Off Topic: Confronting Putin’s Invasion
Off Topic: Confronting Putin’s Invasion – The Weekly Standard.
It can—and must—be done.
Mar 17, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 26 • By ERIC EDELMAN
On the last day of February and first day of March, Russia’s mendacious foreign and defense ministers told their credulous U.S. counterparts that Russia had every intention of respecting Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. Of course, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is virtually the poster child for Henry Wotton’s famous definition of a diplomat as someone sent abroad to lie for his country. Russian assurances to their U.S. counterparts during the war in Georgia in 2008 were equally deceitful. Lavrov’s duplicity during the Georgia war negotiations that year was so outrageous that French president Nicolas Sarkozy, according to witnesses, at one point grabbed him by the lapels and called him a liar to his face.
The crisis in Georgia was a serious matter but unfortunately came in the midst of an American presidential election and at the tail end of an administration that was both physically and psychologically exhausted after seven years of war. The serious but unsuccessful effort to impose costs on Russia was complicated by the fact that Georgia’s impetuous president, Misha Saakashvili, had ignored U.S. cautions, risen to the bait, and carelessly stepped into the trap set for him by Vladimir Putin. When Bush administration witnesses testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2008 (full disclosure: the author was one of the witnesses), some Democrats on the committee, notably including then New York senator Hillary Clinton, hinted darkly at a Bush administration conspiracy that had somehow orchestrated the war (implicitly to assist John McCain’s presidential election campaign), although her own experience appears to have soured her a bit on Putin.
After the Obama team took over, its members demonstrated minimal sympathy for the Georgians (who were facing their own internal political problems) since any close attention to Russia’s continued violations of the agreements that ended the war would detract from the new administration’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia. Although Secretary of State John Kerry now has virtually denied there ever was a “reset” policy, it was aimed at securing Russian support for the president’s overriding nonproliferation objectives, particularly with regard to Iran, and at securing Russian support for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, specifically the northern distribution route for supplying NATO forces (later, Russian support on Syria would be added to the list). The purchase price for this was scaling back U.S. missile defense efforts in Central Europe and a sweetheart deal in the New START Treaty, which required the United States to dismantle nuclear force structure while allowing Russia to build up its strategic nuclear forces to the agreed treaty levels while totally ignoring Russian theater nuclear weapons.
The administration’s failed efforts at reset are now obvious for all but the most deluded to see. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine presents the United States and its European allies with what is commonly conceded to be the biggest test of European security since the end of the wars of the Yugoslav succession in 1999. As was the case in Georgia, there will be a strong temptation to find a face-saving agreement that papers over Putin’s gains in order to trumpet the “success” of a negotiated, diplomatic outcome and allow the international community to return to its normal torpor. It can’t be said enough that any outcome that allows Putin to wrest either Crimea or other parts of Ukraine from Kiev’s control should not be acceptable. He should not be allowed to maintain the ill-gotten gains of his aggression. As Obama’s former NATO ambassador has said, “this isn’t just about Crimea. This is about who is ultimately in control of Ukraine.”
Why does Ukraine matter so much?
First, it matters because—despite Putin’s risible claims of anti-Russian violence in Crimea and eastern Ukraine (even Angela Merkel reportedly told President Obama that she thinks Putin is “in another world”)—this is military aggression against a neighboring independent state in the heart of Europe that violates the U.N. Charter and the Helsinki Final Act. Moreover, the pretext upon which it is based, protection of Russian national minorities in Ukraine, could also be used against NATO member states like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, “an armed attack against one [member state] . . . shall be considered an attack against them all.” The future viability of the alliance is at stake here.
Second, if Putin can pull off a smash and grab operation against Crimea without being made to pay a serious and significant price, others will draw their own conclusions. Would the “international community” exact a price subsequently if China seized the Senkaku Islands or even Taiwan? Would Pyongyang or Tehran conclude that it might have more leeway for aggressive moves against its neighbors?
Third, there is a huge nonproliferation issue (allegedly the president’s highest national security priority) at stake. Ukraine, as one of the successor states to the former Soviet Union, found itself in 1991 with nuclear weapons on its territory to which it laid claim. It was one of the Clinton administration’s signal diplomatic achievements to have gotten Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to agree to return the nuclear weapons on their respective territory to Russia, leaving one nuclear weapons state on the territory of the former USSR rather than four. In return, the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia all signed, along with Ukraine, the Budapest Memorandum, which accompanied Ukraine’s adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Inter alia, that document committed Russia to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and imposed on Russia an “obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” If left standing, Russian aggression will establish that security assurances offered by the nuclear weapons states to states that willingly give up their nuclear weapons or weapons programs mean precisely nothing.
