I offer the following longer terms predictions about the Middle East for 2015.
OK, that’s enough predictive risks for one year…
Photo: The Middle East at Night (NASA, International Space Station, 06/04/12).
This article was first published by Graham E. Fuller and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright Graham E. Fuller.
]]>by Wayne White
As 2014 draws to a close, there is no shortage of alternative suggestions about how to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS or IS). Most of them involve US escalation, driven by exaggerated notions of IS capabilities. Retaking IS’s extensive holdings will, however, take some time. All do acknowledge that regional coalition members are not pulling their weight.
Dismayed by the early December debate in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which many Senators sought to limit President Barack Obama’s military options, Senator Marco Rubio said Dec. 12 that it was “alarming” that IS “now reaches from North Africa…the Middle East, Pakistan, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.” Dismissing administration efforts as “half-measures,” Rubio also demanded that defeating IS include ousting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from power.
Retired Marine Corps Colonel Gary Anderson of George Washington University argued Dec. 22 that a mainly American “large scale punitive expedition” should swiftly crush the Islamic State. Georgetown University’s Anthony Cordesman pointed out, however, that US “airpower cannot resolve the religious, ethnic, political, and governance issues…at the core of Iraqi and Syrian…conflict.” Although Anderson believes a huge foreign ground offensive would clear the way for follow-on solutions, Cordesman, while critical of the inadequacies of the air campaign, warned against major escalation and said realistic endgames could be elusive.
Senator John McCain visited Iraq Dec. 26 and said the training of some 4,000 anti-IS Sunni Arab tribesmen allied to the Iraqi government should take no more than 6 weeks to 2 months and that retaking the IS-held northern Iraqi city of Mosul should be the first Iraqi goal in driving IS from Iraq. He praised Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for “success in unifying the Iraqi factions.”
There also has been a burst of December peace and ceasefire proposals or feelers put forward by the UN, Russia, and some individual countries. Unfortunately, the motives behind Moscow’s initiative are highly suspect, and none would appeal to all combatants or be properly monitored.
Mission Creep à la Obama
Unfortunately, the Obama administration, whether spooked by hawkish critics or pressured by the US military brass, has steadily ramped up US military involvement. The Pentagon is seeking a contractor to deploy jet fuel and gasoline to the al-Asad Airbase in western Iraq (far behind IS lines) by mid-January. One thousand troops from the US 101st Airborne Division also are scheduled to deploy to Iraq in January to train, advise and assist Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
If US aircraft begin using al-Asad, aircraft and US personnel would become a prime IS objective. When the US based aircraft inside South Vietnam, the need to deploy sizeable American ground forces to protect them was quickly generated. Furthermore, nearly 200 US troops sent to al-Asad in November may have fought IS forces in that area earlier this month; if this proves true, it would be the first such encounter between supposedly non-combat US troops sent to Iraq and IS forces.
The State of the Islamic State
Despite the jitters many have concerning the sweep of Islamic State forces, the view from the IS capital of Raqqa is hardly rosy. Still stalled in front of embattled Kobani, IS could not stop a sweeping Iraqi Kurdish, Yazidi, and Iraqi Army drive across northern Iraq to take Sinjar Mountain (again rescuing Yazidi refugees) and wrest from IS much of the town of Sinjar by December 21. Back in mid-December, the Pentagon also confirmed that an air strike killed Haji Mutazz, a deputy to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the IS military operations chief for Iraq, and the IS “governor” of Mosul. Meanwhile, daily coalition air strikes grind away at various targets within IS’s “caliphate” (now increasingly wracked by shortages).
Senator Rubio’s notion of IS extending from North Africa to Southeast Asia is an exaggeration. It merely refers to a scattering of mostly small groups here and there—already extremists—simply declaring allegiance to or praise for IS.
The situation of IS forces beyond Kobani in Syria is meanwhile somewhat muddled. In the northwest Aleppo area, largely Islamic extremist elements like IS and the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front (plus a few mainstream groups) formed a “Shamiyya Front” alliance Dec. 25 to resist recent advances by Syrian government forces. In the south, seventeen mainly non-extremist rebel groups united in early December. Making slow gains against regime forces near Damascus, this grouping has received some moderate Arab aid. Rumors of a grand alliance between IS and al-Nusra, which still fight here and there, were premature.
The desire of some US politicians (and Turkey) for the US-led coalition to also take on the Assad regime is very risky. The fall of or severe weakening of the regime in the near-term would create a vacuum in western Syria and IS and Nusra would be best positioned to fill it. Both groups already encroach on the holdings of moderate rebels there. To block extremist exploitation of regime implosion, a large force of effective combat troops would have to be committed. No coalition member seems ready to do so. Finally, crafting endgames for Syria—now a chaotic, shattered land flush with raging ethno-sectarian hatreds—is an incredibly daunting task.
Iraqi Government Challenges
Despite Senator McCain’s claims, Abadi has not “unified Iraqi factions.” McCain probably got the “canned” tour limited to government successes. On Dec. 18, Abadi did expand press freedom, dropping predecessor Nouri al-Maliki’s official lawsuits against journalists and publications. Yet little else, particularly relating to the military front, is going well.
Only a relatively limited number of Sunni Arab tribes and former “Awakening” cadres continue to fight alongside the government. Worse still, the Iraqi Army has not even rebounded enough to replace Shi’a militias fighting on the front lines against IS in many areas where they devastate recaptured Sunni Arab towns. And Abadi has offered no sweeping initiative to guarantee Sunni Arab inclusion and rights. Meanwhile, IS has been busily weakening Sunni Arab tribal structure by playing on intra-tribal clan rivalries to make major tribal desertions to Baghdad more difficult.
Moreover, four thousand pro-government Sunni tribesmen is a paltry number stacked against many tens of thousands currently in IS’s pocket or under its sway. Opening an offensive against IS in Iraq by assaulting the vast Mosul area would also likely further grind up and demoralize recently trained Iraqi and other forces than empower them or result in victory. Finally, Baghdad is still preoccupied with simply trying to hold onto several key pieces of real estate behind IS lines, repeatedly under attack and poorly supplied.
Abadi appealed to his Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu for greater support in battling IS. Davutoglu declared, “We are open to any idea,” but specifically noted only continuing to train Iraqi Kurds. Aside from intelligence cooperation and training, Ankara may well avoid most meaningful commitments to Baghdad, just as it has rebuffed other coalition members—including its NATO allies.
