By Michael F. Duggan
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past three days, you probably know that the new Cold War has turned hot. Russia has invaded Ukraine.
Last week I wrote on this blog that Biden and Putin must not paint themselves into corners (or force the other side into one) and that crisis diplomacy requires both sides to make concessions. When the respective sides of a negotiation process make inflexible demands that the other side cannot or will not accept, conflict becomes inevitable. This is what has happened.
The two irreconcilable positions are 1). Russian security claims and the threat that Moscow perceives from 25 years of NATO expansion. 2). United States support for the expansion of NATO and for the government in Kiev.
The Russians, long aggrieved at the quarter-century expansion of NATO far into the traditional Russian/Soviet sphere of influence, demanded that Ukraine never be allowed to join the pact and that it roll back its territory to the lines at the end of the Cold War. For the United States, both of these demands were nonstarters. Given that the parameters of the preinvasion discussions were based on two immovable objects, they were destined to fail. But there were also proximate factors that aggravated the situation.
For example one of the provisions of the Minsk II agreement was for greater autonomy for the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. This was ignored by the West which continued to support western Ukrainian forces for eight years, openly announcing weapons shipments and scoffing at the idea that NATO enlargement threatened Russian interests. The Americans, publicly contemptuous of Russian security claims, demanded that they deescalate their military buildup. But Russia is all about buffer zones, and a threat to its national security strikes at the heart of their deep-seated insecurity.
President Biden might have given a personal assurance that NATO would stop its expansion at its current limits. This might have bought enough time to defuse the situation. He might have then been in a position to offer to help resolve the Ukrainian civil war and address issues related to greater autonomy for the Donbas region.
Why did Putin choose to invade now? After seven years of non-enforcement of Minsk II, and with a bloody civil war, which by some accounts has cost upwards of 14,000 lives, on his front doorstep, it is likely that his patience ran out. He told the United States what his demands were; the United States and NATO refused and made no concessions. As it turned out, he was not bluffing and the invasion of a sovereign nation followed. The United States has been a force for good in the world, but it must try to see the situation as the other side sees it and realize that other nations have legitimate national security interests. As for Putin, there is never an excuse to invade another country—even ones involving fundamental national interests—as long as peaceful alternatives exist.
What of the U.S. response to the invasion (i.e. sanctions)? Russia is likely capable of economic self-sufficiency and likely figured-in the economic consequences as a part of its calculus. Sanctions don’t work against Russian and probably never will. For Putin economic consequences are obviously a distant secondary consideration relative to what he regards to be Russia’s national security interests. Unfortunately, there is not much else the U.S. can do at this point in terms of deterrence other than express outrage and pile on more ineffectual sanctions as Russia and China draw closer together.
So what can the U.S. do? As a world leader, the United States should try to contain and mitigate this rapidly-unfolding situation. At this point, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy would have been trying to open back channels in order to tamp down the crisis. But with the baffling Russophobia that has gripped the U.S. foreign policy Blob for the past two decades such a sensible response might be too much to hope for.
This is an extremely dangerous crisis, and what the U.S. should not do is to escalate the conflict by sending in combat assets (troops, helicopters, armored vehicles, military aircraft, etc.) into Ukraine or along its borders with NATO countries. Remember, the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other. To his credit, President Biden has resisted the temptation to intervene militarily. We are obliged to not start a world war that could easily turn nuclear.
What else can the U.S. do? If Putin is stupid enough to try to fully take over and occupy the second largest country in Europe, a country with a population of 44 million people, using a force of fewer than 200,000 troops, then the U.S. should allow refugee status for many western Ukrainians fleeing the violence.
And what about the Russians? At this point, there appear to be three possible courses that this illegal attack could take:
- Russia could bite off the Donbas region in a similar way that NATO allowed for Kosovo to break away from Serbia in 1999.
- Additionally, the invasion could be a punitive measure forcing Ukraine at gunpoint to agree to not join NATO.
- Russia could try to take over and occupy all of Ukraine and install a puppet regime. Again, one would hope that they are not dumb enough to try this.
Time will tell which course events will take.
In case the invasion or the possibility of a wider war in Europe is not enough to keep you up tonight, consider that Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors within its borders and extremists on both sides.