By Mario Loyola
Thursday, June 09, 2022
Henry Kissinger stirred up a hornet’s
nest recently when he suggested that peace talks in Ukraine should seek a
return to the status quo ante. Because that would recognize Russia’s illegal
seizures of territory in the years before the war, the suggestion was widely
slammed as appeasement.
The context is new, but the argument,
pitting idealists against realists, is one of the oldest in American foreign
policy. In staring down the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan showed that American
foreign policy is at its best when it takes a pragmatic approach to achieving
principled goals. But a policy of principled pragmatism can be hard to come by.
In the Fourteen Points he sought to impose on Europe after the First World War,
Woodrow Wilson showed that when there is confusion about the interests at
stake, an unrealistic idealism tends to shape America’s posture, often with a
heavy dose of moral preening — and terrible results.
One example of principled pragmatism was
President Nixon’s brilliant handling of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when an
American airlift saved Israel from a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria.
Israeli forces turned the tables and were soon encircling Egypt’s Third Army.
Suddenly Secretary of State Henry Kissinger convinced Nixon to push for a
cease-fire in place, which stopped the Israelis in their tracks, and began
pressuring Israel to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Many Israelis felt
betrayed after 15,000 dead in just a few weeks of war.
But the outcome, a limited Egyptian defeat
that allowed Anwar Sadat to claim some measure of success, paved the way for
the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, ended the era of
state-on-state Arab–Israeli wars, probably forever, and cemented the position
of the United States as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. By the time
Sadat joined hands with Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin in 1978, his war of
aggression had been forgiven, if not forgotten. He died a hero to the Jewish
people.
Alas, examples of Wilsonian policy-
by-platitude are more numerous and include America’s mishandling of the
Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The otherwise pragmatic President Eisenhower was
under the sway of his arch-idealist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, a virulent
anti-Communist who had encouraged the people of Eastern Europe to rise up
against the Soviet yoke. After unrest in Poland earlier that year, student
demonstrations suddenly rocked Budapest. Radio Free Europe urged the protesters
to reject compromise and embrace maximalist demands, all but pledging American
support. In fact, Washington wasn’t prepared to risk World War III to help an
uprising that was almost certain to be put down by massive Soviet force, which
is what happened next. Seduced by the sirens of American idealism, Hungary
descended deeper into Stalinist repression.
Unfortunately, American policy toward
Ukraine and Russia has had a distinctly Wilsonian bent since at least the
Clinton administration. U.S. wartime aid to Ukraine will soon exceed Russia’s
entire military budget for 2021, but the Biden administration thinks it can
stay out of the war by not putting American boots on the ground and not giving
Ukraine weapons it could use to carry the fight into Russia. Meanwhile, more
than a few members of Congress want to give Ukraine whatever it needs to keep
fighting until it liberates every inch of occupied territory.
***
So what is America’s endgame?
It doesn’t seem to have one yet. Americans
are still figuring out what’s at stake in the conflict — when they’re not busy
railing against the evils of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Most of the
world blames Putin for the current catastrophe, and many Russians doubtless
share that view. He has unleashed a war of aggression and must be held accountable.
But the causes and potential consequences of the conflict in Ukraine go far
beyond the simple question of who’s to blame for the current fighting.
The collapse of the Soviet Union entailed
a host of potentially explosive issues, the main ones being the withdrawal of
Soviet forces from Eastern Europe simultaneously with the reunification of
Germany as a NATO power. Further complicating the situation, the former Soviet
“republics” all started declaring independence within borders that were often
just artifacts of Soviet policy. Among the many resulting problems, the newly
born Ukraine suddenly found itself in possession of sizeable nuclear forces as
well as the Soviet Union’s vaunted Black Sea Fleet, neither of which Ukraine
knew what to do with. Preferring the devil it knew to the one it didn’t, the
U.S. pressured Ukraine to transfer the nukes and the fleet to the
Russians.
