stabilizing the global crisis, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and North Africa to the Pacific Far East are also more remote than they were a mere few months ago.