Monday, April 7, 2014

Eyeball-to-eyeball and the West is blinking

Numerous articles I have read on the current crisis in Ukraine have likened it to Adolf Hitler’s wresting away of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is a tempting analogy but one, I believe, that is flawed.

Vladimir Putin is not Hitler whose ultimate aim went far beyond slicing off pieces of adjacent territory to unite the German peoples under the Third Reich. He sought to dominate Europe and destroy the Soviet Union. Initially Hitler had no desire to confront the United States, or even the United Kingdom, which he was prepared to leave free to enjoy its empire if it would stop fighting him.

It was only his megalomania fuelled by a series of easy victories and the utter stupidity of Japan in bringing the US into the war that was the undoing of the Fuhrer and his Axis allies.

I would suggest that a more relevant date from history is 1962 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was so confident he had the measure of the young and relatively new US President, John Kennedy that he thought he could get away with planting nuclear missiles on his client state of Cuba, little more than 100 kilometres from the American mainland.

It was a simple bully boy tactic, backed by a modicum of logic: after all the US was just as threatening with nuclear missiles stationed on the Soviet Union’s doorstep in Turkey. However he miscalculated and blinked first in the “eyeball-to-eyeball” confrontation. A year later Khrushchev had been deposed.

Would the Soviet Union have ever used those Cuban-based missiles? Of course not; the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was clearly understood by both parties even if then it hadn’t been widely debated. There was not even a need for them. Both sides already had armouries of missiles quite capable of reaching the other from their own homelands.

The rationale behind Cuba was to show the world that not only had the Soviet Union recovered from the ruins of World War II it was now the dominant superpower and that its centralised system of government was triumphant over the decadent democracies of the West. It would have influenced non-aligned nations in Africa, Asia and South America to fall in behind the Kremlin, leaving the US isolated and the remaining Western democracies in disarray.    

Instead, the events of 1963 created the seeds of the Soviet Union’s eventual failure. It took a long while and for a time it seemed that international communism was still on the march especially in South-east Asia, but the rot had set in and was eating away at the philosophical foundations. Afghanistan proved the edifice could be propped up only by brute force and eventually the leadership tired of the struggle.

Russian born Konstantin Sarkivisov, Professor Emeritus at Yamanashi Gakuin University in Japan, believes the low-point for the former superpower came not with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, but a decade later when Putin, in his first term, seemed ready to abandon any pretence of continued rivalry with the West and put out feelers for eventual membership of the EU and even NATO.

The moves were opposed by Washington and even the lesser suggestion that there be visa-less travel between Russia and the EU was rejected. From that point Putin realised there was no point in courting the West. That Russia’s influence could be rebuilt only through rivalry and confrontation.

So we had the five-day war against Georgia, the threats to slice off territory from Moldova, and now Crimea. The West’s answer to date has been a range of economic sanctions, so mild they have hardly caused a ripple in the global financial system. Worst of all, US President Barak Obama has specifically taken the military option off the table even if Moscow uses force to annex further parts of Ukraine with significant ethnic Russian populations. which most recent events in the eastern part of the country indicate he is ready to do. Putin is treading a risky course, but so far his gamble has paid off.

Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says the biggest casualty in this inadequate response will be the principles on which the West is built as it stands by while Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova are punished by Russia simply because of their desire to live in a free and democratic world.

Someone is blinking – and it is not the Russian president.

 

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