I rarely pay any attention to news when I travel, and my recent trip to Florida was no exception. When I left I was vaguely aware of violently repressed anti-Russian (aka "pro-West") protesters in Ukraine, but when I got back to Wichita the table had flipped with Ukraine's Prime Minister (democratically elected, as best I recall) ousted and exiled to Russia, while a new "caretaker" government had taken over and was, in turn, violently repressing pro-Russian (aka "anti-West") protesters. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in turn, had become very upset, and intervened militarily taking control of the Crimean peninsula -- with an invite from the regional government there, and aided by the fact that Russia already had a substantial military presence in Crimea.
As usual, outsiders see events like this through their pre-existing lenses, which in the US mostly means the relics of the "Cold War" -- the anti-Communist ideology that drove America's security state to seek worldwide hegemony. The issue is no longer economic: Russia adopted a particularly brutal form of privatized capitalism following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but remained more/less isolated from the neoliberal international system, and after Putin came to power resumed thinking of itself as an autonomous regional (if not world) power. Meanwhile, neocons in the US shifted their focus from economic to military hegemony, seeking to contain and marginalize any nation that had not aligned itself under US military command.
As such, they were more focused in extending NATO -- which with the end of the Cold War seemed to have no reason for continued existence -- through eastern Europe to the former SSRs than they were interested in pushing economic integration. Russia, quite reasonably, regarded such efforts to expand NATO as a challenge to its own autonomy. The Ukraine has turned out to be a focal point in this US-Russia struggle because popular opinion there is closely divided between pro- and anti-Russian factions, with each able to draw in foreign alliances by catering to the prejudices of Moscow and Washington. That, in turn, results in overreactions by all parties.
I was thinking about doing a piece collecting various links, but one article stands out: Anatol Lieven: Why Obama Shouldn't Fall for Putin's Ukrainian Folly [March 2]:
We're now witnessing the consequences of how grossly both Russia and the West have overplayed their hands in Ukraine. It is urgently necessary that both should find ways of withdrawing from some of the positions that they have taken. Otherwise, the result could very easily be civil war, Russian invasion, the partition of Ukraine, and a conflict that will haunt Europe for generations to come. [ . . . ]
During George W. Bush's second term as president, the U.S., Britain, and other NATO countries made a morally criminal attempt to force this choice by the offer of a NATO Membership Action Plan for Ukraine (despite the fact that repeated opinion polls had shown around two-thirds of Ukrainians opposed to NATO membership). French and German opposition delayed this ill-advised gambit, and after August 2008, it was quietly abandoned. The Georgian-Russian war in that month had made clear both the extreme dangers of further NATO expansion, and that the United States would not in fact fight to defend its allies in the former Soviet Union. [ . . . ]
Over the past year, both Russia and the European Union tried to force Ukraine to make a clear choice between them -- and the entirely predictable result has been to tear the country apart. Russia attempted to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Customs Union by offering a massive financial bailout and heavily subsidized gas supplies. The European Union then tried to block this by offering an association agreement, though (initially) with no major financial aid attached. Neither Russia nor the EU made any serious effort to talk to each other about whether a compromise might be reached that would allow Ukraine somehow to combine the two agreements, to avoid having to choose sides.
President Viktor Yanukovych's rejection of the EU offer led to an uprising in Kiev and the western and central parts of Ukraine, and to his own flight from Kiev, together with many of his supporters in the Ukrainian parliament. This marks a very serious geopolitical defeat for Russia.
Many Americans are so fond of zero-sum games that they assume any"serious geopolitical defeat for Russia" is a net gain for the US -- a sense reinforced by sixty years of unrelenting Cold War propaganda. That's very foolish: a crippled Russia is more desperate and dangerous, more estranged from international norms, and more likely to provoke worse behavior from the US -- a superpower with a notoriously weak sense of international law, scant appreciation that such law holds the key to a stable future, and none that Americans might actually benefit from some constraints.
The neocon notion that a superpower can impose its vision of how political economies should work on foreign peoples has proven to be a disaster, most obviously in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US spent so many billions of dollars and sacrificed thousands of soldiers. That lesson hasn't sunk in, least of all for morons like John McCain, who was so eager to send troops to defend Georgia in 2008, but at least those currently in control recognize that American power is limited -- in particular, an army that can't manage a few thousand Taliban has no itch to take on nuclear-armed Russia or China.
