Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 17 – Donald Trump did
more than collude with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He worked with the Kremlin
leader to destroy the three settlements of the 20th century that the
United States took the lead in arranging, settlements whose destruction leaves
the world and its peoples in a far more dangerous place than it has ever been
before.
In the spring of 2014, the current
author warned about what was at stake for the US in Putin’s Anschluss of
Ukraine in the hopes that the United States would recognize that that Russian
action would quickly be recognized as “a new 911 for the US” and the West.
Unfortunately, just the reverse has happened.
Crimea:
A New 9/11 for the United States
In 1991,
with the end of the Cold War, the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, and the
disintegration of the USSR, many Americans—policymakers among them—believed
that we had reached the end of history. They believed that we had entered a new
period in which cooperation among countries on the basis of shared commitment
to democratic values and free market economics would not only be possible but
would become the central feature of the international system.
Ten years
later, the Islamist terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11th
dispelled much of that optimism but did not dislodge one of the key assumptions
of 1991. The 9/11 attacks were the work of sub-state actors not only against
the United States but against the international community. Americans and
American policymakers continued to assume that the governments of the
countries of the world, whatever their differences on a wide variety of issues,
had a common interest in working together to defeat such challenges and that
the counter-terrorist coalition provided a reliable basis for expanding ties.
Now, 13
years after 9/11, the United States and the international community have been
confronted with a challenge that calls that optimistic assumption into
question. By occupying and annexing Ukraine’s Crimea by force under the fig
leaf of a referendum and by signaling that it views Crimea as a precedent for
further action, the Russian Federation, with which Washington had so hoped to
establish and develop cooperative ties, has shown itself to be a revisionist,
even revanchist power, that is committed not only to overturning the 1991
settlement but that of 1945 as well.
It is
tempting to believe that the current crisis is “just about Crimea, which was
Russian anyway”—and that isn’t true either, given that Stalin deported the
Crimean Tatars from there in 1944, prevented their return, and supported the
introduction of ethnic Russians in their place—as all too many in the West are
doing. It is critically important to understand just what is at stake and why
Russia’s actions in Crimea represent the gravest threat to the rules of the
game that the United States has taken the lead in establishing and maintaining
since the end of World War II.
There are
three reasons for what will seem to many a far too sweeping judgment, reasons
that lie in the history of the area and of international decisions and that are
to be found as well in the statements of Vladimir Putin and other Russian
leaders during the lead up to what can only be described as the Anschluss of
Crimea.
First,
Putin has violated the basic foundation of the international system by
redrawing borders and transferring the territory of one country into another.
He and his supporters claim that they are doing no more than the United States
did in Yugoslavia, but that is simply false. The United States did not organize
the transfer of Kosovo to Albania. Instead, what we are seeing is naked
aggression, covered by a trumped up “referendum” and a massive propaganda
effort in Russia and the West.
There is
one aspect of Putin’s argument, however, that does deserve attention although
it is not compelling under the circumstances. As few in the West have been
prepared to acknowledge, the borders of the republics in the USSR were drawn by
Stalin not to solve ethnic problems but to exacerbate them. In every case,
including most famously Karabakh in Azerbaijan but also Crimea and much of
eastern Ukraine, Stalin drew the borders so there would always be a local
minority nationality whose members would do Moscow’s bidding against the local
majority. That had two benefits for the center. On the one hand, it meant that
inter-ethnic tensions in the Soviet Union were primarily among non-Russian
groups rather than between Russians and non-Russians, a far more explosive mix.
And on the other hand, it justified the kind of repressive system that Stalin
imposed. Indeed, it meant that the USSR could continue to exist only with such
repression. As I wrote in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev was likely going to discover
that a liberal Russia might be possible, but a liberal Soviet Union was a
contradiction in terms. When the last Soviet leader liberalized in the hopes of
getting that country’s economy to expand, the USSR fell into pieces.
Those
borders could have been changed by negotiation. Indeed, as few recognize,
republic borders within the USSR had been changed more than 200 times, with
land and people being transferred from one republic to another. However, in
1991 and 1992, the United States decided that these lines must not be changed
by negotiation or violence. The rest of the world went along with the idea. The
reason for that was the fear that the dismemberment of the Russian Federation,
a country that is more than a fifth non-Russian, would exacerbate the problem
of control of nuclear weapons and could lead to, in Secretary James Baker’s
memorable phrase, “a nuclear Yugoslavia.”
For more
than 20 years, this view has guided American and Western policy. The most
prominent example of this was the insistence that Armenia end its occupation of
Azerbaijani lands and return them to Baku’s sovereignty. So far that has not
happened. But it is also the case that our decision to accept Stalin’s borders
as eternal did not remove the tensions that he introduced as a kind of poison
pill should his empire ever come apart. Putin’s move into Ukraine’s Crimea is
an indication of just how strong those tensions remain.
