Charles W. King

On April 13th, 2018, the Trump administration bombed a number sites in Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. In the aftermath much has been made of the fact that the United States warned the Russian government that the strikes were incoming. In the current political climate in the U.S. this kind of coordination with Russia is being characterized in some quarters as further evidence in support of the allegations that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Regardless of these allegations, the act of warning the Russian government of the April 13th strikes is not unusual. De-escalation procedures like this are common, and are a specific strategic choice that the United States and other have made in the past for good reason.

Throughout the Korean War and the Vietnam War both North Korean and North Vietnamese forces received substantial aid from the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Both sides maintained that American forces were not engaged with, killing, and being killed by Chinese and Russian forces. This was a fiction agreed upon by all sides, particularly in the air wars over Korea and Vietnam. Many of the pilots were Russian or Chinese, as were the crews and officers of much of North Korea’s and North Vietnam’s air defenses. The American, Chinese, and Soviet governments understood that if they admitted that their pilots were regularly engaged with forces of the opposing super-powers the conflicts would escalate from regional one to global, and likely nuclear, wars. Despite the intense competition between the world powers, this kind of escalation was not something they desired, and the mutually agreed upon fiction allowed that. A famous example of this is illustrated in the theatrical depiction of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days. An American pilot returns from taking pictures of missile sites in Cuba with what are clearly bullet holes in his aircraft, but having received instructions from the White House he jokingly tells his ground crew that he, “Ran into a flock of sparrows.” Admitting he had taken anti-aircraft fire would have precipitated a response that would have escalated the conflict just as the United States and Soviet Union were attempting to reign it in.

Warning rivals or even the targets of incoming attacks is also a long standing de-escalation practice, though not always a successful one. On July 22, 1946, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed. The southern wing of the hotel housed the central offices of the government of the British Mandate of Palestine, the target of the bombing. The attack was carried out by the Irgun, a right-wing militant zionist organization. Attempts were made by the Irgun to warn the British, but what happened remains controversial. What is for certain is that the hotel was not evacuated and ninety-one people were killed. The attempted warnings are nonetheless important for understanding the Irgun’s objectives. The bombing would doubtless be an escalation, but the target was the hotel, a symbol of British rule, rather than the people. By trying to mitigate the loss of life the Irgun attempted to escalate the conflict, but not too much. The destruction of building and other capital expenditures without killing the people who work there remains an important, if difficult practice in the conduct of warfare.

The decisions to inform the Russian government of incoming strikes against chemical weapons facilities in Syria is in keeping with a long-standing practice of de-escalation. Preventing the direct engagement between forces of two global powers in a warzone where they both possess a military presence is difficult but essential. The use of warnings to ensure that attacks destroy capital investments in things like weapons programs without loss of life is a feature of modern warfare along with precisions weapons and advanced surveillance. Warning the Russians of this particular attack demonstrates its limited objectives and the desire to prevent escalation to a conflict between the United States and the Russian Federation.

Charles W. King

Vladimir Putin was recently re-elected for another term as President of the Russian Federation. Egypt held a poll in which the erstwhile opponent of Abel Fattah el-Sisi told reporters that seeing el-Sisi’s name on the ballot he could not help but vote for him. The People’s Republic of China has jettisoned its post-Mao restrictions on ten year terms for President, cementing Xi Jinping’s position as the most powerful Chinese ruler since Mao Zedong. While the latter was not technically an election, it did require the accession of the National People’s Congress. All of these recent events speak to the question of states derive legitimacy in the twenty-first century.

For centuries the divine right of kings was the leading theory of legitimacy in Europe. By the dint of the will of God, the royal houses of England, France, Austria, and many more were the legitimate rules of their domains. In a very real sense both Putin’s Russia and the People’s Republic of China since Deng Xiaoping have rested the legitimacy of their governments on economic prosperity. All of these belie what political scientists consider to be the root of sovereignty; a monopoly of violence.

The crowned heads of Europe, before they claimed the divine right of kings, were feudal warlords. Historically it is after establishing a monopoly of violence over a territory that legitimacy is established. A conqueror imposes their will through violence, and over time legitimates their continued rule and the rule of their successors through the sanctioned use of violence by the state as well as other means. For many states this meant transitioning to constitutional and republican systems.

In democracies that derive from the traditions of Locke and Rousseau sovereignty comes from the consent of the governed.Elections are not only a way for the people to select their representation, but also serve to re-legitimize the state. In countries like Russia and Egypt where elections are not free what purpose do they serve? For decades African and Central Asian dictatorships have used sham elections to prove to the outside world that their rule was legitimate. The Soviet Union used similar elections to legitimize the creation of communist satellite states after World War Two. But in most cases these rigged contests are seen for what they, so they must serve another purpose.