What is to be done? Several commentators have suggested there are no military options and effective diplomacy and soft power are the order of the day. This trope of the mainstream media implicitly supports the Obama administration’s standard response to criticism—any alternative to the current policy would result in a “war” that would require U.S. “boots on the ground.” Such either/or thinking totally ignores a range of more forceful middle options that would, in this case, give the president more tools with which to manage the crisis.
The first order of business is clearly to reinforce Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. Dispatching Secretary Kerry to Kiev was a valuable first step, but it would have been better had he been accompanied by either Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. Kerry needs to be followed by a long line of NATO and EU foreign ministers to consult, guide, and reassure the Ukrainian interim government. Shoring up the Ukrainian economy (in conjunction with the EU) is obviously the most immediate and important signal to be sent. It would be good, however, to dispatch a military needs assessment team to identify crucial shortfalls in the Ukrainian military and to lay the basis for urgent and longer-term military assistance programs on a bilateral U.S.-Ukraine basis. This should be done in coordination with (and as a stimulant to) a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission as recently recommended by former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis. The commission could help share intelligence with the Ukrainians but also assist them with planning a more targeted NATO military assistance program.
A second necessary step is to strengthen NATO’s deterrent posture and ability to reassure allies. Reinforcing the NATO air policing mission in the Baltics is a good beginning, but this will also require a thorough reconsideration by the alliance of the self-abnegating undertakings it assumed at the time of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997. The alliance should consider whether and how it wants to position ground combat forces on the territory of the former Warsaw Pact states that now are members of NATO. It should also reconsider the so-called three no’s—no intention, no plan, no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of the new NATO members. Bringing NATO military power closer to the borders of Russia would impose a real cost on the Russian military and might cause nationalists who support Putin’s current course to reconsider. All of this would need to be accompanied by a large increase in the defense budget, much like the one Jimmy Carter obtained after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A jolt to the budget—at least to the levels proposed by Secretary Gates in 2011—would signal an end to the relative decline in U.S. military power over the past four years that, in Secretary Hagel’s words, has meant that “we are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in the skies, and in space can no longer be taken for granted.” That would send a powerful and unwelcome message to those in both Moscow and Beijing who are betting on the end of the unipolar world.
Finally, we need to undercut some of the tools of economic and political influence that Russia has wielded so effectively in Ukraine and elsewhere. The administration’s sanctions targeting corrupt individuals who are complicit in Russian military action in Ukraine are all well and good, but they must hit the malefactors around the head kleptocrat—Vladimir Putin. Russia’s use of oil and gas to intimidate and sway can also be a target. It is time for the U.S. government to enable industry to export oil and natural gas and facilitate the infrastructure for doing so—by building a liquefied natural gas export terminal on the East Coast, for example, turning the United States effectively, as one former Bush administration official has suggested, into an “arsenal of energy.”
If all of this sounds a bit familiar, perhaps reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s successful policies in the 1980s, it shouldn’t be a big surprise. During the third presidential debate in 2012, President Obama derided the courses of action recommended by Governor Mitt Romney by saying that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” There are many words that the president will have to eat in light of the past week’s events. He ought to start with those.
Eric Edelman was undersecretary of defense for policy from 2005 to 2009.
WarSclerotic 
March 7, 2014 at 1:55 PM
The Ukrainian Crisis may be summarized as – The Russian Thug vs the US and European Wimps. But what does it say about the next confrontation – The apocalyptic Twelvers vs Shi’a Twelver ignoramuses? We are in trouble! Google: Why are Bernard Lewis’s views on MAD ignored?
Why are Bernard Lewis’s views on MAD ignored?
http://www.madisdead.blogspot.co.il/2012/05/why-are-bernard-lewiss-views-on-mad.html
March 7, 2014 at 4:18 PM
First of all, I am not Russian but American and Israeli, and I do not think that Putin is wonderful, as I stated, he is a thug. But you need some basic education on the Soviet Union and Russia and therefore I suggest:
Re-reading George F. Kennan’s Memoirs – Why is there nobody today to write The Long Telegram on Iran?
http://madisdead.blogspot.co.il/search?q=george+f+kennanore you need to read George F Kennan
As for Bernard Lewis, you apparently have no clue who he is.
