What next for Eastern Europe?

While President Trump tweets, the United States and Russia drift towards war over Syria, and the new Thirty Years War between Shi'ite and Sunni continues on many fronts, another critical drama is playing out in the Eastern half of the European continent.  I find it particularly interesting because it is a replay of the drama I described about 40 years ago in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, which is linked at left and available as an e-book.

For the first few centuries of the modern era the peoples of Eastern Europe lived under large empires.  The Ottoman Empire had reached Europe in the 15th century and eventually included what is now Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Rumania, some of the nations of the former Yugoslavia, and Hungary.  The Tsar of Russia ruled what are now the Baltic States and, by the 19th century, Poland.  The Holy Roman Empire--which in 1806 became the Austrian Empire, and in 1867 the Austro-Hungarian Empire--included parts of Poland and the present-day Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Slovenia.  All these peoples, to varying degrees, developed nationalist movements during the 19th century.

The enormous strain of the First World War proved too much not only for the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, but also for the German Empire.  The Allies--France, Britain, Italy and eventually the US as well--sponsored the claims of some of the national movements in their territory.  In January 1918, in his Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson endorsed an independent Poland and autonomy (not independence) for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.  When those nations collapsed ten months later, various national movements proclaimed new states.

As the brilliant but eccentric English historian A. J. P. Taylor noted in 1961, the post-1919 settlement in Eastern Europe reflected the astonishing fact that both Germany and Russia had been defeated. Only that allowed for the re-creation of an independent Poland, the new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia,a larger Rumania, independent Poland and Finland, and the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.  It seemed in 1918-9 that things might go even further and that Ukraine might become independent as well, but the Bolsheviks managed to secure control over it in the Russian civil war.  These states were economically and politically weak.  Nearly all of them initially formed some kind of democratic government, encouraged down that path by the western powers.

In the short run, several of the new states--Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania--were threatened by Hungary, which had lost huge territories at the peace conference, while in the long run Czechoslovakia and Poland had to worry about a resurgent Germany. France, eager to cement its status as the leading power in Europe, offered all those states some kind of alliance.  Clearly the French would have trouble defending them once the Germans or Russians regained their military strength, but the French were counting on keeping the Germans weak.  The alliances faced no serious threats until after the rise of Hitler.

By then all these countries had undergone profound political changes.  While all of them had begun as democracies, only Czechoslovakia, Finland and the Baltic States were still electing their governments by the early 1930s--the rest had come under some form of authoritarian rule.  The agricultural states among them, as I showed in my book, came under German influence after 1935 because the Germans, desperate for food, offered them a market for their produce.  In 1938 Hitler managed to destroy Czechoslovakia when the French abandoned their alliance.  In 1939-40, Hitler and Stalin concluded the Nazi-Soviet Pact. They partitioned Poland and the Soviets incorporated the Baltic States.  Hungary and Rumania became allies of Hitler while Yugoslavia was occupied by the Italians and the Nazis.  In 1945,  the whole region (except Finland) came under Soviet occupation and the USSR installed Communist governments.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991--77 years after the start of the First World War--started this process over again.  Once again, as in 1919, the entire region was liberated from foreign rule.  This time the proliferation of new states has gone much further, with Czechoslovakia and former Yugoslavia giving way to no less than 8 new states, and not only the Baltic States, but also Ukraine and Belarus, becoming independent.  Once again the new states established various forms of democracy.  And once again, powerful nations from outside the region offered them alliances. NATO, led by the US, offered membership to virtually every new state in the region, including the Baltic states--after initially promising the new Russian government not to do so.  The EU also offered many of them membership, choosing to ignore the enormous economic and cultural differences that still divide Europe somewhere around the frontiers of Germany and Poland.

Germany is no longer an imperialist nation, although it leads the EU and played a key role in its enlargement.  Russia once again went through a chaotic period but by 2000 it was recovering its strength under Vladimir Putin.  He is clearly determined to reassert Russian influence--if not more--over many of the states of the former USSR.  Belarus lost any real independence very quickly, and Putin is actively contesting the West in a bid for influence in Ukraine, and using the Russian military at the border to do so. He also very obviously has designs on the Baltic states, which are extremely vulnerable militarily.  And while Putin cannot offer these states markets the way the Germans did 80 years ago, he can provide them with energy.

