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AMONG the several intriguing aspects of the truce implemented in eastern Ukraine 10 days ago, what stands out are the cynical efforts to guarantee its failure. The deal reached earlier this month in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, between the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and France and the chancellor of Germany was almost overshadowed by the American debate over providing heavy weaponry to the government in Kiev.
It was easy to assume that the rhetoric emanating from Washington was intended largely to reduce the likelihood of recalcitrance on the part of Vladimir Putin, who at one point during the negotiations gave vent to his frustration by snapping his pencil in two.
While the option aired by the notoriously (and perhaps thankfully) indecisive Barack Obama remains on the table, his secretary of state, John Kerry, has lately been threatening further sanctions against Russia in London and elsewhere in Europe.
It does not require in-depth knowledge of statecraft to recognise that provocations of this nature could prove extremely counterproductive amid the ongoing tension. Time and again it’s hard to escape the impression that a Diplomacy 101 refresher course would do Kerry a world of good.
In this particular context, though, he is not by any means the worst offender. US Air Force Gen Philip Breedlove, Nato’s top military commander, was recently quoted as saying in Munich: “I don’t think we should preclude out of hand the possibility of the military option.” That puts him completely at odds with the leader of a key Nato component, given that Angela Merkel has specifically ruled out such an option in the quest for a political solution.
While making the case for arming Ukraine, Breedlove admitted that “there is no conversation about boots on the ground” — but it wasn’t hard to read into his comment the idea that such a possibility wasn’t out of the question.
He has lately been outdone by his deputy, the British general Sir Adrian Bradshaw, who told an audience in London last week that “the threat from Russia … represents an obvious existential threat to our whole being”. Such rhetoric inevitably recalls the sabre-rattling that characterised the old Cold War during its periods of greatest tension.
Back then, though, at least the Soviet Union was recognised as a superpower — while, at the same time, its military prowess was frequently exaggerated in order to justify inordinate expenditure on Western nuclear armouries. Russia is by any standards a diminished entity. However, as Jack Matlock, a former ambassador to Moscow during the Reagan and (first) Bush administrations, recently pointed out, “No one with ICBMs is a regional power, not by any means.”
A Diplomacy 101 refresher course would do Kerry a world of good.
He also noted that the declaration at Nato’s Bucharest summit in 2008 that the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine would be brought into the fold of the West military alliance clearly violated the promise George H.W. Bush had made to Mikhail Gorbachev at their Malta summit in 1989 to the effect that there would be no eastward expansion of Nato.
That wasn’t the first violation of that vow: within 10 years of the Malta summit, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland had been welcomed into the alliance, followed five years later by another batch of nations that included the former Soviet Baltic republics. It is not surprising, then, that there is frequent mention of potential Russian threats to Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, given that military intervention by Moscow in any of these countries would enable Nato to retaliate on the basis of its collective defence mechanism.
It’s more worrying, though, when the utterances of Nato stalwarts imply that Ukraine is already effectively a member of the US-led alliance. As the realist conservative commentator John Mearsheimer recently noted in The New York Times: “Great powers react harshly when distant rivals project military power into their neighbourhood, much less attempt to make a country on their border an ally. That is why the United States has the Monroe Doctrine, and today no American leader would ever tolerate Canada or Mexico joining a military alliance headed by another great power.”
Russia, moreover, can legitimately see itself as the victim of more than one invasion from the west in the past 100 years. Small wonder, then, that it should see buffer states along the border as a reasonable aspiration.
This is by no means to defend the profoundly flawed administration of Vladimir Putin, let alone justify its surreptitious intervention in eastern Ukraine. Yet it shouldn’t be difficult to understand why Moscow is dead set against the idea of a conspicuously hostile administration in Kiev.
A year after the Maidan events in Kiev that set in motion the latest string of consequences, there is still scope for a modus vivendi covering both Ukraine’s interests and those of Russia. Threats and provocations, however, can more or less be guaranteed to forestall a settlement. And nothing good could conceivably come of that.
Published in Dawn February 25th , 2015
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