Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Russia versus the West: Facing the long‐term challenge

2022; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ecaf.12535

1468-0270

Michael Ben‐Gad,

Astronomical and nuclear sciences

In late February 2022, the prospect of a quick and efficient decapitation of Ukraine's political leadership, followed by the installation of a puppet government in Kyiv, was greeted in Western capitals with a certain grim resignation. Western governments might protest and impose limited sanctions on Russia, taking care that none would inflict an undue burden on their own economies, but nothing could be done to prevent Ukraine – along with Belarus, Moldova and perhaps Kazakhstan – being reintegrated into a resurrected Russian Empire. Over time, relations between Russia and the West would thaw, at least until the next crisis. That was the pattern that followed the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the invasion of Crimea and the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. That explains why sanctions were not imposed to the maximum extent from the start, but instead were gradually escalated as the war dragged on. Now, thanks to a combination of Russian incompetence and Ukrainian heroism, the West has exchanged its initial pessimism for a growing sense of euphoria. Could Ukraine actually prevail and force Russia to withdraw? Could Russia's military debacle prove so embarrassing, and the sanctions so crippling, that the autocratic regime President Putin has created is forced from power? Unlikely. Russia has not exhausted all the brutal means it still has available to achieve its ends, including high-altitude bombing and the use of non-conventional weapons. Whatever Putin's personal fate, the regime is likely to remain in power for years to come. In the years after 2014, the Obama, Trump and Biden US administrations, in succession, limited both the type and quantity of weapons that Ukraine could receive from the US. The UK, too, resisted sending weapons lest it impede relations with Russia. Only now is Ukraine receiving in sufficient volume the kinds of weapons that, had they been provided before, might have deterred Russia's aggression. A no-fly zone could help, but it would entail Western pilots becoming engaged in direct combat with their Russian counterparts over the skies of Ukraine, and with Russian air defences – perhaps including those stationed in Russia itself. Could this escalate to the use of nuclear weapons? Almost certainly not, but the key here is the word 'almost'. During the Cold War the US government lavishly funded the development of game theory to help inform its strategy for confronting the Soviet Union. One of its insights is that bad outcomes can emerge precisely when all actors behave rationally. Confronting Russia's immediate aggression has limits. So, attention must turn to confronting the long-term threat from Russia. That means relearning lessons from the history of the last century, particularly its two world wars. It also means re-engaging with ideas about deterrence – perhaps forgotten in recent years – derived from formal models of strategic behaviour developed to curtail Soviet expansionism without escalating to nuclear war.11 See Erickson et al. (2013), discussing the work of Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling and others associated with the RAND Corporation and its efforts to provide US policymakers with decision-making tools: "The Cold War is long over, and the debate over Cold War rationality ended with it – more or less" (2013, p. 183). These lessons and ideas will also need to be applied to the growing threat from China. Policymakers are naturally attracted to the flexibility afforded by the strategic ambiguity that currently typifies vague US commitments to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression. Yet it was this kind of strategic ambiguity that proved so calamitous during the summer of 1914. In the six weeks following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, as the continental powers began to mobilise, the determination of British leaders, particularly foreign secretary Edward Grey, to keep all options open to the very last moment – coupled with the human tendency for wishful thinking – led to disaster. Germany went to war convinced that Britain would remain neutral, France convinced that Britain would join the conflict on its side (MacMillan, 2013, chs 17, 20). NATO's Article 5 means that de jure, an attack on Poland or the Baltic states will be treated as an attack on all NATO members. Yet, until recently, with so few NATO alliance troops deployed on its eastern frontier, the Russians could be forgiven for treating this as a policy of de facto strategic ambiguity. Suppose sometime in the future Russia were to test NATO's resolve, not with the type of large invasion it is attempting in Ukraine, but with a small, bloodless incursion across an undefended frontier, to seize the Russian-speaking town of Narva in Estonia (see Bed-Gad, 2014). Should the Russians expect their territory to be bombed or invaded in response? And if so, with which forces? Threats that are not credible are what game theorists call 'cheap talk', and are unlikely to be heeded. During the Cold War Western allies did not rely on theoretical commitments, but instead kept hundreds of thousands of troops at the ready, close to likely invasion routes in West Germany. With the Russian army busy in Ukraine, now would be the time to create a large and permanent defensive force along NATO's