[Repairing U.S.-Russia relations is
possible. Too bad Washington keeps making them worse.]
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| KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images |
Last week, as the ruble collapsed in value against the U.S. dollar and
a full-blown financial crisis threatened to explode in Russia, news broke that
President Barack Obama planned to sign a piece of legislation that essentially
amounts to a declaration of war on Russia.
The evocatively titled Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014, which was unanimously approved by the House and Senate, is short on common sense and long belligerent ultimatums and misstatements of recent history. The legislation names Russia “a threat to international peace,” accuses it of violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and urges the president “to review the Treaty readiness of U.S. and NATO armed forces.” It demands that Russia cease destabilizing Ukraine, abandon the Crimean Peninsula (which it annexed in March, following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych), withdraw its forces from Georgia (apparently referring to the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, under Russian control since the 2008 war), and even stop aiding Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. It designates Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia “major non-NATO allies,” and urges Obama to adopt more sanctions and visa bans against Russia.
The evocatively titled Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014, which was unanimously approved by the House and Senate, is short on common sense and long belligerent ultimatums and misstatements of recent history. The legislation names Russia “a threat to international peace,” accuses it of violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and urges the president “to review the Treaty readiness of U.S. and NATO armed forces.” It demands that Russia cease destabilizing Ukraine, abandon the Crimean Peninsula (which it annexed in March, following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych), withdraw its forces from Georgia (apparently referring to the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, under Russian control since the 2008 war), and even stop aiding Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. It designates Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia “major non-NATO allies,” and urges Obama to adopt more sanctions and visa bans against Russia.
Most ominously, the bill authorizes
the president to “provide the government of Ukraine with necessary defense
articles, services, and intelligence in order to defend its territory and
sovereignty.” Without a hint of irony, it also “calls upon the Russian
Federation to seek a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States
based on respect for the independence and sovereignty of all countries,” as
well as for “the reestablishment of a cooperative relationship between the
people of the United States and the Russian people based on the shared pursuit
of democracy, human rights, and peace.”
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking of the sanctions already
imposed on Russia, declared in
a press conference in London on Dec. 16 that “We do not want the people of Russia
to be hurt here,” and “None of what we are doing is targeted specifically
against the people.” The Ukraine Freedom Support Act sends another message
entirely: the United States, through Ukraine, is bent on escalating its dispute
with Russia — even to the point of armed conflict.
It should surprise no one that the response from Moscow has been
less than conciliatory. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs got that
message andcalled the
Ukraine Freedom Support Act “hostile,” but
said Russia would refrain from retaliating against the new legislation until it
leads to concrete action on Obama’s part. In November, Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov had already accused the United States of
seeking “regime change” in Moscow State Duma deputy Mikhail Emelyanov,
however, spoke more
forthrightly, warning that Russia “cannot calmly watch as the U.S. arms Ukraine
with the most modern lethal weapons…. Judging by U.S. intentions, they want to
turn Ukraine into a fighting platform against Russia.”
Russia had hardly been “standing by” in any case. Sanctions or no,
Russia’s unprecedented $375 billion military build-up proceeds apace. Moscow continues
sending its air force on provocative missions to probe NATO borders, with the
Baltic countries scrambling their jets to intercept Russian planes a record 21 times —
just in the week of December 8-14. For the second time this year, a near miss took
place between a Russian military plane and a European civilian airliner.
(Moscow disputes this.) Russia has twice conducted military exercises
practicing a nuclear attack on Warsaw. And Russian warships and submarines have
patrolled as far afield as Australia and the United States.
In August, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the inflammatory leader of the
far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, even went so far as to predict a possible
preemptive “Third World War,” to be started by President Vladimir Putin, and
warned the “little dwarf states” of Eastern Europe that they faced “total
annihilation” for allowing themselves to be used as (presumably NATO) bases for
attacks on Russia. In other circumstances, such bellicose statements, reckless
in the extreme, would have just caused heads to shake in Moscow and Washington.
But in view of rising tensions between Russia and the West, they no longer
seemed so entirely far-fetched.
The sanctions and the increasingly charged military stand-off
between Russia and NATO member countries have done little to dent Putin’s
popularity, which the respected Levada Center rates
at 85 percent. A majority of Russians — 59 percent according to the center’s
last poll, in November — believe their country is on the right track. Sanctions
have convinced Russians that the West is out to get them — a trope with
enduring historical resonance that Putin himself stressed in his Dec. 4 address to the Federal Assembly and his press conference
of Dec. 18. The conclusion we can draw from the polls: Russians do not blame
this turbulent state of affairs on their president, but on the United States
and its “puppets” in the European Union — a view they have had relentlessly
pounded into them by state-controlled airwaves. In any case, after four rounds
of NATO expansion into formerly Warsaw-Pact and Soviet domains, the wellspring
of Russian goodwill toward the West long ago ran dry.
But it’s not just goodwill that
is diminishing. It’s the prospect for peace between Russia and the
West. It requires little effort to imagine an accident leading to outright
conflict: A Russian bomber could collide with a European civilian airliner in
or near NATO airspace. Russian and NATO submarines could accidentally crash in
international waters. A technological glitch could prompt either Russia or the
United States to conclude the other has launched its nuclear missiles, which
would necessitate “using them or losing them” — a frightening dilemma the
Soviet Union faced when it almost mistook the 1983 NATO exercise Able Archer
for an actual attack. Such a catastrophic, improbable eventuality would be
considerably reduced if the two countries had retained even basic relations of
trust.
Or, as has been credibly
suggested, Putin could decide he has nothing to gain by even
minimally cooperating with the West. Needing to distract his people from ever
direr economic straits, he could foment separatist sentiment in, say, the
majority-Russian Estonian town of Narva and send in his “little green men,”
thereby chancing an armed confrontation with NATO. The latter might seem
fanciful, and we should all hope it is. But no one predicted that Russia would
re-acquire Crimea last March through a stealth occupation.
The real question, though, is will Putin, having invested all his
political capital in returning the Crimean Peninsula to Russia, publicly
surrender to U.S. lawmakers and announce that his annexation was a huge
blunder? Will he issue a tender apology to the Ukrainian leadership in Kiev and
withdraw support from separatists in the Donbass? Will he hand over the keys to
the Kremlin and hop the next train back to his hometown, Saint Petersburg? Or
will he otherwise slip away into the night, after having wished his successor
Godspeed?
Ha. Not likely. Putin was elected to a six-year term in 2012.
Short of a palace coup or popular uprising (both implausible), the probability
of his relinquishing his grip on power ahead of schedule is minuscule. If we accept
that Putin is not going anywhere soon, we find ourselves in need of a political
solution, a way of crafting a relationship with Russia that allows for (and,
here, a Cold War-era phrase comes to mind) “peaceful coexistence” with the
West. Some analysts have already taken on the work of imagining this
possibility: Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski in addressing the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger in the Washington Post,
Samuel Charap in an essay for this magazine,
and I twice in The Atlantic.
Broadly speaking, this is what the United States and Europe need
to offer, in writing, to Russia: Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO.
That’s not all that much to ask. Given the separatist conflict in
eastern Ukraine, odds are infinitesimal that NATO would seek to induct Ukraine,
and yet the alliance’s 2008 Budapest declaration promised that one day it
would. Moreover, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has just passed legislation
abolishing the country’s “non-bloc” status, established by law in 2010. The
legislature also made entering the Western military alliance a national goal.
NATO leaders should disabuse Ukrainians of these hopes. Not doing so, and fast
is irresponsible and pointlessly provocative.
Russia has mooted the matter and been rebuffed. In November, the
Kremlin requested a “100 percent
guarantee” that Ukraine not join NATO, presumably in exchange
for helping foster peace in the Donbass — an overture towards ending the crisis
that no one explored. In his March address on the unification of Russia and
Crimea, Putin justified Russia’s actions in light of eventual NATO expansion.
Indeed, NATO and European Union membership have mostly gone hand in hand — it
is hardly unreasonable that the Russian leadership considers this possibility
of Ukraine joining the alliance credible. The author of the containment policy,
George Kennan, warned in
the 1990s that the then-planned expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders would
result in a “new cold war, probably ending in a hot one,” and kill chances for
democracy in the country. He was at least partly right. God forbid he should
prove fully so.