But there was another major problem, one
that has unfortunately escaped the notice of American diplomats to this day:
Ukraine had declared independence within borders that left it in possession of
far too much of historical Russia. As long as Ukraine was a Russian puppet, the
location of their mutual border didn’t matter. But should Ukraine ever seek
real independence or, even worse, NATO membership, its borders would have to be
adjusted to avoid creating an existential conflict with Russia; the only
question was whether the adjustment would happen by negotiation or by war.
Simply put, Ukraine was born within borders that were totally incompatible with
a truly independent state.
For as long as Russia itself had existed,
Ukraine had been a part of it. Ukraine actually predated Muscovite Russia by
many centuries, but as Putin rightly points out, the administrative entity
known today as Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin after Germany cleaved it
from Russia in the widely condemned diktat of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.
The Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine
thus wound up with tens of millions of Russians, but Russian Communists didn’t
care because the Soviet Union was a unified totalitarian state. It certainly
was not with Ukraine’s national independence in mind that Nikita Khrushchev,
himself a Ukrainian, transferred the Crimean Peninsula to Ukraine, along with
the Black Sea Fleet and Russia’s most important naval base in the world, at
Sevastopol. It didn’t matter to him that Crimea had never been considered part
of Ukraine or that few ethnic Ukrainians had ever lived there. It was a
propaganda exercise meant to give the utterly false appearance of multipolarity
within the Soviet Union, Potemkin’s villages reenacted for a global
audience.
There is at the heart of this
conflagration a great mystery: Why did Russia agree to recognize Ukraine’s
independence in 1991 within borders that contained such large swaths of
historically Russian territory? One answer might be that, even amid the chaos
that attended the fall of the Soviet Union, it would have been inconceivable to
most people in the Kremlin that Ukraine might one day achieve real independence
from Russia — least of all within borders that seemed to guarantee Russia’s
continued hegemony. A version of Ukraine that included the entire north coast
of the Black Sea and stretched east of the Dnipro River for 1,000 miles,
containing perhaps 20 million Russians, seemed to guarantee, among other
things, that pro-Russian parties would win most elections.
The strategy actually worked for a while,
but its key assumption — the loyalty of ethnic Russians to Mother Russia — was
fast eroding. Ukraine’s nationalists embraced the dream of joining the European
Union, and for a country with the GDP per capita of Guatemala, that made
Ukrainian nationalism dazzling even in heavily Russian cities such as Odesa,
Kharkiv, and Mariupol.
In 1997, Ukraine and Russia signed a
20-year lease granting Russia access to Sevastopol. The failure to reach a more
lasting agreement was an ominous sign and left a ticking time bomb with a
frightfully short delay. Russia’s need to secure the north coast of the Black
Sea has been one of the central drivers of Russian history, indeed of European
history, what an American might call “manifest destiny.” The Russians have
fought half a dozen wars over that territory since the 18th century, including
some of the largest and most desperate battles of the Second World War. Any
student of Russian history could see that the Russians were going to get that
naval base back one way or the other.
It was increasingly clear that the two
countries were on a collision course. Ukrainian nationalists were steadily
gaining ground, and by 2004, an overtly anti-Russian candidate, Viktor
Yushchenko, was poised to win the presidency in Ukraine. Putin moved to
forestall what he must have seen as a looming disaster. He opted for
assassination by a disfiguring, military-grade poison, designed to leave little
evidence — and little doubt — that he was responsible.
But Yushchenko survived and was soon
confirmed as president, whereupon he pledged to join NATO and kick Russia’s
Black Sea fleet out of its home base. By now, the Americans, who hate election
interference except when they’re the ones committing it, were openly supporting
Ukrainian nationalist parties and generally fomenting anti-Russian feeling,
culminating in the offer of NATO membership to Ukraine in 2008, a move that,
unlike the expansion of NATO to other parts of Europe, had no obvious strategic
justification and caused considerable alarm and anger in the Kremlin.
By the time the pro-Russian Viktor
Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election in Ukraine, even Russian puppets
had to ingratiate themselves with the nationalists. Straddling the fence,
Yanukovych agreed to join the European Union but then backed out at the last
minute, in late 2013, under pressure from Putin.