Long War Ahead
Short of a severe weakening of IS from the inside, the struggle against the group probably will be prolonged. The problem is not merely the limited Western forces willing to participate, but paltry support from the nearest coalition members.
Turkey, sharing a vast border with IS, is the worst offender. Nonetheless, the extreme reluctance of a nervous Jordan and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to become heavily involved is also a major drawback. Unless these reluctant allies enter the fray more forcefully on the military and economic fronts, and Baghdad grasps the need for a genuinely diverse future for Iraq, the fight is likely to be a hard slog. And the more the US does militarily further reduces the incentive for regional players to do their part.
Photo: President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, convenes a meeting regarding Iraq in the Situation Room of the White House, June 12, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>Twenty-five years ago, on “9/11”—November 9th in European date-notation—the Berlin Wall opened and, it seemed, everything changed. Freedom was no longer just an aspiration across much of Europe but a rising reality. The transformation was so profound that it is now hard to remember the bad old days of communist oppression and Soviet dominance, when peoples all across Central Europe lacked hope for the future and feared the secret police.
A quarter century beyond the settlement of the 75-year European civil war (1914-89), what is the balance of achievement following that remarkable overturning of European history and of much of global politics and economics? There is much good, but also some bad, and history did not “come to an end.”
The Soviet empires—internal and external—are both gone, and so is the Cold War, which was the most dangerous time in all of history, when the planet was at risk of being destroyed. The world escaped, although as the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo: It was a damn close-run thing.
Other good things happened, notably a definitive answer to the 120-year-old question: “What do we do about Germany?” It became unified, was anchored to the West, and, with the wisdom of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, it surrounded itself with NATO and the EU and sank the Deutschmark in the Euro. Thus Germany is again becoming economically the top nation in Central Europe, but there is no valid basis for fearing a German national menace.
Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush led in working to create a “Europe whole and free” and at peace. The US stayed in Europe, NATO was not wrapped up but has continued to keep European history pacified. Central Europe was taken off the geopolitical chessboard with the Partnership for Peace Program and, for many countries, NATO and EU membership. Ukraine was encouraged in its Western, democratic vocation, but without first being pulled into a Western alliance system that could be perceived as a challenge to Russian Federation. (The fact that a succession of Ukrainian governments largely funked the task is another matter).
The first President Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, also tried to prevent the growth of revanchism in Russia, to avoid what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, whose punitive features against Germany helped produce Hitler. This effort, too, went awry, as leaders in the G. W. Bush and then Barack Obama administrations forgot this central lesson and heaped fuel on the fire of Russian nationalism that was set alight by Vladimir Putin. Maybe the result (in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine) would have been the same, under Putin or any other Russian leader who appealed to his people’s sense of lost position and prestige, but the US failure to take account of legitimate Russian concerns certainly did not help.
There have been other negatives, unintended byproducts of success following the Berlin Wall’s opening. Many West European countries wisely shifted limited security resources from military spending not needed after the Cold War to economic support for Central Europe—beginning with the Federal Republic of Germany’s investment of trillions of Euros in the old East Germany. But the US did not. Today in the United States, non-military instruments are starved while it maintains the mightiest military in history at a time where there is no “peer competitor.” Thus, while priding itself on being the “indispensable nation,” the US was caught short by the Ebola epidemic and has done so much less in other countries compared to the good it could do and the security it could promote in the broadest sense of that term.
The US did not totally ignore Will Roger’s warning: “When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.” But after our “9/11,” the US did overdo Afghanistan by trying to get its political and social cultures to leapfrog centuries of development; and the US then committed one of the worse follies in American history, by invading Iraq for no good reason. The results have been more than 5,000 US servicemen and women dead, thousands more wounded, little promise in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and more than 3 trillion dollars of treasure wasted when it could have been used to refurbish the American homeland and create a more solid and lasting basis for US power and influence.
It is doubtful that either excess—in Afghanistan or Iraq—would have been possible during the Cold War, when the United States had to be worried about a superpower competitor, prepared to promote its own, contending interests. The lesson for today has to be that, just because it is possible to do something, it is not necessarily wise or prudent to do it.
So chto delat? As Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Here are some ideas, mostly for America:
More needs to be done to deal effectively with the requirements of a world newly created in the wake of the end of the Cold War’s certainties, a product of the Berlin wall’s opening, but this is enough to be getting on with. It befits America’s role as a great power, a champion of freedom, a protector of those most in need of protecting, a beacon of hope. It is what we expect in terms of leadership by our president and Congress. It would be a fitting commemoration of what a lot of courageous people did across Central Europe a quarter century ago. Can we be less committed and far-sighted than they were?
]]>by Derek Davison
Turkey, nominally a member of America’s new anti-ISIS coalition (well, maybe), has for some time now been refusing to allow Kurdish reinforcements and weapons to cross its Syrian border into the besieged city of Kobani. Due to its resistance to even allowing assistance to cross into Kobani, Turkey has faced large Kurdish protests in several cities, to which it has responded in occasionally brutal fashion. Yesterday, Turkey escalated this Kurdish crisis by shelling positions connected to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in the southeastern part of the country, supposedly in response to a PKK attack on an army outpost in Hakkari. The PKK is affiliated with the Syrian People’s Protection Units (YPG), the group currently trying to defend Kobani from Daesh (ISIS or ISIL). For a country that seemed on the verge of joining an anti-ISIS coalition just a few days ago, the decision to bomb Kurds, rather than Daesh, is naturally raising some eyebrows.
The PKK shelling comes only about a day after Turkey publicly denied that it has given the US permission to use its Incirlik air base to launch sorties against Daesh and al-Qaeda/Jabhat al-Nusra targets in Syria, which directly contradicts earlier US reports. Talks are ongoing with respect to the use of Incirlik, with new President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government still insisting, more or less, that it won’t seriously get involved in Syria unless the coalition turns its real focus to getting rid of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey is its own nation with its own national priorities, and it has never been shy about the fact that its number one priority is making sure its Kurdish population doesn’t get any funny ideas about independence.
