Let’s Use Chicago Rules to Beat Russia
Why the U.S. adversary is a
lot like Al Capone
JULY 6, 2022, 9:10 AM ET
About the author: Eliot A. Cohen is a contributing writer
at The Atlantic, a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School
of Advanced International Studies, and the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at
CSIS. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Counselor of the Department of State. He is
the author most recently of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of
Military Force.
Carl von Clausewitz
observed in his classic On War that “the maximum use of force
is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.” That
means, in part, acting thoughtfully but with the utmost effort, understanding
that war is more bar fight than chess game. Or, to put it in the simpler words
of Jim Malone, Eliot Ness’s counselor in The Untouchables, “You
wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one
of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago
way! And that’s how you get Capone.”
Al Capone is an apt
analogy for what the West confronts in Russia: a particularly noxious mix of
Mafia mentality, hypernationalist ideology, and totalitarian technique.
Elegance is not the Russian way, and it cannot be our way. This is the light in
which one should measure the accomplishments of NATO’s recent gathering in
Madrid.
The tangible efforts
that Western leaders announced were impressive in many respects, particularly
the commitments to provide Ukraine with nearly 500 artillery systems, 600
tanks, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and more. The question,
as always, is whether these will be delivered as swiftly as they can be
absorbed, and whether the United States and its allies are “leading the target”
by putting in place now the infrastructure to prepare Ukraine for the weapons
it will require and hopefully receive one, two, or six months from now, and for
training the large forces it must mobilize.
Read: More than 100 days of war in Ukraine
The United States
made some incremental additional commitments of forces to Europe, including two
destroyers for a naval base in Spain. The policy declarations were important as
well: a decision to expand by an order of magnitude NATO’s high-readiness forces;
a formal recognition of the challenge (NATO avoided for now the word threat)
posed by China; and an agreement to welcome Finnish and Swedish applications to
join the alliance.
But these moves,
beneficial as they may be, only partly meet the needs of the moment. Time and
again Ukraine has demonstrated its ability to absorb high-end military hardware
and deploy it quickly and effectively. This seems to be the case with HIMARS,
the mobile rocket systems that are extremely accurate, and with which Ukrainian
forces seem to be already hitting Russian ammunition dumps and military
headquarters. Instead of the promised eight, the Ukrainians need 80, and work
should be happening now to scale up transfers of these and like weapons as fast
as possible.
What the Biden
administration still struggles with is the ultimate purpose of Western assistance to Ukraine. At his press
conference, the president said that the United States and its allies would not
“allow Ukraine to be defeated.” That is the wrong objective. It should be,
rather, to ensure Russia’s defeat—the thwarting of its aims
to conquer yet more of Ukrainian territory, the smashing of its armed forces,
and the doing of both in a convincing, public, and, yes, therefore humiliating
way. Chicago rules, in other words.
In the same way, the
administration is wrong to titrate arms out of a misguided desire to avoid
provoking Russian escalation or enabling the Ukrainians to do too much. The
West is in a moment of military-industrial crisis; it should be taking concrete
measures to ramp up industrial mobilization, with the goal of equipping Ukraine
to the maximum while rearming the expanding forces of a newly awakened NATO.
Even as Western
allies counter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they must also meet the
broader and longer-term threat that Russia poses to the eastern members of
NATO, particularly the Baltic states.
The Western allies
will not invade Russia, nor will they overthrow its regime directly—one day,
hopefully, Russians will do that. Putin is motivated by imperial fantasies of
imitating Peter the Great and other, even less savory Russian leaders. And
Putin’s successor, should the Russian leader die or become incapacitated while
in office, will likely be no better. For evidence of that, one need only consult the ravings of key advisers such as
Nikolai Patrushev. If and when the battles cease in Ukraine, Russia’s intentions
to expand and subjugate its neighbors will remain.
The good news here is
that if one sets aside misleading memories of World War II and the Cold War,
and disregards the ominous mutterings of experts who exaggerated Russian
capacity before the war, then it becomes obvious that Russia is a weak state.
Russia’s GDP is less
than that of South Korea. Its leadership is afraid to openly mobilize its
middle class, so it refuses to declare war and send young men from Moscow and
St. Petersburg to the slaughterhouse that is the Donbas. Its generals are, for
the most part, incompetent, which is why purges of them continue. It is
scraping the bottom of its manpower barrel and so raises to absurd heights the
age level of potential service members. Corruption and indiscipline have rotted
out its maintenance and low-level leadership. What it has is Cold War–era
stockpiles of weapons and munitions (and those are huge, but finite); some
pockets of excellence, for example its railroad units; and utter disregard for
human life throughout the chain of command.
Even so, a mangy,
myopic, and rabid bear is still a dangerous beast. That’s why beating Russian
forces in Ukraine is not enough. The West must impose upon Russia sanctions
intended not, as the current ones are, to punish, but rather to enfeeble
(Chicago rules, again). The plummeting of Russian car production is an example
of a basic fact, which is that Russian production depends, more than one might
think, on access to Western chips, machine tools, and special materials.
However the Ukraine war ends, permanently or temporarily, the West needs to
settle into a comprehensive sanctions regime that will weaken Russia’s economy
in the long haul and throttle its ability to rearm on a large scale when the
shooting stops.
NATO expansion should
assist in this process. The alliance will soon in all likelihood have Sweden
and Finland as full members. They have real and potential capacity (Finland
more the former, Sweden more the latter) and serious political leadership. But
a NATO of 32 members will be even more unwieldy than what we now have.
Read: The accidental Trumpification of NATO
The solution—which
cannot be publicly declared—is a NATO-within-NATO. Germany, France, and Italy
have the largest economies in the European Union and in theory should carry the
most weight in European-security decision making as well. But they cannot.
Germany, the proverbial Hamlet of nations, is fatally compromised by its
unwillingness and inability to make good on military commitments, and its
recent sordid past in enabling Russia’s growth and stranglehold on European
energy supplies. France is domestically torn, while the overweening vanity of
its presidents makes it difficult for them to get a receptive hearing from
lesser mortals. Italy, as ever, produces statesmen on occasion, but not
statesmanship.
A nascent coalition
of powers is, however, willing to take Russia seriously and has the muscle to
thwart her while bringing less resolute European states along. The Eastern
European and Baltic states, with Poland in the lead, know Russian tyranny
firsthand, and are ready to stand up to it; the Scandinavian states, in
particular Finland and Norway, are almost as intent; the English-speaking
external powers, including the United Kingdom and Canada, are similarly alive
and determined. It is to this core group that American statecraft must look.
The British chief of
the General Staff recently described the Ukraine crisis as a 1937 moment for
the West. It was an acute historical comparison. In that year the Sino-Japanese
war began, setting the stage for World War II. In that year the West had before
it choices that could have avoided the horrors of a far worse conflict, but it
ducked.
To their credit, in
the current moment, Western leaders are performing far better than did their
counterparts 85 years ago—but not yet well enough. We’re dealing with Capone,
and while, like Eliot Ness, we need to stay within the constraints of law and
basic decency, we also need to apply Chicago rules.
