lunes, 24 de febrero de 2014

lunes, febrero 24, 2014

Opinion

Putin Knows History Hasn't Ended

Obama might like to pretend that geopolitics don't matter, but the slaughter in Kiev shows how mistaken he is.

By Walter Russell Mead

Feb. 20, 2014 7:18 p.m. ET



The Ukrainian government's assault on protesters in Kiev's Independence Square over the past 48 hours shocked Europe and the world. The turmoil is also forcing both the European Union and the United States to re-examine some of their deepest assumptions about foreign policy in the post Cold War environment.

The Ukrainian crisis started last fall, when EU ministers thought Ukraine was about to sign an Association Agreement that would have begun the process of economic integration between Europe's second-largest country and the European Union. This would have been a decisive step for Ukraine. Long hesitating between Moscow and Brussels, Ukraine would have seen the Association Agreement put it firmly on a Western path.

That Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political support is rooted in the Russia-leaning half of the country, seemed prepared to take this step was particularly significant. It looked as if both halves of Ukraine had reached a consensus that the future lay with the West.

But the diplomats in Brussels and Washington forgot to factor one man into their calculations. For Russia's President Vladimir Putin, the prospect that a united Ukraine might desert Russia and join Europe is completely unacceptable

Mr. Putin saw the West's overtures to Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia's great power status and his own political position. Sensing that the West was unprepared and unfocused, he moved quickly and effectively to block the wedding by offering Mr. Yanukovych $15 billion to leave the Europeans standing at the altar.

European diplomats were flummoxed. Far from anticipating Putin's intervention, they thought Mr. Yanukovych was hungry enough for an EU agreement that they could force him to free his imprisoned political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, as the price of the trade deal. These days, nothing much is heard about Ms. Tymoshenko—who was jailed in 2011 on charges of abusing power and embezzlement, after what many observers say was a politicized process—and the Europeans are scrambling, in their slow and bureaucratic way, to sweeten their offer and lure Ukraine back to the wedding chapel.


Washington was no better prepared. Between pivoting to Asia and coping with various crises in the Middle East, the Obama administration hadn't deigned to engage seriously until Mr. Putin knocked the EU plan off course

Inside Ukraine, Mr. Yanukovych's reversal on Europe broke the fragile national consensus. Few countries had as wretched a 20th century as Ukraine. World War I, the Russian Civil War, the mass starvation and political purges of the Stalin era, the genocidal violence of World War II: wave after wave of mass death rolled over the land. The western half of the country sees Moscow as a hostile, rapacious power and believescorrectly—that Mr. Putin's vision for their country will involve the loss of democratic freedoms and destroy any hope of establishing the rule of law and transparent institutions, or of joining the EU.

The eastern half is not so sure. Trade and cultural connections with Russia are stronger than they are with Europe, and while the EU is a good market for Ukrainian raw materials, Russia is willing to buy Ukrainian manufactured and consumer goods that Europe doesn't much want.

Meanwhile, given Ukraine's tormented history and the post-Soviet legacy of criminal oligarchs and corruption, the country's weak institutions lack the legitimacy and perhaps the competence to manage deep conflicts like the one now shaking the nation. Political movements in both halves of the country have ties to shady figures, and the horrors of the past have left a residue of ethnic hatreds and conspiracy theories on both sides of the current divide.

For Mr. Putin, this is of little moment. With Ukraine, Russia can at least aspire to great power status and can hope to build a power center between the EU and China that can stand on something approaching equal terms with both

If, on the other hand, the verdict of 1989 and the Soviet collapse becomes final, Russia must come to terms with the same kind of loss of empire and stature that Britain, France and Spain have faced. Mr. Putin's standing at home will be sharply, and perhaps decisively, diminished.

Both the EU and the U.S. made a historic blunder by underestimating Russia's reaction to the Ukrainian trade agreement. Mr. Putin cannot let Ukraine slip out of Russia's sphere without throwing everything he has into the fight. As I wrote last fall, the EU brought a baguette to a knife fight, and the bloody result is on the streets of Kiev.

The policy of detaching Ukraine from Russia should either have been pursued with enormous determination and focus—and an irresistible array of economic and political instruments of persuasion—or it should not have been pursued at all. While Mr. Putin and the Ukrainian government have turned a problem into a crisis, some responsibility for the deaths in Ukraine lies at the doors of those who blithely embarked on a dangerous journey without assessing the risks.

Neither the American policy makers nor the European ones who stumbled into this bear trap are stupid, but this episode is confirmation that the problem that has haunted Western statesmanship since 1989 is still with us. Both President Obama and the many-headed collection of committees that constitutes the decision-making apparatus of the EU believe that the end of the Cold War meant an end to geopolitics.

This helps explain why American diplomacy these days is about order and norms. The objectives are global: an environmental climate treaty, the abolition of nuclear weapons, the creation of new global governance mechanisms like the G-20, the further expansion of free trade agreements, and so on. When the U.S. voices its objections—to Bashar Assad's slaughter in Syria, say, or to the Ukrainian crackdown this week—they are stated in terms of global norms. And so U.S. diplomacy with Russia has focused on order-building questions like nonproliferation, while gravely underestimating the degree to which Russia's geopolitical interests conflict with those of the U.S.

This is not so much an intellectual error as a political miscalculation. For American and European policy makers, the 1989 geopolitical settlement of the Cold War seemed both desirable and irreversible. Powers like Russia, China and Iran, who might be dissatisfied with either the boundaries or the legal and moral norms that characterized the post-Cold War world, lacked the power to do anything about it. This outlook is Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" on steroids: Humanity had not only discovered the forms of government and economic organization under which it would proceed from here on out, it had found the national boundaries and the hierarchy of states that would last indefinitely.

There are many things that Vladimir Putin doesn't understand, but geopolitics isn't one of them. His ability to identify and exploit the difference between the West's rhetoric and its capabilities and intentions has allowed him to stop NATO expansion, split Georgia, subject Washington to serial humiliations in Syria and, now, to bring chaos to Ukraine.

Mr. Putin is a master of a game that the West doesn't want to play, and as a result he's won game after game with weak cards. He cannot use smoke and mirrors to elevate Russia back into superpower rank, and bringing a peaceful Ukraine back into the Kremlin's tight embrace is also probably beyond him.

But as long as the West, beguiled by dreams of win-win solutions, fails to grapple effectively in the muddy, zero-sum world of classic geopolitics, Mr. Putin and his fellow revisionists in Beijing and Tehran will continue to wreak havoc with Western designs.


Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest.


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