Turkey’s real rooting interest in Syria is against the YPG and other Syrian Kurds. The fact that Iraqi Kurds have achieved significant autonomy from Baghdad is worrying enough to Ankara; if Syria’s Kurds achieve a similar level of autonomy, the Turks believe that their Kurdish population will try to follow suit. Assad is thus their main target, not Sunni extremists like Daesh, because Assad has been allied with Syria’s Kurds throughout the country’s more than three-year-long civil war, and has been ceding increased autonomy to them. For added measure, the Turks argue that, while they’re as opposed to Daesh and similar groups as anybody, those groups can’t be removed from Syria until Assad is ousted, since the Syrian dictator has been propping up extremists all this time as a counterweight to more moderate opposition groups. The Turks have a point here, or would have had one if this were 2012 or 2013, but now it seems that Daesh is standing up pretty well on its own and is an immediate enough threat to Iraq that diverting coalition resources to unseating Assad could actually be counterproductive to the goal of degrading Daesh.
So the question of the day for America’s foreign policy establishment, particularly the neoconservative elements within it (who already oppose Erdogan’s government over its alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood and its tense relations with Israel), seems to be: “what can America do about Turkey?” It’s never considered sufficient to say, “well, that other country’s national interests just don’t coincide with America’s, and I guess we’ll have to adjust for that.” No, any failure on the part of another supposedly sovereign nation to recognize that America Is Exceptional And The Indispensable Nation is An Insult and Must Be Dealt With Harshly.
Turkey is a “non-ally” and America should move its regional military bases into Kurdish Iraq, says the Wall Street Journal, presumably because the Turks are refusing to commit their army to fighting a war on America’s behalf. US officials are reportedly angry because Turkey “want[s] the U.S. to come in and take care of the problem,” except, you know, the US is the one for whom “it” (Daesh) is apparently a problem, not the Turks. From the serious reactionaries we’re even hearing calls to “kick Turkey out of NATO,” a course of action for which NATO seems to have no precedent or procedure, and that, like most reactionary policy ideas, would create maximum disruption while accomplishing nothing constructive. Say NATO does kick Turkey out—what then? Do the Turks suddenly see the error of their ways and make amends? Why would they do that? What if NATO divides on the question of expelling Turkey? Is there any possible outcome of pursuing Turkey’s expulsion from NATO that would have a positive impact on the fight against ISIS?
The fact that Turkey would apparently rather let Daesh slaughter and enslave the Kurdish defenders of Kobani than do anything that might benefit long-term Kurdish political aims may be immoral, unconscionable, even indefensible on a humanitarian level, and it’s fine to condemn Turkey on those grounds, but as a pure calculation of national interest, what Turkey is doing shouldn’t surprise anybody. It’s not as though America hasn’t greatly wronged the Kurds in the past, when it was in US interests to do so. It’s also worth noting that the UK and Germany have also opted out of direct military involvement in Syria, but nobody seems to be talking about expelling them from NATO or moving American military hardware to other countries in Europe.
It may be that Turkey will still come around to America’s position on Daesh, or at least closer to it; recent Kurdish protests aside, Ankara’s Syria policy has been consistently unpopular within Turkey, and PKK threats to break-off peace talks with the government over its inaction in Kobani may yet force Erdogan’s hand. But if Erdogan is swayed, it will be because of domestic politics, not American pressure or threats.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
At West Point last May, President Obama said that “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” He continued “…US military action cannot be the only—or even primary—component of our leadership in every instance.”
With the growing crisis over the spread of the Ebola virus, not just in West African countries but also now in the United States, the appropriate response to the president’s words should be a rousing “And how!”
The fact is that even after the end of the Cold War returned to us the security of the two broad oceans that we lost in December 1941, the application of resources to the US role in the world has not adjusted to that reality. Even the “wake up call” of 9/11 did not require the level of response that the US applied. We did not have to try remaking Afghanistan in a Western image after toppling the Taliban. We did not need to invade Iraq and try there, too, to remake a society when we had no capacity to do so—a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam. Even in accepting that the US would continue to have interests abroad and would continue to be looked to by so many countries as the “indispensable nation,” we didn’t have to focus that task, year upon year, on—very expensive—military instruments.
Since the end of the Cold War, a succession of administrations, along with every Congress since the opening of the Berlin Wall, has refused to conduct a serious review of US engagement in the outside world—what really matters to us?—and to accept that the military instrument is only one tool, and an increasingly smaller tool compared to what can be lumped together as “non-military instruments.” Even when we throw in to the mix of essential interests the promoting of American values, the military is rarely the biggest part of the answer. Sometimes, it has been necessary in “holding the ring,” as NATO did in Europe until the Soviet Union fell apart because of the rot in the system; but even then the US military was only the “shield,” not the “sword” of change.
Since the end of the Cold War, we have failed to follow Isaiah’s admonition: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” Rather, at least in relative terms, we followed Joel—the latest word in the Old Testament on this subject: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”
There is no need to rehearse the trials and errors in US foreign and security policy in the post-Cold War world, at least in dealing with the causes of conflict and how to prevent them.
Just look at the numbers: we have spent three trillion dollars and more on Afghanistan and Iraq, but a mere pittance on helping other societies help themselves. We spend $7.3 billion on the Transportation Security Administration, and we take off our outer garments and our shoes every time we get on an airplane, but until this past weekend there was next to no effort put into containing the spread of one of the most hideous diseases that has come down the pike since the Black Death several centuries ago. Ask yourself: if you were to get on a plane, tomorrow, coming from some international departure point, which would you be more worried about: a terrorist bomb or a passenger infected with Ebola and entering the phase of being contagious?
For the fiscal year that has just started, the Pentagon has asked for $495.6 billion just in base budget authority while the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention get about $37 billion between them—and that is for everything. Using the categories of the Office of Management and Budget, military matters get, depending on the finer points of definition, between 13:1 and 17:1 as much as all non-military US government engagement in the outside world put together.
During the Clinton administration, the late Senator Jesse Helms engineered the demise of the United States Information Agency—a major element of showing people who we are rather than just telling them what a particular administration wants them to hear; and he nearly crippled the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Even now, USAID (2015 budget request: $1.4 billion) has to rely to a major extent on contractors and, while we heard recently that it is fielding 2,800 hospital beds in West Africa to meet the Ebola outbreak, it should have been able to field 10,000 or even 100,000.