This was the decision that finally plunged
Ukraine into the calamity of war and revolution. After police tried to suppress
the “Euromaidan” protests, with dozens killed, Yanukovych was deposed in an
extra-constitutional parliamentary vote. Meanwhile, pro-Russian separatists
declared breakaway republics in Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbas region of
eastern Ukraine, and the country fractured along an ethnic Russo–Ukrainian
divide.
With Yanukovych deposed and millions of
ethnic Russians in the breakaway regions now excluded from the Ukrainian
electorate, nothing could stop the nationalists from consolidating power. That
meant that the Sevastopol lease would not be renewed when it was set to expire
in 2017, a prospect that, justifiably or not, was fully as unacceptable to
Russia as the loss of Pearl Harbor would be to Americans. After an all-night
session of Russia’s security cabinet, Putin declared that it was necessary to
“return Crimea to Russia” as soon as possible. Weeks later, Russia engineered a
separatist vote in Crimea and annexed the province.
In eastern Ukraine, however, Russia
pursued a different course. Instead of annexing the Donbas at the same time as
Crimea, which it could easily have done, Russia insisted on the reintegration
of the Donbas into Ukraine under Russian “protection.” Indeed, this became
Russia’s key demand in the internationally sponsored Minsk cease-fire
agreements of 2014 and 2015.
Thus did Russia’s responses to the events
of 2014 develop along two azimuths, with very different objectives: the
wresting of Crimea from Ukraine, and the preservation of the
Donbas as an electoral foothold in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s nationalists finally had to face
the existential dilemma created by the country’s 1991 borders. They could have
territorial integrity or political independence, but not both. Full
implementation of the Minsk agreements meant choosing the former over the
latter. Ukraine’s borders would be restored, but so would Russian suzerainty.
Like Putin himself, Ukraine’s nationalists realized that political control
mattered more than territory. Ignoring the pleas of Germany and France, and
encouraged by America’s tacit assurances of support, they preferred to leave
the breakaway territories in limbo indefinitely while they consolidated their
power in Kyiv. Hence the government of Volodymyr Zelensky all but abandoned the
Minsk agreements and dared Russia to do something about it.
***
None of this justifies Russia’s war
of aggression or its systematic violations of international law. But the United
States has moved quickly into the role of a de facto belligerent on the basis
of assumptions about Putin’s motives that are often remarkably undiscerning.
One of those assumptions is the idea that
if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine, then other European countries could be next
in his sights. Putin probably would take back the Baltic states if he could —
but he can’t. NATO is so powerful that it’s on the verge of defeating Russia
without deploying a single soldier in combat, simply with economic sanctions
and military assistance to Ukraine. Putin surely knows that every inch of NATO
territory is hopelessly beyond Russia’s reach.
Americans have not forgotten the folly of
appeasement. But comparing Putin’s territorial claims in Ukraine to Adolf
Hitler’s in Czechoslovakia betrays a deep misunderstanding of both situations.
What made Nazi Germany so dangerous in the fall of 1938 was that its strategic
position was spring-loaded with overwhelming offensive advantages. Giving in to
Hitler’s demands at the Munich Conference was suicide, for the strategic effect
was that Hitler’s conquest of Europe could no longer be prevented. NATO faces
no such threat today. What makes Russia dangerous now is the desperation of a
man sinking in quicksand. His every exertion sinks him deeper still — and he
has a loaded gun.
Writing in the New York Times recently,
President Biden articulated the most coherent statement yet of America’s war
aims: “make it clear that might does not make right”; “send a message to other
would-be aggressors”; and protect “the rules-based international order.” Beyond
those Wilsonian platitudes, however, there was no mention of the substance of
the dispute between Russia and Ukraine — no mention, for example, of the Minsk
agreements or of the peace proposal floated by Italy recently, or of the issues
raised in the lengthy phone calls between French president Emmanuel Macron,
German chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Putin. It’s almost as if the details don’t
matter, a good indicator of the weight of America’s interests in the
conflict.