And once again, democracy has proven fragile in Eastern Europe.  Rightist parties now lead the governments of Hungary, Poland, and some of the other states of the region. The governments of the Czech Republic and Slovakia are weak and subject to corruption and outside influence.  These nations face a choice between  western-style democracy--which is having enormous problems in the west--and Russian-style authoritarianism.  It is not at all clear which path they shall take.

Only a gigantic war settled the question of Eastern Europe's future 80 years ago.  Such a war does not seem in prospect now, but limited wars, such as a lightning Russian occupation of one or more Baltic states, cannot be ruled out.  Russian and NATO aircraft are constantly confronting one another in the region.  The Russians also seem to be using cyberwar against Ukraine, and they may use it elsewhere. To reach a new equilibrium diplomatically would require a level of statesmanship which is not apparent on the world scene.  Nearly thirty years ago, when the Soviet empire collapsed, I commented frequently that this time, Eastern Europe had taken a new shape without a new world war.  Now it seems that the process may involve a larger conflict--albeit of a possibly different kind.

Ukraine and the Baltic

I am beginning to despair of our government ever thinking sensibly about foreign policy.

I was not especially in favor of NATO expansion in the 1990s.  NATO was a cold war artifact, and I didn't see why it should be extended into eastern Europe, whose future was surely somewhat uncertain.  Two War College colleagues of mine from opposite sides of the political fence wrote an effective op-ed opposing it, on the grounds that it would needlessly antagonize Russia.  I don't blame NATO expansion for what Putin is doing now.  Yes, he resents the US's pretensions, power and influence, but he simply wants to restore Russia to something closer to its former glory, just as Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin did after the peace of Brest-Litovsk.  It is not clear that he actually wants to annex more of Ukraine, and indeed, as I write, there are reports of a peace agreement with the Kiev government that will agree to decentralize the country further and presumably end any idea of its becoming a NATO member or a western bastion.  As I indicated months ago when the crisis began, I think that we can live with that and that we do not have much choice.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, however, are another matter altogether.  As I learned writing my dissertation 40 years ago, they were one of the success stories of the interwar period, when they built thriving economies based upon dairy products.  They are culturally more part of Scandinavia than of Russia, and their democracies are working quite well.  Their Russian minorities realize how much better off they are under their current governments than they would be in Putin's Russia.  Whether or not they should have been invited into NATO, they are there now, and we have to take our alliance obligations seriously.

When the United States broke James Baker's promise not to expand NATO into the former Warsaw Pact or the former USSR, it stated that it would not station troops permanently in the new nations.  Even though Putin is now violating international law by sending Russian troops into Ukraine to help the rebels there, we apparently still feel compelled to stick to that pledge.   We are creating a rapid deployment force that could supposedly move into the Baltic states if they were threatened.  Putting on my military strategist's hat for a moment, let me say that I think this is a serious mistake.

A conflict over the Baltic states between NATO and Russia would be a limited war, a struggle for relatively small pieces of territory.  It would not involve the United States on a huge front.  Estonia is largely protected by large lakes on its eastern frontier.  Latvia and Lithuania are somewhat more threatened, but the terrain is difficult and an invasion could probably be blocked at key points.  In addition, NATO would have as a potential counterstroke the option of occupying Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave that used to be part of East Prussia and which is entirely cut off from Belarus by Poland and Lithuania.   The question, however, would be who got there first.  Putin knows how to pick the right moment for an adventure, and he could easily provoke or fake incidents in the Baltic and get troops into them within the 48 hours it would take for our force to deploy.  That is why, I think, NATO has to station substantial forces in those territories now--just as it had to field large armies along the NATO and Warsaw Pact border during the Cold War.

I still think we should also be making diplomatic proposals to try, in essence, to re-establish peace in Europe.  I do not think they will succeed, because I don't think Putin will accept the status quo any more formally than he already has--but he will not last forever.  We cannot however, as I argued last week, trust to some inevitable historical tide to keep the new nations free and democratic.  Rather than send more troops back into the Middle East and Central Asia where they can do nothing but harm, we should offer them to the Baltic states, who belong inside the ambit of western civilization.

