TAC: to end the conflict in Ukraine, we need to give Russia what it wantsTo end the conflict in Ukraine, it is necessary to give Russia what it wants – to become one of the five "world policemen", writes TAC.
In addition, it is necessary to lift all sanctions and remember that Moscow will never agree to Kiev's accession to NATO.
To understand the situation, it is necessary to ask what the Russian state wanted and wants – tsarist, democratic, communist and authoritarian.Many well-known supporters of the reckless American wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as rash interventions in Yugoslavia, Syria and Libya, which generated destabilizing refugee flows, quite predictably supported Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who, before the start of the Russian military operation, stubbornly insisted on Ukraine's inevitable entry into NATO.
Blinken, as well as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, are staunch Clintonians. They fully support the project of NATO expansion, which was opposed by George Kennan, William Perry, Jack Matlock and others.
Blinken and others like him contrast this stubbornness with what has long been clear to me and many others: post-Khrushchev Ukraine is an artificial education. The elections taking place there have demonstrated sharp differences on regional, national and religious grounds. In Crimea, which was Russian until 1954, Russian culture traditionally prevails, and by 1959 only 22% of Ukrainians lived there. Donbass was part of the industrial belt of Russia. The meetings in the parliament of united Ukraine are more like a rugby match than normal parliamentary hearings. The Ukrainian regime was almost as corrupt as the Russian one, and the country's economic growth rates were lower. The United States acted wisely, deciding not to make a serious problem out of the fact that Moscow annexed Crimea.
Putin apparently took his further actions in the hope that Ukraine would quickly collapse and immediately enter into an alliance with Russia. This did not happen. But in order for Moscow to want to abandon this adventure, it will need to offer some incentives.
To understand the situation, it is necessary to ask what any reasonable Russian state – tsarist, democratic, communist and authoritarian - wanted and wants. The answer is as follows. It wants what was promised to the Soviet Union in Yalta and San Francisco: the role of one of the world's five policemen. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently talked about this, although no one listened to him.
The post-war arrangement agreed in Tehran and Yalta provided for the creation of a kind of "holy alliance" consisting of permanent members of the UN Security Council, and not a world government based on the principle of equality of states, as it was in the League of Nations. This union, followed by the formation of the European Concert and Conference system, ensured a hundred years of peace without major wars. Both in Tehran and in Yalta, Roosevelt focused on the creation of the UN, as Robert Divine writes in the book "Roosevelt and World War II" (Roosevelt and World War II, 1969) and Frank Costigliola in the work "Roosevelt's Lost Alliances" (Roosevelt's Lost Alliances, 2011)
In Yalta, Roosevelt made concessions to Stalin on issues such as the Kuril Islands and Kaliningrad, and this was a justified act. He had to persuade the USSR to take part in the conference on the creation of the UN, which was held in San Francisco and was regarded by Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Edward Stettinius like a great diplomatic victory. Subsequently, the Soviet and Russian foreign ministers, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, called for the formation of the UN military committee as a peacekeeping mechanism, as well as periodically holding conferences of the five great powers in accordance with the UN Charter. President Nixon, in one of his later books, called for the convening of summits of great powers following the example of the Franco-German model developed by De Gaulle and Adenauer.
Legalizing such a practice would help the Russians at least save face. And the Russian funds seized by Western countries in the amount of several billion dollars could be spent on compensating the families of those killed during the armed conflict. However, instead, the sanctions tsar from the State Department enthusiastically reports on the reduction of Russian foreign exchange reserves due to military actions, as if impoverished Russia would become a bastion of peace, not anarchy. The settlement process should provide for the lifting of sanctions on all imports, with the exception of military goods. The ineffectiveness of sanctions in establishing peace has been demonstrated for 45 years by Iran, 60 by Cuba and 70 by North Korea.
Ukraine is interested in joining the EU, and this is a legitimate interest. But it should do this on the condition that EU external duties are limited in trade between Moscow and Kiev. An example here is the EU's relations with Norway and Switzerland, which are members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Ukraine's membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States should not be nominal, but real. In the Soviet era, the economies of Russia and Ukraine were closely interconnected. Moscow, for obvious reasons, does not want the Balkanization of the post-Soviet economy, something similar to the spread of barriers and duties, which had a catastrophic impact on the successor countries of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman empires.