March 7, 2014 at 5:50 PM
Reblogged this on BPI reblog and commented:
Off Topic: Confronting Putin’s Invasion
March 7, 2014 at 7:14 PM
Invasion , where ???
March 7, 2014 at 7:26 PM
t 4:45 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, a German warship opened fire on the city of Danzig, a Polish-administered enclave — overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Germans — that had been separated from Germany since World War I.
Throughout the previous decade, Adolf Hitler had intimidated neighboring states into relinquishing regions where German speakers made their homes: France in the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss absorption of Austria in 1938, followed by the most famous such capitulation, the Franco-British appeasement that forced Czechoslovakia to hand Germany the Sudetenland region — again, largely populated by ethnic Germans.
But it was in Danzig where bullying failed and true violence began. Among the city’s residents was Günter Grass, a German boy whose description of the opening salvos of World War II would later win him a Nobel Prize for his novel The Tin Drum.
It’s so easily written: machine guns, twin turrets. Might it not have been a cloudburst, a hailstorm, the deployment of a late-summer thunderstorm like the one that accompanied my birth? I was too sleepy, such speculations were beyond me, and so, the sounds still fresh in my ear, like all sleepyheads I simply and aptly called a spade a spade: Now they are shooting!
In Crimea and in Donetsk, they are not yet shooting. But efforts to enforce the rights of ethnic groups across international borders often lead to war, especially when those groups are the remnants of a collapsed empire.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s stridently nationalistic president, should consider the parallels as he plots his next move. Putin talks a lot about precedent these days as he seeks to justify his infiltration of Russian special forces and intelligence agents to seize government centers in the Ukrainian region of Crimea.
“I believe that only residents of a given country who have freedom of will and are in complete safety can and should determine their future,” Putin said on Tuesday, March 4. “If this right was granted to the Albanians in Kosovo, if this was made possible in many different parts of the world, then nobody has ruled out the right of nations to self-determination.”
No one, of course, is fooled by this. Indeed, when compared with the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, the Russians today are playing the Serbian card. At issue in Kosovo, then an autonomous province of Serbia, was the protection of an ethnic Albanian majority from a larger power using violence. That is, a larger power using a “lost tribe” — in that case, ethnic Serbs — as an excuse to occupy and repress another ethnic group. And this is precisely what Russia has in mind in Ukraine.
If Putin wants to consider the potential consequences of his current actions, he should first remember his stint as a KGB agent — in Dresden — a city obliterated by firebombing at the end of a world war started in the name of reuniting the lost tribes of Germany.
Putin is no Hitler. This goes without saying, but must be said nonetheless.
Putin is no Hitler. This goes without saying, but must be said nonetheless. But Putin’s own frequent evocations of Nazis and fascists in his descriptions of the Ukrainians who overthrew and impeached pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych has invited Hitler into the conversation.
So — when considering ethnic ties as a pretext for bold diplomatic bullying and outright military adventures — are there actual similarities between Hitler and Putin?
The dispersion of ethnic groups across multiple states in diasporas is not new or confined to Germany and Russia. Nor, of course, is it peculiar to Europe. Often, the lost-tribe argument proves a useful pretext for diplomatic snubs, and sometimes war.
For example, Thailand and Malaysia dispute ownership of southern Thailand, where Muslim insurgents have been battling security forces since the 1970s. India and Pakistan have gone to war repeatedly — in 1947, 1965, and 1999 — over their rival claims to rule the people of Kashmir. Indonesia invaded the island of East Timor in 1976 allegedly to free it from colonial Portuguese rule — but truly to prevent Timorese independence (which it granted only reluctantly in 1999).
Non-Russian former Soviet states have also experienced this plight. In the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a bitter conflict over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where ethnic Armenians were resisting Azerbaijani rule. When Georgia’s ethnic Russians in South Ossetia and Abkhazia declared separatist states in 1991, Georgia pushed back and tried to squash these attempts. But Tbilisi was unsuccessful: Russia rolled in with tanks and troops in 2008.