The World Crisis Begins

During the early 1990s the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia fell apart. The collapse of the first two--and especially of Yugoslavia--involved considerable violence. But it occurred to me at the time--even before Strauss and Howe had discovered the 80-year cycle in human affairs--that these events, parallel in many ways to those of 1914-18, had not involved the rest of Europe and the world in a general war. When Serbia and Austria-Hungary came to blows in 1914, Russia and Germany regarded the outcome as critical to their own futures, and European war resulted. That war in turn shaped the great crisis in the Atlantic world that began in the early 1930s and unleashed an even greater war. It seemed in the 1990s that we were going to be spared such events. In 2000 Harvard Press reissued my book Politics and War, and I wrote a new concluding chapter. Things seemed to be going well in Eastern Europe by then, but I referred briefly to the possibility that nationality conflicts in the Soviet Union (where war was already raging in Chechnya) might draw in Western Europe. Little did I know. The events in Georgia this past week suggest that we are witnessing a reply of the first half of the twentieth century, one with potentially disastrous consequences.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is looking more and more like the collapse of the Russian Empire 74 years earlier, which culminated in the spring of 1918 in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Bolsheviks and the German empire. Brest-Litovsk rolled Russia back almost to where is today, excluding Russian influence not only from Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland, but also from Ukraine, the Caucasus (including Georgia), and part of Cental Asia. (Belarus remained part of Russia, but significantly, Belarus has already become a Russian satellite again now.) The restoration of Russian power under the Soviet Union occurred in two phases. In the first, the Communist Party re-assimilated Ukraine, the Caucasus region and Central Asia during the decade after the revolution and turned them into constituent parts of the USSR. Western Europe, pre-occupied with its own problems, did nothing to intervene, and Poland managed to save itself from a Soviet military offensive. The Soviet borders remained stable from the early 1920s until 1939, when the second stage began with the Nazi-Soviet Pact. That Pact allowed the Soviets to regain Moldavia from Rumania, to annex a substantial portion of Poland (one that today remains part of Belarus and Ukraine), to absorb the Baltic states, and to start a war with Finland that moved the Soviet-Finnish border to where it is today. The third stage, of course, took place during the latter stages of the Second World War, which brought Soviet troops to the heart of Germany, and the early stages of the Cold War, during which Communist governments came to power peacefully in Hungary and Czechoslavakia.
The various regimes established after 1919 in Eastern Europe also began as democracies but most did not remain so for very long. Westerners, and particularly neoconservatives, proclaimed "the end of history" again in the 1990s, and did not allow the rapid evolution of Russia from a proto-democracy into an authoritarian state dominated by oligarchs, the secret police, and a government-controlled media to disburb their inspiring vision. Meanwhile, two Administrations--those of both Clinton and George W. Bush--decided to regard the Soviet collapse simply as an opportunity to expand American influence as far as possible. With the Soviet threat gone, NATO became an expanding American sphere of influence, soon including Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic States. NATO in 1999 went to war against what was left of Yugoslavia to free Kossovo, and has recently blessed its independence. Bush also abandoned the cornerstone of Cold War arms control, the ABM treaty, and halted progress on the reduction of Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. The Russians protested all these moves--and we ignored their protests. Most recently the decision to install anti-missile batteries in Poland and Czechoslovakia--weapons which are well known to be ineffective--has led the Russians to denounce the Conventional Forces Treaty that kept their army away from their western borders. The US also cultivated various Central Asian successor states, albeit with decidedly mixed results. 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, meanwhile, diverted our attention from what was happening in and around the former Soviet Union.
Those wars, however, and particularly the war in Iraq, now loom as the beginning of a new age of international anarchy which the United States should have done whatever it could to avoid. With only one real ally, Britain, in tow, the US government decided that the government of Iraq had to be removed and replaced, and proceeded to do so without UN endorsement. Last week President Bush and Secretary Rice issued daily pronouncements claiming that Russian tactics--the invasion of a sovereign state--did not belong in the 21st century. It would never occur to them, of course, that they themselves had made them a centerpiece of the twentieth century in Iraq and constantly reserve the right to revive them against Iran. The United States now has to deal with potential new crises in Eastern Europe without much of the moral and diplomatic capital it had accumulated in Europe during and after the Cold War.
The Russians have now lifted the taboo on the use of their armed forces (which they have evidently strengthened somewhat in recent years, even though they, like our own, remain relatively small) outside their borders. They did so partly because of the aggressively pro-western stance of Georgia's new President Shakashvili, who wants to get into NATO and who has also been trying to re-assert control over breakway regions with Russian populations. Lots of Russians still live in Ukraine (which wants to enter NATO) and the Baltic States (which already have), and similar scenarios are entirely possible there, too. Meanwhile, Russia retains a large nuclear arsenal, and--unlike either Germany or Japan in the 1930s--benefits economically from any increases in international tension because of its oil exports. On the other hand, Russia does not have, and is not going to have, a major European ally like Germany in the 1930s that is going to collaborate in re-occupying Eastern Europe.
In retrospect it looks more and more unfortunate that the US and the Western Europeans decided to substitute NATO expansion for further work on creating an international regime within which everyone could live in peace. Cooler heads of all political persuasions had doubts about NATO expansion into Eastern Europe from the start, regarding it as needlessly provocative. I suspect that the acceleration of NATO expansion to include Ukraine and perhaps even Georgia will now become a neoconservative demand and an issue in the Presidential campaign. But before taking such steps we have to give some thought to what they would mean in practice. We do not have the forces to set up a defense line on the border between Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states on one side and Belarus and the USSR on the other. Nor are we going to be stationing tactical nuclear weapons there as in days of old. Some believe that merely enlarging NATO will have the necessary deterrent effect on the Russians, but I am not so sure. We would still be much better off to focus on a peaceful competition for influence--in which we hold most of the cards--than to do anything to militarize the confrontation any further.
In 2003 Condoleezza Rice made a famous speech arguing in effect that the world had no choice but to accept American leadership (or hegemony) in the promotion of democratic values. It remains my belief that this is a fantasy. Perhaps at some level our increasingly conservative foreign policy establishment has welcomed Russia's nationalistic resurgence, thinking that it will help us rally a defensive coalition behind us, as in days of old. John McCain, I suspect, will make this a major theme of his campaign and it will not be easy for Barack Obama to respond effectively. And if Russian troops stay in Georgia and threaten new moves elsewhere, eventually there will be a call for the return to the draft.
The United States fought the Second World War to save western civilization in Europe--and won only by promoting the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Far East. During the Cold War, in my opinion, our biggest problems invariably stemmed from our inability to distinguish between territory that was vital and territory that was not. The defense perimeters around western Europe and Japan served a very useful purpose (and did not lead to war); attempts to defend areas like Vietnam or to promote friendly clients in Africa led to nothing but misery on an enormous scale. It does not increase the security of the United States, in my opinion, to treat territories like Georgia or Ukraine as comparable to West Germany or Japan in their importance. I shall try to think in weeks to come about how we might begin to reverse the track that we are on, but it looks harder and harder. The world order is disintegrating in ways similar to those of the early 1930s now, and a new catastrophe is slowly becoming a real possibility.

Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and history

The current issue of the New York Review of Books contains a long article by George Soros arguing that the West should take dramatic measures to shore up the new government of Ukraine.  Soros believes that the West is in effect under attack from Russia, but that Putin must be thinking about new options because of the Russian economic crisis brought about by a mix of sanctions and the fall of the price of oil.  He also believes that the youth of Ukraine are enthusiastic democrats who will fight to defend and rebuild their country.  I hope that he is right, but I am afraid that history is against him. Let me explain.

Since the dawn of modern history around the 16th century, the eastern half of Europe has been ruled largely by empires.  These included the Ottoman Empire (which in the late 17th century still included all of Hungary and reached the gates of Vienna), the Austrian Empire, which eventually liberated Hungary, and the Russian Empire.  Poland was a relatively weak aristocracy until the second half of the 18th century, when the Russian and Austrian empires and the Prussian monarchy swallowed it up.  That situation did not change after 1815.  The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires all came under internal pressure from various nationalist movements during the 19th century, and by 1914 small versions of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Rumania already existed.  The First World War destroyed all these empires, and the German empire as well.  It enlarged some of the existing national states, restored Poland, gave birth to new, truncated versions of Austria and Hungary, and added new nations in Finland and along the Baltic.  All of them wrote constitutions and began the 1920s as democracies or constitutional monarchies.