eastern perimeter. By similar logic, Finland's and Sweden's accession to NATO membership creates a fait accompli – exploiting the idea, also derived from game theory, of first-mover advantage. Of course, NATO cannot deploy forces on its eastern flank that it does not have. The second component of any effective deterrence is that European countries rebuild their own military capabilities rather than rely on the United States. Might Donald Trump, had he won a second term as president, have withdrawn the US from the NATO alliance? Barak Obama expressed, perhaps more diplomatically, many of the same concerns about the United States being overextended abroad, and the same frustrations about Europeans' unwillingness to pay for their own defence. President Biden's decision to withdraw the last US troops from Afghanistan and pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran at nearly any cost are motivated by the desire to disentangle the United States from foreign commitments, to shift resources to domestic spending, and to focus its foreign policy on preventing China from dominating the Pacific. Europeans should pay heed. President Biden's plans for military spending in fiscal year 2023 belie his hawkish statements about supporting Ukraine and rhetoric about rebuilding the transatlantic alliance. While spending on US national defence will increase from $796.1 billion to $813.3 billion, that 2.16 per cent nominal increase represents a significant cut in real terms, given that inflation is likely to be well above 5 per cent. Nor has the war in Ukraine affected the shift in focus from fighting land wars or counter-insurgencies in Europe and the Middle East to an emphasis on controlling the sea and airspace in the Pacific. Across the three military departments, the Army's share of spending will decline from 29.7 per cent in 2021 to 27.2 per cent in 2023, mostly to benefit the Air Force, whose share increases from 35 per cent to 36.4 per cent (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), 2022). Given its poor performance so far in Ukraine, it is tempting to think that Russia's military no longer poses a threat. This is a mistake. First, some of the failure stems from Russia's decision to deviate from its own doctrine to use maximum force from the outset, in the mistaken belief that the Ukrainian government would collapse and the Ukrainian army would not resist. That is an error the Russians are unlikely to repeat elsewhere. Russian soldiers are also likely confused about their mission and why they are being asked to kill people with whom they share a common civilisation. Once they crossed the border, they found no evidence to support Putin's accusations of genocide being committed against ethnic Russians (indeed, many Ukrainians, including the President, are native Russian speakers). Will they be so tentative next time? Expect not just Russia, but China, Iran, North Korea and others to implement changes to their force structures and military doctrines in response to lessons learned in Ukraine. The West will need to absorb lessons as well, and implementing them will cost money. To take but one example, during the 1990s American military planners began to implement the 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA) – a shift in emphasis away from large heavy-armour formations in favour of forces operating from lightly armoured vehicles equipped with long-range, over-the-horizon, non-line-of-sight weapons designed to destroy the enemy from a distance. At the start of its invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US Army had yet to complete the planned transformation. That delay was fortuitous, as the strategy could work only if commanders had instantaneous access to aerial and satellite images, and that technology nearly always failed. The success of the invasion (with so few US casualties) was entirely effectuated by heavy armour units that the US Army had not yet transformed (Ben-Gad et al., 2020). This experience led to a partial reassessment of the RMA doctrine, and in recent years, as counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been winding down, the United States has increased the number of its armoured brigades from 9 to 12, at the expense of lighter infantry and Stryker brigades.22 Stryker brigades are medium-weight forces. "Medium-weight forces seek to combine the mobility and firepower of heavy forces with the deployability of light forces" (Vick et al., 2002, p. xvi, n. 3). They are based on the eight-wheeled Stryker armoured personnel carrier. Yet now the heavy armour that proved so decisive in Iraq appears very vulnerable to a new generation of anti-tank missiles in Ukraine. In 2009 Israel began fitting its tanks, and later its armoured personnel carriers, with 'Trophy', an active protection system that can intercept such missiles. In 2021 the United States finished outfitting the M1 Abrams in four of its armoured brigades with Trophy, and Germany and Britain have both signed deals to instal the system on their main battle tanks. Western militaries can easily afford to do this – at less than a million dollars apiece, these systems raise the cost of a modern tank by no more than 20 per cent. Yet the extensive use of relatively inexpensive Turkish-made drones, both in Ukraine and in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, means that now any vehicle that carries soldiers, even miles from the front line, is vulnerable to attack. Protecting tens or hundreds of thousands of them from this threat will be very expensive. NATO members have long