The time to stop enlargement
talk is now. In any case, opposition to Ukraine’s membership is strong in Berlinand Paris.
This matters: Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty stipulates that countries
may be invited to join only by “unanimous agreement.” Such will not be
forthcoming. The issue needs to be formally taken of the table. To forestall
the “Ukraine scenario” from befalling other former Soviet states, NATO would also
need to foreswear — in writing — further expansion to the east.
Resolving the status of Crimea poses graver problems. Putin
recently compared the peninsula’s relationship to Russia with that of the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem for Jews and Muslims — a puzzling assertion to say the least, given
that the territory only belonged to Russia from when Catherine the Great
conquered it from the Ottoman Empire in 1783 until 1954, when Soviet premier
Khrushchev “gave” it to Ukraine. Still, it might take a Holy Land-like
international mandate to solve the Crimean conundrum: The United Nations needs
to oversee a new, totally transparent referendum on the peninsula’s status.
Both Russia and the West would have to agree to be bound by its results.
In return for a guarantee of neutrality for Ukraine and carrying
out a transparent, binding new referendum on Crimea, Moscow would have to cease
supporting separatist insurgents in the Donbass, verifiably withdrawing
whatever personnel and materiel it has in the region. (The Kremlin still denies
open involvement in eastern Ukraine, though in a Dec. 18press conference Putin acknowledged
the presence of Russian “volunteers.”) Russia would also have to re-commit to
the provisions of the SeptemberMinsk Protocol that
established a cease-fire between the rebels and the government in Kiev and to
respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty. And if Ukraine opts to join the European
Union, Russia must let it do so.
To give Russia incentive to agree to halt support for Donbass
separatists and allow a second referendum in Crimea, the United States and the
European Union can offer a prompt end to economic sanctions and visa bans.
Previous iterations of such a proposed accord have received no
serious consideration. It’s worth asking why. Can the United States really have
learned nothing from its decades of Cold War experience in dealing with the
Kremlin? Has Washington entirely dispensed with diplomacy in favor of issuing
ultimatums, even when dealing with the only country on Earth possessing a
nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the United States — and the world? Can
U.S. policymakers still fail to perceive the damage done to relations with
Russia by the United States’ unilateral withdrawal, in 2002, from the landmark
1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow, and by four rounds of eastward
NATO expansion? Can the United States truly believe its flagrant transgressions
of international law — for starters, its unprovoked invasion and occupation of
Iraq and its hundreds of lethal drone strikes across the Islamic world, to say
nothing of its history of supporting bloody dictators in Latin America and
elsewhere — have done nothing but breed cynicism about its motives abroad? Can
the White House not see that talk of “American exceptionalism” sounds myopic
and delusional to other countries, and runs up against their national pride?
More to the point, what are the United States and the European
Union really willing to risk for Ukraine, when Russia occupied Crimea without
Ukrainian troops there firing a single shot in its defense? Let’s recall, as
well, that when Russia helped insurgents seize part of Ukraine’s east, perhaps
a million of that region’s population fled not
to Kiev-controlled territory, but into Russia itself.
Now is the time for the United States and the European Union —
specifically, Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President
Francois Hollande — to launch a new diplomatic overture to Russia. The combined
effect of sanctions and record low oil prices are leading to a scenario for an
economic doomsday: a government so starved of hydrocarbon revenues it cannot
pay salaries and pensions; a private sector with no credit options either at
home or abroad; a devalued currency making prohibitively expensive the dollar-
and euro-purchased food imports Russia relies on. This may provide Putin with
ample objective grounds for reaching an agreement. As unpalatable as it will be
to Western leaders, they will have to deal with him to get it.
It’s unfortunate that instead policymakers and legislators in
Washington seem to be pushing relations with Russia in the opposite direction.
The latest in the West’s assault on Russia, the belligerent Ukraine Freedom
Support Act that Obama himself signed, only makes the inevitable and necessary
reconciliation with Russia all the more difficult. And that’s the last thing
Russia, or the United States, or Ukraine need right now.
Jeffrey Tayler is a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and the author, most recently, of Murderers in Mausoleums.
