SOL SANDERS: THE REAL RED LINE
The real red line
Recorded history is generally a straight-line narrative, often written with prejudice, and as the cliché has it, by the victors.
Only those involved in writing it, or more importantly, living through it, know the many cross-currents that because they do not present a clear picture of events defy immediate balanced analysis. These truths apply to any moment in history but particularly to those when violent events or revolutionary technology changes the pattern of life for everyone.
We are obviously in one of those periods on several scores by any calculation.
But while history may or may not repeat itself, there are permanent aspects of the relationships among nations. And we live with contemporary manifestations of the intricate nature of those liaisons.
Among those which is of ultimate importance is the integrity of the national state as a cornerstone of international law.
With the expansion of the concept of the European nation-state after the NapoleonicWars, its further consolidation in the 19th century, and Woodrow Wilsons blessing if failure of implementation — after World War I, conquest, international acceptance and treaty obligations have made national boundaries sacrosanct.
When they have been violated deliberately by a rogue power, it has led to even more bloodletting on the Old Continent where they had been enshrined to prevent just that very catastrophe, and now expanded however unfittingly to a vast new world in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
It matters little in principle whether those borders are in some way arbitrary, that they cross ethnic, racial or linguistic lines, or even that they contradict traditional avenues of commerce. What does matter more is that respect for them is violated at great jeopardy and usually at great cost to peace and stability of the world.
Russian demagogue Vladimir Putin has done just that in Crimea. The Russian leaders has perpetrated all the familiar moves of his own military acting as volunteers, the recruitment of local thugs to intimidate the populace, and bald-faced lies about his activities. Alas! as so often happens in the early years of a successful demagoguery, he has enlisted the nationalist sympathies of much of the Russian people, on a poor diet of other accomplishments by this regime.
Crimea, on all counts, qualifies as an integral part of the Ukrainian state. By original Russian Imperial conquest, by general acceptance of the new Eurasian states after the 1990 implosion of the Soviet Union, by the 1994 U.S.-U.K.-Russian Budapest Treaty guaranteeing Ukraines integrity in exchange in exchange for its abandoning nuclear weapons of mass destruction, by the very fact Russians military bases in Crimea were extended through negotiations with a Kiev government by Moscow, the peninsular was part and parcel of the Ukrainian state.
If Putins unilateral transgression of that integrity is permitted to endure, or in fact, if he expands it further to undermine the status of the Kiev regime, the world would be likely to again pay a very high price.
Sophisticated rationalizations by the talking heads notwithstanding, none of the arguments are conclusive about the ambiguous history of Crimean sovereignty. [Little mention is made of how Russian Imperial and Communist rule wiped out the greater part of its original Tartar population to be supplanted with Russian emigrants, often the families of the military bases there.] Nor does it matter that during Josef Stalins times and later by his Ukrainian ethnic successor, Nikita Khrushchev Moscow played at mapmaker for the region by assigning it to the former Soviet regional Ukrainian republic.
Nor, again, does the fact that the implosion of the Soviet Union left behind in a dozen of Stalins largely artificially drawn states smaller or larger Russian minority populations negate Ukrainian sovereignty. Hillary Clinton, who has never shown much aptitude for historical scholarship, is perfectly correct when her speechwriter makes the point that Putins claim to protecting the rights of Crimean Russian ethnics as an excuse for intervention is too reminiscent of Adolph Hitlers provocations leading to World War II.
Clintons indirect references to attempted appeasement of the Nazi dictator is perhaps too pat. Nor are the problems of recruiting an effective counter by the peace-loving coalition any less difficult than they were when Emperor Haile Selassie stood inconsolably before the League of Nations at Geneva in 1936 calling for action to halt the Italian Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolinis destruction of his. ancient Abyssinia [Ethiopia].
Yet the fundamental problem remains the same for the Western alliance: how to rally an alliance which faces short-term disadvantages in a unified effort to halt Russian aggression through measures short of war.
To a considerable extent, Putins actions against Ukraine have been bluff. But at each turning, the Obama Administration has sought to use only the persuasion of rhetoric rather than moving its own pieces on the chessboard. To announce sanctions against the enormous deposits of Russian flight capital in the West most of it thefts by Putins most intimate collaborators — before actually implement them was typical. Secretary of State John Kerrys invoking of the theme of how the West was playing by new and more sophisticated rules of the contemporary world while Putin was somewhere stuck in the 19th and 20th century was pitiful.
We apparently are now at the mercy of Putins own clumsy strategies and their possible self-destruction through their impact on the Russian economy.
sws-03-09-2014
Comments are closed.