consoled themselves with the thought that Russia's economy, smaller than that of South Korea or Canada and only slightly larger than Brazil's or Australia's, could at best sustain levels of military spending not much higher than what each of the three large West European economies spends alone. Calculated at market exchange rates, Russia spent $66.5 billion on defence in 2017 (compared with $605.8 billion for the US). France spent nearly as much as Russia, $60.7 billion, while the UK spent $46.6 billion and Germany $45.6 billion. However, these comparisons do not account for differences in costs, particularly wage costs, which vary greatly between Russia and Western countries. Adjusted for military purchasing power parity, the numbers look very different. Russia spent in that same year the equivalent of $206.5 billion, whereas France spent $80.33 billion, the UK $57.6 billion and Germany $54.7 billion, for a total of $192.7 billion (Robertson, 2021). One might argue that, even without the United States, NATO as a whole spends more than Russia, but it is hard to imagine how much firepower smaller countries such as Portugal, Denmark or Belgium can deploy eastwards. And of course, the dollar figures tell only part of the story. Consider what Germany's past spending actually bought. In 2018, out of an already small force of 128 Eurofighter jets, the Luftwaffe had only four that were combat-ready, and all six of the German navy's submarines were disabled at the same time. Four years earlier army units on manoeuvres were mounting broomsticks on their tanks, painted black to simulate missing machine guns. There are two reasons why the threat of economic sanctions failed to deter Putin from invading Ukraine. First, as mentioned above, he assumed the war would end quickly and the sanctions would be limited in scope. Second, even if he could have anticipated the much harsher sanctions Russia now faces, he considered the pain worth enduring, given the historical importance of what he set out to achieve – a Slavic Anschluss to reconstitute much of the old Russian Empire. This is not to say that the sanctions are pointless. Even if many of Russia's non-Western trade partners do not cooperate with the West's sanctions regime, they will eventually deny Russia the foreign currency inflows it relies upon to pay for vital imports, particularly if sanctions are extended to stop gas exports to Europe (there is currently no infrastructure to send the gas from west Siberia elsewhere). Also, though since 2014 Russia has successfully reduced its reliance on imported food, it will take many years before it can produce the aircraft parts or microchips it needs. That will impede any efforts to rebuild Russia's now-degraded military capabilities. Yet sanctions can accomplish only so much. There is little evidence, based on the experience of sanctions imposed on other rogue states, that they will lead the Kremlin's inner circle – Putin's security chiefs and/or the oligarchs – to remove Putin from power. Focusing on the latter, the oligarchs care nothing about the Donbas or Crimea and had nothing to gain from this war – yet they had no power to stop it. Furthermore, while efforts by Western governments to freeze or seize the foreign assets of Russian citizens, including the oligarchs, are meant to complement sanctions, the two – economic sanctions and the freezing of assets – may actually work at cross-purposes. That's because seizing oligarchs' wealth at this moment, rather than simply preventing them from repatriating it back to Russia, helps Russia's central bank in its efforts to preserve foreign currency and support the rouble by deterring more capital flight. The oligarchs' wealth derives from the period when communism collapsed and shares in state assets could be acquired at a fraction of their value, either through forgery and the intimidation of ordinary shareholders, or directly from the state through rigged auctions administered by corrupt government officials. To survive the thuggish mafia-like atmosphere that prevailed in Russia after the USSR collapsed meant being either a veteran of the security services or, more often, skilled in cultivating close links to them through bribery. Yet the corrupt provenance of their wealth is not the reason oligarchs choose to invest so much of it abroad. No one understands better than they do the precarious nature of wealth in a country without the rule of law, where the courts exist merely to legitimise the leader's arbitrary rule. Perhaps, one day, Western countries may need to consider the moral imperative to extradite the oligarchs and return their stolen billions back to a newly peaceful and democratic Russia. Until then, the state corruption that enables them and others to loot and exfiltrate resources from their own country is a strategic weakness the West should leverage. The media's obsession with Russia's oligarchs often says less about the oligarchs themselves, the corrupt ways they acquired their money and the vulgar ways they spend it (yachts, mansions, planes, football clubs, young girlfriends), and more about the envy and prurience of some Western journalists. Yes, there is plenty of evidence that oligarchs have attempted to use their wealth to influence policymakers, particularly in the UK. However, it seems that most of these lobbying efforts have been aimed at protecting themselves, rather than – as perhaps Putin might intend – promoting the interests of the Russian state. No matter how distasteful they are, what the world needs is more, not fewer, images of Roman Abramovich