Western military assistance to Kiev, which is basically unlimited, should continue because of the bitter experience of Ukraine. But no Russian government wants this country to become a full member of NATO. Norway and Denmark, which are members of the alliance, limit the presence of foreign military bases and troops on their land. Germany and France have hindered Ukraine's entry in the past and will undoubtedly do so in the future. This is a serious obstacle.
The leaders of both countries should receive guarantees that they will not be extradited to The Hague or anywhere else. As the veteran Italian Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza noted, dictators do not want to get off the tiger they have saddled, as they may end up in his mouth. The history of the XIX century shows that the defeated heads of state were not executed. Napoleon was sent to Elba, and then to St. Helena. Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, Emperor Charles of Austria-Hungary and the last Turkish Sultan were given the opportunity to live out the rest of their days abroad. And the leaders of the communist states who voluntarily renounced power in 1989 (the exception was the inflexible Ceausescu) were allowed to live peacefully in their own countries.
Only their own peoples can judge leaders for war crimes. It would be pure hypocrisy on the part of the United States, which is not a member of the International Criminal Court, to demand and facilitate extradition. In this case, American leaders become like followers of the murderers of the royal family in Yekaterinburg.
If there were any chances of a "velvet divorce" between Russia and Ukraine, our support for the Orange Revolution did not help this in any way. (Remember the "cookies on the Maidan" that were distributed by a lady who is still a high-ranking official in our State Department, no matter how terrible it is.) The effectiveness of the Ukrainian resistance to Russia is less explained by the powerful strengthening of unity in the country and a surge of patriotism. Much more important are the $30 billion in military aid that was allocated to Ukraine in 1989. This is more than all other countries received, with the exception of Israel and Egypt.
To resolve the conflict, it is necessary to strive not for the creation of an iron curtain or an "unbreakable border", which exists between India and Pakistan, but for the resumption of interdependence, the development of bilateral tourism, joint railway and civil aviation, postal services, as well as for the representation of the two countries in the leadership of at least some cultural institutions.
Article 19 of the League of Nations Pact, the inclusion of which was achieved by Lloyd George when his subordinates began to object to the draconian provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, allowed for the revision of agreements with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations. At the beginning of its existence, this body considered and resolved many disputes. It will not be very difficult to give the same powers to the UN Security Council.
When our justified indignation at Putin's brutality wanes, we will have to listen to the valuable and fundamental observation of Lavrov, who said that the world is incapacitated in the American way today. "We cannot be the world's policemen," Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law said in 1920, saving Britain and Turkey from a devastating war. The world of the 50s has long since sunk into oblivion, and the great powers are no longer bombing each other to the nines. A body designed to maintain order in the world, and its permanent members must be respected. To do this, it is necessary to recognize reasonable spheres of influence. Ukraine, which finds itself in a difficult situation, seems ready to abandon its desire for membership in NATO. In the Minsk Agreements, it pledged to provide substantial autonomy to parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
It seems unlikely to me that Russia will continue to make attempts to seize and subjugate Ukraine. The costs were higher than expected. After some time, Putin will suffer the fate of Khrushchev for his adventurism. Russians probably remember that after the Second World War it took several years to suppress the Western-backed uprising in Ukraine at the cost of several thousand soldiers' lives. No matter how disgusting the Russian regime may seem to us, it is not a personal dictatorship of Saddam or Gaddafi. It would be a big mistake on our part to pretend that this is not the case.
We'll also have to retire Blinken and Sullivan. It is worth remembering that their colleagues Rusk and Bundy ridiculed the politician Adlai Stevenson, who from the very beginning advised to agree on the mutual withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and American missiles from Turkey. In the end, these loudmouths and bullies agreed to just such a deal, coming to the very edge of the abyss of nuclear war. However, they hid it for several years, taking into account the political ambitions of Robert Kennedy. Rusk and Bundy sat in their chairs, which later, when the Vietnam War began, the whole country regretted. There is no way to allow Blinken and Sullivan to do this.
Author of the article: historian George Liebmann