Second, and
related to this, Vladimir Putin has done something that overturns not just the
1991 but the 1945 settlement as well. He has argued that ethnicity is more
important than citizenship, a reversal of the hierarchy that the United Nations
is predicated on and a position that has the potential to undermine many
members of the international community. While some may see this as nothing more
than a commitment to the right of nations to national self-determination, the
Kremlin leader’s approach suffers from a fatal flaw, a defect that unless
denounced and countered could lead the heads of other states to take similar
and equally dangerous steps. At the very least, Putin’s ideas will lead to
massive instability in a large part of Eurasia.
Put in
simplest terms, Putin has insisted that ethnic Russians living beyond the
borders of the Russian Federation, in this case in Ukraine, have the right to
self-determination. Putin has made his career by denying that right to nations
within the borders of the Russian Federation, most famously the Chechens
against whom he launched and has conducted a brutal campaign that has cost tens
of thousands of lives. Consequently, what Putin has done is to say that in
Eurasia, ethnic Russians have rights that other peoples do not, a
hyper-nationalist, even racist view that will bleed back into Russian society
and also spark greater nationalism among the non-Russians both in the
non-Russian post-Soviet states and in the Russian Federation as well.
By his
actions, Putin has already guaranteed that no Ukrainian state and no Ukrainians
will be sympathetic to Russia ever again. Instead, they will view Moscow as a
threat. As many people have pointed out since the occupation of Crimea, Putin
has done something no Ukrainian leader has ever achieved: he has united
Ukrainians and united them around an anti-Russian agenda. Indeed, Ukraine now
joins Poland and the Baltic countries as victims of Soviet and Russian actions
and will do everything it can, as those countries have done, to escape from the
Russian orbit. Some Ukrainians may be suborned or intimidated into saying
otherwise, all the more so because some Western countries, including our own,
will insist on that. But the underlying geo-psychology has shifted in the
region against Russia because of Russian action.
And third,
Putin’s annexation of Crimea has been accompanied by the most sweeping
crackdown against civil society in the Russian Federation since the end of the
Cold War. News outlets have been harassed and suppressed, and opposition
figures have been threatened. Putin himself has talked about the existence of
“national traitors” and “a fifth column” within Russia, terms that to many
Russian ears are not very far removed from the Stalin-era term “enemies of the
people.” Indeed, some of Putin’s more rabid supporters are already drawing that
conclusion: xenophobia in Russia is at an all-time high, attacks on ethnic and
religious minorities are increasing, and many Russian democrats—and we should
not forget that they are numerous and our allies—are invoking the words of
Pastor Niemöller, fearful that what Putin is doing now will spread to ever more
groups, including ominously Jews in that country.
Many in the
West have self-confidently assured themselves that this is not a return to the
ugly past and that the Internet will block Putin’s efforts. But that may be
whistling in the dark. Only one in five Russian homes have a computer, and far
fewer have links to the World Wide Web. If Russians can sign on only at work,
the ability of the authorities to shut Russians off from the rest of the world
is still far greater than one would like. And that allows messages to be sent
to the Russian people by the state-controlled media that are truly disturbing, including
the recent suggestion that Russian forces could incinerate the United States in
a nuclear exchange if Washington does not back off.
One needs
to be clear: Crimea is not or at least does not need to be the trigger for a
new Cold War. The ideological competition of the Cold War was very different.
But those who say we must avoid standing up to the Russians lest we provoke one
have fallen into a trap set by Moscow. On the one hand, the bogeyman of “a new
Cold War” is intended to block such criticism by the West even where and when
it is merited. And on the other, what Putin is doing in some ways is even more
vicious than what most Soviet leaders after Stalin did.
Soviet
ideology was at its base fundamentally internationalist, a fact that limited
but of course did not prevent outrages against ethnic and religious groups by
the Communist Party and the USSR authorities. But as one wise Baltic leader
has put it, if the Russians come back this time, and with Putin’s program of
the ethnic supremacy of Russians, Moscow will not be constrained by communism
and the results will be truly tragic.
Some argue
that because we cannot force Putin to back down on Crimea, we should not speak
and act against what he has done. We have a moral obligation and a geopolitical
interest in doing so. As we think about Crimea, a small place far away about
which few in Washington had heard of until very recently, we need to remember
the words of the great Russian memoirist Nadezhda Mandelshtam who wrote that
“happy is the country in which the despicable will at least be despised,” even
if at any one point there may not be anything more than one can do.
Putin’s
occupation of Ukraine is a second 9/11, a warning that the optimism of 1991 was
misplaced and that the kind of cooperative future we hoped for has been put on
hold for some time. That future is still possible. There are many Russians and
others who want it. Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he is
not among their number unless we are prepared to concede to everything he
wants.