America has an abiding interest in
protecting the “rules-based international order” but has been more than willing
to ignore it on compelling occasions, such as the Cuban missile crisis and
NATO’s 1999 dismemberment of Serbia, the example Russia uses to refute the
claim that NATO is a “purely defensive” alliance. Whatever its outcome, the war
in Ukraine will not be the end of the rules-based order. People follow rules
when they are afraid of the consequences of violating them, and Russians are
already suffering the consequences of Putin’s war.
America also has a vital interest in
maintaining NATO’s “open door” policy, and Russia cannot be given any sort of
veto over membership in the alliance. But that does not mean that the
composition of NATO is none of Russia’s business, as American diplomats have
asserted. It should be easy to see that Ukraine’s accession to NATO would threaten
vital Russian interests, particularly when Ukraine is still laying claim to
Sevastopol. That makes NATO accession a proper subject for negotiation within
the framework of collective security and cooperation that maintained the peace
during the Cold War.
While he delivers huge amounts of military
assistance to Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly asserted that Russia must be
defeated. Similarly, leaders in the Baltic states, Poland, and other countries
with long memories of the Russian boot are bent on inflicting a severe defeat
on Putin, hoping to deter any attack against themselves and perhaps also to
exact revenge for a long history of Russian abuses.
Elsewhere in Europe, attitudes are more
circumspect. Europe gets almost a third of its oil from Russia and 40 percent
of its natural gas for electricity, cooking, and home heating. France and
Germany still remember the grand alliances in which Russia played a crucial
role, and they still remember that it was Russia, more than any other power,
that defeated Napoleon and Hitler. Not surprisingly, Paris and Berlin tried the
hardest to prevent the war in Ukraine and are now calling for a negotiated
cease-fire. Italy has gone further still, proposing a cease-fire in place, a
Ukrainian pledge not to join NATO, and autonomy for Crimea and the Donbas,
presumably under Russian “protection.”
This has triggered vehement protests from
Zelensky’s government, which is understandable given America’s pledges of
apparently open-ended support. Biden has said that he won’t put pressure on
Ukraine to define its war aims, one way or another, in public or in private.
But not making that choice is still a choice. A commitment of massive military
aid tied to no precise purpose can only encourage Zelensky to expand his war
aims.
Despite Kyiv’s negative reaction,
Kissinger’s proposal of a return to the status quo ante is actually so
favorable to Ukraine that the Russians would be unlikely to consider it unless
they were facing complete defeat. There is at least one major thing that Russia
will need, in addition to the status quo ante, before it stops fighting, and
that is a land bridge connecting the Donbas with Crimea, along the Sea of Azov.
Hence the epic significance of the Battle of Mariupol. Americans admirably want
to help Ukraine in its hour of need. But as they commit to supplying as many
weapons as Ukraine may require for “victory,” they need to understand how far
Russia is willing to go to secure what it sees as an existential
lifeline.
Meanwhile, remarkably little attention has
been given to how the conflict affects Americans, though the effects are plain
enough in skyrocketing prices of food, gasoline, and electricity. Indeed, the
war in Ukraine is causing such economic devastation around the world that poor
countries such as Sri Lanka are suddenly on the brink of famine.
The U.S. has an overwhelming interest in
the stability of the European system, which will have to be restored sooner or
later, with Russia in a vital role. The U.S. also has a vital interest in
securing Russia’s help against the great challenges of our age: Islamist
extremism and the rise of China. Instead, as the U.S. continues its years-long
pattern of inciting Ukraine and antagonizing Russia, the risk of a direct
confrontation between the U.S. and Russia increases. Russia may or may not be
bluffing about its willingness to use nuclear weapons in case of escalation
between the two superpowers. That’s worth keeping in mind as America continues
weapons shipments that easily qualify it as a belligerent actor under the
Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual, and that America would have every
right to interdict if the situations were reversed.
Since 1991, some sort of compromise
involving the status and borders of Ukraine has been the only realistic
alternative to war. That compromise cannot be fully satisfactory, but it is the
only way the conflict will end. Let’s hope that America’s idealism doesn’t get
too many more people killed between now and then.
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