In
the U.S. Russia-hating liberals are joining the neocons in seeking
more war in Ukraine, as the prospects for a rational and peaceful
resolution to the crisis continue to fade.
by
James W. Carden
Part
3 - Less Dangerous Options
One
reasonable alternative to NATO membership would be a treaty along the
lines of the 1955 Austrian State Treaty, which was an agreement
reached between the four post-World War II occupying powers (U.S.,
USSR, Great Britain and France) that granted Austria its independence
“with the understanding,” according to the U.S. State Department,
“that the newly independent state of Austria would declare its
neutrality, creating a buffer zone between the East and the West,”
meaning it would join neither NATO nor the Soviet-run Warsaw Pact.
Charles
Bohlen, the legendary American diplomat who served as ambassador to
Moscow from 1953-57, recalled in his memoir Witness To History that,
with regard to the Austrian State Treaty, he believed “that the
Kremlin leaders, and probably the Soviet military chiefs, decided
that a genuinely neutral Austria was of more value to Soviet Russia
than the maintenance of a divided country where the Red Army would
occupy only the poorer half.”
The
situation in postwar Austria – occupied by East and West – is not
perfectly analogous to the situation that obtains in Ukraine today,
but there seem to be lessons from what Bohlen intuited were the
Kremlin’s motives that might be drawn upon to inform Western
diplomacy.
But
instead of trying to implement the Minsk peace agreement (which calls
for the Donbas to remain as part of Ukraine but with more autonomy
from Kiev) or search for a reasonable alternative to what are indeed
perplexing and pressing matters of national security, Poroshenko has
continued to ring the alarm over the another, this time illusory,
Russian invasion.
In a
recent speech before the Ukrainian parliament, Poroshenko claimed
“there is more and more evidence for [Russia’s] preparations
for an offensive war of continental proportions.”
Yet
perhaps the danger isn’t as clear and present as Poroshenko
portrayed it. As Mary Dejevesky of the U.K.’s Independent has
observed: “Nato itself had held exercises in the Black Sea and
before that in and around the western borderlands of Ukraine. Who, it
has to be asked here, is threatening whom?”
Indeed,
if Russia was on the precipice of launching a land war in Eastern
Europe, would it have cut its defense budget by 25 percent to $48
billion a year, as was recently announced by the Kremlin?
As
difficult as it might be for our hearty band on new cold warriors to
believe (some of whom have scant knowledge about the topic of
U.S.-Russia relations on which they so frequently choose to declaim),
the push for a peaceable settlement in Ukraine is coming not from
Washington, but from Moscow and Berlin.
Nevertheless,
the stalemate continues: a resolution to the Ukrainian conflict –
through the implementation of the Minsk agreements, as well as a
settlement of the outstanding security concerns of all parties to the
conflict – seems to remain tragically out of reach.
***
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