The US military does an outstanding job in helping people in need in disaster zones, and is now beginning to help in places affected by Ebola, but why should the Pentagon have to take the lead, rather than other agencies far better equipped in terms of people and technique? Simple answer: one has the bucks and the congressional interest-group backing, the other goes begging.
President Obama has done better than his recent predecessors in talking up what the United States needs to do to show the world the values that we are made of, as well as analyzing many of the causes of what ails the less developed and more conflicted parts of the world. But his budget people, along with the “military industrial complex” (now 53 years since being called out by President Dwight Eisenhower) and Congress haven’t got the message. This is the message about what directly threatens the United States and what the American people really need their government to do in order to feel—and to be—more secure.
As the United States ramps up to fight yet another war in the Middle East, it is not ready to deal with so many other matters of direct importance to the American people (Ebola, etc.) or that could help keep new wars from being necessary. (By the way, at the moment 59 US embassies abroad do not have an ambassador because of Senate deadlock on confirmations). The White House, which is supposed to take the lead, has been largely silent about asking Congress for the resources needed to do the diplomacy, the aid, the involvement of non-military government agencies, the support of non-governmental organizations, and the mobilization of other countries to act with us (where, in fact, we are near the bottom of the heap among members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of GDP share spent on foreign assistance: a mere .19 percent). Even in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where we have had a heavy footprint, there has been grossly inadequate engagement of most of the US government’s non-military agencies that could be delivering a lot more in areas that include health, education, counter-narcotics, rule of law, and other human resources.
As Americans—and as members of the human species—our hats should be off to organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carter Center, and Doctors Without Borders for what they are doing in the realm of global health, including in West Africa. But where is the president’s leadership and Congress’ followership in terms of a critical shift of resources? The “nail” that has to be hit right now is Ebola, but our leaders have so far been unwilling to build the right hammer. They are instead building more military hammers that are even less relevant to American security.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
Less than a month from now, September 4-5, the 28 NATO allies will hold a summit in Wales. It was originally figured to be a “ho-hum” meeting, focusing on the end of the Alliance’s decade-long military campaign in Afghanistan and plans for “adapting” NATO for an uncertain future [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
Less than a month from now, September 4-5, the 28 NATO allies will hold a summit in Wales. It was originally figured to be a “ho-hum” meeting, focusing on the end of the Alliance’s decade-long military campaign in Afghanistan and plans for “adapting” NATO for an uncertain future of potential engagements “outside of area” — to use the technical term for any place beyond Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, aided and abetted by a lengthy period of instability, incompetence, and corruption by various Ukrainian governments, has changed the agenda. Now the allies need to come up with a plan for dealing not just with Putin’s peremptory seizure of Crimea but also with continuing military clashes between Russian-speakers in southeast Ukraine, who wish to be united with Mother Russia, and forces of the Ukrainian central government in Kiev. There is even speculation in various parts of the West that, in order to save loyalists from defeat by Ukraine, Putin will intervene directly with military force. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No.
The Ukrainian crisis was sidelined in media focus everywhere but in Central Europe until the accidental — other than an act of sheer insanity, that’s what it was — shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on July 17, which took 298 lives. Almost certainly, however, the weapon used was a high-altitude anti-aircraft system supplied to Russian rebels in Ukraine by authorities in Moscow. At that point, it became impossible for Western leaders, especially in Washington, to hope that the Ukraine crisis could be easily de-escalated. That includes diplomacy to see whether it could be possible, in time, to return to the vision that President George H.W. Bush had of trying to create a “Europe whole and fee,” which he believed (correctly) had to include Russia in some way acceptable to all.
Throughout this rolling crisis, the question for the West, especially the United States (as “leader of the West”), and for NATO has been, in the Russian phrase popularized by Lenin, Shto Delat’? (Что делать?) –“What is to be done?”
This has not been an easy question to answer, for a number of reasons.
Countering Russia
In the first place, there has been a general willingness by Western governments, except those closest to Ukraine and Russia, to separate “Crimea” from the rest of “Ukraine.” The former was for two centuries part of Russia, with a population that is almost entirely Russian (Stalin having expelled the native Crimean Tatars in 1944), until given as a birthday present to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev (himself a Ukrainian) in 1954. But so what? It was still part of the Soviet Union.
In the process, Putin clearly violated agreements signed by Russia, notably the 1975 Helsinki Final Act (signed by Russia’s legal predecessor, the Soviet Union) and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine relinquished nuclear weapons left on its territory when the Soviet Union collapsed, in exchange for security guarantees by the US, UK, and Russia. Nevertheless, it was convenient for most Western governments to view the seizure of Crimea as a “one-off” or “correction” of boundaries that should never have put Russians in Ukraine.
What has caught universal attention among Western governments is the campaign by Russian nationalists to dominate southeast Ukraine and, presumably, to detach it, probably with the objective of joining Russia. The Budapest Memorandum does commit the US and UK to refer any violation to the United Nations Security Council, but that is a standard weak-kneed diplomatic formulation. Something more had to be done, if only to keep from setting a precedent that borders in Europe can be changed by force and, in the process, giving aid and comfort to other states — not just those with significant Russian populations — to seek extra-legal territorial redress.
But the “something” to be done by the West cannot, by common agreement, include direct military action. Most importantly, in the local region itself, Russian military forces would have a clear advantage over anything that NATO or any member thereof could bring to bear. And what is happening in Ukraine would not justify the invocation of the US trump card, escalation to nuclear confrontation. Among other things, such an escalation of threats would not be credible to Moscow.
What the West has done is begin the process of providing Ukraine with some limited military support, while relying on the government in Kiev to begin, under its newly elected government, to take steps to recognize that the Russian-speaking minority should have some form of autonomy or role in a federal system. Under US leadership, NATO has also begun beefing up the symbols of military reassurance to other countries in Central Europe, those like the three Baltic states that are formal members of NATO and are thus subject to its political-security guarantees in the case of their being subjected to external aggression.
The phrase “symbols of military reassurance” is used advisedly, because whatever is done to show that the NATO guarantees are real would not in fact be sufficient to prevent Russian military action, if Putin were either stupid or reckless enough to take such action. (And if Putin were either so stupid or reckless, the world of European security and even much more would be changed fundamentally, leading to another “long, twilight struggle,” to quote President John F. Kennedy on the Cold War.).
