By Jeffrey Sachs
October 05, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--
Former US
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously
described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot”
of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian
power. Since Russia views its vital security
interests to be at stake in the current
conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly
escalating to a nuclear showdown. It’s urgent
for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint
before disaster hits.
Since the middle of the 19th Century, the
West has competed with Russia over Crimea and
more specifically, naval power in the Black Sea.
In the
Crimean War (1853-6), Britain and France
captured Sevastopol and temporarily banished
Russia’s navy from the Black Sea. The current
conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War.
This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to
expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five
NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.
The US has long regarded any encroachment by
great powers in the Western Hemisphere as a
direct threat to US security, dating back to
the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823, which states: “We owe it,
therefore, to candor and to the amicable
relations existing between the United States and
those [European] powers to declare that we
should consider any attempt on their part to
extend their system to any portion of this
hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and
safety.”
In 1961, the US invaded Cuba when Cuba’s
revolutionary leader Fidel Castro looked to the
Soviet Union for support. The US was not much
interested in Cuba’s “right” to align with
whichever country it wanted – the claim the US
asserts regarding Ukraine’s supposed right to
join NATO. The failed US invasion in 1961 led to
the Soviet Union’s decision to place offensive
nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, which in turn
led to the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly 60 years
ago this month. That crisis brought the world to
the brink of nuclear war.
Yet America’s regard for its own security
interests in the Americas has not stopped it
from encroaching on Russia’s core security
interests in Russia’s neighbourhood. As the
Soviet Union weakened, US policy leaders came to
believe that the US military could operate as it
pleases. In 1991, Undersecretary of Defence Paul
Wolfowitz
explained to General Wesley Clark that the
US can deploy its military force in the Middle
East “and the Soviet Union won’t stop us.”
America’s national security officials decided to
overthrow Middle East regimes allied to the
Soviet Union, and to encroach on Russia’s
security interests.
In 1990, Germany
and the US gave assurances to Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union
could disband its own military alliance, the
Warsaw Pact, without fear that NATO would
enlarge eastward to replace the Soviet Union. It
won Gorbachev’s assent to German reunification
in 1990 on this basis. Yet with the Soviet
Union’s demise, President Bill Clinton reneged
by supporting the eastward expansion of NATO.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested
vociferously but could do nothing to stop it.
America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George
Kennan,
declared that NATO expansion “is the
beginning of a new cold war.”
Under Clinton’s watch, NATO expanded to
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999.
Five years later, under President George W.
Bush, Jr. NATO expanded to seven more countries:
the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania), the Black Sea (Bulgaria and
Romania), the Balkans (Slovenia), and Slovakia.
Under President Barack Obama, NATO expanded to
Albania and Croatia in 2009, and under President
Donald Trump, to Montenegro in 2019.
Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement
intensified sharply in 1999 when NATO countries
disregarded the UN and attacked Russia’s ally
Serbia, and stiffened further in the 2000’s with
the US wars of choice in Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
At the Munich Security conference in 2007,
President Putin declared that NATO enlargement
represents a “serious provocation that reduces
the level of mutual trust.”
Putin continued: “And we have the right to
ask: against whom is this expansion intended?
And what happened to the assurances [of no NATO
enlargement] our western partners made after the
dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those
declarations today? No one even remembers them.
But I will allow myself to remind this audience
what was said. I would like to quote the speech
of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in
Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time
that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a
NATO army outside of German territory gives the
Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where
are these guarantees?”
Also in 2007, with the NATO admission of two
Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the
US established the Black Sea Area Task Group
(originally the Task Force East). Then in 2008,
the US raised the US-Russia tensions still
further by declaring that NATO would expand to
the very heart of the Black Sea, by
incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening
Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea,
Mediterranean, and Middle East. With Ukraine’s
and Georgia’s entry, Russia would be surrounded
by five NATO countries in the Black Sea:
Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Russia was initially protected from NATO
enlargement to Ukraine by Ukraine’s pro-Russian
president Viktor Yanukovych, who led the
Ukrainian parliament to declare Ukraine’s
neutrality in 2010. Yet in 2014, the US helped
to overthrow Yanukovych and bring to power a
staunchly anti-Russian government. The Ukraine
War broke out at that point, with Russia quickly
reclaiming Crimea and supporting pro-Russian
separatists in the Donbas, the region of Eastern
Ukraine with a relatively high proportion of
Russian population. Ukraine’s parliament
formally abandoned neutrality later in 2014.
Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the
Donbas have been fighting a brutal war for 8
years. Attempts to end the war in the Donbas
through the Minsk Agreements failed when
Ukraine’s leaders decided not to honour the
agreements, which called for autonomy for the
Donbas. After 2014, the US poured in massive
armaments to Ukraine and helped to restructure
Ukraine’s military to be interoperable with
NATO, as evidenced in this year’s fighting.
The Russian invasion in 2022 would likely
have been averted had Biden agreed with Putin’s
demand at the end of 2021 to end NATO’s eastward
enlargement. The war would likely have been
ended in March 2022, when the governments of
Ukraine and Russia exchanged a draft peace
agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Behind
the scenes, the US and UK pushed Zelensky to
reject any agreement with Putin and to fight on.
At that point, Ukraine walked away from the
negotiations.
Russia will escalate as necessary, possibly
to nuclear weapons, to avoid military defeat and
NATO’s further eastward enlargement. The nuclear
threat is not empty, but a measure of the
Russian leadership’s perception of its security
interests at stake. Terrifyingly, the US was
also prepared to use nuclear weapons in the
Cuban Missile Crisis, and a senior Ukrainian
official recently
urged the US to launch nuclear strikes “as
soon as Russia even thinks of carrying out
nuclear strikes,” surely a recipe for World War
III. We are again on the brink of nuclear
catastrophe.
President John F. Kennedy learned about
nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile
crisis. He defused that crisis not by force of
will or US military might, but by diplomacy and
compromise, removing US nuclear missiles in
Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing
its nuclear missiles in Cuba. The following
year, he pursued peace with the Soviet Union,
signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
In June 1963, Kennedy
uttered the essential truth that can keep us
alive today: “Above all, while defending our own
vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those
confrontations which bring an adversary to a
choice of either a humiliating retreat or a
nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the
nuclear age would be evidence only of the
bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective
death-wish for the world.”
It is urgent to return to the draft peace
agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late
March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO.
Today’s fraught situation can easily spin out of
control, as the world has done on so many past
occasions – yet this time with the possibility
of nuclear catastrophe. The world’s very
survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and
compromise by all sides.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable
Development and Professor of Health Policy and
Management at Columbia University, is Director
of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development
and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions
Network. He has served as Special Adviser to
three UN Secretaries-General. His books include
The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of
Sustainable Development, Building the New
American Economy, and most recently, A New
Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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