and his counterparts enjoying their yachts – preferably conveyed to Russian soldiers now sleeping rough in muddy ditches in the Donbas. The flight of financial capital can hamper Russian ambitions in the years to come, but if this is to be a generational struggle, a second cold war, the flight of human capital will be more consequential for far longer. Given the growing atmosphere of fear and repression, it is impossible to gauge how many Russians truly support the war or believe the Kremlin's outlandish propaganda. What we do know is that those who have fled to Armenia, Georgia and Turkey because they oppose the war are overwhelmingly young and well-educated. Nothing points to Putin's receding vision of the future more than his talk about cleansing Russia by spitting out these traitors 'like gnats'. If Putin wants to rid his country of its most productive citizens, Western policymakers should ask themselves what they can do to help. And this need not be a burden. Economies grow when they absorb new workers. Wages may decline temporarily (though not by much), but immigration also induces more investment. On average, natives benefit on a per-capita basis, because the small losses they suffer in wages are more than offset by (also small) increases in the value of the capital they own, whether that takes the form of residential property or shares in a company (Ben-Gad, 2004). This is what economists call an 'immigration surplus' – a small increase in average income for the population that absorbs new immigrants. True, immigration can exacerbate inequality, particularly if the immigrants compete for work in the low-skilled end of the labour market (Ben-Gad, 2006). But skilled immigrants are different. They compete for work with the well-paid, and so reduce inequality while at the same time paying lots of taxes during the many decades they work (particularly if they arrive when they're still young). Skilled work also complements capital more than unskilled work—the much larger rise in the value of native-owned capital generated by skilled immigrants means a bigger immigration surplus (Ben-Gad, 2008). Immigrants at the highest end of the skill distribution, those likely to work in research and development, are better still, as they make workers other than themselves more productive, accelerating economic growth (Ehrlich & Kim, 2015). Scientists fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s not only drove innovation in the US directly through their own work, but increased the productivity of younger scientists who collaborated with them (Moser et al., 2014). This is the logic that drives the move towards points-based immigration policies in Australia, Canada and the UK, which assign high weights to PhDs in STEM disciplines. The importance of human capital in fostering economic growth, particularly when applied to R&D, is the reason the US government does not cap the number of H1-B skilled worker visas that its universities can sponsor. By the same logic, could the flight of human capital from Russia impede its scientific achievement and economic growth for years to come? Once again, the experience of Germany in the 1930s is instructive. The expulsion of Jews from the professions had long-term effects on German educational attainment (Akbulut-Yuksel & Yuksel, 2015). The negative impact on the productivity of German PhD students in mathematics generated by the expulsion of Jewish mathematicians from German universities between 1933 and 1934 (18.3 per cent of all mathematics professors were dismissed) had measurable negative effects that lasted into the 1980s (Waldinger, 2010). Western countries cannot take in everyone who might want to emigrate from Russia, particularly now when they may need to prioritise the absorption of millions of Ukrainian refugees. They can, however, absorb some of them. The Russian government currently maintains and funds 29 highly prestigious institutions designated as National Research Universities (NRUs). Their graduates are meant to become the country's scientific elite. How many of them might welcome the opportunity to enjoy a more prosperous and freer life in the West? Offering long-term work visas to anyone under the age of 40 (along with spouses and children) who has completed a PhD at an NRU in a STEM field is also a way to counter the Kremlin's assertions that the West is rife with anti-Russian racism. Russia could return to Soviet-era policies and limit travel abroad. But that would be an admission of failure no amount of propaganda could obfuscate. No one, not even the most zealous communists in East Germany, believed the claim that the purpose of the Berlin wall was to keep Westerners out. One might also wonder how many young Russians might opt not to pursue a scientific career if it meant losing their freedom to travel. The West has been far more unified than we could have hoped, but that unity will be tested in the months and years to come. From Madrid the magnitude of the threat posed by an expansionist Russia looks very different from the way it does in Warsaw. European countries also differ in terms of their reliance on Russia for energy. Norway is the world's third largest exporter of natural gas; Hungary imports most of the gas it uses from Russia. Serious policy differences between Europe and the US may also emerge over time. Europe as a whole is simultaneously more dependent on Russian energy and more threatened by its reckless behaviour. In the past that condition has led mainland Europe to seek greater accommodation with Russia, while the US and the UK