RUTHFULLY YOURS

The appeasement of Iran in respect of its nuclear development is so likely to be the prelude to future violence that other danger-spots are overlooked. Vladimir Putin’s imperialist Russia is bearing down on Estonia, formerly occupied by Communist Russia and now independent and a member of the EU and NATO. Last September, President Obama visited this Baltic State, and gave an assurance that NATO’s doctrine of collective defense would be applicable in the event of Russian aggression. Only two days later, a Russian strong-arm squad crossed the border, and on Estonian territory kidnapped Eston Kohver, an Estonian security agent. Taken illegally to Russia, he was held in prison, for all we know in the former KGB and now FSB’s Lubianka headquarters itself, where tens of thousands of innocent victims have met their fates.

According to international law, the hijacking of a bona fide official of another state is cause for war. But Obama’s grandiloquent speech proved mere verbiage. Nobody much put in a good word for Eston Kohver. The crime was hardly reported. Presumably the mainstream media did not like to dwell on the open and public humiliation of the president of the United States or the failure of NATO to rise to the challenge. After a lot of prevarication, NATO has announced that a spearhead force of 4,000 troops will be stationed in the Baltic republics. So feeble a response has once more encouraged Putin to do his worst. Eston Kohver has been brought before a court in Moscow, where in one of those Soviet-era trumped-up and pre-judged trials lasting half an hour, he has been sentenced to fifteen years in a hard labor camp, and the payment of a sum of money.

Evidently Putin takes it for granted that he can treat Obama with an impunity that is nothing short of contempt. Rulers such as Putin, or for that matter Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran, will always pursue imperial ambitions if there is no cost to doing so. The practice of statecraft is what it has always been. Without the protection of a greater power prepared to put more than 4,000 token troops into the field, smaller countries like Estonia on the one hand and the Gulf emirates on the other pay the price under threat of colonization.