Unfortunately, democracy took hold only around the Baltic.  The new states, as I found writing the dissertation that became my first book (see at left), were poor and politically unstable, and were hard hit by the depression. By the 1930s most of them were living under some form of authoritarian rule, and had Fascist movements of varying degrees of strength.  Germany incorporated several of them into an informal economic empire during the 1930s by providing a market for their agricultural products.  Hitler's goals, however, went far beyond that.  In 1938-9 he annexed large parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and in 1941 he brought Hungary and Rumania into his war on the Soviet Union.  The Germans occupied the Baltic states, Belarus, and what is now Ukraine, which they planned to settle with hardy Aryan pioneers.  Instead, the tide of war turned against them, and between 1944 and 1947 the whole region, less Greece, came under Communist rule. The Soviet empire lasted, of course, until 1989.

In the neo-Hegelian celebration of the early 1990s,. western intellectuals and governments assumed that nothing could stand in the way of democracy.  But democracy is not a law of nature: it needs to be built, nurtured and maintained by elites that believe in it.  Given that democratic political authority has steadily been getting weaker in western Europe and the United States, particular in relation to financial institutions and corporations, it is not too surprising that the eastern European nations have had trouble making it work. Belarus almost immediately became a Russian satellite. Ukraine quickly degenerated into a kelptocracy, and the orange revolution of more than a decade ago did not help much.  Bulgaria is prey to Soviet influence.  The Baltic states now face a potential military threat.  And Hungary, Soros's own homeland, has a right-wing authoritarian government not dissimilar in spirit to Putin's Russia.  There is a real clash of civilizations and political systems occurring in Eastern Europe once again, just as there was 80 years ago.

In Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, I argued that the British and French took very little interest in Eastern Europe in the 1930s because they were far more focused upon their empires.  Something similar has happened to the United States government.  One of many unfortunate byproducts of our endless war in the Middle East is our neglect of other regions, and especially of Europe.  In the 1960s or 1970s an economic crisis such as Europe has now experienced would have been at the top of the US foreign policy agenda,. because our government included many men who remembered the economic crisis of the 1930s and its consequences.  As it is we have done almost nothing either to help the Europeans or to encourage them to pursue different policies.  We seem even less interested in Eastern Europe.

Last fall I provided the Princeton University Press with one of my remaining copies of Economic Diplomacy in order that they might scan it and release an e-book. This project is very dear to my heart, because for some time now it has been the only one of my books that had gone out of print. I hope that we are not living through a kind of replay of the story it told.  The future of the eastern European states, including Ukraine, lies mainly in their own hands.  But the western nations can help--above all by doing the other thing the western Europeans failed to do in the 1930s, which is to provide an inspiring example of robust democracy in action.

Another long telegram

In February 1946, George F. Kennan, then the Chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in Moscow, wrote what became known as the Long Telegram in an effort to awaken his superiors in Washington to new realities.  No one could have spoken with more authority than Kennan: he spoke Russian fluently and was highly familiar with its literature and history, and he had been serving in the Moscow Embassy for several years.  The telegram, which may be read here, stated his case simply and clearly. The wartime alliance against Hitler was over, Kennan wrote, and the Soviet Union's hopes for the new world had little or nothing in common with those of the United States.  The Communist leadership deeply believed in the historical  necessity of a worldwide struggle against capitalism and would do nothing that did not, in its view, further that cause.  Yet Kennan was not without hope, because he did not believe that the Soviets saw the struggle as a military one, or that they had the slightest wish to resume a world war.  Eighteen months later he published some of the same insights in his famous X article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct."  By then he was the chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Council. By a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, his boss, Secretary of State George Marshall--one of the half-dozen greatest unelected public servants the United States has ever produced--was a man who had risen to the command of the American Army by identifying the ablest available subordinates and following their advice.  He believed the Policy Planning Council should plan policy, and during the next two years, Kennan laid the foundation for the strategy of the Cold War.

