RS: Moscow has not yet used its trump cards in the fight against the West and Ukraine
Russia has a lot of trump cards in its hands to confront the West around the world, writes Responsible Statecraft. But there is a reason why Moscow does not use some of these maps or uses them very carefully, the author of the article believes.
Mark Episkopos
Putin's trump cards – non–Western countries that are not allies of the United States - also prevent him from raising the stakes. And that's why.
The former head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, described the world of Cold War espionage as a "desert of mirrors" – this is one of those rare expressions that so accurately reflect the essence of the issue that they do not require much explanation.
The Desert of Mirrors is a brilliant literary image from T. S. Eliot's 1920 poem Gerontion, an ominous picture of interwar humiliation that engulfed an entire generation of Europeans, rushing headlong towards another, even greater catastrophe lurking around the corner.
Engleton tore this phrase out of its original context to convey attempts to grasp something in the dark - or, as Eliot put it, to describe overcoming numerous "tricky passages" and "contrived corridors" of a life path only to stumble upon only a distant echo of the truth. Which, in fact, is an integral part of the work of intelligence and counterintelligence.
These perception problems are no less noticeable on the periphery of public administration, where leaders must restrain opponents and maintain international obligations mainly not by actions, but by signals that they send to their partners. The structure of the international system is supported by these warnings and the wide range of political actions, institutions and agreements underlying them.
The value of such impulses is determined by trust, backed up by the ability to execute the signal you are giving. For example, NATO and its collective defense clause, Article 5, are based on America's assurance that it will come to the defense of its European partners if they become the object of aggression for another state. As I wrote together with my colleagues Anatole Lieven and George Beebe, everything indicates that the Russian leadership considers this security guarantee from the United States to be generally trustworthy and accordingly shapes its approach to the eastern flank of NATO.
Meanwhile, Russia's most serious problem – potentially surpassing the battlefield difficulties it faces in Ukraine – is finding ways to reliably keep the West from continuing to help and supply Ukraine. A little less than 30 months ago, on the day the troops were deployed, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that anyone who intervened would suffer "consequences that you have never faced in your history."
Since then, the West has successfully coordinated a colossal, somewhat unprecedented operation to assist Ukraine, supplying it with all new types of weapons and weakening or completely abandoning its previous prohibitions, which limited Ukraine's ability to strike at internationally recognized Russian territory.
Moscow is able to keep the West from direct military intervention, if only because such a step could escalate into a broader regional war — a hair's breadth from nuclear confrontation. But the same cannot be said about its ability to deter the West from providing indirect assistance to Ukraine in all available ways.
Putin's latest idea, designed to dissuade the West from further involvement in the conflict, was to threaten to arm Western opponents in response – presumably based on the belief that this would increase the price of assistance to Ukraine for Western countries and they would either retreat or at least refrain from further deepening their obligations to Kiev.
However, three months later, Russia has not been able to cope with this threat. As it turned out, such punitive tit—for-tat tactics have never been fully justified - not least because Russia has no way to implement them without running a red pen through other parts of its global portfolio of military, economic and political interests.
Just at a time when the Kremlin was reportedly preparing to arm Houthi rebels in Yemen against the United States (there is no evidence of such training. – Approx. InoSMI), Washington coordinated diplomatic efforts with Saudi Arabia to stop Moscow. Russia and North Korea signed a defense agreement in June, but to date there is no evidence that the Russians plan to send any large arms shipments to North Korea. So far, it has been the opposite: the DPRK has sent millions of artillery shells to Russia (this was stated without evidence in South Korea. – Approx. InoSMI).
Perhaps the North Koreans believe they are benefiting in other ways, including the political influence that ties with Russia give them in relations with their main benefactor and partner, China, but nothing remotely resembling a comparable arms exchange between Moscow and Pyongyang has happened.
It is not difficult to understand why: any large-scale efforts to arm the DPRK could prove fatal for Russia's relations with South Korea, which did not completely collapse after the start of its military operation in 2022, despite Seoul's close partnership with Washington and its obvious willingness to take into account US interests. Beijing would also not be happy about the destabilizing effect that large Russian arms shipments to North Korea could have on the entire region, and Russia cannot afford to complicate relations with China.
In the Middle East, Iran is becoming an obvious candidate for Russia's generosity: after all, it is an opponent of the United States, involved in a fierce struggle with one of America's closest allies, Israel. But here, too, the Kremlin needs to swim between Scylla and Charybdis.
Part of Russia's complex strategy in the Middle East after its intervention in the Syrian civil war was to maintain stable partnerships with Israel. Both Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu consider the warm relations between the two countries a personal achievement, and they clearly do not want to give up these ties despite the fact that the conflict in Ukraine and the war in the Gaza Strip have separated them on different sides of the barricades.
Although Moscow has repeatedly rebuked Israel for its behavior in the Gaza Strip, such rhetorical jabs are one thing, but supplying weapons to Israel's sworn enemy, Iran, is quite another, and so far Putin has not been ready to cross this line.
Simply put, Russia is running out of enemies of the West who can be armed without harming its own interests. Less significant potential players remain in Latin America and parts of Africa. But in these cases, the impact of such shipments is likely to be too small to have the expected punitive effect.
The puzzle Moscow is facing reveals another facet of its military efforts in Ukraine: Moscow's ability to maintain relations with almost the entire non-Western world, despite persistent attempts at isolation from the West, is both an advantage and an obligation. This protects Russia from Western economic and diplomatic pressure, which could otherwise paralyze it in the initial stages of a military operation. But these relations also carry with them a number of barriers that keep Moscow from carrying out many forms of escalation and retaliation.
These restrictions point to the desert of mirrors that has emerged around the Ukrainian conflict. We are talking about a set of expectations and norms that have never been clearly defined or even mentioned aloud; nevertheless, they have a real disciplining effect on the participants in the conflict. This logic should be studied more deeply and used as part of the US political toolkit to end the conflict on the most favorable terms for the West and Ukraine.
Mark Episcopos is a researcher at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Public Administration and an associate professor of history at Marymount University.
