TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

10 November 2024: Top Trumps, plus questions and answers, and a song

It’s been … a week.

With apologies to readers, I’m afraid I just haven’t had the mental bandwidth to put together the usual compendium of thoughts, texts and tunes this week. Or, rather, I have put some of it together, but it ended up getting published in other venues. So, at the risk of wanton self-promotion, I thought it might be best just to summarize some key thoughts here.

That said, given where we are, I’d very much like to make this newsletter a bit more interactive going forward, including input from readers to help set the agenda. With that in mind, please do click over to the TL;DRussia chat and let me know your thoughts.

My thoughts this week

Dumb question, I suppose.

I mean, there are a million different directions one’s thoughts might go after Tuesday night’s result, including in the general direction of the liquor cabinet. And we’ll have time to wander all those roads in due course. I’ll admit, I’m preemptively exhausted just by the notion of everything the next four years might entail.

In the meantime, there’s work to be done, and I tried to get some quick thoughts out there as the reality of Trump’s re-election settled in. In particular, I published two pieces mid-week for CEPA, one focused on what the election means for Europe, and the other on what it means for Russia. Both pieces are mercifully short!

In the Europe-focused piece, published Wednesday, I began by stating the blindingly obvious:

The challenges a second Trump administration may pose for Europe are significant, ranging from the expected disruption of trading and security relationships to the multiplication of instability on Europe’s eastern and southern flanks.

Each of these challenges, however, exploits Europe’s own internal divisions. Only by addressing those divisions can Europe bolster its hand not just vis-à-vis Washington but also versus overt threats from Moscow, Beijing, and beyond.

The piece suggests three policy imperatives, which I lay at the door not of the European Commission, but of Paris and Warsaw in the first instance, Berlin in the second, and London, Rome and others thereafter:

1. Devise and build public and member-state support for a new fiscal settlement and cross-border defense procurement commensurate with the size of the challenge posed by a belligerent Moscow and a recalcitrant Washington;

2. Mobilize politically and diplomatically to isolate Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico, and potentially Andrej Babiš, backstopping the Commission’s efforts to maintain European solidarity;

3. Implement multiple bilateral and/or multilateral security arrangements with Ukraine to provide deterrence in the event of a ceasefire, and fast-track EU accession, as a long-term hedge against any short-term instability emanating from Washington.

The piece should be read, in part, as a companion to an earlier and longer paper co-authored with Marija Golubeva, Volodymyr Dubovyk and Jessica Berlin on foreign and security policy priorities for the new European Commission, which includes the following:

Winning the war in Ukraine, deterring further Russian aggression, and restoring peace and stability across Europe will require constant attention and durable commitments — all the more so because such constancy and durability may not be forthcoming from Washington. The challenge for Brussels is thus multiplied: European leadership is simultaneously more important and more difficult than ever. 

The Russia-focused piece, published Thursday, was more interesting, I think. Re-hashing some earlier skepticism (expressed in the 3 November issue of this newsletter, and elsewhere), I tried to delve a bit deeper into how a Trump-Putin transaction over Ukraine might be structured, as well as how it might fit into Trump’s broader foreign policy, with his evident desire to start picking fights with Beijing and Tehran. Here’s the key passage:

While forward planning and a more pliant Congress may give the White House a freer hand this time around, Trump is still likely to find there is little political capital to be gained from making nice with Putin. Indeed, there may be a price to pay. Trump will also cling to his image, not just as a deal-maker but as a deal-winner, and if Putin wants American acquiescence in Ukraine, he will likely have to give Trump something in return.

But Putin doesn’t have much to offer. The Biden administration has already won the release of Russia’s highest-profile American hostages, and while renouncing claims to dominion in the post-Soviet space might give Trump a nice rhetorical win, Putin will be loath to eat humble pie in the public eye.

To make matters worse, the one thing Trump is likely to want — Russian cooperation or at least abstention on his broader geopolitical agenda — is the one thing Putin is most unable to give. 

There’s more detail in the article, though, so please do give it a read and let me know what you think.

On top of that, a couple of media appearances might be of interest, including a lengthy-ish interview in the French newspaper La Croix expanding on the implications of Trump’s approach to Russia and Ukraine for Europe, and this interview, given in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, with very little sleep and way too much glare on my forehead:

Oldies but goodies

While I’m in self-promotion mode, I thought I might take the opportunity to re-up two evergreen thoughts.

One is the piece I wrote for CEPA when Biden withdrew from the race, which had the following kicker:

Inconsistency on any of the three pillars of current US foreign policy — support for Ukraine, resistance to Russia, and partnership with Europe — will do more than ensure Ukraine’s eventual defeat. It will cement in Europe an understanding that the US is no longer reliable. And it will prove to Putin and every other aggressive autocrat from Caracas to Tehran to Beijing that America cannot mount a generational response to a generational challenge.  