An election is a large and complicated process, taking hundreds or thousands of people to organize. Rigging an election takes even more manpower. The ability to mobilize the people required to have the kind of turn out and margin that re-elected Putin is a clear demonstration of the power of the Russian state and Putin’s control of it. The ability to stage rigged elections is a stand in for more obvious and bloody forms of violence, but at its core it is a form of state violence. Rigged elections like those in Russia and Egypt have not only foreign but domestic audiences. They demonstrate to the population that the state is powerful and organized, and that opposition to that system is futile and dangerous. They are relatively cheap in blood and treasure compared to putting down riots in the streets.

Democracies attempt to put as much distance as possible between their legitimacy and the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence through elections and representative government. It is important to recognize that in the late twentieth and early twenty first century elections can serve another purpose, as a relatively bloodless demonstration of the state’s monopoly of violence.

Charles W. King

At a recent speech on the state of the Russian Federation Russian President Vladimir Putin announced to the world a number of new nuclear weapons. These included not only a new, longer range, intercontinental ballistic missile, but also a long range nuclear torpedo and a cruise missile that is not only capable of carrying a nuclear warhead but uses a nuclear reaction as its method of propulsion. While these weapons may seem fantastical, neither is beyond the scope of current technology. The nuclear torpedo is simply the combination of existing technologies that are already being adapted for underwater drones, and is in fact a much simpler technical problem than what many Western drones are being designed to address. The nuclear powered cruise missile is technology the United States developed as far back as the 1950’s. Engine tests were performed, but not atmospheric flight tests for the same reason the program was ultimately scrapped; the large amount of radioactivity dispersed by the engine. Western defense officials will be wise to take Putin’s statement with some skepticism, it was part of a speech with primarily a domestic Russian audience, but it cannot be discounted that the Russian Federation is developing new strategic weapons.

The United States and the Russian Federation are both investing considerable sums into their strategic weapons, but the difference between the projects being developed demonstrates the differences in American and Russian priorities. The United States’ programs consist primarily of anti-missile technology, smaller & variable yield tactical warheads, and the modernization of existing stockpiles. These projects show that the United States is focusing on the threat of smaller nuclear powers like Iran and North Korea where regional instability increases the risk of conflict, and on the safety and reliability of aging nuclear weapons. These programs will cost the United State significant amounts of money, but they represent a desire to maintain existing deterrence with nuclear powers like Russia and China and increased capability to strike small hardened targets.

In contrast the Russian focus is on new delivery systems. The various capabilities of the three delivery systems mentioned in Putin’s speech are all designed to defeat Western defensive capabilities. They also reveal that there is a profound difference in perception between the U.S. and Russia. While the United States is attempting to maintain the Cold War status quo of Mutually Assured Destruction, Russian development of new delivery systems shows that they believe the status quo has changed significantly and they need new capabilities in order to maintain a credible second strike capacity. This cannot simply be brushed off as Russian paranoia or propaganda for domestic Russian consumption. This kind of investment, at a time when the Russian economy is struggling under sanctions, is indicative of Russian geopolitical concerns.

One of the keys to effective foreign policy and diplomatic relations is to understand that foreign countries have different perceptions of history and current events. The announcement of new delivery systems for nuclear warheads demonstrates that Russian policy makers have a starkly different assessment of the nuclear balance of power than their Western counterparts. No amount of Western assurances that the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems to Poland, Romania, or South Korea will change this view, and attempting to do so would be futile. American policy makers must recognize Russian strategic concerns, then they will be able to effectively engage diplomatically.

Charles W. King

The 2018 Olympic Winter Games began last week in PyeongChang, South Korea. In a reprise of a number of international sporting events in the early 2000’s the North Korean and South Korean delegations marched together under a join flag during the opening ceremony and will field a women’s ice hockey team with players from both North and South Korea. This is a significant event in the simmering international crisis that is the Korean Peninsula, but it is hardly the only event of the games with geopolitical importance. Also competing under a flag that is not their own are one hundred and sixty eight “Olympic Athletes from Russia” (OAR). The Russian Olympic Committee has been sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for its extensive state-sponsored doping program that has been revealed in the wake of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

The Russian government and Vladimir Putin, its President, have been vocal in their criticism of the IOC’s ban on the Russian team, to the surprise of no one. What has been surprising is the reaction in South Korea to the joint participation of North and South Korea. Created in 1990 for the Asian Games, the Korean Unification Flag has been used at a number of sporting events since, including 4 Olympic Games. This time it has received significant push back. It is doubly surprising because the pushback has come from younger, liberal voters in South Korea who to date have overwhelmingly supported Moon Jae-In and his administration’s attempts to negotiate with the increasingly belligerent North Korea. Most of the objections appear to be over the joint hockey team according to polls.

