The West is now living in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s world. It is there not because Putin is right, or even because he is stronger, but because he is taking the initiative. Putin is “wild,” while the West is “wary.” While European and US leaders recognize that the world order is undergoing a dramatic change, they cannot quite grasp it. They remain overwhelmed by Putin’s transformation from chief executive officer of Russia, Inc into an ideology-fueled national leader who will stop at nothing to restore his country’s influence.
International politics may be founded on treaties, but it functions on the basis of rational expectations. If those expectations turn out to be wrong, the prevailing international order collapses. That is precisely what has happened in the course of the Ukrainian crisis.
Just a few months ago, most Western politicians were convinced that in an interdependent world revisionism is too costly and that despite Putin’s determination to defend Russia’s interests in the post-Soviet space, he would not resort to military force to do so. It is now clear that they were sorely mistaken.
Then, after Russian troops occupied Crimea, international observers largely assumed that the Kremlin would support its secession from Ukraine, but would stop short of making it part of the Russian Federation. That belief, too, proved to be entirely wrong.
At this point, the West has no idea what Russia is willing to do, but Russia knows exactly what the West will — and, more important, will not — do. This has created a dangerous asymmetry.
For example, when Moldova requests membership in the EU, Russia may move to annex its breakaway region of Transnistria, where Russian troops have been stationed for two decades. And Moldova now knows that, should that happen, the West will not intervene militarily to protect its sovereignty.
When it comes to Ukraine, Russia has made it clear that it hopes to obstruct the presidential election next month, which Western leaders hope will cement change in Ukraine, while turning the country’s constitutional negotiations into the opening act in the establishment of a new European order.
Russia envisions Ukraine becoming something akin to Bosnia — a radically federalized country comprising political units that each adhere to their own economic, cultural and geopolitical preferences.
In other words, while Ukraine’s territorial integrity would technically be preserved, the eastern part of the country would have closer ties with Russia than with the rest of Ukraine — similar to the relationship between Bosnia’s Republika Srpska and Serbia.
This creates a dilemma for Europe. While radical federalization could allow Ukraine to remain intact through the current crisis, it would most likely doom the country to disintegration and failure in the longer term.
As Yugoslavia’s experience demonstrated, radical decentralization works in theory, but does not always work in practice.
The West will be confronted with the uneasy task of rejecting in the post-Soviet space solutions that it promoted two decades ago in the former Yugoslavia.
Confronted with Russia’s revisionism, the West resembles the proverbial drunkard searching for his lost keys under a streetlight, because that is where the light is. With their assumptions invalidated, Western leaders are struggling to craft an effective response.
In Europe, the strategies that have emerged — trivializing the annexation of Crimea or treating Putin as a madman — are self-defeating. The EU is oscillating between rhetorical extremism and policy minimalism. Though some have recommended an ill-advised expansion by NATO in the post-Soviet space, most are limiting themselves to support for symbolic sanctions, such as visa bans that affect a dozen or so Russian officials.
However, this could ratchet up pressure on non-sanctioned Russian elites to prove their loyalty to Putin, possibly even triggering a purge of the more pro-Western elements in Russia’s political class.
Indeed, no one actually believes that the visa bans will make a difference. They were imposed because doing so was the only action upon which Western governments could agree.
When it comes to Ukraine, both Western leaders and Western publics are in a mood of preventive disappointment.
Burned by a decade of wishful thinking and over-expectations — from the “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet world to the Arab Spring — Western public opinion has chosen to hear only bad news now. And this is the real risk, because the future of the European order mostly depends on what happens next in Ukraine.
It is now clear that Crimea will not return to Kiev; but it is also clear that postponement of next month’s election will mean the end of Ukraine, as we know it. It is the West’s responsibility to persuade Russia to support the elections — and to guarantee that the needed constitutional reforms will be decided in Kiev, not in Dayton.
Ivan Krastev is chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs