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Old 04-25-2018, 06:45 AM
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Arrow Putin’s retaliation to US strikes on Syria will be cold and calculated

Putin’s retaliation to US strikes on Syria will be cold and calculated
by Nikita Vladimirov - April 24, 2018 - 11:44 AM
RE: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...and-calculated

Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive tone toward the West, the Russian response to the U.S. missile strikes in Syria will continue to be calm, composed, and calculated.

Gone are the threats of a direct retaliation against Washington and its allies that emanated from the highest military officials in Moscow. Gone are the immediate fears of a seemingly unavoidable confrontation that could further plunge the region into deadly uncertainty.

“We told [the U.S.] where our red lines were, including the geographical red lines,” Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, announced on Friday. “The results have shown that they haven’t crossed those lines.”

On a fundamental level, the stunning change in Moscow’s tone seems to demonstrate that Russia’s militant posture often packs no punch to justify its rhetoric. Putin’s actions, however, are also dictated by the precarious nature of the Syrian conflict that leaves no room for geopolitical mistakes or careless stratagems that will undermine Russia’s long-term goal of reclaiming strategic parity with its Cold War rival.

From the unmarked uniforms of mysterious soldiers in Crimea to the subtle hint of Russian engineering in North Korean nukes, every major move to advance the Kremlin’s tactical objectives stems from a foundation of careful, meticulous planning.

The recent war of words between the U.S. and Russia, therefore, was not only a test of Putin’s willingness to defend Syrian President Bashar Assad.


“In general the Kremlin seemed to go overboard in its threats of response before the attack took place,” William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, told the Washington Examiner.

“I think the Kremlin is probably quite relieved that the U.S., British, and French response was as limited as it was, very specifically to chemical weapons targets, not to delivery systems … or to governmental facilities of other kind, ” he continued. “So as a result, the Kremlin seems to be more careful about its response.”

If the conflict in Syria does not escalate, Putin and Assad will have a definite advantage in achieving their regional objectives. For that precise reason, the Russian president has no strategic incentive to further test the Americans by baiting the Pentagon into additional military operations.

A greater show of force in Syria is also likely to give the White House an edge in negotiating with Kim Jong Un through strength. And given that Trump already claimed victory with his “mission accomplished” tweet, Putin will see no practical value in convincing the U.S. president of the opposite.

While Moscow will certainly continue to stoke domestic support with anti-American propaganda, the Kremlin will be determined to provide more structural support to Assad and attempt to derail efforts to denuclearize North Korea. In order to successfully reach these goals, Putin will strive to swiftly adapt to changing geopolitical circumstances – a tactic that has always made Russia a strategic threat to the U.S.

“After the Magnitsky Act was passed, none of us in Washington expected that the response would be a ban on adoption of Russian children by Americans,” Courtney, who served as a U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the U.S.-Soviet commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, told the Washington Examiner. “The Kremlin is too unpredictable.”

Putin’s attempts to unbalance the U.S., however, can do little to compensate for Russia’s rather predictable economic underperformance and the punishing effect of the recently-imposed sanctions. By violently reacting to the missile strikes in Syria, Moscow would certainly risk yet another wave of economic countermeasures that would further cripple the already struggling Russian markets.

“Another factor, though, was the shock in the Russian stock market after the April 6 U.S. sanctions,” Courtney explained. “It surprised the Kremlin how much economic impact those sanctions would have.”

According to the former ambassador, the economy “is the soft underbelly of Russia” that could force the Kremlin to be “a little more restrained in the future than it has been in the past” despite its shrill rhetoric.

In addition to direct sanctions, Russian experts also fear that Trump’s new import tariffs will damage its metal manufacturers, causing billions of dollars in industry losses, the Moscow Times reported.

The struggling Russian economy provides Washington with a great opportunity to pressure Moscow at the most crucial time of the decade. Taming Putin’s geopolitical influence, therefore, will greatly improve U.S. chances of striking a landmark deal with North Korea – an objective that many believed to be entirely unattainable.

About the writer: Nikita Vladimirov (@nikvofficial) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is founder of Inside Geopolitics and also an investigative reporter for Campus Reform.
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