Russia appears to have been involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. The deeper issues, however, go beyond partisan politics.

At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, assured the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not absorb former Warsaw Pact states. The most recent NATO summit was held in Warsaw. We plan to deploy advanced weapons in Poland.

While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the United States was involved in an intense political crisis in Ukraine, which had been a republic of the now extinct Soviet Union. Ukraine’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovich, an unsavory leader by any standards, was close to Moscow. Washington supported a revolution by Yanukovich’s political opponents, Western-oriented free market advocates. They prevailed. Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern population revolted, and Russia then seized Crimea and interfered in eastern Ukraine. Five thousand Ukrainian forces — anti and pro Russian — have been killed, along with 2,000 civilians.

Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, was caught on tape designating one Ukrainian leader as “the guy”; he became Prime Minister.

To be sure, both the U.S. and Russia have interfered in many countries, but when it comes to former Warsaw Pact states and especially to former Soviet republics, the moral issues of democracy — or hypocrisy — are overshadowed by extreme risk.

As the West incorporates former Soviet republics into NATO, as it has the Baltic states, it becomes obliged to defend them with nuclear weapons. In turn, Russia is moving toward nuclear launch on warning, with greatly increased danger of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. The next President will need to manage tensions with Moscow to avoid a new arms race.

For Speak Your Mind, this is David Keppel.

The apparent missile shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine also deserves independent investigation, but clearly in both cases innocent people lost their lives when civilian airliners crossed zones of intense conflict. Many civilians have been killed in recent battles in eastern Ukraine after government forces ended a truce with separatists.

If pro-Russian rebels mistook the Malaysian plane for a Ukrainian military aircraft, their mistake, though criminally reckless, was not unique. Ukraine shot down a Russian airliner in 2001, and the U.S. downed an Iranian civilian Airbus in 1988, killing 290.

The Reagan administration seized on the 1983 Korean Airlines tragedy to push Europeans to accept deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles on their soil. Senator John McCain already speaks of the Malaysian Airlines tragedy as a “game-changer.”

One hundred years ago, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo led to the cataclysm of world war. This is no time for games. NATO deployments in or near Ukraine would be especially provocative. A new Cold War on the border of a resentful, nuclear armed Russia would carry incalculable risk, to which the Malaysian Airlines tragedy is just a clue.

Sources:

Democracy Now

The Nation

The Nation

MSNBC

The Sleepwalkers:  How Europe Went to War in 1914

You don’t have to admire a foreign leader to think the Hitler comparison is irresponsible. Hitler was a genocidal dictator bent upon world conquest. Neville Chamberlain’s celebration of the 1938 Munich agreement as “peace in our time” lives in infamy. If someone is really Hitler, the only answer can be total war.

Surely Hillary Clinton does not really believe that Putin’s annexation of Crimea, which in 1954 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, is a first step toward Russian invasion of Europe all the way to the beaches of Normandy. I trust she also does not think the U.S. should fight Russia, since such a war would unleash a nuclear apocalypse.

Casually comparing an opponent to Hitler not only blocks needed diplomacy; it also cheapens the darkest lesson in human history. The traumas of the First World War, humiliating terms of Versailles, and the Great Depression led a civilized nation into stark pathology. We have also seen genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Rather than call adversaries Hitler, we should take care to avoid the shocks and stresses that can push any society to madness and murder.

America’s great Cold War diplomats—George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Lwellyn Thompson—were realists. They had no love for Soviet communism, but they warned repeatedly against Americans’ capacity to see their own actions as righteous and others as evil. They knew that that diplomacy depends on recognizing all parties’ essential interests, as well as allowing them to save face.

When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to the reunification of Germany, the West promised him that we would not take advantage of the change to expand NATO. Yet today, Eastern European states are part of NATO. NATO installed missile defenses in Poland and Romania and set up a military outpost in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

American diplomats and American money were involved in the ouster of Ukraine’s corrupt but democratically elected pro-Russian president. The new government, ratified by a rump parliament, includes far right-wing forces. It excluded Russian as a national language, alarming eastern Ukrainians, then reversed the decision.

I believe Kennan would have counseled President Obama not to take advantage of the conflict to threaten Russia, specifically through NATO membership, military integration, or deployments and to beware of using American money to support opposition groups, above all in Russia itself. Washington would insist on no less of Moscow if there were a socialist revolution in Mexico.