I cannot pretend to expertise comparable to Kennan's.  I have made only one brief visit to Russia, 42 years ago, and I have never studied the language, although The First Circle and Dr. Zhivago are among the books I return to again and again in translation.  Yet I would like to think that I learned diplomatic realism from him, among many other sources, and that I can put it to use in examining the new situation that has been created by President Putin's annexation of Ukraine.  Kennan has become increasingly unfashionable in recent years, and the publication of his diaries, which are a very poor substitute for his extraordinary memoirs, isn't helping his reputation either.  But never in my whole life have I felt so acutely the complete absence of anyone like him in the highest councils of our government--and thus, I am going to yield to temptation and try to suggest what a young Kennan, were he posted in Moscow today, might say.

The Chargé d’affaires to the Secretary of State
March 21, 2014

The current situation in Russia, the Ukraine, and surrounding nations inevitably calls to mind the immediate aftermath of the last great crisis in the Atlantic world in 1933-45, when the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese was immediately followed by the Soviet installation of Communist regimes in various countries of Eastern Europe.  It also recalls developments in the wake of the First World War, when Russia was briefly reduced almost to its current extent within Europe, facing a newly independent Ukraine and Baltic States, while retaining control of Belarus.  That previous example is, in fact, more relevant.  The problem Lenin and Trotsky faced at the time of the German collapse was to recover the territory they had lost early in 1918 in the Peace of Brest Litovsk, and they successfully reincorporated Ukraine into the new Soviet Union, but failed in a war against Poland and had to tolerate the independence of the Baltic states for twenty years, until the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler.  The current crisis began, of course, with the collapse of Communism in 1989-90, followed by the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union.  Vladimir Putin did not come to power in Russia until 1999, and he has obviously moved much more slowly than Lenin in 1919 or Stalin in 1920 to begin increasing the extent of his territorial control and influence.  The nature of his goals has become clearer in recent years, and his speech last Monday in Moscow, which I encourage all serious students of Russian policy to read, leaves relatively little doubt of how he sees the world and where he may be heading.  Our first, and perhaps easiest, task, is to understand what he had to say.

The collapse of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union were indeed world-historical events comparable in impact to each of the two world wars.  We must be extraordinarily thankful that they were accomplished with relatively little serious bloodshed, a most remarkable outcome, but no one should have expected the emergence of a new order to be a smooth process.  Indeed, President Bush and Secretary of State Baker plainly had mixed feelings, to put it mildly, about the disintegration of the USSR, and the kinds of regimes that have emerged in many of the successor states have not been inspiring.  In his speech, Putin regretted the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but he did not dwell upon it, much less lay the blame on foreign influences, as he so often likes to do when discussing unpleasant subjects.  What he objected to was, first, the way in which the boundaries of Soviet Republics automatically became the borders of newly independent states, and, second, the ways in which, as he sees it, the western powers have taken advantage of the situation over the last 25 years or so.  There is not the slightest evidence that Putin wants to embark on a worldwide crusade comparable to those of Lenin and Stalin, and it is highly doubtful, to say the least, that he has any designs even upon eastern European nations such as Poland and Rumania.  But he is not willing to accept the situation within the former Soviet Union as it has evolved to date, and the events of the last month show that he has powerful cards to play.

It was to be expected that the collapse of Communist authority over Eastern Europe would lead to turmoil, and even to the redrawing of borders, as indeed it has.  The process was not confined to the former USSR.  Czechoslovakia immediately separated into its two component parts, ironically vindicating those who in the 1930s pronounced it an artificial creation that was not destined to survive.  Yugoslavia, which Serbia had managed to create in 1919 by virtue of having played the key role in unleashing the First World War that destroyed Austria-Hungary, came apart much more bloodily, and it took the better part of a decade to establish new frontiers for Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia--the last still a very fragile construction.   The first Bush Administration declined to intervene in the war among the successor states, but the Clinton Administration took a different view.  It brought what seemed to be the last phase of the struggle to an end with the agreement on Bosnia in 1995.  Then, in 1999, the rump state of Yugoslavia apparently embarked upon a campaign to cleanse Kosovo of ethnic Albanians, and the government of the United States, supported by NATO--but not by the UN Security Council--went to war with it to stop this process.  The war, conducted entirely from the air, succeeded, and Yugoslav (really Serbian) authorities gave up Kosovo.  Kosovar independence followed, and the United States and other NATO countries recognized it.  In the succeeding 15 years, most of the Serb population has been driven out of Kosovo, although peaceably, not violently.

