The Cold War is history, but its spirit this weekend stalked the security conference held in Munich each winter for the past 51 years. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US Senator John McCain drew very different lessons from the West’s 20th-century showdown with the Soviet Union, as they clashed over whether to arm Kiev’s troops in response to Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine. That disagreement represents one of the sharpest rifts yet over how the allies should respond to the current challenge from Moscow.
Europe is very different from the days when the militaries of NATO and the then-Soviet bloc stared each other down. However, the crisis in Ukraine has reopened familiar differences as to whether the threat of force — in this case, Washington’s readiness to bolster Ukraine’s military against pro-Russia rebels said to be backed by the Kremlin — is more effective than months of so-far failed negotiations.
It is not quite former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s choice of “jaw-jaw” or “war-war.” Everyone agreed that a negotiated solution is the preferred outcome. US Secretary of State John Kerry, addressing the conference on Sunday, insisted therefore that the West is united.
However, even he said that “we are in the midst of a defining moment” in the trans-Atlantic partnership, and there were differences over tactics as leaders head into another round of talks this week.
Merkel traveled to Washington on Monday for talks with US President Barack Obama, who is said to be undecided on whether to provide Ukraine with antitank artillery and an array of communications and other equipment, which some US officials say could enable Ukraine to build and hold a line against pro-Russia forces moving west in eastern Ukraine.
Diplomats held more talks in Berlin on Tuesday. An additional summit of the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia was held in Minsk, Belarus, yesterday.
‘PARTING OF THE WAYS’
Speaking in Sochi before yesterday’s meeting, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the meeting would require agreement between Russia and the West on key points beforehand. A meeting then would be possible if “we are able to agree on a number of points that we’ve recently been discussing intensely,” he said.
On Sunday, Kerry issued a statement of support for the European efforts, but added that Washington is concerned by new reports of “fierce fighting … in Debaltseve and Mariupol, and press references to new Russian convoys into eastern Ukraine.”
German Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke on Saturday last week of the real danger of a new division in Europe and a “parting of the ways” with Putin if negotiations fail.
French Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius on Sunday was firm that “what we must seek right now is not peace on paper, but peace on the ground.”
That echoed comments by US Vice President Joe Biden, who recalled the many hours he had spent trying to end the conflict.
“Don’t tell us. Show us, President Putin,” he said on Saturday. “Too many times President Putin has promised peace and delivered tanks, weapons.”
Putin’s view has been that the crisis in Ukraine, far from being a violation of international law, has been caused by a peremptory West eager to impose its way on Russia. Accordingly, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov delivered a speech brimming with Cold War-style bromides at the alleged strength of fascists in Ukraine, or Kiev’s supposed mistreatment of ethnic Hungarian minorities, which the Russians have cited as causes for them to support the rebels.
Emotion is sometimes rare in international diplomacy, but was very much present in the public and private discourse in Munich all weekend.
Unusually, Merkel offered up a memory of her childhood in communist East Germany in reply to former British foreign and defense secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, who questioned whether the diplomacy she has pursued in the Ukraine crisis was effective without a threat of force.
“Look,” said Merkel, who, like French President Francois Hollande, had just returned from hours of negotiations with Putin, “I grew up in East Germany, and when I was seven the Berlin Wall was built.”
Nobody expected the West to mount a military attack to bring it down, she said, meaning that East Germans waited 28 more years in “dictatorship and unfreedom” until the wall came down in November 1989.
She did not begrudge the West, Merkel said.
However, she implied that it informed her idea that “I do not believe that the advances Ukraine needs will be achieved with weapons.”
McCain, a Republican, in remarks on Saturday and a speech on Sunday, rebuffed the chancellor, despite German complaints about his tone while in the country she heads.
“Asserting that there is no military solution, which is a truism, should not lead us to believe that there is no military dimension to the problem — or that hard power can play no role in a favorable solution,” McCain told the conference.
OPPOSING CAMPS
Responding to Merkel’s Berlin Wall story, McCain on Saturday said: “What I particularly took exception to was Chancellor Merkel comparing this situation with that during the Cold War.”
Hundreds of thousands of members of the US military had defended West Germany, and “when Berlin was surrounded, we sent in an airlift,” he said, recalling the mission that broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin in the late 1940s. “We didn’t say: ‘Hey, we don’t want to provoke the Russians.’ So I just take strong exception to that comparison.”
He said the Soviets were kept at bay during the Cold War by “the price they would have to pay for their aggression, and right now there is no price that Putin is paying for his aggression.”
McCain’s view contrasted with the vision of Steinmeier, who emphasized the need for a peaceful end to the conflict through negotiations.
“It would be irresponsible not to use the opportunities we have,” Steinmeier said.
He spoke broadly of a new “security model” that might restore trust with Russia, an idea that seems distant as death and misery spread in eastern Ukraine.
The German foreign minister recalled that a Canadian colleague at a NATO meeting last summer had asked whether Russia should be seen as “a friend, partner, enemy or opponent to us.”
“Perhaps,” Steinmeier said, “this is easier to answer when you are further away from the conflict region. Our experience in Europe — in good times or bad — is that Russia remains our neighbor.”
It was an observation steeped in decades of Ostpolitik, Germany’s policy of detente with eastern Europe, forged by German Social Democrats like Steinmeier. Merkel, a center-right Christian Democrat, governs in coalition with the Social Democrats, another factor influencing her Ukraine policy, in which the two politicians from opposing camps have so far been able to keep the support of most Germans.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Sunday said that any Minsk meeting should result in a durable and effective cease-fire in his country. European and US leaders expressed hope that their unity, and not their differences, would prevail.
“We have to stick together and we have to negotiate,” Fabius said, “but not agree to concessions that would undermine the key pillars of European security. It is the time to make a choice.”
Additional reporting by Michael Gordon
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