In an interview with Jeffrey
Goldberg of the Atlantic, President Obama laid out key elements of his
approach to foreign policy. There is much in it with which one can agree.
“Don’t do stupid s——” makes sense as an axiom of foreign policy—or of any
policy, for that matter—as does taking deliberate and strategic decisions about
when to engage American military power.
As regards the two-year-old conflict between
Ukraine and Russia, the president said Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow,
in a way that it is not for the United States. He noted that, since Ukraine
does not belong to NATO, it is vulnerable to Russian military domination, and
that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we
are willing to go to war for.”
It is hard to dispute these points… except that
the president set up a straw man. The United States could have done more to
help Kyiv resist the Kremlin’s aggression without a war with Russia.
Why Care about Ukraine?
There are critical reasons for Washington to
support Ukraine. The Kremlin is pursuing a revisionist policy designed to
undermine the post–Cold War order established in Europe. Vladimir Putin claims
a right and duty to intervene to protect ethnic Russians and speakers wherever
they live and regardless of their citizenship. He used that as a justification
to invade Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. 25 percent of the populations of
two NATO member states—Estonia and Latvia—are ethnic Russians.
Recent Russian
provocations in the Baltic states include kidnapping an Estonian
counterintelligence official on the final day of the last NATO summit.
Making Putin pay a heavy price for his aggression in #Ukraine makes it less
likely that he will commit further provocations in the Baltic states. Such
provocations could lead to miscalculations and the war that President Obama
wants to avoid.
Moreover, in 1994, the leaders of the United
States, Britain and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, in which they
committed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial
integrity and pledged not to use force against that country. That memorandum
was key to Kyiv’s decision to give up nearly two thousand strategic nuclear
warheads and the associated strategic missiles and bombers.
This was a major
victory for U.S. policy, and for nonproliferation. Moscow’s violation of this
agreement is a strong disincentive for future nations to give up weapons of
mass destruction. The Obama administration rarely mentions the Budapest
Memorandum, but that memorandum answers the “why should we care?” question that
Obama implied in his interview with Goldberg.
What should Washington do? It should keep
providing Kyiv political support, and work with the European Union to offer
additional financial assistance, provided that Ukraine accelerates reforms and
anti-corruption measures. It should also provide additional military
assistance.
On the last point, we are two of eight coauthors
of a report issued early
last year—“Preserving
Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States
and NATO Must Do”—that argued for providing Ukraine additional military
assistance, including light antiarmor weapons. Those were intended to fill a
gap when the Russian military was pouring tanks and other armored vehicles into
the Donbas.
The administration rejected lethal military
assistance. In our meetings last year with senior U.S. officials, it was
apparent that the White House’s main concern was escalation: that the Russians
might out-escalate the United States, or that U.S. leaders would find
themselves on an escalation ladder that would end up with the Eighty-Second
Airborne Division deploying to Donetsk.
These were good questions to raise, but they had
good answers. Could Moscow escalate if the United States provided light
antiarmor weapons? Certainly. But would Moscow escalate, given the risks—more
dead Russian soldiers, which the Kremlin disgracefully hides from the public,
and additional sanctions on an economy already mired in recession?
As for an escalation ladder, Washington would
control that. None of the report’s coauthors advocated sending U.S. soldiers to
fight or even proposed high-end arms. Washington would have owed it to Kyiv to
make clear where it would draw the line, but the argument that providing some
arms would have led to an inevitable U.S.-Russian military clash does not hold
water.
This is what is troubling about the president’s
view of the conflict. If the choice is between continuing what the United
States is currently doing and World War III with Russia, it’s a no-brainer. The
president, however, rejected lesser steps, which would not have led to war with
Russia, but that would have taken away easy military options from Moscow and
increased the prospects of a genuine settlement.
Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, and John Herbst, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu
Patriciu Eurasia Center, formerly served as U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine and
previously at the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
No comments:
Post a Comment