At this writing, a welcome cease-fire in Ukraine has been arranged but not yet activated. If it's activated, I'm guessing it will fail once again and we'll be back to considering other options, including U.S. involvement by supplying deadly weapons. This would be a huge mistake, a formula for endless war and escalation.
Ukraine, a huge flat expanse and a buffer that Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany had to cross to attack Russia, is of vital importance to Russians. Putin will not stand idly by while the U.S. supplies weapons to a Ukrainian government that is militarily allied with the West. Neither sanctions, military threats, nor weapons are going to change Putin's direction. As University of Chicago foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer put on the PBS evening news, "Do you want to take a country that has thousands of nuclear warheads and back it into a corner?"
Historical perspective, too often in short supply, is essential here. The West has followed a dangerous Russia-phobic path ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. During the Clinton administration, some favored NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe while others argued there was no reason for this and it would only ignite tensions with Russia, which considers its neighbors to be buffers against attack. In fact, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine did help buffer the Nazi blow in June 1941. But NATO expansionists won this argument, and Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary joined NATO in 1997.
NATO could have cooperated with Russia. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's president from 1991-1999, suggested Russian membership in NATO, calling this a "long-term political aim." Vladimir Putin also raised this issue in 2000, saying "We believe we can talk about more profound integration with NATO, but only if Russia is regarded as an equal partner." He warned that any attempt to exclude Russia would provoke opposition.
Russia lacked leverage to prevent a second NATO expansion in 2004 into seven more of Russia's neighbors: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The West continued pouring fuel on the fire of Russian fears by planning to site missile systems in Poland and Czech Republic to defend against future Iranian missiles. Russia regarded these missiles, rightly in my opinion, as a threat to their own strategic nuclear deterrent force. Wisely, President Obama decided in 2009 not to go ahead with these missile systems.
In 2008, the George W. Bush administration and the NATO alliance endorsed the aspirations of Georgia, on Russia's southern border, and Ukraine, on Russia's southwestern border, to become NATO members. That goal has never been abandoned.
The current crisis was entirely predictable. Russian leaders have long made it clear that their security is threatened when neighbors join NATO and become anti-Russian bastions. The illegal overthrow of the democratically elected pro-Russian president and his eventual replacement by the anti-Russian Petro Poroshenko was the final straw. Putin's response was to take Crimea, which he feared would become a NATO naval base on Russia's border.
Influential Republican hawks, along with several Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton, are demonizing Putin and calling for lethal aid to Ukraine. President Poroshenko says "I don't have the slightest doubt that the decision to supply Ukraine with weapons will be made by the United States as well as by other partners of ours." However, two of these "other partners," namely France and Germany, have expressed their opposition to any such decision.
We are too quick to make war. Our infatuation with military solutions haunts us in Ukraine and worldwide. It didn't need to be this way. You don't have to like a country to get along with it. Russia has made some paranoid decisions since 1991, but we have fed that paranoia by surrounding them with a hostile military alliance on their doorsteps. Consider how Americans would react if China dominated the world and formed a hostile military alliance with Canada and Mexico. America's provocative policies, combined with Russia's historical fear of encirclement, are a prescription for the current war.
There is an easy and rational way out of the mess we've made for ourselves. We should abandon our plan to militarize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, like Austria or Finland during the Cold War. And the West should explicitly renounce expanding NATO into Ukraine and Georgia. If we had done these things years ago, the suffering in Ukraine could have been prevented. Ukraine, Russia, America, and the planet would have been healthier for it.
Art Hobson is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Arkansas. Email him at [email protected].
Commentary on 02/17/2015