Hard Power, Soft Power, Muscovy, Strategy, and My Once-Again Failure to Understand Where Niall Ferguson Is Coming From: Live from Le Pain Quotidien
In which I once again fail to understand where Niall Ferguson is coming from...
...Having annexed Crimea to Russia, President Putin still has forces camped out in eastern Ukraine. And all over the Muslim world, myriad Islamist organizations, from Islamic State to the Taliban, are using violence to pursue their atavistic goals. In practice, the Obama administration has had little choice but to keep using hard power, from the airstrikes on Islamic State to the economic sanctions on Russia...
And I think: Of course hard power can be decisive--but one needs to have a lot of it, and be willing not just to threaten to use it but to actually use it, and not care that one's use of it may lead the abyss to look into you, and turn you into something you did not want to be, and so cause you to lose even as you "win".
And I think: The science fiction/horror/fantasy author David Drake very effectively and rightly, I think, puts it thus in the mouth of one of his characters, the Goddess Athene Danny Pritchard:
Force accomplishes a lot of things. They just aren’t the ones you want here. Bring in the Slammers [Regiment] and we kick ass for as long as you pay us. Six months, a year. And we kick ass even if the other side brings in mercs of their own--which they’ll do--but that’s not a problem, not if you’ve got us. So, there’s what? Three hundred thousand people....
So, you want to kill fifty kay? Fifty thousand people, let’s remember they’re people for the moment.... You see, if we go in quick and dirty, the only way that has a prayer of working is if we get them all. If we get everybody who opposes you, everybody related to them, everybody who called them master--everybody.... They’re not dangerous now, but they will be after the killing starts. Believe me. I’ve seen it often enough. Not all of them, but one in ten, one in a hundred. One in a thousand’s enough when he blasts your car down over the ocean a year from now. You’ll see. It changes people, the killing does. Once it starts, there’s no way to stop it but all the way to the end. If you figure to still live here on Tethys....
What do you think the Slammers do, milady? Work magic? We kill, and we’re good at it, bloody good. You call the Slammers in to solve your problems here and you’ll be able to cover the Port with the corpses. I guarantee it. I’ve done it, milady. In my time...
And I think: If Niall Ferguson thinks internationally-agreed economic sanctions are "hard power", I do not think he understands what hard power and soft power are. But I would like the very smart Joe Nye to weigh in on this... UPDATE: Dan Drezner informs me that I am the one who is confused here--that Joe Nye counts economic sanctions as "hard power"...
Putin does not have enough hard power to dominate the world, or the North Atlantic, or the ex-Soviet Empire, or even Russia's Muscovy's near abroad.
What he has managed to do with his hard power is grab one peninsula (the Crimea), and four provinces--Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Luhansk, and Donetsk. In return, he has shrunk Russia--formerly the predominant power in eastern Europe and the primus inter pares of the Slavic nations--into a generally-disliked albeit somewhat-feared Muscovy. The Muscovite generals who danced in Paris in 1815, in Berlin in 1945, in Havana in 1962, and in Saigon in 1975 are now... camped along the right bank of the lower Don near the Sea of Azov? Siberia aside, the borders of Muscovy look a lot like those under... Dread Ivan Rurik at the time of the Livonian War?
And this is supposed to be a demonstration of Putin's hard power? Of the rewards to military adventurism, and evidence that we should do what we did in Iraq in 2003 again?
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