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The chess match that Putin has been playing involves putting his forces in places that risk nuclear war or full-on conventional war to remove them. Like the classic prisoner's dilemma game, it means only a willingness to do the same on the part of the West is capable of thwarting Putin's strategy, a condition which is inherently unstable because of the uncertainty involved and so unlikely to be made by the West.
If the Ukrainians were to react negatively to US troops entering their country, which is always a possibility, then such a strategy to match Putin's risk-taking won't work, I agree. It is dependent upon support from Ukrainians. My sense right now, however, having talked to many different Ukrainians over the last few weeks, Russian as well as Ukrainian speaking, is that such support would be forthcoming for the US at the present time. They really don't want Russia coming any further right now.
The West, meaning the US all alone, certainly can "win" a conventional war against Russia in the Ukraine. Such an outcome is not guaranteed, but both Russian and US generals know that this is the case. A conventional war in Eastern Europe is actually the war that the US is best equipped to fight as well, and it is the one that it has spent more resources, time, and preparation training for than any other, Afghanistan and Iraq notwithstanding. The US is still equipped mostly with pre-2000 era heavy equipment exactly designed for that very fight, so although that scenario is also the one Russia is best equipped for, it is still the one NATO has always had all the equipment already in place in Europe to do as well. That's what makes this crisis such a scary prospect, similar to the conditions at the beginning of WWI.
However, if a war of any kind starts, it's a loss for everyone, because it really would be a big one, and both sides know this and are specifically trying to avoid it while bluffing each other and making strategic moves that require the other side to back away when war is the only other option. So far Putin has outplayed NATO in every way in this chess game, largely because he has been willing to take risks the West has not. He has been willing to play chicken with the prospect of full on war with the West, which means that unless the West is willing to do the same, it cannot possibly gain an equivalent standing in any negotiation.
Not being willing to do that means allowing Putin to have the upper hand in negotiations. To me, that's perfectly okay and is probably the best thing for the West to do in this case, precisely because the Ukraine really isn't that important to anyone except Russia, and really should never have been staked out as a NATO objective in the first place.
If Russia shoots US troops that are simply defending themselves while trying to keep a Russian army from advancing into Eastern Ukraine, the US will probably to go to war scale war with Russia. It's that simple. It doesn't matter what Russia claims because it is the US population and political class that makes that call, not international opinion.
This is how this works:
In 1969 the British sent troops into Northern Ireland to help protect Catholics who were being burnt out of their houses and attacked by protestants mobs with the shadowy support of the protestant police force and B Special auxiliary police force.
They were welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the Catholic citizenry.
However a small minority of catholic nationalists/republicans didn't want British troops on their turf and started some semi covert attacks on the troops from the cover of local knowledge. The troops responded unskillfully and started inadvertently killing innocent Catholics in response. Within months the entire Catholic community was turned against the troops and turned a blind eye when a full scale guerrilla war against the troops gradually emerged.
It won't take so long in the Eastern Ukraine, because unlike Northern Ireland (where the troops gained the support of the majority protestant community) US troops have basically to legitmate reason for being in Uktraine.
If, as you say, the US political classes will make the call, at some point, to go to war with Russia in response, they are simply setting themselves up for a bigger disaster than Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined. The US will lose its dominant position - economically and politically, in the world regardless of military outcomes in Ukraine.
And don't make the mistake of thinking Russia won't go full scale thermonuclear in response to (say) the US using Neutron or other battlefield nuclear weapons in the Ukraine. (You use nuclear weapons on our turf, don't think we won't do so on yours).
It never ceases to amaze me that deapite Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq - all wars the US essentially lost - the "US political classes" still think they can win such wars such is their imperial arrogance. And Russia is not Vietnam. You will be creating an enemy many orders of magnitude stronger. Index of Frank's Diaries
The US is actually a fake military state - like North Korea, with better PR and advertising. It doesn't matter that it's not good at winning wars. What matters is the fake patriotism (for the proles) and the state spending (for the CEOs) that keep the pantomime running.
Practically, a lot of super-expensive hardware simply doesn't work. E.g. the F35 program is a disaster. So there's a good chance the US would quickly get its arse kicked in a real non-nuclear superpower war.
