The Skeptic, or, a Bit Hard to Say Goodbye

In conversation with Matthias Dembinski

Matthias, your assessments have often been right. So, let's start like this: Where did the research or theory fail; what did you misjudge, underestimate?

The most significant misjudgment was related to the Russian attack on Ukraine. What I did not correctly assess was the way in which the Russian system radicalized itself before the start of the war. There was of course a run-up to the war, which I also noticed: the deployment of Russian troops a year before the war began, Putin's article from June 2021 in which he announced a revisionist program towards Ukraine. But the radicalism of the regime surprised me. The fact that the blatant war of aggression, with the aim of overthrowing the government of another country and annexing territory, was coming back to Europe was such a break with everything we had known until then in terms of European security, it was beyond imagination.

Why did Putin start a war that he could not win and why did hardly anyone in the West see it coming?

In fact, the vast majority of the strategic community did not expect this. Like me, they believed that it was ultimately just a threat, and that Putin was out to achieve a diplomatic success. It was hardly possible to imagine this because Russia had no option for victory. Putin set out the war aims before the war: firstly, to bring Ukraine back into the Russian world and secondly, to demand that the USA and NATO take back the eastward expansion of NATO that had taken place 20 years earlier and grant Russia a sphere of influence there. The first goal was not achievable, and not just from my point of view. Ukraine is a large country with 44 million inhabitants and the military force that Russia deployed was not enough to conquer it. Russia might have been able to incorporate parts of Ukraine, but the consequence would have been a counter-movement, a significant increase in Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Russian attitudes and feelings in Ukrainian society.

And the second goal could not be achieved either. It was reasonable to assume that the opposite would happen, that the West would close ranks, that Finland and Sweden would join NATO, that NATO would reconstitute itself as a collective security organization, that it would start investing in defense and that Russia would be pushed out of Europe and no longer play a role in it. That is the price that Putin is paying – a price that is so high that, from a rationalist cost-benefit calculation, the costs of this war are enormous and the benefits relatively limited.

You have shown in your Working Paper “Putins unmöglicher Krieg: Überlegungen zum Nicht-Rationalen in der internationalen Politik”, that war cannot really be explained with rationalist theories of action, at best only partially. Are these models perhaps based too much on a Western perspective or strategic culture, i.e. are they more useful for explaining why Western states start/do not start wars?

I'm not sure about that myself. There are two answers to this question, and both pose a problem for rational choice. One explanation is that the West has miscalculated. According to this version, we must assume that states have very different orders of preference, that they do not recognize the costs and benefit calculations of the other side and instead project their own ideas onto the other. Their own strategic culture then obscures the fact that the other side moves quite the opposite way and values the significance of historical size or territory very differently, for example.

The other explanation is that Russia miscalculated. In other words, although both sides have similar preferences, Moscow misjudged Ukraine's defensive capabilities and the unity of the West and therefore the costs of its own actions. Putin apparently expected this war to be short, with few casualties and similar to the annexation of Crimea. Instead, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers are now dead or maimed. Such misjudgments are common in international politics. In the case of the Russian war of aggression, however, the deviations from the models of rational choice are particularly large. The aim of my working paper was to trace the reasons for this deviation.

Let's move on to the other side, to the West. Despite the isolationist and xenophobic tendencies of the USA, you have always been a convinced transatlanticist. How do you assess the current phase and how do you see the future?

I was always a critical transatlanticist (laughs), but never anti-American. A lot has changed. However, this isolationism and xenophobic tendencies are part of the history of the USA. The history of the USA was never a history that only embodied the radiance of freedom and democracy. There was always racial hatred, there was slavery in the early days, there were always xenophobic tendencies, there was always a counter-movement against an open society, there were xenophobic forces, forces that fought immigration. So, these phenomena that we see today are not fundamentally new.

Nevertheless, I would not underestimate the capacity for reform or innovation of the American political system and society.

Matthias Dembinski

For recent history after 1945, however, they are new and worrying. But I would not underestimate the capacity for reform or innovation of the American political system and society. There have always been fluctuations in the US and currently the tide is turning towards polarization and populism. But it can also turn back again. Ultimately, Trump's success shows how divided American society is, but it can also be explained by Biden's perceived weakness and the mainstream drifting away from the Democratic side. Another thought on the subject: after all, developments in the USA often arrive with a delay and before we start pointing the finger at the USA, we should perhaps look at what is happening in Europe. And the idea, for example, that France will have a president Le Pen in the future is not completely absurd.

These developments are also interesting for NATO. How do you see its future?

At the moment, its existence is assured. Russia has revitalized NATO. Before the war, there was talk of NATO being brain-dead. Before the war, there were exuberant conflicts, for example, between Turkey and Greece. In that situation, many people asked themselves what this alliance was still there for. Putin has answered this question. With the war of aggression, NATO has rediscovered its (old) raison d'être: collective defense. It is still highly attractive for a number of countries. The fact that Sweden, with its long history of non-alignment, is joining NATO, speaks volumes. In short, NATO can now celebrate its 75th anniversary as an organization whose future shines brighter than it did just a few years ago. But with Trump, of course, dark clouds are gathering. If he is re-elected, the exciting question is to what extent he will follow through on a program this time that he only alluded to during his last term in office. Trump has a deep-seated aversion to integrating the USA into binding alliances. This is an impulse that is particularly dangerous for NATO. It is not only the debate on burden sharing, but more so Trump's aversion to international binding commitments that could become a threat to NATO.