These can be called prophylactic measures, and they will be buttressed and emphasized at the NATO summit in Wales. The Alliance can do no less, and many things are already being done, including training, exercises, supply of equipment, and the prospective periodic moving of US forces back to Europe for brief periods (given that only the United States, within the Alliance, has any capacity to deal effectively with Russia. In order to guarantee this US role, after all, was the reason that the NATO allies sent troops to far-off Afghanistan).
These are negative steps, in the sense that they are designed to show Putin that by taking further military actions — possibly even within Ukraine, though it has no formal NATO commitment — would be a major raising of the stakes and that there would be “consequences” that would not be to Putin’s liking. Unless he is willing to have Russia become a pariah in the West for the foreseeable future, he will take this general notion of “consequences” most seriously. This is, after all, not 1923, when Lenin could accept the economic and political isolation of the Soviet Union from the outside world. Even though Russia is not yet a major player in the global economy, it is already tightly and, one is tempted to say, irrevocably tied to it.
Sanctions
This proposition has led the US, and now its European allies (including, formally, the European Union) to impose what are called “targeted” economic sanctions against Russia. This was not easy to achieve, especially because of uncertainties on the part of some European countries that are not directly affected — so they believe — by Putin’s actions. There is a clear division across the continent between what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once called “old” and “new” Europe, its western and its eastern parts. The exception has been Britain, which has chosen to emphasize its special relationship with Washington, a decision not disconnected with the continuing debate about British membership in the EU. There is also the heavy dependence of much of Western Europe on Russian hydrocarbons, reflecting two decades of foolishness in not diversifying sources of supply, and which will now take many years to do.
Sanctions, however, are tools that almost never work in the short-term and usually only against weak economies. Indeed, hoped-for political pressures on Russia (Putin) to change course will, if at all, be some time in coming and will depend on a passing of the current popularity among most Russians of what Putin is doing. This is a product, in major part, both of the retained sense of Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War and also in being taken advantage of by many Western countries, and especially by the United States — actions that Washington chooses to “misremember” — since about the second half of the Clinton administration through the onset of the current Ukraine crisis.
Putin is also now trying to show that sanctions are a double-edged sword, by beginning to impose restrictions on the import of Western agricultural products. Ironically, if implemented, these could hit the EU countries (about $15 billion in exports a year) much harder than the US (about $1 billion), which pressed for these actions.
Of course, this is also a “triple-edged sword” if one can imagine such a thing, in that restrictions on Western imports will have an impact on Russian consumers and thus, presumably, over time on their support for Putin.
Sizing Up Russia
This crisis very likely has a long way to go before it is over, even if Ukrainian forces do prevail over the Russian separatists and Putin decides not to intervene militarily.
In the process, a number of other factors need to be considered as the US and its allies and partners decide what to do next.
First, Russia is a big country. The importance of that simple statement is that it is contiguous to virtually all of the territories in the Northeastern “quadrisphere,” from Europe through the Middle East and South Asia, to the Far East, and even the Artic. It is not possible to separate out the different areas of interaction — where the US is more universally engaged than any West European countries — from one another.
Thus Putin is already seeking to exploit the penchant of many people in Washington to see China as a looming threat by trying to work more closely with Beijing. Not being fools, the Chinese will exact high prices for responding, and have already been doing so; they have an interest in at least exploring the possibility.
The US also had a continuing interest in retaining Russian support in Afghanistan as NATO’s presence there winds down and, more importantly, in containing Iran. Moscow does share an interest in keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, but it has never taken this problem as seriously as do the United States and Israel. While Iran would be foolish to back-off on current negotiations with the so-called P5+1 because of the US-Russian mini-confrontation, Russia is already beginning to leave the fold when it comes to the broader interest of both Israel and Persian Gulf Arab states to keep Iran from rejoining the international community. Perhaps strategists in the Obama administration have weighed the trade-offs; perhaps not.
A final point that the West and especially the United States need to bear in mind is that a confrontation, the stigmatizing of a country as the “enemy,” is easy to get going but even more difficult to stop, without the abject surrender of the offending party. Of course, Putin also had to bear this problem in mind. Already, the psychological apparatus of the old Cold War is being trundled out in Washington and in much of the think-tank and media communities. This is coupled with the traditional US problem of having difficulty in talking the game of realpolitik, as opposed to occasionally practicing it. As a culture, Americans have difficulty in foreign affairs in dealing with uncertainties. While exaggerated, the notion of dividing the world into “friends” versus “foes” — reflected in President George W. Bush’s remark about the invasion of Iraq: “you are either with us or against us” — is buried deeply within American culture.
At the end of the day, it is Putin who, through his actions, undertaken for whatever motive, most has the tiger by the tail. If there is a final accounting of winners and losers from this crisis, he will be included in the latter category. But that can be a long and difficult time for us all. The first requirement is for us to see the global picture of relations with Russia in its entirety, and to do nothing further without thinking carefully about the potential consequences.
This should be Task Number One between now and the NATO summit, with its requirement that “something” be seen to be done, expectations both by Central European states and the media, including a demonstration of what everyone in the West wants: US leadership. Getting that right in the next few weeks is a tall order.
]]>by Peter Jenkins
Last week an independent, cross-party commission of inquiry into UK nuclear weapons policy issued its report.
The commission (comprising three politicians, two diplomats, one field marshal and two academics) reviewed the arguments for and against the UK retaining nuclear weapons. They came, somewhat hesitantly, to the conclusion that [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
Last week an independent, cross-party commission of inquiry into UK nuclear weapons policy issued its report.
The commission (comprising three politicians, two diplomats, one field marshal and two academics) reviewed the arguments for and against the UK retaining nuclear weapons. They came, somewhat hesitantly, to the conclusion that on balance a UK strategic nuclear deterrent should be retained.
LobeLog readers may be most interested in the commission’s review of the global threat environment, which is based on a distinction between threats that are an argument for retaining a nuclear deterrent and threats that are not.
That review opens with an endorsement for the British government’s view that threats are a product of both capability and intent: “The Commission [agrees] that currently no state has both the intent to threaten our vital interests and the capability to do so with nuclear weapons.”
This reminder of the compound nature of nuclear threats is relevant to the US debate on Iran’s nuclear activities — relevant, indeed, to the negotiations that are ongoing in Vienna. A fixation on Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities seems to blind some to the fact that there is still no sign that Iran’s leaders intend to build and use nuclear weapons to threaten vital US interests.
