 Welcome to the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. In February 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the podium at the Munich International Security Conference and gave a dramatic speech on the danger of the unipolar global security environment led by the United States. Steps away from President Putin sat then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, Angela Merkel, and other foreign policy luminaries from around the world. In the bluntest of terms, Putin accused the United States of pursuing policies aimed at reinforcing its supreme power across the globe at the expense of all other nations in general and of Russia in particular. That speech was Russia's declaration of the start of its new great power competition with the United States. Great power competition, that's a term we hear quite a bit these days. It's thrown around in Washington DC all the time. But what does great power competition look like from Moscow's point of view? And how has Russia carried out this competition? I'm Professor Mike Peterson, the Director of the Russia Maritime Studies Institute, and this is NWC Talks. We've reached a rare bipartisan moment in Washington, one in which there is broad agreement that the United States is in the midst of a serious competition with other great powers, especially Russia and China, and that this competition will fundamentally reshape geopolitics for better or for worse for the foreseeable future. Great power competition and conflict has been a fact of relations between states for centuries, but few nations in history have paid the bill for this quite like Russia has. Napoleon's devastating invasion of the Russian Empire in 1812 and the catastrophic war with Nazi Germany, in which perhaps as many as 26 million Soviet citizens were killed, are both seared across Russian history and Russian culture and Russian literature. They are a fundamental part of what it means to be Russian, a fundamental part of Russian identity. During the Cold War the Warsaw Pact provided a modicum of strategic buffer between the Soviet Union and its NATO rivals, but the collapse of that system and NATO's accession of those states has revived old fears. These historical realities have colored Russian perceptions of competition and conflict, and if you don't believe that's true, I'd ask you to carry out a thought experiment with yourself. Imagine that history that I just proposed to you, but imagine it happened to the United States, a history of war and conquest and invasion. Now imagine that the United States lost the Cold War and that Canada and Mexico joined the Warsaw Pact, and you may begin to get some kind of sense for what it's like to be a Russian and to look out at the world around you and understand what may be in store if you don't secure your own territorial well-being, your own national well-being. Russia's entry into the arena of great power competition in the 21st century can be traced to the early days of 2007. That year the United States would enter its sixth year of war in Afghanistan, the fourth year of its war in Iraq. So-called color revolutions had been challenging authoritarianism and corruption around the Russian periphery, first in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine, and later in Iran, and even for a short period in Russia itself. And these protests rattled the government in Moscow, which was convinced that the movements were a direct result of U.S. efforts to export democracy to the post-Soviet states, and that this would come at great cost to Russian security. When President Putin took the podium in Munich, he argued that the world was seeing an uncontained hyperuse of force, as he put it. Force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. He accused the United States of abusing international law and, as he said, overstepping its national borders in every way. As a result, he said, no one feels safe. No one feels safe, he repeated. Who is happy with this? Who can be happy with this? He asked the audience around him. This was the diplomatic equivalent of Howard Beale standing up behind his Anchorman's Desk in the classic film Network in 1976 and yelling, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore. Over the next decade, Russia wouldn't make good on that brutal promise. The first clear example of Russia's new approach would occur when it went to war with Georgia in 2008, short-circuiting a tightening of relations between NATO and the government in Tbilisi. But the 2011 Arab Spring and the killing of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya were more evidence to Russia that the West was still on the march. In 2014, Russia intervened in Ukraine, seeking to put a stop to what they saw as the Ukrainian drift into the European Union's orbit. And they did so by annexing Crimea and initiating a destabilizing conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. In 2015, Moscow intervened to stabilize to protect its long-time ally and partner, Syria, from both the depredations of ISIS and what it saw as U.S.