Edward A. Kolodziej is Emeritus Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of the book “Global Governance: Evaluating the Liberal Democratic, Chinese, and Russian Solutions.” He spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has altered the landscape for U.S. and European security interests.
We’re more than 100 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How has it altered U.S. and Western security interests?
The Russian invasion directly challenges the security order established by the Western democracies after World War II, with the formation of NATO and the creation of the European Union and their subsequent expansion in the aftermath of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In essence, Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding a seat at the table in determining European security that’s equal to the Western democracies. Based on Putin’s own pronouncements, he seeks nothing less than the dissolution of NATO and the EU to advance Russian security and economic interests. In attacking Ukraine, he was betting on the West not responding to Russian aggression against a non-NATO state, just as the West has mostly resisted responding to Russian aggression abroad since it invaded the Republic of Georgia in 2008 and the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014, while reabsorbing Crimea into Russia.
Putin’s miscalculations have galvanized the Western alliance; incurred damaging economic sanctions on the Russian economy; and, except for China and a clutch of other mostly authoritarian states, isolated Russia from the international community.
On a more positive note, Putin’s aggression also has prompted Finland and Sweden, neutral throughout the Cold War, to request entry into NATO. All of the European states within NATO, as well as the U.S., also have notably increased their military expenditures. Germany, chronically in arrears in meeting its NATO obligation of spending 2% of its gross domestic product for military purposes, is now fulfilling that mandate, while breaking with its long-standing policy of not sending arms to combatants at war. It has joined other NATO members in arming Ukraine.
It is sobering to realize that, whether one likes it or not, the U.S. and Europe are going to have to deal with Russia and compromise their mutually shared, if largely contradictory, economic and security interests. And so we’re looking at a fractured global system in which the Western democracies need to hang together. Otherwise, as the cliché goes, they’re going to hang separately.
What are the invasion’s consequences for U.S. and NATO military policies?
The big one is the possibility of nuclear escalation in a military conflict between the Western allies and Russia in which you have a handful of nuclear powers: the U.S., Russia, the U.K. and France. That threat is real and no small matter. Putin’s invasion automatically ups the ante of security threats facing the West, moving them beyond the borders of Ukraine. In threatening to use nuclear weapons, Putin has broached a fundamental change in how states will likely conceive of the use of nuclear weapons. That’s not an option you put on the table lightly.
Putin’s threat to use nuclear force has had two effects. One, it has historically changed the nature of the dialogue on the use of nuclear weapons simply because he, in effect, has declared that Russia can use them in an offensive manner of its choosing against Ukraine or any other NATO member. Two, no one knows what the outcome would be if Putin were to use nuclear weapons because that puts the Western allies in a tit-for-tat situation. A small nuclear weapon of only 18 kilotons destroyed Hiroshima. What happens if Putin unleashes a weapon many times that size on Ukraine? That’s really an apocalyptic scenario that Putin has brought to the fore, threatening Western civilization and human life on earth more generally.
It’s also not clear that once the nuclear genie has been released from the bottle that Putin will be able to control it, especially if he’s under the duress of losing in Ukraine.
What if Putin deploys what military leaders have called “tactical nuclear weapons” on the battlefield in Ukraine?
You’re talking about small nuclear weapons, and when I say small I mean less than the 18 kiloton weapons that destroyed Hiroshima. Most of current nuclear weapons Russia possesses are well in excess of the Hiroshima bomb. At the same time, any weapon of that caliber is going to be enormously destructive. These weapons can unleash unimaginable human and material destruction. There are also the lasting effects of radiation and their impact not only on Europe but also around the globe.
And what is the endgame of the use of small nuclear weapons? Nobody knows, but the effects will certainly be damaging. The U.S. and Russia have thousands of thermonuclear weapons in their respective arsenals. So to even open up the discussion of tactical nuclear weapons, which of course Putin has irresponsibly done, has really changed the strategic calculus of the Western allies. They must now think about the unthinkable, the possible use of nuclear weapons in a military conflict with Putin’s Russia.
Putin has also created an incentive for other states such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, with severely destabilizing consequences for trans-Atlantic and global security.
What does this mean for the U.S. defense of Taiwan against a potential Chinese invasion?
The Chinese are certainly closely watching what Russia is doing and taking notes. It’s no secret that China intends to re-integrate Taiwan into the Chinese state. President Xi Jinping has already succeeded in doing so with respect to Hong Kong. If Putin’s use of force succeeds in submitting Ukraine to Moscow’s rule, then the Chinese have increased incentive to use force to bring Taiwan under its control.
Going further, a Putin victory would bolster Chinese insistence that its sovereignty extends over the South China Sea, where its military power increasingly approaches parity with the U.S. in that region.