The commission’s view is that an Iranian nuclear threat has yet to emerge and (by implication) is not bound to do so: “Any further development of a nuclear programme in Iran, were the current developments to take a turn for the worse, is not a reason on its own for Britain to retain a nuclear deterrent.”
The commission is equally sanguine about the potential for the four nuclear–armed states (Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) to pose a threat that requires the retention of a nuclear deterrent. The commission is confident that neither India nor Pakistan will ever want to target the UK. They consider the UK’s strategic footprint in the Far East too small (what a change over the last 100 years!) for North Korea’s nuclear weapons to pose a substantial threat to the UK. Of Israel they write: “Israel’s nuclear arsenal does present a major challenge to regional arms control in the Middle East and to universalisation of the NPT, and as such is a difficult and critical obstacle to realising the essential global non-proliferation agenda. But it is no direct threat to the UK.”
These conclusions, together with the belief that strategic confrontation with China is highly unlikely, leave the commission contemplating only one possible threat as an argument for retention. In the commission’s view, recent events show that Russia is willing “to use the threat of military force…to shape the internal affairs of a sovereign country to conform to its desires.” This prompts the commission to the conclusion that NATO (and, by implication, Britain) should maintain a capacity to deter Russia from considering nuclear blackmail in pursuit of political objectives.
Following are three other arguments for retention, in the commission’s opinion:
And here are four arguments that the commission dismisses:
In reviewing industrial and budgetary considerations, the commission is more tentative. They recognize that several British communities have been dependent on the UK submarine industry for their viability, but they believe it would be wrong to allow this to be a decisive influence on a national security question. They find that capital expenditure on the Trident program, during the years when replacement submarines are being procured, will consume a quarter of the Defense Ministry’s capital projects budget, but they characterize this cost as “not prohibitive given the possible implications were the UK in future to face a nuclear-armed state.”
This last sentence suggests one flaw in the report. Though the commission is opposed to seeing a nuclear deterrent as insurance against uncertainty, their central argument can be reduced, irreverently, to: “We don’t really need it now, but it could come in handy one day.” Of course, this may be fitting: a majority of Britons would probably agree.
Photo: The HMS Victorious is the second Vanguard-class submarine of the Royal Navy. Victorious carries the Trident ballistic missile, the UK’s nuclear deterrent.
]]>by Derek Davison
This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
This Monday marked the end of a five-day conference (May 15-19) in Kiev, called “Ukraine: Thinking Together,” organized by The New Republic and specifically its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. The conference press release promised that “an international group of intellectuals will come to Kiev to meet Ukrainian counterparts, demonstrate solidarity, and carry out a public discussion about the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for the future of Europe, Russia, and the world.” However, Wieseltier’s remarks at the conference, delivered on May 17, focused very little on “Ukrainian pluralism” and instead painted a picture of a crisis that bears little resemblance to what we actually know about the situation in Ukraine.
Wieseltier should be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the neoconservative policy world. Despite being considered a liberal thinker, he has worked on behalf of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and its offshoot, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), as well as continues to be affiliated with PNAC’s successor, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). FPI has written many letters, all including Wieseltier’s signature, to prominent DC politicians, endorsing a litany of neocon policy goals: military intervention in Syria, increased hostility toward Iran, and belligerence toward Russia. Wieseltier himself insists that he is not a neocon, and former LobeLog contributor Ali Gharib once declared him a “liberal neocon enabler and booster” rather than a neocon in his own right. This may be a distinction without much of a difference.
During his remarks in Kiev, Wieseltier began by placing his feelings on the situation in Ukraine in the context of his “somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals, some of whom became my teachers and my heroes, against the Stalinist assault on democracy in Europe.” That desire seems to have motivated Wieseltier to concoct a new narrative of recent events that papers over the very real internal struggle going on among the Ukrainians themselves, in order to make the crisis entirely about Russian aggression. He concedes that “Putin is not Stalin,” at least, and no one could challenge his assertion that “Putin is bad enough,” but Wieseltier was still trading in half-truths through much of his speech.
For starters, Wieseltier opines that “[t]he Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West, its unintimidated preference for Europe over Russia, is not merely a strategic and economic choice; it is also a moral choice, a philosophical choice, a societal decision about ideals, a defiance of power in the name of justice, a stirring aspiration to build a society and a state that is representative of some values and not others.” This assumes facts not in evidence — specifically, of a “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” According to polling data, prior to Crimea’s secession in March, when Ukrainians were asked which economic union their country should join if it could only join one, support for joining the European Union never polled higher than a slim plurality of Ukrainian citizens. A Gallup poll taken in June-July 2013 found that more Ukrainians saw NATO as a “threat” than as “protection” (a plurality chose “neither”). Predictably, Ukrainians in the country’s east have been more likely to have a negative view of NATO and the EU than Ukrainians in the west.
Even now, after Crimea’s secession and the implied threats of a Russian invasion, only 43% of Ukrainians want stronger relations with the EU to the exclusion of stronger relations with Russia, and only 45% of Ukrainians have a positive view of the EU’s influence on Ukraine. These are both pluralities, yes, but they hardly speak to some universal “Ukrainian desire to affiliate with the West.” In fact, there is evidence to suggest that recent polling that indicates growing support for joining the EU reflects the Ukrainians’ response to what they see as Russian aggression and does not necessarily involve any abiding Ukrainian desire to join the West.
Wieseltier talks about four principles that guide the Ukrainian “revolution”: liberty, truth, pluralism, and moral accountability, but in each case his remarks obscure what is really happening in Ukraine. He talks about liberty, “the right of individuals and nations to determine their own destinies and their own way of life,” but ignores the fact that, for many Crimeans and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, the Euromaidan protests that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych took away their rights, as individuals, “to determine their own destinies.” This was not a democratic or electoral transfer of power; it was a coup against what was by all accounts a legitimately elected government. Weiseltier seems unconcerned that Ukraine’s revolution effectively disenfranchised vast numbers of Ukrainian citizens by short circuiting their electoral process. He also criticizes Russian propaganda that calls the Kiev government “fascist” without acknowledging that there are fascist or soft fascist elements involved with Euromaidan who have been given a significant role in the government.