I think the US political classes know this. Hence the huffing and puffing over the Ukraine, and the complete absence of concrete action.
In fact when the US wants to do geopolitics, it sends in the spooks and creates a coup, or sends in the bankers. (See also Gene Sharp, Venezuela, Greece and Spain, etc.) Actually blowing shit up is largely for PR purposes these days.
The West, meaning the US all alone, certainly can "win" a conventional war against Russia in the Ukraine.
I really don't think Ukraine has anything to let Russia know about the mainstreaming of far-right thugs.
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
A rump Ukraine seems more likely. I do think that union between Moldova and Romania is likely if the Russian try to annex Transnistria. Between this and separatist movements, it's going to be a very different Europe. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
the Ukraine really isn't that important to anyone except Russia, and really should never have been staked out as a NATO objective in the first place
I suspect the US foreign policy establishment must be really pissed off at the way the EU (and Merkel) has handled Ukraine. Total fantasist rookies, if you ask me.
Look, the entire European establishment bought into the idea we had a post-realist world order in Europe. They didn't even have the phrase "sphere of influence" enter their heads during the trade negotiations with Ukraine last fall, because they don't think in those terms any longer. I've kept telling people for years this is totally wrong, but they needed this kind of brutal wake-up call to get it. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Putinism and the Anti-WEIRD Coalition [...] Americans of all stripes have a well-honed ability to ignore inconvenient facts, and our better educated citizens seem particularly prone to this (as I noted with our "expert" inability to see what North Korea believes, even though they aren't shy about it). At root, I suspect Obama and many Americans refuse to accept the in-our-face reality of Putin and his regime because they represent a past version of ourselves, caught up in retrograde views that are entirely unacceptable to our elites, therefore they pretend they do not exist, because they don't actually exist in their world. Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he's what they thought they'd gotten past. He's a traditional male with "outmoded" views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons - and he hates us. Of course, this also happens to explain why some Westerners who loathe post-modernism positively love Putin, at least from a safe distance. Some far-right Westerners - the accurate term is paleoconservatives - have been saying for years that the West, led very much by America, has become hopelessly decadent and they've been looking for a leader to counter all this, and - lo and behold - here he is, the new "leader of global conservatism." Some paleocons have stated that, with the end of the Cold War, America has become the global revolutionary power, seeking to foist its post-modern views on the whole planet, by force if necessary, and now Putin's Russia has emerged as the counterrevolutionary element. Cold War 2.0, in this telling, has the sides reversed. [...] We are entering a New Cold War with Russia, whether we want to or not, thanks to Putin's acts in Ukraine, which are far from the endpoint of where the Kremlin is headed in foreign policy. As long as the West continues to pretend there is no ideological component to this struggle, it will not understand what is actually going on. Simply put, Putin believes that his country has been victimized by the West for two decades, and he is pushing back, while he is seeking partners. We will have many allies in resisting Russian aggression if we focus on issues of freedom and sovereignty, standing up for the rights of smaller countries to choose their own destiny. However, too much emphasis on social and sexual matters - that is, telling countries how they must organize their societies and families - will be strategically counterproductive.
[...]
Americans of all stripes have a well-honed ability to ignore inconvenient facts, and our better educated citizens seem particularly prone to this (as I noted with our "expert" inability to see what North Korea believes, even though they aren't shy about it). At root, I suspect Obama and many Americans refuse to accept the in-our-face reality of Putin and his regime because they represent a past version of ourselves, caught up in retrograde views that are entirely unacceptable to our elites, therefore they pretend they do not exist, because they don't actually exist in their world.
Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he's what they thought they'd gotten past. He's a traditional male with "outmoded" views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons - and he hates us.
Of course, this also happens to explain why some Westerners who loathe post-modernism positively love Putin, at least from a safe distance. Some far-right Westerners - the accurate term is paleoconservatives - have been saying for years that the West, led very much by America, has become hopelessly decadent and they've been looking for a leader to counter all this, and - lo and behold - here he is, the new "leader of global conservatism." Some paleocons have stated that, with the end of the Cold War, America has become the global revolutionary power, seeking to foist its post-modern views on the whole planet, by force if necessary, and now Putin's Russia has emerged as the counterrevolutionary element. Cold War 2.0, in this telling, has the sides reversed.