It was the Kosovo war, Putin makes very clear, that established the precedent that he is determined to fight.  Confronted with a conflict generated by the collapse of Communism, NATO, as he sees it, unilaterally took responsibility for determining the proper outcome without the endorsement of the UN Security Council, where both Russia and China would have refused assent.  And in so doing, NATO only extended the approach it had already taken to the aftermath of the collapse of Communism: its belief that the extension of western influence and western values must be the inevitable result.

It is at this point in the story, it seems to me, that our own government must for a moment reflect upon the wisdom of the choices made by previous administrations.   There were those of us who believed that NATO, having functioned successfully for more than 40 years as a defensive alliance against Communism, had lost much of its raison d'etre when Communism collapsed, and that its role in a new world might be re-evaluated.  The government of the United States, however, did not take this road.  Instead, NATO became a mechanism for expanding western and American influence as far eastward as possible, and all the former Soviet satellite states of the Cold War era, as well as the former Soviet Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, are now members.  The second Bush Administration, indeed, was on the point of offering Ukraine membership in 2008, but the current Administration--wisely in my view--did not pursue this initiative.

The US government made these decisions, it seems to me, in the belief that the Russian government's views did not matter.  They also made them in the belief--encouraged by our triumph over our Cold War adversary--that American institutions and American values were destined to triumph over the entire world.  That view, specifically enunciated in the National Security Strategy of 2002, still seems to remain the basis of our policy. As one who has never held it--who has instead believed that democracy is the heritage of certain specific nations, who must always be vigilant to make sure that it functions well, and hesitant to assume that it will thrive elsewhere--I cannot say that I believe this to be the basis of a sound foreign policy.  In the past five years, we have adopted another set of assumptions highly relevant to the current crisis.

Those assumptions, in essence, seem to hold that any uprising against an authoritarian or dictatorial government must be a good thing, and that the United States should embrace revolutionary movements as soon as they have become large enough to fill the main square of their nation's capital city with demonstrators.  That is what the United States has done, Putin points out in his speech, in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria--with very mixed results.   And that is also what both the United States and the EU did in Ukraine.

Ukraine has been, indeed, the test case for our assumption that democracy must follow Communism, and its recent history has not born it out.  We have assumed that anti-Russian elements within Ukraine would be both more democratic and less corrupt, but that did not turn out to be the case. The Orange revolution of 2004 did not have the results we had hoped, and a pro-Russian government returned to power.   The Ukrainian people, like so many others in the western world, have been hit hard by the Great Recession, and last year they turned against that government.  Both the EU and the United States seized upon this as an opportunity to return a friendly regime to power.  To this Putin decided he must respond.

In arranging the secession and rapid accession to Russia of Crimea, Putin, as his speech makes clear, has taken advantage both of ethnic realities and of history.  Russians constitute the bulk of the Crimean population, and Khrushchev's decision to transfer it to Ukraine 60 years ago took place within a completely different context.  As Putin pointed out in his speech, were a Ukrainian state that included Crimea to join NATO, as has been discussed recently, NATO forces would acquire the only major naval bases in the Black Sea.  The referendum just held almost certainly reflects the wishes of the bulk of the population.

In my opinion, our government must reconsider the wisdom of the sanctions it is imposing in response to these events, since we have no means of undoing them.  We do face a continuing crisis and we need strategies to face it, but we cannot make Crimea part of Ukraine again, and it will not serve the interests of the American, Russian or Ukrainian peoples to create an endless confrontation over what has taken place.  Diplomacy must be based upon reality.