But it is on the principle of “pluralism” where Wieseltier is most confounding. He says that “[t]he crisis in the Ukraine is testing the proposition that people who speak different languages can live together in a single polity. That proposition is one of the great accomplishments of modern liberalism. Putin repudiates it.” But Putin’s geopolitics aside, it was, in fact, the new Ukrainian parliament installed by Euromaidan that initially repudiated that proposition; its very first act was a repeal (passed but not signed into law) of a 2012 law that allowed regional languages to attain semi-official status in parts of Ukraine with sizable non-Ukrainian populations. The impact of this action in terms of stoking the fears of Ukraine’s Russian population about the intentions of the new government probably can’t be overstated.
It seems clear that, as Jim Sleeper writes, Wieseltier has “learned nothing from his moral posturing on Iraq.” As he and his colleagues in PNAC and the CLI did a decade ago, Wieseltier is still using the language of principle and moral absolutes to mask reality and support the desire for a more muscular American foreign policy.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
Almost from the day the Cold War ended, pundits, professors, and professionals alike have been wondering Quo Vadis? for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This has happened despite the facts that NATO (at times also with what is now the European Union) has stopped two [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
Almost from the day the Cold War ended, pundits, professors, and professionals alike have been wondering Quo Vadis? for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This has happened despite the facts that NATO (at times also with what is now the European Union) has stopped two wars in Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo), written finis to the 120-year German Problem, taken almost all of Central Europe off the geopolitical chess board, fought as far afield as Afghanistan, played at least a supporting role in toppling Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and reached out to Ukraine, Russia, and countries in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. And, oh, NATO has also ensured that the United States would remain a European power, itself no mean feat.
Not a bad bit of work for the last quarter century, for an alliance that is still seen as “lacking direction,” “lacking a purpose,” and “lacking a future.” In fact, all three points were answered many years ago: NATO’s key purpose is to provide strategic and political confidence in a region that, when that confidence died 100 years ago this August, produced an era of history’s worst carnage.
Well, those who have still wondered about NATO’s future need wonder no longer. Once again, it seems, the Russians have ridden to the rescue, this time not as Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union but as Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. By seizing Crimea, albeit through the form of a referendum, Putin has told the West that Russia, to steal a phrase from US president Ronald Reagan, “is back, standing tall.”
Perhaps Putin has a greater appetite, at one end of the scale seeking to seize more territory in Ukraine or elsewhere (doubtful though possible) or at the other to intimidate other former members of the Russian and then Soviet Empires (almost certain). Or even if Crimea “…is the last territorial claim that [Putin has] to make in Europe,” and even if Western policies did contribute to what Putin has now done, it is clear that Russia is violating both the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine agreed to ship to Russia those nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil when the USSR was disbanded.
The West has had to react. So far, this has consisted mainly of strong statements by Western Alliance leaders; visits to Ukraine and elsewhere by officials that include US Vice President Joseph Biden; limited but growing economic sanctions imposed on the Russian economy and Mr. Putin’s cronies; financial promises to Ukraine; and some NATO military demonstrations. Given that Ukraine is not a member of NATO and thus not entitled to the commitments against external aggression contained in the NATO’s Treaty’s Article 5, direct military intervention by any NATO country or the Alliance as a whole has been ruled out. Further, given the geography — as was true with isolated West Berlin in the Cold War — if there were need for the West to react much more strongly against unambiguous Russian aggression, escalation would likely have to be “horizontal” (that is, done some other way in some other place) rather than “vertical” (e.g., sending troops up against the Russians). Thus NATO military demonstrations have been limited to air policing over the three Baltic States (most vulnerable among NATO allies to further Russian intimidation), aerial surveillance, and previously-scheduled military and naval exercises.
Despite these limitations, with Russia’s seizure of Crimea NATO did overnight gain a new sense of purpose, or so it seems. But not so fast. In the first place, not all members of the Western Alliance are convinced that Putin will continue to make other “territorial claims” and many are reluctant to impose truly swinging economic sanctions — Russia clearly needs the outside world and can’t retreat as Lenin and Stalin did, but Western economies and companies also have a stake in dealing with the Russian Federation. Also, while new NATO allies in Central Europe are naturally more concerned about their own security and, in particular, Western security guarantees (especially by the US), allies to their West are not likely to be spooked to the same degree — this is the distinction once drawn by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld between “Old” and “New” Europe.
Further, some thoughtful statesmen in the West and perhaps even some “silent” leaders in Russia are wondering whether what has happened in Crimea means that the pursuit of President George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “Europe whole and free” and at peace has to be abandoned for all time. Obviously, even if that process could be renewed, with its aspiration of someday including Russia in broader European political, economic, and security structures supplementing NATO, it would now have to be a long time in the future. Also obviously, Russia will suffer grievously from what Putin has already done, not from the West’s short-term pin-prick sanctions, but from longer-range existential sanctions; no serious person or institutions in the West will easily again trust Russia.
For NATO, the EU, and individual Western states, there needs to be a balance struck. First is to make sure that Putin is under no illusions that he has taken a momentous decision — call it drawing an unspoken, existential red line; that he has broken rules that Russia must abide by if it wants to be involved in the outside world; and that in time he and Russia will pay a price that is likely to be greater than his immediate gains. All this is being done and will be reinforced by President Barack Obama’s trip to Europe next week, where he meets with G-7 leaders in The Hague — real money for Ukraine, please — and at the EU and NATO in Brussels.
Second, however, is to do what is possible in the West not to accept that there is a new Cold War, with all of the apparatus implied in terms of institutions, actions, statements, psychology, and rigidities. Most Western leaders, including President Barack Obama, seem to get this point, especially since Russian support is still needed in other places, most immediately in regard to nuclear talks with Iran — though many people in the US commentariat are pushing hard in the other direction, without their having to count the costs.
Third is to structure today’s opposition to what Russia has done in Crimea in a way that it is not irreversible — i.e. a new Cold War by inertia. This is easy to say but hard to do, in a culture (ours) where diplomacy is too often represented as cowardice and compromise as something for chumps. (For example, it is hard for the West, and especially Americans, to understand that what Putin has done in Crimea is not “100% different” from what the West did in wrenching Kosovo from Serbia; or that we have indeed on many occasions taken advantage of the Soviet Union’s having “lost” the Cold War and the Russians inability, at least until now, to push back. That doesn’t excuse what Putin has done, but to avoid becoming prisoners of our own perspective and rhetoric we must at least make an honest assessment of how everyone got to this point.)