We are entering a New Cold War with Russia, whether we want to or not, thanks to Putin's acts in Ukraine, which are far from the endpoint of where the Kremlin is headed in foreign policy. As long as the West continues to pretend there is no ideological component to this struggle, it will not understand what is actually going on. Simply put, Putin believes that his country has been victimized by the West for two decades, and he is pushing back, while he is seeking partners. We will have many allies in resisting Russian aggression if we focus on issues of freedom and sovereignty, standing up for the rights of smaller countries to choose their own destiny.
However, too much emphasis on social and sexual matters - that is, telling countries how they must organize their societies and families - will be strategically counterproductive.
On matters of political strategy and military affairs at least, Russians and Americans are so uncannily alike in their thought processes and ways of looking at the world that "mirror image" is really the best way of characterizing them. After all, these are the two peoples who have been studying each other, for billions of man-hours, over a nuclear chess board for almost 70 years now. That's why so many Americans have man-crushes on Putin, after all. We really do understand and appreciate the guy. And contrary to what many in the commentariat have been writing in the past few weeks, Putin, and Russians in general, have displayed an amazingly accurate understanding of how Americans think strategically as well.
All of Putin's actions, and those of the US, are completely explained the the realist theory of international relations -- that the interests of power always take precedence, and that "the strong will do what they must while the weak can only do what they can." No ideological explanation is necessary, and it appears doubtful that Putin is really interested at all in anti-neoliberal or any other post-modernist inspired discourse. He has never indicated, in his entire, well publicized life, any interest in such thinking.
Realism, on the other hand, is the same principal of foreign policy (and all policy really) that has dominated thinking in the affairs of statecraft since Thucydides first made the observation, and later re-popularized by Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger, and now still be taught and argued by people like John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, as well as having comprised the core pedagogy of both US and Russian military staff colleges for over a century, at least.
Realism is how US and Russians think and how their soldiers and diplomats have been educated, and it is how they expect the other to interpret events and actions, and nothing that has actually transpired in events in Europe, right down to the infamous "fuck the EU" phone call and exposure by Russia, contradicts a purely realist interpretation of what is going on in both Russian and American policymakers' minds. Only the blogosphere, and perhaps various EU heads of state, appear to be consistently duped by US and Russian press releases.
-------- As the unelected Kiev junta sends armed balaclava-clad paramilitaries to quell protests in Ukraine's eastern cities it declares the operation «anti-terrorism». The acting (sic) president in Kiev Oleksandr Turchynov has labeled all those seeking political autonomy in Kharkov, Donetsk, Lugansk and other pro-Russian cities in the east of the country as «terrorists and criminals»; a new set of laws cobbled together by the junta - two months before scheduled official elections have taken place and therefore of dubious legality - gives the self-appointed politicians in Kiev the power to prosecute any one that does not recognize their self-imposed authority... Meanwhile, NATO has warned Moscow to «step back» from alleged military aggression (from within its own borders!) towards Ukraine - even though the US-led alliance has escalated the presence of its fighter jets and troops in Russia's neighboring countries. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary general of the 28-member NATO organization, has also led calls for speeding up the incorporation of Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina into the nuclear-armed pact. This is in addition to a deal hastily worked out by NATO and the NATO-backed junta in Kiev for joint military exercises to be carried out on Ukrainian territory. This constitutes a new genre of politics, which one might dub «surrealpolitik». The former realpolitik of the bygone Cold War decades may have been cynical and callous, but at least such thinking was based on an objective reality that vying sides could commonly recognize and therefore negotiate. In the new genre of surrealpolitik, one side's version of reality seems more in the realm of fantasy, which makes any dialogue between political contentions nearly, if not totally, impossible.
Meanwhile, NATO has warned Moscow to «step back» from alleged military aggression (from within its own borders!) towards Ukraine - even though the US-led alliance has escalated the presence of its fighter jets and troops in Russia's neighboring countries. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary general of the 28-member NATO organization, has also led calls for speeding up the incorporation of Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina into the nuclear-armed pact. This is in addition to a deal hastily worked out by NATO and the NATO-backed junta in Kiev for joint military exercises to be carried out on Ukrainian territory.