-backed pro-democracy forces. But it's important to understand that these were not attempts to restore the Soviet Empire, nor were they attempts to restore the Tsarist Empire. From the Russian perspective, these are entirely defensive moves. Defensive moves aimed at securing Russia's borders, at providing that buffer space, at creating greater conditions for Russian security. This is not an effort to restore any kind of Soviet or Russian Empire. Russia has been very successful in these activities over the last several years, but how have they managed to compete? Their economy, after all, is much smaller than the U.S. by at least one measure. It's the 12th largest around the world, behind the likes of Italy and Canada. The U.S. defense budget is 10 times the size of Russia's. Texas and California alone have larger economies than the Russian Federation. So how is it that Russia is able to compete in this environment? The answer to this question lies in Russian conceptions of modern competition and conflict. At the heart of Russian thought on these issues lies the hunt for strategic asymmetries. Russian strategic thinkers acknowledged that in terms of military force, they simply cannot compete over the long term with the U.S. and NATO. This has led them into the use of what they call political methods to put themselves in an advantageous position vis-a-vis their rivals. By political methods, I don't mean Kenanesk notions of political warfare. This is something different, something Russian, something with a Russian twist to it. Russia envisions using these political methods to bring about political changes and policy changes in other states and to prepare the battlefield for military action. It seeks to make a target nation ungovernable by undermining its leadership, by undermining its faith in national institutions, and thereby paralyzing decision-making and allowing Russia to seize the initiative. I think we in the United States can understand this very well in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. At the military operational level, this hunt for strategic asymmetries translates into using its advanced military hardware to deter the U.S. and NATO. And, if deterrence fails, of raising the cost, of raising the human and economic cost of conflict to a height so high that it becomes politically impossible for its adversaries to sustain that conflict. But that's not to say that Russia is seeking a high-end, high-intensity conflict with the United States. Even though that's exactly what their military trains for, it most assuredly does not seek such a conflict. As I've said, Russian strategic thinkers understand that a military conflict with the U.S. is not in their interest. Instead, Russia competes below the level of armed conflict to achieve its strategic goals. It seeks to exploit differing degrees of ambiguity in order to seize and maintain the initiative and to keep its opponents off balance. The most famous example of this are the little green men who appeared in Ukraine or who appeared in Crimea in 2014. These little green men were unacknowledged military units with no unit patches, Russian Marine infantry and special forces officers who appeared to seize communications checkpoints and important strategic sites such as airfields and government buildings to ease the seizure of the Crimean Peninsula. Russia has also exploited the services of even more ambiguous, more ostensibly deniable so-called impolite people. These include militiamen, biker gangs, and private military contractors. These are private groups given quiet support by the state to carry out strategic goals of destabilizing rivals or propping up friends. However, there's a catch-22 with using these groups for deniable activities. In order to make those groups deniable, they have to operate at a level of remove from the state. However, the farther they are from state control, the less effective they may be or the more dangerous their activities may become. If they are unleashed from the state, they may wander off the reservation and commit acts that are truly dangerous from a global security perspective. If Ganey Prugosian's Wagner group offers a cautionary tale in this respect. In 2016, the Assad regime offered Prugosian a contract in which he could receive the 20 percent of the profits of all oil and gas facilities that were taken back from ISIS and from U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic forces. So in 2018, Prugosian put together his Wagner group and their Syrian partners and those forces marched on the town of Derazor and the gas facility outside the town. That gas facility was in the possession of U.S. Special Operations soldiers and their Syrian partners. In the four-hour battle that followed, U.S. Special Operations soldiers under constant artillery, rocket, and mortar fire called an airstrike after airstrike after airstrike killing hundreds of Syrians and Russians. Put another way, the military forces of a global nuclear superpower directly engaged the armed and hostile citizens of another global military superpower who was carrying out activities at the behest of that state. This is a very dangerous situation in which Americans and Russians find themselves trading fire and anger the first time since the Vietnam War that has occurred. Thus, a resurgent Russia seeks once again to engage in great power competition. But in its means and methods of doing so, in its hunt for strategic asymmetries, the risk of miscalculation and conflict is elevated and spiraling geopolitical tensions are the result. Thank you for sharing a few minutes with me. I'm Mike Peterson and this is NWC Talks.