Wretchard,
You make a good point about the Russians perceiving that they might have few many military options between the most extreme and most paltry. This is where the decline of Russia’s conventional armed forces and its lack of a professional officer and NCO corps could cause Russia to build more nukes, as they would seem a cheap deterrent in comparison to a truly well-trained and equipped conventional force. But how do you enforce immigration policies along a very long border with the world’s most populous nation using Topol ICBMs? And if Russia thought it could afford to maintain its present stockpile, why is the Kremlin so eager to take up Senator McCain’s offer of even deeper cuts in our respective arsenals? Because they know that they cannot afford to maintain even the nukes they have now.
The American and British conservatives presently arguing that Russia is engaged in some huge military buildup (perhaps, as Tom Barnett charges, to justify building more F-22s and nuclear attack submarines while the ground pounders need more trucks and men) are not doing much for their credibility. In the case of the most hardcore Russophobes in D.C., their views of Russia were essentially frozen in 1984 with some blend of the contempt for the basket case of the 90s thrown in. They had the expectation that Russia was supposed to sit back and say nothing as we cut it out of energy deals and influence in its own back yard. When the Chinese exploit a big offshore oil find in the Straits of Florida and the Russians develop Venezuela’s heavy oil fields with Canadian assistance, perhaps we’ll feel a tiny twinge of what Moscow felt in the late 90s when American oil men were striking black gold in Azerbaijan and sending it away from Russia.
While threatening to point nukes at specific targets in Europe is a hostile gesture, in the recent past this crowd has viewed any reassertion of Russian power as automaticlly a threat to the West. For example, when the Russians played hardball and cut off Ukraine’s gas supplies in 2006, this was viewed as a dire threat, rather than one country getting tiring of subsidizing cheap gas for another – heck, even Belarus was overnight turned into another victim of the mean old Kremlin rather than a country that needed to get off the dole.
At the end of the day, the weak Russia of the 90s that allowed Chechnya to become a playground for international terrorists was a far greater threat to the West than the Russia of today.