Even in the Americas, the ghosts of plantation policies and imperial collapse are present. In 1836, the Republic of Texas cited protection of the rights of ethnic Americans — Anglos — as part of its reason for declaring independence from Mexico. More recently, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher went to war in 1982 over the “ethnic Britons” of the Falkland Islands.
The Soviet empire’s collapse is only the most recent example of ancient ethnic diasporas — or colonial remnants — sparking modern wars. Ever since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union (which we are constantly reminded ranks as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century in Putin’s eyes), Russia has played this card, arguing that when sizable Russian communities remain in former Soviet states, there is justification for treating these countries as less-than-sovereign entities.
This hardly began with Putin. In 1990, Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor, ordered a Russian army led by Gen. Alexander Lebed to Moldova to support a separatist bid by ethnic Russians in that newly independent — and largely ethnic Romanian — country. This would become a harbinger of things to come in Georgia in 2008 and possibly now in Ukraine. At the time, the ethnic Russian (and some ethnic Ukrainian) citizens of Moldova declared themselves the republic of Trans-Dniester — named for the river that formed the border of a region called Bessarabia, which, history buffs may recall, Joseph Stalin stole from Romania in the 1939 deal that also split Poland between Stalin and Hitler.
There he is again. Nary a bad word about Stalin from the current Russian government, of course — a man who, some scholars argue, killed even more people than the Austrian corporal, if not in such a spectacularly racist, efficient, and megalomaniacal way. But Hitler stalks the current narrative in multiple ways. Here, European history offers a template for reassembling an imploded empire, as well as tradecraft for stoking up public support in Russia for actions that might otherwise be seen as reckless.
While Putin’s motives may only pay lip service to the alleged peril ethnic Russians face outside the federation’s borders, he has rich ground for sowing doubt about the motives of Ukrainian nationalists. In the months before Hitler turned on his Soviet ally in 1940, German agents expertly fomented anger and intrigue in many non-Russian communities within the Soviet Union, from the Baltic lands to the Tatars of Crimea to Ukraine.
Few remember now the many divisions of Hitler’s armies that were drawn from ethnic groups in conquered territories and even neutral states, including Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine contributed some 80,000 troops in three divisions to the German Wehrmacht, including one division of the Waffen SS. Ukrainians were hardly alone. Germany fielded divisions manned by Georgians, Armenians, Finns, the Vichy French, and even the neutral Swedes during the war. And Russia itself was not immune: Ten full divisions of anti-communist White Russian émigrés joined Hitler’s army — some 250,000 officers and Russian elite styling themselves as the “Russian Liberation Army” under the czarist general Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov.
Ukrainians and others also fought Russian partisans alongside German units and served as guards in Hitler’s death camps — John Demjanjuk, the former U.S. autoworker from Cleveland whose prosecution on war crimes made headlines in 1993, was one of them. But Ukrainian nationalists — and their cohorts in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and countless other places duped by Hitler into siding with the western “liberators” — had been murdered and starved to death in the millions by Stalin’s communist tyranny in the 1930s. What might have seemed as a lesser of two evils may, in retrospect, have been a greater evil — or at least a commensurate one.
Nonetheless, for Russians, the word “fascist” has very real and profoundly divisive emotional consequences.
Nonetheless, for Russians, the word “fascist” has very real and profoundly divisive emotional consequences. The shame of non-Russian nationalists at the sins of their grandparents remains fertile today. The sins of Stalin, however, have been downplayed repeatedly, particularly since Yeltsin’s brand of romantic Slavic nationalism gave way to Putin’s Soviet nostalgia and all its big-power trappings.
For all his citations of Western-led interventions in Libya and Kosovo as precedents for Russia’s actions, Putin must understand that he is stirring a very dangerous pot. Russia has land borders with 14 countries — more states than any other nation on Earth other than China (which also borders 14, including Russia). Many of those neighboring states contain large populations of people who self-identify as Russians. But Russia itself also contains millions of ethnic Koreans, Mongols, Uighurs, and others whose crowded, resource-starved motherlands may someday have their own designs on reincorporating their lost tribes.
In the Russian Far East, this dynamic is palpable, and it is common to hear Russians in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk complain about the influx of Korean and Chinese money, along with immigrant workers. Some 80 million Chinese and 45 million Koreans live in the provinces that border Russia. The population of Russia’s own Far Eastern territory, Primorsky krai, is below 2 million.
