Checkers Anyone?

New York Times – President Obama has warned Russia that “there will be costs” for a military intervention in Ukraine. But the United States has few palatable options for imposing such costs, and recent history has shown that when it considers its interests at stake, Russia has been willing to absorb any such fallout.

Even before President Vladimir V. Putin on Saturday made his first public gesture toward ordering Russian troops into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, Mr. Obama and his team were already discussing how to respond. They talked about canceling the president’s trip to a summit meeting in Russia in June, shelving a possible trade agreement, kicking Moscow out of the Group of 8 or moving American warships to the region.

That is the same menu of actions that was offered to President George W. Bush in 2008 when Russia went to war with Georgia, another balky former Soviet republic. Yet the costs imposed at that time proved only marginally effective and short-lived. Russia stopped its advance but nearly six years later has never fully lived up to the terms of the cease-fire it signed. And whatever penalty it paid at the time evidently has not deterred it from again muscling a neighbor.

“The question is: are those costs big enough to cause Russia not to take advantage of the situation in the Crimea? That’s the $64,000 question,” said Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, a retired Army officer who served as defense attaché in the American Embassy in Moscow and now, as a Harvard scholar, leads a group of former Russian and American officials in back-channel talks.

Mr. Putin has already demonstrated that the most obvious cost, to its international reputation, would not stop him from what Ukraine is calling an invasion of Crimea and what United States officials, at least privately, are calling a military intervention. Having just hosted the Winter Olympics in Sochi, he must have realized he was all but throwing away seven years and $50 billion of effort to polish Russia’s image.

Before issuing any orders, Mr. Putin certainly expected condemnations and diplomatic protests from the United States and Europe, and he calculated that they did not outweigh what he sees as a threat to Russia’s historical interest in Ukraine, which was ruled by Moscow until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and where it still has a major military base.

Finding more compelling levers to influence his decision-making will be a challenge for Mr. Obama and the European allies. Mr. Obama has seen repeatedly that warnings often do not discourage autocratic rulers from taking violent action, as when Syria crossed the president’s “red line” by using chemical weapons in its civil war.

Russia is an even tougher country to pressure, too powerful even in the post-Soviet age to rattle with stern lectures or shows of military force, and too rich in resources to squeeze economically in the short term. With a veto on the United Nations Security Council, it need not worry about the world body. And as the primary source of natural gas to much of Europe, it holds a trump card over many American allies.

Mr. Obama is under bipartisan pressure to take action to stop Mr. Putin. A dozen senators from both parties wrote him a letter Friday arguing that “the U.S. should make use of the tools at its disposal,” including targeted sanctions and asset seizure.

“Now is the time for U.S. leadership,” said one of those senators, Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “The U.S. and the European Union should take meaningful measures to demonstrate to the Russian government that military action against Ukraine is intolerable and will carry significant consequences for Moscow.”

None of the senators, however, outlined ideas not already on the table in the Situation Room. And besides, Mr. Obama needs Russian support in the midst of critical talks over Syria’s civil war and Iran’s nuclear program.

“What can we do?” asked Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution scholar who was the government’s top intelligence officer on Russia during the Georgia war when Mr. Putin deflected Western agitation. “We’ll talk about sanctions. We’ll talk about red lines. We’ll basically drive ourselves into a frenzy. And he’ll stand back and just watch it. He just knows that none of the rest of us want a war.”

James F. Jeffrey was Mr. Bush’s deputy national security adviser in August 2008 and the first to inform him that Russian troops were moving into Georgia in response to what the Kremlin called Georgian aggression against the pro-Moscow separatist republic of South Ossetia. As it happened, the clash also took place at Olympic time; Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin were both in Beijing for the Summer Games.

Mr. Bush confronted Mr. Putin in Beijing to no avail and then responded by ordering American ships to the region and providing a military transport to return home Georgian troops on duty in Iraq. He sent humanitarian aid on a military aircraft on the assumption that Russia would be loath to attack the capital of Tbilisi with American military personnel present. Mr. Bush also suspended a pending civilian nuclear agreement, and NATO suspended military contacts.

“We did a lot but in the end there was not that much that you could do,” Mr. Jeffrey recalled.

Inside the Bush administration, there was discussion of more robust action, like bombing the Roki Tunnel to block Russian advances or providing Georgia with Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bristled at what she called the “chest beating” and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, urged the president to poll his team to see if anyone actually recommended putting American troops on the ground.

None did, and Mr. Bush was not willing to risk further escalation. While Russia stopped short of moving into Tbilisi, it achieved its goal by securing the effective independence of South Ossetia and another pro-Russian republic, Abkhazia, while leaving troops in areas it was supposed to evacuate under a cease-fire. Within a year or so, Russia’s diplomatic isolation was over. Mr. Obama took office and tried to improve relations. NATO resumed military contacts in 2009 and the United States revived the civilian nuclear agreement in 2010.

Mr. Jeffrey, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Mr. Obama should now respond assertively by suggesting that NATO deploy forces to the Polish-Ukrainian border not to intervene in Crimea but to draw a line. “There’s nothing we can do to save Ukraine at this point,” he said. “All we can do is save the alliance.”

Others like Mr. Ryan warn that military movements could backfire by misleading Ukrainians into thinking the West might come to their rescue and so inadvertently encourage them to be more provocative with Russia at their peril, much as Georgia was.

Ms. Hill, who also co-authored the recent book, “Mr. Putin,” said the Russian leader may simply wait out the West, slowly establishing facts on the ground that are hard to reverse. “Time,” she said, “is on his side.”