Putin’s War
Obama had no good options to stop the invasion. In fact, the only mistake the president made was ever suggesting there would be “consequences.”
Photo by PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AFP/Getty Images
Is the West about to go to war with
Russia over the fate of Ukraine? The question should answer itself. I
can’t imagine many Americans or Europeans willingly spending “blood and
treasure” to keep Moscow’s mitts off of Kiev and Kviv. So why, then, did
President Obama publicly warn Vladimir Putin that armed aggression
against Ukraine would lead to “consequences”?
What “consequences” did Obama have in mind? To put it another way,
what cache of consequences could the United States fling at Moscow that
would make Putin (or any Russian leader) change his behavior, or alter
his cost-benefit calculus, when it comes to Ukraine?
Putin may face a bad month or so in the world media—perhaps face some
sanctions and other troubles—for moving tanks, planes, and Russia’s own
brutal brigade of riot police to quash protesters, overthrow
parliament, and restore some version of the old regime. But in his mind,
that’s nothing compared with the prospect of losing Ukraine.
Putin, after all, has lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. He considers Ukraine to be a Russian “territory,”
not an independent nation (and said so to President George W. Bush in
2008). And the Crimean peninsula, which Nikita Khrushchev ceded to
Ukraine in 1954, is Ukrainian in name only, and even then just barely.
(Khrushchev didn’t quite surrender the land but declared it an
autonomous enclave.) The Russian Navy maintains an important fleet
there; most of its people speak, and regard themselves as, Russian. In
the ongoing crisis, Putin did send troops to seize Crimea—to the
complaint of few locals.
Yes, Russia signed an accord guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders, and
Secretary of State John Kerry scored debater’s points by noting that
Putin couldn’t very well insist on Syria’s sovereignty while violating
Ukraine’s. None of this matters to Putin, nor would it have to any other
Russian leader in memory. Putin could cite the Crimean people’s pleas
to restore order in their streets (not that they’d been teeming with
disorder). If the crisis persists, he could easily find someone in the
eastern part of the Ukrainian mainland—which is largely pro-Russia—to
issue similar pleas. “I’m not invading Ukraine,” he could say, “I’m only
answering the calls for fraternal assistance from citizens endangered
by hooligans and terrorists.” (Indeed, in his phone call with President Obama today, Putin reserved the right to protect Russian interests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.)
Of course, these are rationalizations, not real reasons. Putin’s
principal motive, now in the Crimea and possibly later in eastern
Ukraine, is to reassert Russian hegemony.
Is this horrendous? Yes. Is it a big surprise? No. What can we do in
response? Not a whole lot—again, unless we want to go to war, which
would be stupid. There are good reasons why even George W. Bush backed
off (or at least stopped short of pursuing) a pledge to consider Ukraine
for NATO membership. First, calmer minds weighed the level of Western
interests in Ukrainian independence against the cost of defending it in a
pinch, and found the former coming up short. (A military alliance like
NATO, in which an attack on one is seen as an attack against all, should
mean something.) Second, polls suggested that only a minority of
Ukraine’s citizens wanted to join this alliance; about 40 percent saw
NATO as a threat.
In 1959, and again in 1961, when Khrushchev threatened to occupy West
Berlin, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy called his
bluff, and Khrushchev backed down. If Khrushchev had sent in tanks, the
United States couldn’t have staved them off. (Berlin was in the middle
of East Germany, and at the time NATO had only small conventional
armies.) But West Berlin was a key Cold War battleground, a symbol of
freedom and the home to millions of people who had been promised
American protection. Eisenhower and Kennedy said that they were willing
to go to nuclear war to keep West Berlin free—and Khrushchev
believed them enough to back down, in part because, despite his
belligerent claims to the contrary, he had almost no nuclear weapons of
his own. (Kennedy actually ordered a top-secret study on whether a nuclear first strike against Soviet military targets was feasible; it turned out, it was.)
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