All that land, all that oil — and lost tribes, to boot. Putin should be worried less about the precedents he cites and more about those he sets.
March 7, 2014 at 7:40 PM
Thanks for the history lesson, but in this case the “past is not prologue”.
The 21st century will be nothing like the 20th century or all those who came before it.
March 8, 2014 at 12:08 AM
Quote :
Justice for israel Says:
March 7, 2014 at 4:03 PM
you are a russian thug and if you think were wimps just watch whats about to happen were going to cleanse europe of russia ,if you,think russia is so wonderful why dont you go home,Bernard Lewiss coward in chef,russia is the whimp
Unquote
Oke i,am done here , i wish you all a lot of pleasure reading the comments from Justice for israel .
for trash can conversation i go somewhere else !
March 8, 2014 at 12:27 AM
yes joop lets side with the authoritarian Russia and china after all Obama going bring forth the new world order you and john work for our enemy’s there is doubt in that all the two of you do is promote discord with your country’s strongest allies you dont deserve us,all we listen to from you is a torrent of complete garbage about how oppressive the west well go and blow yourself we have all seen your true colors,while you try and justify despotic dictatorships vile and oppressive deeds you fool no one,and i will point out that every time i write something you and john attack me well you have made a real enemy here see you in hell
March 8, 2014 at 3:55 PM
@ Justice:
CUT THE CRAP! ENOUGH!
Your vicious personal attacks, insults and foul language are NOT TOLERATED on this site.
Moreover your attacks on Mladen were totally unprovoked.
You have NO EXCUSE WHATSOEVER!
This HAS TO END and it WILL END!
@ all others:
Understand that we cannot monitor comments 24/7.
The fact that certain comments remain on the blog does not mean that we approve of them.
I’m sure I speak also for Joseph and Dan when I declare that we are advocates of free speech and we are not in the business of censorship. We allow views to be expressed even when we strongly disagree with them.
That’s why we don’t take deleting comments or banning users lightly
But the fun ends when persons are viciously attacked or racist views are expressed or threats are issued.
Justice has clearly crossed the line.
In the meantime I ask for your patience while we are working for a way to deal with such issues quicker and better.
Artaxes
March 8, 2014 at 4:13 PM
Well said AR. Might I add that this site is not just about us. It reaches out further than any of us can imagine. Take a look at these stats I found recently…
http://urlm.co/www.warsclerotic.wordpress.com
We all have a duty to keep the conversation civil and professional. I feel that JW formed this site to deal with the Iranian issue and how it relates first to Israel and second to the world in general, a subject that is so much more than any one of us. In other words, we all must strive for more focus and less hocus-pocus.
March 8, 2014 at 6:14 PM
Joseph, Artaxes and I have discussed the matter and agree that childish nonsense has to cease. Now.
We have no problem with comments that disagree substantively with posted articles, with us and/or with other commenters. They are welcome.
Personal attacks are not welcome and will not be tolerated. They degrade the person making them to the point that even a modest sense of self respect should, by itself, be enough to preclude them. They also degrade the site and tax the patience of other readers.
Lest there be any question, In particular we are warning the following users:
– Justice for Israel
– John Prophet
Justice and John have both made useful contributions to the site through some of their comments. However, Justice has repeatedly launched vicious attacks on other commenters.
John has repeatedly and despite repeated requests to stop, as it seems to us, intentionally tried to provoke precisely such behaviour from Justice.
Repetitions will be dealt with in the only way we have available, deletion of offending comments followed when appropriate by withdrawal of the privilege of commenting. Our patience is running low and there won’t be any more warnings.
March 8, 2014 at 8:05 PM
John is the problem not me,you ought to look at who i attacked under a microscope as they simply are not what you think they are they are in league together ,they are destroying the credibility of this site you dont need my help for that,lets face new world order Bernard lewis,thats whats killing the sites creditability it was about time someone told them what they are i wont do it again but if john does not leave me alone i will catch up with him personally,or someone that you obviously know is a very close friend of mine will
March 8, 2014 at 8:12 PM
If abused, complain to the editors.
Don’t respond in kind.
That goes for EVERYBODY.
There’s no other way to keep this place worth visiting.
March 9, 2014 at 12:14 AM
I understand , agree and hold back as i have done for several months now.