The other is a long Twitter thread from December 2023, when the news was reverberating—much as it is now—with hints that Putin might be willing to negotiate over Ukraine. Again, the kicker (from Tweet 16 of 18):

The problem is this: For the West, negotiations are a means of ending the war. For Russia, they are a means of winning it. Putin recognizes this mismatch and is eager to exploit it. I'm not sure all Western policymakers understand it, however.

Also worth reading

I haven’t had much chance to read this week—and little of what I read was terribly edifying (you hear me, New York Times opinion editors?!)—so only two things to pass on this time around.

The first is an excellent and exceedingly brief Twitter thread from my always cogent and insightful KCL colleague Ruth Deyermond, which I bring to you here in its entirety:

How does NATO survive as a meaningful alliance when the leadership of its dominant member is compromised by relations with its primary adversary? European NATO has been deeply complacent about this issue, but that's a luxury we no longer have.

Many people are rightly saying that Europe needs to quickly increase defence spending. But govts are, I think, going to look at the way that economic discontent seems to have fuelled a Trump victory and worry that spending on non-domestic issues will do the same here.

European governments need to start clearly communicating the need for defence increases. First, of course, they have to acknowledge it themselves.

And the second is the best post-mortem I’ve come across of the election itself, from Jonathan Weiler at UNC (and please don’t read all of that dreck in the Times).

Asked and answered

As we were waiting for the votes to be cast and the results to roll in, I appealed to readers to join an “Ask Me Anything” chat here on Substack. I answered most of those questions late on Tuesday, both on the chat and here in the newsletter. But there are a few questions that came in later, which I’ll try to address now.

Laura: Do you have any info sources updating us on the North Koreans' locations/success and how the news of their presence is being received in Russia? I could imagine the public being a bit glad it's them and not their own men being sent to the front lines.

Great question, especially because it’s a really difficult one to answer. I’ve spent a little bit of time poking around, and I’m struggling to come up with much in the way of detailed reporting about what’s going on with the North Korean troops. We know they’re in Kursk Oblast, and probably in Belgorod Oblast, too. The Ukrainians claim to have beaten them back in their first skirmishes, but we don’t know much. (For a little bit of info, see this piece from Voice of America, this one from Deutsche Welle, and a roundup from True Story.) Both the Russians and the North Koreans seem to be keeping the whole operation as quiet as possible, including keeping ordinary Russians away from the North Korean soldiers—not least because Russia for the North Koreans is an unusually liberal environment.

Miriam: Do you think Trump might get his end of the bargain (SG: over Ukraine) with Putin in the Middle East? Trump could negotiate with Putin such that concessions by US in Ukraine are compensated with a deal in Middle East. Trump cares more about Israel/Iran than he does about Ukraine.

Another great question. I don’t doubt that Trump might try to go down this route, but it would put Putin in a very difficult position, and I don’t think he’d be inclined to play ball. To quote one of my CEPA pieces from earlier in the week:

When Trump starts throwing punches at Beijing and Tehran, then it will be incumbent on Putin to show solidarity with his authoritarian allies. If he sits on his hands, he would inevitably evoke the ire of Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei, who retains the ability to make his life difficult by stopping the flow of goods and money that have allowed Moscow to circumvent sanctions and export controls. 

Ksenija Čevere: My question is do you think that Trump might go on with some kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in Europe while trying to present himself as a peace keeper, deal maker and problem solver? How compromised the security of The Baltic States and Eastern European countries can become?

I certainly understand where this is coming from, but the pact I’d be more worried about is Yalta, not Molotov-Ribbentrop. Whatever Trump might be inclined to do, I don’t think it’s likely he’ll become the Hitler to Putin’s Stalin, neutralizing one front in order to open another. I do, however, think it’s within the realm of possibility that he and Putin could seek to agree on spheres of influence, which Moscow would read as domination.

The good news here is that 2024 is not 1945. The European countries that Putin and Trump might be inclined to divvy up are much more powerful and autonomous than they were after World War II. In short, they have agency of their own, and I don’t see anyone in the region acquiescing to Russian dominion simply because Trump signed off on it. (Just look at last weekend’s second round of the Moldovan presidential election, which Russia failed to sway.)

Daniel: Do you think a Trump win could speed up conflict escalation and push Russia to attack a NATO ally? And do you think his transactional approach might weaken trust among NATO allies?

An excellent follow-on to Ksenija’s question. Do I think Trump’s transactional approach might weaken trust among NATO allies? Absolutely. Do I think that might spur Russia to escalate or even attack a NATO ally? Not in the immediate future. One of the lessons I hope Putin has learned from this war is that escalation galvanizes Western public opinion and spurs NATO to greater consolidation (in contrast to grinding attrition, which has the opposite effect). So, if Putin sees Trump as an opportunity to help break down Western resolve, my assumption is that he would want to avoid getting in the way.

That said, if Putin finds that things aren’t going the way he wants, all bets are off.

What I’m listening to

Whenever I begin to despair at the world I’ll be leaving to my daughters, I put this song on, and I know they’ll have the strength I don’t. (The audio in the album version is better, but this one hits home a little harder.)