have typically emphasised deterrence. The US will continue to shift its attention towards the Pacific and the perceived threat to its interests from China. For the Europeans, limiting China's support for Russia's war in Ukraine will take precedence over the fate of Taiwan, or the Uighurs in Xingang, or the health of US alliances with its partners in East Asia. Before the conflict Russia demanded that NATO withdraw troops and weapons from its eastern members that joined during the two enlargements in 1999 and 2004. At the same time, Putin's demands from Ukraine have been inconsistent. Most notably, Putin has repeated since as early as 2008 that Ukraine is 'not a real nation state', and since August 2014 that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Three days before the invasion, he stated that "modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia" (Putin, 2022) – a clear declaration that Ukraine should be abolished as a sovereign state and (re)incorporated into Russia. Yet at other times the goal has seemed narrower. Specifically, after the invasion had begun, Putin suggested that if its military capitulated quickly Ukraine could retain its formal sovereignty, but with the 'Nazi' regime replaced with one controlled by Moscow. Now that the war is not going as Putin expected, which of these different outcomes will he demand to end the conflict? One theory of how wars terminate divides regimes into three categories: democracies, dictatorships, and mixed regimes which are dominated by a large 'in group' that applies moderate repression to maintain control (Goemans, 2000). In democratic regimes, even a moderate military setback can force a leader from office. However, deposed leaders have the option to either stay in politics as members of the opposition in the hopes of returning to power, or enjoy a peaceful retirement. In dictatorships, loss of power means prison or execution, but internal opposition is so weak, only massive military losses that lead to externally imposed regime change can unseat leaders. Leaders of mixed regimes face the worst of both worlds. They are replaced if military campaigns go badly, and they face a bleak personal future when forced from office. Hence, once a conflict begins to go wrong, they have no incentive to cut their losses. Instead they 'gamble for redemption' – engage in ever riskier behaviour in the hope of achieving some turnaround in their fortunes. Such a turnaround is certainly possible. The Russians have the resources and strategic depth to suffer any number of reversals and still prevail; Ukraine does not. In a protracted war, Russia could conceivably return its forces to the area near Kyiv, conquer the capital and even march westwards towards Lviv. There is no conceivable scenario where the Ukrainians conquer Moscow and march eastward to conquer Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.33 Or liberate it. Russia's Pacific coast, the so-called Green Triangle or Green Ukraine, was largely settled by Ukrainians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the Russian Empire expanded eastwards. During the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution there was an abortive attempt to create an independent Ukrainian state in the region – a sort of Donbas in reverse (see Kubijovyc, 1984, p. 857). Ukrainian President Zelensky has more or less conceded that Ukraine will not join NATO. There are hints emanating from Moscow that this, along with territorial concessions that would formally cede both Crimea and the Donbas to Russia, might be enough to end the war. The Ukrainians could be forgiven for treating these offers with scepticism. Paradoxically, it could be that only if Putin truly is a dictator, rather than head of a loose coalition of ex-KGB siloviki (strongmen) and oligarchs, might he be willing to give up his maximalist demands and accept compromise rather than escalate the conflict further. Russia's war with Ukraine in 2022 has so far followed a pattern remarkably similar to Stalin's assault on Finland in 1939. Analysis of that conflict may suggest the type of cruel choices the Ukrainians may yet face. First, then as now, there were demands for territorial concessions, along with the demand that Finland ally itself with the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, as in Ukraine, there was preparation for regime change – according to the Soviet timetable, after a mere 12 days of fighting a new communist government would be installed (Reiter, 2009, ch. 7). Two months after Germany launched its war against Poland with a false flag operation, the Soviets did the same in Finland, invading on 30 November. Vastly outnumbered, the Finns nonetheless imposed enormous losses on the Red Army – anywhere from 250,000 to a million dead – at the cost of 25,000 Finnish lives (Reiter, 2009). The war ended just over three months later, as the Soviets recovered from their early setbacks and began to overwhelm Finnish defences. British and French promises of assistance to Finland, including the promise of 150 bomber planes, failed to materialise (Reiter, 2009). Finland was forced to cede 9 per cent of its territory, including its second largest city, Viipuri, and agreed not to join any anti-Soviet alliance. Under the circumstances, did this count as a Finnish victory? On the one hand, given the strength of Finland's resistance, Stalin was forced to concede that he could not achieve his original war aims. On the other hand, new Soviet demands soon followed, and in 1941 Finland joined Germany's war against the USSR. A new treaty