Coyne: Illusions shed as war has come

A file picture taken from a video released on Jan. 4, 2014 by Islamic State's al-Furqan Media allegedly shows Islamic State fighters marching at an undisclosed location. Photo: AFP PHOTO/ AL-FURQAN MEDIA/Files

For the democracies, it is a time for shedding illusions. After a decade of bloodshed we were weary and sick of war. We thought that if we brought our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq the people they were fighting would go home, too; that if we did not call it a “war on terror,” there would not be one; that if we stopped fighting the enemy, the enemy would stop fighting us.

But it turns out not to have been so. The advocates of withdrawal who told us these wars were unwinnable — or at any rate, they asked, how will we know when we have won? — were not, we can see now, pessimists. They were the optimists. They assumed we had a choice — as if we were not condemned to decades of struggle whether we wished it or not. We thought because we’d killed or captured a few of their top commanders, that the forces of global jihad were “on the run.” Islamic State has taught us differently.

We thought, in the same way, that a “reset” of relations would put things right with Russia. We had failed to understand her wounded pride, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse; we had provoked her, with our defensive alliances and our forward missile defence bases. We denied admission to both Georgia and Ukraine — precisely the countries Russia later invaded.

Earlier we had thought that the ties of commerce, our mutual interest in trade, would make war less likely, admitting Russia to the G8 to clinch the deal. When that proved a false hope, we thought we could use those commercial ties to our advantage, deploying economic sanctions in place of military force — if not to reverse the aggressor’s gains, as we’d first hoped, then at least to deter it from advancing further.

But that turns out not to have been so, either. Crimea has been followed by Donetsk and Luhansk. Our warnings have been ignored; our bluffs have been called. Economically, we need Russia, its oil and gas in particular, more than it needs us. Or at least, some of us do, which is enough. Sanctions, when they came, were late, spotty, and grudgingly applied. It was only this week that France agreed to stop selling it warships.

Ukrainian army soldiers ride a tank on a road near where pro-Russian separatists fired heavy artillery, on the outskirts of the key southeastern port city of Mariupol, on Sept. 5, 2014. PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

We have done all we could, in short, to avoid war, in the Middle East and eastern Europe. And war has come. We retreated from war, and war followed us. And so we are beginning to shed our illusions. There are some threats, we are learning again, that cannot be placated. They must either be deterred or destroyed. That will take money and time and lives, and there is no use pretending otherwise. President Obama’s speech in Estonia this week, in which he committed the United States, in the most explicit terms any U.S. president has yet used, to defend the countries on NATO’s eastern flank against invasion, is a watershed in this regard.

But we should not replace the illusions of peace with the illusions of war. No two situations are alike, and the kind of threats we have faced in the past are not the kinds we necessarily face today. The very distinction between military power, the traditional preserve of nation-states, and the asymmetric power of terrorist groups has eroded. In Islamic State, we see a terrorist group with many of the attributes of a state, including the ability to conduct sustained, open-field military operations. And in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we see a state adopting many of the tactics of asymmetric warfare, using stealth, lies and proxies to achieve its ends in place of overwhelming force.

This has confounded NATO and presents the alliance with not one but two strategic questions: not only where to draw “the line in the sand” but how. To the first, the answer is: We draw the line around NATO. As an alliance we should keep our promises, but we should not make promises we cannot keep — and we should not keep promises we haven’t made.

Perhaps we should have admitted Ukraine to NATO before; perhaps we should yet. But until we do, we cannot credibly commit to its defence. Deterrence, to be credible, must be backed by public opinion, and public opinion, to be willing to go to war, must be prepared well in advance. To go to war for Ukraine now would be to draw the line after the fact rather than before. Public opinion would not stand for it; knowing that, Russia would be inclined to call our bluff, with the most disastrous consequences.

Peshmerga fighters ride an armed military vehicle while guarding a post in the strategic Jalawla area, a gateway to Baghdad, as battles with Islamic State jihadists continue on Aug. 25, 2014. ALI AL-SAADI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

That doesn’t mean we can’t assist Ukraine in other ways: arms, financial aid and so on. But an all-out military commitment — meaning troops on the ground — will have to be reserved for NATO members. But here we run into the second question. How do we draw a line so that it is clear to everyone when it has been crossed?

Again, public opinion is crucial. Deterrence depends upon the tripwires being highly visible, not only to leave any potential aggressor in no doubt as to where they are, but also to mobilize public opinion at home. A full-scale invasion, of the kind we remember from history, with tanks rolling across the border, is one thing: The shock of it would be sure to raise the necessary alarm. But what if the line is crossed in a hundred subtler, less visible ways, as in Ukraine? The kidnapping Friday of an Estonian counter-intelligence officer by unknown Russians is an ominous portent.

This is the dilemma that now confronts NATO. The rapid response force to which it committed this week is a good start: By deploying it at the first sign of trouble, for example in the event of any “spontaneous” uprisings in ethnic-Russian areas, we would draw the line anew: With our own troops in harm’s way, the tripwires would be made visible again. But this, too, will require a long-term commitment, against a patient foe. We should be under no illusions.