Tom Kando
Putin is saber rattling again, threatening, blackmailing, maybe bluffing, maybe not...I mean, of course, his renewed nuclear threat.
The current deja vu is the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, the stand-off between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, two weeks during which the world was at the edge of nuclear Armageddon. We are not there - yet.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, there is nothing refreshing to say about it. There are no words to express how evil Putin’s unprovoked assault and his devastation of the neighboring country are.
We hear that Ukraine is turning the tide, that it may well win the war. This would be great, if it were realistic.
The problem is that Ukraine is fighting the devil. Putin holds the trump card - the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
And just like the devil, Putin is not going anywhere. Russia’s and Putin’s defeats are hard to imagine, judging from what we know about the man’s mentality. It can be described generously as “stubborn,” or bluntly as “psychopathic.”
At the risk of falling into the mea culpa mode so often typical of Western liberals, let me bring up what may have been a mistake on the part of the West. I am referring to the vast expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We added a dozen new members and encircled Russia, making practically every state bordering that country into its enemy. Russia became entirely isolated, the international black sheep.
By no means am I blaming the West for what Russia is doing now. There are those who bring up the tired old refrain of our “military industrial complex..” They argue that “this war is what the capitalist weapons manufacturers want, for profit, etc.” I am not among this group.
Of course, we did not create Putin’s imperial ambitions. He might have behaved even more aggressively if we had not enlarged and strengthened NATO. There is always the Munich analogy, Neville Chamberlain, “Peace in our Time,” the appeasement of Hitler in 1938. Maybe the only proper response to such aggressive dictators is force.
However, isn’t it possible that the West made some mistakes, that it didn’t think the situation through, didn’t think sufficiently about the future, about some side-effects of such a drastic expansion of NATO, especially the inclusion of all the countries that used to be Russia’s vassals?
Gorbachev brought us Glasnost. There was talk of openness, transparency, detente, cooperation. There was talk of Russia joining NATO, something highly unrealistic of course, but at least indicating a carrot-and-stick approach by the West. A continued effort at rapprochement might have been advisable, when confronted with a dangerous neighbor. Instead, the West has increasingly alienated and isolated Russia. It expelled it from the Group of Eight. Russia is no longer permitted to compete in the Olympics under its own name. The sanctions have been piling on for years.
Granted that the sanctions are the logical international response to Russian misdeeds, that the country’s misbehavior did not start with its attacks on Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022.
Nevertheless, should there not have been a major effort to achieve long-term detente, when dealing with a country that has the power to destroy the planet with one push of the button?
This is a difficult problem, certainly morally. But problems are not only moral; they are also practical. FDR had no trouble collaborating with Stalin, arguably as bloody a dictator as Putin.
Time is irreversible. We cannot undo what happened in the 1990s. But treating Russia as a rogue state is a mistake. It contributes to MAKING IT into a rogue state. It is one thing to isolate and pressure countries such as North Korea. But trying to isolate a giant rarely works.
Am I saying that “might makes right?” No. I am saying that one must deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. NATO’s total encirclement and isolation of Russia has helped to create an enraged and lethal power, threatening to bring everyone down with them.
There is no alternative to avert catastrophe, other than compromise, negotiations and diplomacy. Of course, Ukraine must somehow survive. But this will have to be in a “Finlandized” form - somewhat reduced and neutralized. A return to the pre-2014 status quo and Ukraine repossessing Crimea and all other stolen territories are impossibilities.
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