Fourth, we need to recognize that, while the Crimea and Ukraine crises are an immediate shot in the arm for NATO, in terms of showing its continued relevance in Europe (or, more particularly, underscoring that the United States is still needed strategically in Europe), these crises do not answer the long-term Quo Vadis? question. Added Western conventional military power would have almost no effect on the situation, since war has been ruled out short of an unambiguous Russian military (or cyber?) attack on a formal NATO ally. Military demonstrations of solidary with frightened Central European states can be done with what NATO has now. Parliaments throughout the Alliance will still be reluctant to increase defense budgets — for what long-term purposes, they will ask?
Further, European allies will still need to show the United States that they will support US strategic objectives elsewhere in the world, as they have done in Afghanistan, in order to keep the US pinned to Europe strategically. If the Ukraine situation does stabilize and Putin does no more sabre rattling, the US will again shift a considerable part of its central preoccupations to the Middle East and East Asia, especially China. Thus NATO’s European allies must still ponder what they can and will do elsewhere in the world to support the US strategically, almost regardless of what happens in Ukraine and its vicinity in the period ahead. Indeed, by underscoring that only the United States can deal with Russia, the requirement for the allies to support the US elsewhere has been redoubled.
As of now, therefore, the NATO summit in Wales this September has been saved from being a dud, inevitably underscoring that the mission in Afghanistan is running down without much of lasting value to show for it, and without much political will to craft a serious future for NATO. Just going on about Crimea is no lasting answer and, unless Putin gets fully into the aggression business, can be no substitute for getting on with the serious business of figuring out the Alliance’s future. There still needs to be a new Transatlantic Compact that brings together all elements of economic, political, military, and strategic relations to bind the Atlantic nations together in the post-Cold War, 21st century. But there is no indication, now, that either the ideas, the US leadership, or European receptivity will be found, either at the Wales summit or afterward. Crimea can be no substitute for addressing these more fundamental matters: it is a tonic for NATO as an institution, a pick-me-up, but not a cure.
]]>by Peter Jenkins
British people who take an interest in what is happening abroad are perplexed and worried by the recent turn of events in Ukraine. They have difficulty understanding why the US and EU have been showing so little sensitivity to Russia’s vital security interests in the Ukraine; and they are [...]]]>
by Peter Jenkins
British people who take an interest in what is happening abroad are perplexed and worried by the recent turn of events in Ukraine. They have difficulty understanding why the US and EU have been showing so little sensitivity to Russia’s vital security interests in the Ukraine; and they are not convinced that adequate thought has been given to identifying where the West’s true interests lie.
Russia has good reason to care about the strategic alignment of its neighbour to the South. As a former British ambassador to NATO reminded an audience recently, Ukraine is to Russia a bit what Ireland is, or was, to Britain.
Western politicians talk as though Russia’s attachment to the “sphere of influence” concept is reprehensible. Yet the US has long seen Latin America as a US sphere of influence and has not hesitated to act to keep unwelcome intruders out. How many of those who have condemned the sending of Russian troops to the Crimea as unlawful, and a threat to peace, remember the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, which amused neither Grenada’s head of state, Her Majesty the Queen, nor her Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher? And that’s only one example of US unlawful acts in the Latin American sphere.
Similarly, for centuries British leaders not only regarded the island to the West as a potential back-door into Britain that must not be allowed to come under hostile influence, let alone occupation; they also held to the principle that the Channel ports opposite Britain must be kept out of the hands of potentially hostile powers.
Even that paragon of 21st century soft power, the EU, has a “neighbourhood policy”, which is a sphere of influence policy by another name.
Perhaps US and European leaders believe that the Kremlin is wrong to see NATO and the EU as potentially hostile. If so, they underestimate the effect on Russian strategic perceptions of the eastward expansion of NATO since the reunification of Germany, and of NATO plans to station on the Russian periphery missiles that could be targeted against Russian assets, not to mention the huge sums of money that the US continues to spend on renewing its weapons of mass destruction, and on modernizing delivery systems.
Whereas Russia’s interest in avoiding a strategic realignment of the Ukraine is obvious, the West’s interest in encouraging a realignment is not.
Have EU leaders asked themselves whether European electorates will thank them if the overthrow of a democratically elected Ukrainian government leads to the EU having to subsidize Ukrainian agricultural production, open up EU labour markets to millions of Ukrainians, and channel tens of billions of Euros from EU structural and regional funds into developing Ukrainian infrastructure? The idea of fast-track Ukrainian accession to the EU, which is now in play, will lead in precisely that direction, and sooner rather than later.
Are NATO leaders considering the wisdom of giving Ukrainian nationalists reason to expect a future in which a Ukrainian government is entitled to demand that British or French soldiers die in defence of Kiev?
And to what extent have Western leaders weighed the possible consequences of the provocations they have been offering to Russia? Do heavily-indebted European states want to have to start rebuilding their armed forces to guard against a renewal of Russian hostility towards the Western democracies? Are leaders confident that they can end the humanitarian crisis in Syria without Russian cooperation? Are they sure they can dispense with Russian influence in Tehran and Pyongyang? Do they want to bring to an end the era of multilateral cooperation at the UN and in other global institutions that the demise of Soviet communism ushered in?
The potential consequences of the West’s handling of this latest Ukrainian crisis are so serious that a change of course is a necessity. There is an alternative to multiplying provocations and threatening Russia with dire but still-to-be-determined “consequences” (“I shall do such things, I know not what” says Shakespeare’s King Lear before madness overwhelms him). Far more constructive would be for the EU and US to invite Russia and China, and representatives of all shades of Ukrainian opinion, to a conference to discuss long-term arrangements for the security, prosperity and neutrality of the Ukraine. (A guarantee of neutrality akin to that in the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 is, surely, a promising way forward.)
Such Great Power conferences have long been a feature of European diplomacy. On the whole, they have done more good than harm. A conference now can offer an opportunity not only to resolve the Ukrainian crisis but to do so within the wider context of East/West relations. It is time the West made an effort to understand the resentments that have been accumulating in Russia since 1990, and to address the trust deficit that has been growing where it should have been shrinking — as Russia’s actions in recent days demonstrate all too clearly.
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