It’s not the central line of thought that’s shaping the Biden administration’s response to the crisis in eastern Europe, but it’s worth noting that Obama-era wishful thinking on Russia seems to be shaping some of the U.S. response to Russia’s military buildup.
This was most obvious when, earlier this month, Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, told reporters that the Kremlin should be focusing on health care, education, and infrastructure — “the same kinds of conversations that we’re having in the United States” — instead of manufacturing a military crisis. She said that Russian officials should be focused on “building back better.”
The idea seemed to be to remind Russian officials that they could face domestic criticism for embarking on a costly military buildup rather than implementing their own version of the White House’s stalled, two-trillion-dollar domestic-policy program.
The administration, of course, is pursuing numerous other approaches to negotiating with Moscow, deterring a military attack, and shoring up allied unity across Europe. Officials have only twice used the phrase Build Back Better in relation to this crisis in public (an unnamed senior official also used it late last year during a press call).
Still, it’s significant because it reflects at least a slight hope on the part of America’s top diplomats that Moscow can be talked off this ledge by appealing to Vladimir Putin’s sense of self-preservation. The premise of this argument is that Russian forces are overextending themselves to an extent that Putin’s team just cannot tolerate in the long term.
Before this sort of thinking was couched in terms of Biden’s signature domestic agenda, it was a corollary of the Obama Doctrine, as in the landmark piece focusing on the former president’s worldview described by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Putin’s seizure of Crimea was a reactive response to “a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp.” It was improvisational, Obama told Goldberg.
Obama also said that he declined to boost U.S. support for the Syrian opposition after Russia’s intervention on the side of the government in 2015 because Russian forces “are overextended. They’re bleeding.”
But to the extent that Putin has faced blowback at home from Russia’s misadventures in Ukraine and Syria, he’s managed to bottle it up. And despite the economic contraction that Obama cited as punishment enough to convince Putin to cut his losses, more than five years later, the Russian intervention in Syria seems to be a strategic victory that propped up a key Putin client.
So far, Nuland has been alone in stating that Russia should build back better. But Blinken, during his stint as deputy secretary state under the Obama administration, espoused a similar line about Putin’s Syria intervention becoming a likely source of regret. “The quagmire will spread and deepen, drawing Russia further in,” he told a crowd in 2015, predicting that Russia would alienate itself from Sunni Muslims across the world.
It’s not a stretch to wonder about the degree to which that sort of misplaced optimism is shaping U.S. responses to Russia’s latest strategic moves in light of Nuland’s comments two weeks ago. Since Nuland’s build-back-better comments on January 11, Moscow has only significantly built up its presence surrounding Ukraine. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told reporters this morning that there are now some 127,000 Russian troops stationed at the border.