A Grand Bargain With Putin Against ISIS?

What follows is not very pretty. But it may be the best option available in a crisis without good options.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of the fact that he would like some kind of political settlement with the West. The German magazine Der Spiegel has just published a leaked official Russian memo outlining a proposed grand bargain in which Putin eases out its close ally, Syrian President Assad, in favor of a still pro-Russian regime that at least stops killing its own people. In return the West acknowledges what has been an open secret for several decades--that Syria is Russia's sphere of influence in the Arab world.

Then the U.S., Russia, Iran, and the rest of the grand coalition can get on with the urgent business of eliminating or at least drastically weakening ISIS. Greater progress on getting rid of Assad was raised at a strategy conference on Syria held in Vienna earlier this week that included senior diplomats from the U.S., Russia, Iraq and several other nations. No grand bargain was reached but the idea will surely be raised again at the G-20 Summit now under way in Turkey.

Until the Paris attacks, there was little enthusiasm in the West for this approach. Putin, after all, is a thug and he has put Russia on an expansionist course. On the other hand, maybe a grand bargain with Putin against ISIS is not so crazy.

As part of the deal, the U.S. and Russia would have to reach some understanding about how to stabilize the situation in Ukraine, probably acknowledging a Russian sphere of influence in the eastern, Russian-speaking part of the country. That is not pretty either.

But then the great powers would actually have a real chance of reversing the territorial gains of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, restoring stability to Syria, which in turn would slow the torrent of refugees now engulfing Europe, increasing votes for far-right parties, and undermining the European Union. Maybe that's not such a bad bargain.

Right now, the U.S., Russia, and to some extent Iran are each pursuing inconsistent military actions against ISIS rather than collaborating. That's really crazy.

Would we be selling out the promise of a democratic Syria? It's not as if any of the regimes in the Middle East are Jeffersonian democracies, or have any chance of becoming so any time soon.

During World War II, the U.S. and the far more repressive Soviet Russia were allies against an even worse Nazi regime. We gave the Soviets Lend Lease aid, to help them destroy the Wehrmacht after Hitler's worst blunder of the war, his invasion of Russia.

As the War was ending, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill took the lead at the Yalta conference of February 1945 in negotiating post-war spheres of influence, acknowledging Stalin's demands for client states on the USSR's near borders. That was not pretty either; it was outrageous.

What the West did not give Russia, Stalin took by military occupation. But the alternative was probably a pivot from an exhausting war against Hitler to a shooting war against Stalin. Nobody wanted that. It took another forty years for communism to finally collapse.

Churchill had habit of making such deals. After World War I, it was Churchill who carved up the Middle East into its current sheikdoms and kingdoms, partly for geo-political reasons and partly to make deals between client states and Western oil companies. This was also far from pretty, and it seeded the ground for much of today's anti-Western rebellions in the region. What goes around comes around.

But there are truly ugly, and not so ugly, versions of realpolitik. The Middle East imperialism of the younger Churchill was an outrage that took the better part of a century to backfire on the West. The deal at Yalta in 1945 probably gave Stalin more territory than the West had to.

On the other hand, the wartime alliance with the loathsome Soviet dictator was absolutely necessary to defeat Hitler. Which brings me back to Putin.

A few commentators, such as the Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, have argued that it is at least partly the fault of the West that Putin is now our enemy. Russia, Cohen contends, has legitimate security interests like any other great power. From Russia's perspective, expanding NATO to Russia's very borders and colluding in the overthrow of a pro-Moscow government in Kiev were gratuitous provocations. For this argument, Cohen has been excoriated in in leftwing and rightwing publication alike.

I don't share Cohen's analysis, but he is right on one point. Russia and the U.S. do potentially have some common interests.

The attacks on Paris demonstrate that ISIS and its local sympathizers are capable of hitting civilian targets almost at will. Unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS is partly decentralized, and far more difficult for police and intelligence to infiltrate or monitor.

On the other hand, fanatical zealots tend to overreach, just as Hitler disastrously overreached when he invaded Soviet Russia. In its recent actions, ISIS has over-reached.

In the past few weeks, ISIS or its sympathizers blew up a Russian civilian airliner and suicide-bombed a neighborhood in Beirut controlled by Hezbollah, in addition to its barbaric attacks in Paris. This all may be consistent with ISIS's warped world view--but it is strategic insanity. You can't attack everybody without bringing everybody into a coalition against you.

It's no accident that the Putin memo was leaked to a German magazine. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in Soviet-occupied East Germany, is fluent in Russian. Putin, who was a KGB agent in East Germany, is fluent in German. The two leaders speak at least weekly. The idea of such a grand bargain surely has some appeal to Merkel, as the refugee crisis increasingly threatens her own leadership in Germany.


In a nation such as ours that cherishes democracy, this brand of realpolitik is never pretty--and it can be executed well or badly. It makes strategic sense only when all the other options are worse.


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