MY TURN

Greenfield Recorder, July 12, 2023

Recognizing them isn’t appeasement

By AARON FALBEL

Several letters printed in the Recorder have asserted that a negotiated settlement to end the war in Ukraine would play into the hands of Vladimir Putin. Echoes of Neville Chamberlain reverberate in our minds and lead many to believe that anything other than military victory over Russia would embolden strong-arm dictators everywhere. Even Bill Coli’s respectful response to Pat Hynes [“Negotiate for peace in Ukraine,” Recorder, July 3] makes this assumption.

The real situation is a lot more complex than that.

Mr. Coli’s response does not take into account NATO’s role in fomenting this conflict. Contrary to what some writers to the Recorder have claimed, the U.S. (along with Britain, Germany, and France) did give repeated assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would “not shift one inch eastward” toward the USSR if they would accept German reunification. This is a historical fact, backed up by documents and memoranda declassified in 2017. (See NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard)

Many U.S. officials now claim that these assurances were never put in writing as part of an official treaty, which may be technically true. However, there is a word for this type of behavior: It’s called duplicity.

NATO did not waste much time in its eastward expansion (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; North Macedonia in 2020; and now Finland in 2023) with Russia complaining vociferously at each new NATO member. So much for not one inch.

I say this not to justify Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Such violence against a sovereign nation is not justifiable and violates international law. But I think it is important to make a distinction between justification and explanation. Putin’s aggressive behavior, though illegal, was not entirely unprovoked. Russians have long felt double-crossed by a bait-and-switch scheme.

The question has been posed: How would the U.S. respond if Russia were to make a deal with Mexico and place missiles on Mexican soil, right up against the Texas border? More to the point, how did we in fact respond in 1962 when the USSR made precisely such an arrangement with Cuba? The Kennedy administration placed Cuba under military “quarantine,” and we came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war over this standoff (which, by the way, was resolved through a secret negotiated settlement involving withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey and Italy).

Would Russia have attacked Ukraine anyway, even if real assurances (in writing this time) were given to Putin that Ukraine would not join NATO? It is impossible to know. Perhaps, but perhaps not. It would have shown, at the very least, that the West took Russia’s long-standing concerns about security seriously, as numerous diplomats have been urging the U.S. to do for many, many years.

This would certainly speak volumes to the Russian public, if not to its leaders. It would have taken away Putin’s main piece of war propaganda.

The point is, Russia is now acting just as the United States would have acted in Putin’s place. And as far as Putin’s war crimes are concerned, there isn’t anything that Putin is doing in Ukraine that the U.S. didn’t also do in Iraq: targeting civilians, bombing schools, hospitals, apartment complexes, power plants, water treatment plants, air-raid shelters.

We committed these illegal acts to defend ourselves against Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” which never materialized. Putin’s lie is that the Ukrainians are Nazis. As has been said throughout history, “The first casualty of war is the truth.”

Since surrender by either side is unlikely, there is only one way this war will end: through a negotiated settlement, with the principal countries making decisions about territory, not the U.S. or NATO. Such a settlement can come sooner or it can come later (after much more bloodshed).

In the interest of peace, we should use whatever leverage we have to bring it about sooner. The fact that each side thinks it can emerge from this conflict victorious makes this difficult. We should emphasize that ultimately each side has more to gain from peace than from a prolonged war.

The U.S., however, does not have a good track record when it comes to avoiding prolonged wars. We have very little moral platform to stand on. As the people of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan can attest, we have a lot to atone for in this regard.

Aaron Falbel lives in Sunderland.