This constitutes a new genre of politics, which one might dub «surrealpolitik». The former realpolitik of the bygone Cold War decades may have been cynical and callous, but at least such thinking was based on an objective reality that vying sides could commonly recognize and therefore negotiate. In the new genre of surrealpolitik, one side's version of reality seems more in the realm of fantasy, which makes any dialogue between political contentions nearly, if not totally, impossible.
NATO installs an unelected regime in Kiev through a coup d'état against a legally elected government. That is a fact. Yet in the surreal world of Washington and its NATO allies, this fact is inverted into a fictional notion that what happened in Kiev during February was the culmination of «a democratic revolution». Airbrushed from the objective narrative are details such as the new regime arrogating administrative power through a campaign of Western-backed street violence and terrorism, including the fatal shooting of police officers by covert snipers. Without supporting evidence, the sniper-assisted regime in Kiev, which was promptly accorded the authority of «government» by Western capitals and their media, has since counter-charged Russian secret services and the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych of orchestrating the shootings. Of course, the incriminating leaked telephone conversation, dated February 26, between EU ministers Catherine Ashton and Estonia's Urmas Paet on Western-backed covert snipers is conveniently deleted from the official Western record.
Without supporting evidence, the sniper-assisted regime in Kiev, which was promptly accorded the authority of «government» by Western capitals and their media, has since counter-charged Russian secret services and the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych of orchestrating the shootings. Of course, the incriminating leaked telephone conversation, dated February 26, between EU ministers Catherine Ashton and Estonia's Urmas Paet on Western-backed covert snipers is conveniently deleted from the official Western record.
The wrong interpretation is to imagine that anything new, like a new surrealpolitik paradigm, has infected the thinking of the non-aggressive side, which is what I see all over the blogosphere, like in your blockquote here.
The right interpretation is that the NATO side has already determined that use of force in Ukraine is not worth the effort, so it is writing the Ukraine off but cannot tell that to their allies in the Ukraine and elsewhere because it sounds too ruthless and unsupportive of justice, democracy, and the rule of law, the shared values for which any use of force must be consistent in the first place. In Realpolitik, when someone uses words and official statements rather than actions, it is code for: you're not that important to us right now. No one should infer from this that policymakers on the NATO side have a different view of reality at all.
As a young community organizer in Chicago, President Barrack Obama used to lead intense organizer trainings, called "week-longs" where trainees learned to abandon the "justice junkie" mindset and adopt Saul Alinsky's unique style of Machiavellian street politics. The week's training begins by reading Thucydides' "Milean Dialogue," the core text for the Realist school of international relations. The exercise that Obama, like all trainers then, like now, taught was to divide the trainees into the Melians and Athenians, and let them try to negotiate an outcome. One of the key lessons was to not think like the stupid, self-righteous, but sympathetic Melians, but to think instead as ruthlessly and strategic as the Athenians. Don't waste your resources on something where you can't build power as an outcome.
I really doubt Obama has forgotten this formational part of his entry into politics. Nothing else he has done indicates that he has. I'm pretty sure the US and NATO just aren't seeing where it helps them build power to get involved militarily in Ukraine at the present time, or they would have already done so.
So, strategically, it was a pretty ruthless and low-risk (for the West) move that would have impressed Saul Alinsky, if not Henry Kissinger.
Earlier this week, Russia laid out its vision for eastern Ukraine and how Ukraine can move toward reestablishing its stability and territorial integrity - or what's left of it. Ukrainian officials called the Russian road map, published on the foreign ministry's website, an "ultimatum" and a "completely unacceptable" demand. But, as Yatsenyuk's speech showed, the two sides share common themes with regard to Ukraine's east. The prospect of a federalized Ukraine. Yatsenyuk promised government reforms that would transfer to Ukraine's regions "the broadest scope of authority and financial resources." The Russian memorandum also calls for decentralization in Ukraine - it called the process "federalization" - and said it should be written into the Ukrainian Constitution. Yatsenyuk's statement confirmed that this was being done.
The prospect of a federalized Ukraine. Yatsenyuk promised government reforms that would transfer to Ukraine's regions "the broadest scope of authority and financial resources." The Russian memorandum also calls for decentralization in Ukraine - it called the process "federalization" - and said it should be written into the Ukrainian Constitution. Yatsenyuk's statement confirmed that this was being done.
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