The same polls also indicate a common refrain from the rest of the world; that politics shouldn’t influence sport. This inherently conservative argument is typical of when countries or individuals use sporting events to confront others with ideas or positions they disagree with, and it fails to recognize that sport, international competitions in particular, is and always has been inherently political. Various nations including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have used the Olympic Games to showcase the superiority of their political systems. Tommie Smith and John Carlos used an Olympic medal ceremony in Mexico City in 1968 to protest for civil and human rights in the United States and abroad. Sport is political because competitors are deemed to be the best in their field, held up by society as pinnacles of human achievement and role models for children to emulate. Society cares what prominent athletes believe, say, and do, and that means that sports always make a political statement. Typically that statement favors the status quo, but when prominent athletes take positions on controversial issues there is outcry not because sport is apolitical but because it is inherently conservative.

If the politics of sports typically favors the status quo then why is the unified Korean Olympic team so controversial in South Korea? The unified team received widespread support in previous iterations. The reason is that the demographics of South Korea are changing. South Koreans in their 20’s and 30’s cannot remember at time without a belligerent North without a nuclear program, the increasingly oppose reunification. Just over a third of South Koreans who claimed to be estranged from family in the North by the Korean ware remain alive, and 60% of them are over the age of 80. South Korea is in the middle of its forty years in the desert. When it comes out the other side in a generation or two there may remain little to no support for reunification. The window for Korean reunification is closing and the North knows it. North Korea’s continued pressure on South Korea and its American and Japanese allies is part of a long standing plan to reunify on the North’s terms while reunification is still possible.

Charles W. King

At the height of the Cold War there existed within the Western intelligence community a cadre of analysts who specialized taking whatever their agency could get on events within the Soviet Union—human and signals intelligence, Soviet Propaganda—and attempting to divine the inner workings of the Soviet state. These Kremlin watchers, also called Kremlinologists, used the slightest hints: changes in the order of portraits and standing position overlooking parades, and the arrangement of articles in the part’s newspaper Pravda. Kremlinologists resorted to this kind of piecemeal clues to determine who was currently influential within the Soviet Politburo because getting information out the Soviet Union was extremely difficult, but knowing who was pulling the strings behind the Iron Curtain was tremendously valuable. Knowledge of who was in control of Soviet policy, what their tendencies and beliefs were, and who their rivals were could potentially be the difference between escalating a tense situation and finding a resolution that averted a third World War.

Kremlinology was a high stakes exercise in anthropology, taking what information that could be gleaned from the Soviet Union as a whole to elicit fine detail about the day to day politics of the most powerful men in the Soviet government. The Soviet government did not work like any western government, knowledge of how it did function, which was itself scarce in the West, was treasured knowledge. Even then Kremlinologists often got things wrong, or failed to predict sweeping changes in Soviet policy. The underlying assumption of Kremlinology, that Soviet politics are fundamentally different from Western politics demonstrates how the Anthropologist’s Dilemma can affect policy-making and national security in a number of dangerous ways. Knowledge of the extensive dysfunction of the Soviet Union could lead analysts to distain Soviet methods; conversely there are examples of western experts on the Soviet Union becoming disillusioned with Western liberal democracy and becoming Soviet agents. Both are examples of errors endemic to the field of anthropology, because the core assumption of anthropology is that another society is different than one’s own it becomes exceedingly tempting to categorize that society as inferior or superior. Doing this in academia is problematic; doing it in policy-making is dangerous.

Kremlinology did not disappear with the Soviet Union. The term is still used to describe analysis of the internal politics of the Russian Federation. The most famous use of anthropology by the United States in recent years may be the Human Terrain Teams that were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. These teams ended up being controversial, but they did demonstrate the fundamental value of understanding the society that American and coalition forces were operating in. On the other side of the curtain, it has been repeated many times when attempting to deal with the Soviet Union, Russian Federation, or People’s Republic of China that those governments do not understand the constraints and pressures of democratic political systems. The United States and others will continue to engage in Kremlinology, both of the Kremlin itself, and the general principal of watching the internal politics of foreign powers, but analysts and policy-makers must be cognizant of the assumptions and pitfalls inherent in such endeavors.