Still, the Obama administration hasn't done much to reassure us of its sanity. They've moved token armed forces into position close to Russia. Secretary of State Kerry has pushed for economic sanctions against Russia -- "war by other means" but still hostile with an aim toward crippling -- while his predecessor, probable future president Hillary Clinton, has absent-mindedly likened Putin to Adolph Hitler. (The problem isn't just historical. The US waged total war against Hitler, insisting on nothing short of unconditional surrender. When Bush I painted Saddam Hussein as "just like Hitler" he set up an expectation for victory that his 1991 Gulf War couldn't deliver, a shortsightedness that Bush II felt the need to remedy in 2003.)
One more point: intervention, and its ill effects, didn't start with Putin seizing Crimea. It goes back to when the Ukraine became independent, split off from the Soviet Union, with NATO expansion a particularly aggressive move by the US. Moreover, apprehension and bad blood wasn't inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the main ways the US irritated Putin was the program to install a US-controlled anti-missile defense network in Poland during the Bush II years. This should remind us all once again: conflicts don't begin with war; rather, war is the shameful and disastrous failure of parties to solve conflicts before they get out of hand.
More links:
- Uri Avnery: Israel and Ukraine: More luck for Netanyahu as Ukraine provides yet another distraction for Kerry's "peace mission" -- indeed, the crisis has not only sapped Kerry's attention, it's turned him into a blathering neocon posturing against the only statesman who could have helped with the now-forgotten Syrian crisis. Avnery includes a useful historical survey, which doesn't leave anyone wearing white hats.
- William Boardman: US Provokes Russia, Acts Surprised to Get Nasty Reaction: Covers most aspects of the crisis, including the fact that Russia didn't have to invade Crimea: they already had troops stationed there, by long-standing agreement with Ukraine, much as the US has troops in Germany and Japan.
- Patrick J Buchanan: Hillary, Hitler, and Cold War II: Gives Hillary more credit than I would, but that's because Buchanan's more sympathetic to Hitler. I'd be inclined to downplay Putin's concerns "as protector of the ethnic Russians left behind when the Soviet Union came apart" because I don't see him as a racist or ethnic bigot, unlike Hitler (or even Buchanan). There are, after all, ethnic Russians scattered all over the former SSRs (and there are many non-Russians left in Russia). Rather, his concern is with the economic and political power of the Russian state. The Ukraine matters to Putin not because there are lots of ethnic Russians living there but because the Ukraine is one of Russia's largest trading partners, and because Russia's security is tied to its Crimean naval bases.
- Chris Floyd: Oligarchs Triumphant: Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda: More background on the pressure the west introduced to provoke the crisis and the coup against Yanukovich. Floyd identifiers E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar as one of the key oligarchs here -- we're not really used to private individuals acting on a geopolitical scale, but I readily recall examples like Sanford Dole in Hawaii and United Front in Guatemala.
- John Glaser: Kissinger: Leave Ukrain to Ukrainians: An intro to the infamous war criminal's Washington Post op-ed on the crisis, which is distinguished by a deeper understanding of the relevant history and of diplomatic nuance than is common among "experts" today. Key line: "the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one." Recommendations are reasonable too.
- Jim Lobe: US Hawks Take Flight Over Ukraine: A useful summary of neocon blathering over Ukraine, although you get the sense that they are happier slamming Obama for weakness and incompetence than they would be if he actually did something, not least something that they themselves recommended. Moreover, they are less concerned with rolling back Russia's position than they are with setting an example reinforcing the world's perception of American recklessness and lawlessness.
- John Feffer: Ukraine: The Clash of Partnerships: Argues that the stakes here are not just whether Ukraine leans east or west but whether Russia joins the worldwide trend toward liberal democracy or is further isolated. He might have added "like the Soviet Union" -- unreconstructed cold warriors (like McCain) argue that the Cold War never ended, but through their rhetoric and acts what they are doing is constructing another one.
- Andrew Wilson: Tatar Sunni Muslims pose a threat to Russia's occupation of Crimea: The Tatar minority is only 13% of Crimea's population, but has been there longer than any of the others, formerly ruled the Crimean Tatar Khanate (1441-1783), and recall being treated particularly badly by Stalin.