in 1944 saw more Finnish territorial concessions, and though Stalin never succeeded in imposing a communist regime on Finland, the treaty gave the Soviets a high degree of control over both its foreign policy and its domestic politics that lasted to the end of the Cold War. Could this be Ukraine's future? Alternatively, the conflict may end with nothing more than a fragile ceasefire that leaves Ukraine permanently under siege. That remains the situation in Russia's frozen conflicts with both Georgia and Moldova.44 There is also no formal peace treaty between Japan and Russia, as the two have never resolved their dispute over the four Kuril Islands the Soviets seized after they declared war in 1945, two weeks before the end of World War II. And what if the lifting of Western sanctions becomes a condition for achieving a halt to the fighting? The Ukrainians and their allies may have a common interest in weakening Russia's ability to rebuild its economy and military, but it is the Ukrainians who are dying. The impact of the war in Ukraine will resonate for decades to come, in ways we may not yet be able completely to comprehend. One thing is clear: current energy policies in both the US and Europe will need to be rethought. Higher taxes on fossil fuel consumption and a faster shift towards greener renewable energy technology will please the left and infuriate the right. Yet the need for oil and gas will not disappear. Policies that penalise and limit domestic production, including efforts to restrict energy companies' access to financing, do little to lower consumption, only increase reliance on imports, including from Russia and Iran. This is not a good outcome even in terms of climate change, as transporting energy across long distances is often more damaging than extracting it locally. More fundamentally, our three-decades-long hiatus from the fear of nuclear confrontation between superpowers is over. Amidst the mounting horrors of the war in Ukraine, the first combat use of a Khinzal hypersonic missile on 19 March – on a fuel depot near the Romanian border – seems little more than a minor detail. That is not the case. Past nuclear arms control agreements emphasised the elimination of short- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons. The short flight times of these missiles increased the temptation for each side to deliver a first strike to decapitate a rival's leadership and eliminate its nuclear deterrent before it could be activated. With so little time between launch and detonation, the existence of these missiles also increased the likelihood that false alarms and panicked decision making would lead to catastrophe. Hypersonic technology, which is also being developed by the US, the UK and China, means missiles can now travel at five times or more the speed of sound and cannot be easily tracked. No country has yet overcome all the technological challenges that will allow them to deploy a workable long-range hypersonic missile. Yet once they do, such a missile, armed with a nuclear warhead, could reach anywhere on the planet in minutes. In the current atmosphere, it is hard to imagine any new arms control agreements that would eliminate this dangerous new weapon. Amidst the gloom, there is at least one reason for guarded optimism that the West can prevail. Putin, like his Soviet and Czarist predecessors as well as his present-day counterparts in China, Iran and elsewhere, has long deemed the countries of the liberal West too decadent, chaotic and soft to defend their interests if challenged by more mobilised and martial societies like his own.55 That is, too wedded to financing social and health care spending, primarily on their aging populations, in place of spending on defence. Hence, it is notable that in the wake of the invasion Germany has finally agreed to increase its spending on defence from 1.5% to the 2% of GDP expected of all NATO members. So far it is the weakness of the authoritarian model of governance that the war has demonstrated. After the losses it suffered in 2014, the Ukrainian military was reorganised into a Western-style force. This means that at each level, commanders are expected to devise their own plans for achieving an objective, rather than merely passing down the chain of command plans developed by their superiors. The successful manner in which this was implemented shows how much Ukrainian society has drifted away from its Soviet past. By contrast, Russia's military failures demonstrate how societies that inculcate conformity and obedience as their highest values do not produce soldiers with the initiative or flexibility to operate effectively when confronted with unexpected challenges. Authoritarianism also means there are few checks on corruption, including in the realm of military procurement. And it means a terrified bureaucracy, including an intelligence service that dares not report truthfully about the facts on the ground, and military officers who trick their front-line troops by telling them they are only being sent on manoeuvres. In the last decade, left-wing progressives, particularly on college campuses, and right-wing populists, including the growing national conservative movement in the US and illiberal democrats on the European continent, have launched an assault on the enlightenment values of free thought, free speech, empiricism, limited government and the rule of law. Ukrainians are demonstrating not only that these are intrinsically valuable things worth fighting for, but that they have practical utility in the fight for national survival.