However, Trump will not decide alone. If you know how the American security policy establishment operates, you can calculate that the domestic resistance to a program that takes the USA out of NATO will be enormous. And if the USA leaves, it has not yet been decided what will happen to the alliance. Would it collapse, would it be dead? Or does it have a life without the USA? Because NATO has the same problem as the EU. Both are consensus-oriented, there are no majority votes in either, both organizations have a broad membership that is very heterogeneous. Nevertheless, NATO is perhaps in a better position than the EU to ensure the security and defense of alliance members without the USA.

Now for a nice general question: all the efforts of recent decades, the efforts after the Second World War to create a resilient, peaceful world order with multilateralism, international organizations, arms control, globalization – were they naive or were too many mistakes made?

Well, that was by no means naive. What we experienced after the end of the East-West conflict was a period in which it was really possible to contain conflicts. The reason why the Russian war of aggression surprises us so much is because the phenomenon of war has become relatively rare. It became rare after 1945 due to the confrontation between the blocs, but it also became rare in the period that followed. Before 1945, the European continent was a continent where there were always wars. Even longer phases of peace, but there were always armed conflicts and power politics was always in the background. And the long period of peace was, of course, something that gave us hope and was also taken up in research. Until 2014, there was a very serious idea in research that the world was not getting worse, but better, that it was becoming more peaceful. That the number of wars would decrease, that violence would decrease. That reason would prevail, that we would undergo a historic process of civilization. Steve Pinker and his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, for example, are the tip of the iceberg of this research.

The big question facing us today, which we really don't understand yet, is whether the war marks a permanent break in this development, whether the hope for a civilization of power politics has been permanently refuted? Or is it just a slip-up? Again, this question can only be answered speculatively today. But there is still hope that what has always been seen as a driver of civilization will continue: interdependence, increasing trade, increasing communication, that this is not yet completely lost, but perhaps still exists and has an effect in some form. But this is speculation and there are also a number of counter-developments that need to be considered. It is not even the Russian impact, but the question of how China will position itself in the future.

A topic that you have also been dealing with for many years is the question of peace in a pluralistic world. What does that mean with regard to Russia?

One aspect of this topic is my skepticism about an idea that spread after the East-West conflict that there was a canon of universal values that could be enforced, even by military means. When I first became involved with the NATO mission in Afghanistan, I very quickly realized that the idea of democratization and the enforcement of values such as human rights in contexts such as Afghanistan is highly problematic. That this mission in Afghanistan must become a counterinsurgency mission because there is resistance to these values, to attempts at modernization from outside. And that counterinsurgency missions usually fail. The question that follows on from this is how can any kind of peace be secured in a pluralistic world? This led to my preoccupation with peace theories. Theories of peace have actually always been conceived as integrative theories: Peace is achieved through normative harmonization, through democracy, peace through greater exchange, peace through trade, peace through communication, in other words the idea that the parties become more similar in the course of the process. So, if the long-term hope of civilization is dashed by the diagnosis of current normative plurality, how can peace be achieved?

One dimension of this topic is my skepticism about the idea that spread after the East-West conflict that there was a canon of universal values that could be enforced, even by military means.

Matthias Dembinski

In the whole discussion about peace concepts and strategies, the idea that peace can also be created through dissociation only comes up very occasionally, very tentatively. This is not a positive peace, but at least a negative peace, a stable situation of "non-war", created through demarcation. The question of how demarcation, how dissociation works, has been one of my core interests at least since this time and also motivated the “Drifting Apart” project Dirk Peters and I started. I have returned to the topic several times, for example in a report or in my work on plural peace (with Hans-Joachim Spanger). After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, it was clear that Russia was no longer part of a Western security community, that it had withdrawn from it and that it was no longer a matter of integrating Russia, but of realizing something like very basic structures of coexistence in a pluralistic world with a normatively different state like Russia. That would be a kind of negative peace that is simply based on functioning demarcation. You make very basic arrangements, for example: Treaties must be adhered to, the principle of territorial integrity applies, a regulated coexistence is organized. This hope for negative peace failed because Russia did not want it and proved to be a thoroughly revisionist power under Putin. Nevertheless, plural peace and demarcation was a strategy that, in our opinion, could have worked best.

Today, this might be a perspective for the future when thinking about how the relationship with Russia could be shaped once this war is over. The core idea of such a model of European security would be to cement borders, even if only in the form of demarcation lines, and to hope for a gradually developing coexistence on this basis.

Exciting.

Yes, this model of recognizing plurality and the search for peace in a plural world, these are really exciting questions. Although (laughs): I have always been skeptical about the idea that liberal values can be universalized in the short term and through intervention, even though it was mainstream for a long time. (kha)