It was no surprise when last Sunday’s emergency meeting in Paris between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov ended inconclusively. The United States is not prepared to cut a 19th-century-style deal with Moscow to resolve the Crimea crisis, but neither has it articulated a 21st-century response that would change Russia’s calculus.
The Kremlin remains puzzled as to why Washington is not more responsive to its pitch for a settlement for Ukraine that would result in the decentralization, federalization and neutralization of the country. After all, similar arrangements were made as late as the mid-20th century concerning the status of Finland, Austria and Laos. The U.S. would even retain some bargaining chips to utilize on behalf of its interests in Ukraine in such a deal. The same devolution of power that might allow more Russia-leaning regions of Ukraine to forge closer ties with Moscow could be utilized to connect the pro-Western segments of the country in a closer relationship with Europe.
And if a formal commitment to neutrality meant that Ukraine could not join NATO—a prospect that President Barack Obama has already ruled out for the foreseeable future—and could only have a looser affiliation with the European Union, it also would prevent Kiev from being roped into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s planned Eurasian Union or the existing Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. The status of Crimea, of course, is a separate problem, but even here, some have hinted at a swap that would see Ukraine accept the loss of the peninsula in return for debt forgiveness and discounted energy.
But the American foreign policy establishment today is not temperamentally suited to make such deals, which reek of realpolitik and of playing with the destinies of countries as if they were pieces on a game board. Obama’s rejection of the chessboard motif as a way to encapsulate the U.S.-Russia geopolitical competition in Eurasia is not accidental. On top of that, there are two major objections to cutting any sort of deal with Moscow over Ukraine.
The first comes from those who argue that Russia is acting from weakness, another theme heard in recent Obama speeches, and that the Putin regime is vulnerable. If Putin is next in line to be removed in a wave of popular unrest, why should Washington make any sort of deal that legitimizes a Russian zone of privileged interests in the Eurasian space? The types of deals U.S. presidents like Dwight Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy were forced to make with the Soviet superpower are not applicable to a Russia that is but a “regional power,” in Obama’s description, and not a peer competitor of the United States.
The second is a more ideological objection: The United States should not compromise its belief that every nation should be free to determine its domestic politics and geopolitical orientation without any sort of pressure from more powerful neighbors. (Latin Americans might have cause to question the strength of America’s commitment to this principle.) If a majority of Ukrainians want to join NATO—although polls show they do not—then they should have the right to pursue talks with the alliance regardless of Russia’s objections. A separate but related debate is whether NATO is under any obligation to honor the application. Ukraine might very much wish to enter the alliance, but other allies could reasonably question whether Ukraine will be a net benefit or liability—and judge the fitness of the application accordingly.
But it is here that the United States has not made clear to itself, the Europeans or the Russians how important the defense of this principle is to American foreign policy. If the rough guide to policymaking is to determine what a state is willing to die for, kill for or pay money for, it seems clear that there is no appetite in the United States for aggressive action to defend Ukraine. Americans are certainly unwilling to die for the principle of free choice for Ukraine. And even as a reduced regional power, Russia has some degree of immunity from “being killed,” given its conventional military strength and its nuclear deterrent. The United States has no ability to rain low-cost, no-risk death upon Russian troops in the same way it was visited upon the forces of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic or Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. To this extent, therefore, 21st-century warfare, at least as practiced by the U.S. in its first two decades, is not feasible.
So that leaves the payment option. Indeed, while military deterrence remains on the table should Russia tangle with existing NATO allies, the overwhelming consensus is that the only tool in the box for countering further Russian incursions into Ukraine would be sanctions. Already, a series of largely symbolic first sanctions have been levied by the U.S., although the interruption of NATO-Russia relations and of “nonessential” space cooperation could bite harder by jeopardizing some areas of cooperation that have been profitable to Russia. The imposition of more serious measures to target the Russian financial, energy and defense industrial sectors by the United States, and perhaps its European allies, would bring real pain to the Russian economy—but they would also exact a serious toll on Western economies. The Russian side seems to be convinced that these harsher measures will not be used to force Moscow’s withdrawal from Crimea, but would be enacted if the Russians were to move further into Ukraine. In other words, the U.S., at this point, is not prepared to pay much to force a return to the status quo as it existed prior to March.
What also remains unclear is the West’s willingness to shoulder costs in the short run to achieve longer-term reorientations. There has been much talk about how Europe needs to wean itself off of Russian supplies of energy, not dissimilar to talk in the past decade about ending American reliance on Saudi Arabia as an energy provider for the U.S. and its allies. But in both cases, the cheapness and reliability of existing supplies makes it harder to generate the political will to assume the costs of diversification. After the dust settles around Crimea, will Europeans conclude, just as they did after the end of the 2008 dust-up between Georgia and Russia, that they can live with Moscow partially redrawing the post-Soviet map in return for access on easy terms to Russia’s vast energy endowment? Will Americans, who have been reluctant to fund major new energy projects in greater Eurasia that bypass Russia, bankroll new initiatives to ease the Europeans off their addiction to Russian gas? There are no clear answers at this point.
If the U.S. is not prepared to make a grand bargain on Crimea and Ukraine with Russia, but is also not going to take decisive steps to reverse Russian gains, then what? With the prospect of a flare-up on the Korean Peninsula and the apparent collapse of Kerry’s ambitious Middle East peace initiative, the administration may be satisfied with preventing the Ukrainian crisis from escalating into open conflict. But in less than two months time, once the Ukrainian elections are held and a more permanent government takes over in Kiev, these questions will have to be addressed.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, The Realist Prism, appears every Friday.
Photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Berlin, Germany, Feb. 26, 2013 (U.S. State Department photo).
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