The serious question we now face involves the future of the government of Ukraine. Putin denies its legitimacy, and clearly threatens in his speech to make that a pretext for intervention in Ukraine proper, and perhaps for the separation of the large Russian-speaking portions of eastern Ukraine and their addition to Russia as well.  Meanwhile, the new Ukrainian government--which, it must be acknowledged, did not come to power by constitutional means--is moving rapidly to strengthen its ties to the European union.  It may ask for NATO membership.  Putin, very simply, is determined not to allow the West to choose who shall govern Ukraine.  He clearly desires to turn more of the former USSR into a Russian sphere of influence based upon his Eurasian union.  He will use what cards he has to play to achieve these goals--but he will only use the military, in all probability, if there is no opposition, as there was not in Ukraine.

Elections are now scheduled in Ukraine.  I would suggest that we invest our political capital in ensuring that all interested parties, including the Russian government, will respect the results of those elections.  A conflict over the legitimacy of the government within the shrinking territory that divides the NATO alliance from Russia is a recipe for disaster, one that could even lead to war.  Meanwhile, we need Russian cooperation to deal with both Syria and the Iranian nuclear program.  We need, in short, to do the work diplomacy has always tried to do: to find a solution that we all can live with.

Here the Cold War, properly understood, provides some useful examples.  We must face the fact, as we did in 1946-7, that Putin does not share our values or our vision of the future. He feels Russia to be different from the West and he wants to increase its influence.  He is not, however, prepared to do so by war.  The early years of the Cold War featured a number of struggles within contested nations that were decided by political, rather than military means.  Hungary in 1947 and Czechoslovakia in 1948 fell to Communism because of internal political changes, not Soviet military power.  Finland and Austria remained outside the Soviet orbit for parallel reasons: their anti-Communist forces proved stronger than Moscow's satellites.  That also happened in the critical nations of France and Italy.  It will happen now, one way or another, in the Baltic States, Moldova, and Ukraine.

Our assumption that democracy would spread, as it were, automatically, has proven false.  That does not however mean that it cannot spread--only that its spread will require determination and character on the part of the nations of the former USSR, and also of the United States and the nations of the European Union.  They must assess each situation wisely and do what they can.  They must also realize that the Putin government remains very important to a host of broader problems in which we have an enormous interest.  Let us not not once again allow dogma to trap us into an endless confrontation with a nuclear power, punctuated by crises that put the whole world at risk.  Let us base our ends upon realities and trust to the long-term movement of history.

[sgd) George Kennan


(not really--DK)

(Please share this as widely as you can. Thanks.)

The Munich moment

 After a year of wildly oscillating statements from President Trump regarding the Russia-Ukraine War, Trump, acting through his personal envoy Steve Witkoff, has definitely emerged as the Neville Chamberlain of our time.  It's time to review the historical parallel.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles took significant territory away from Germany and awarded it to Poland, while other treaties left the German-speaking regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a new vastly reduced Austria and in the new state of Czechoslovakia, which was dominated by the Czechs, its largest ethnic group.  In the wake of the treaty France attempted to play the role that the US played in Europe beginning in 1948--it signed alliances with Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia in an attempt to contain the new Germany within its new borders.  Great Britain held aloof from those alliances.  It took 14 years for a new German government, Hitler's, to embark upon the mission of undoing the Versailles treaty borders.  After five years of rearmament, Hitler managed to bring Austria into the Third Reich through political pressure.  He then demanded better treatment for the German minority in Czechoslovakia--a pretext to create a conflict with the Czech government that would allow him to attack and destroy that nation and bring both the German and Czech-inhabited parts of it into Germany.

France, sadly, knew that they could not fight on behalf of Czechoslovakia without Britain.  Neville Chamberlain had taken over as British Prime Minister in 1937.  He desperately wanted to avoid another European or world war, and by the end of that year he had made clear to Hitler that he would allow changes in frontiers to prevent one.  He sent a British cabinet member to mediate between the Czech government and its German minority, but Hitler had ordered the Sudeten German leader to keep raising his demands so that they could not be satisfied.  With  Europe on the brink of war in September 1938, Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and agreed to the German annexation of the border territories inhabited by Germans.  Chamberlain then persuaded the French and the Czechs to agree to this as well.  Two more meetings at Bad Godesberg and then Munich--where Hitler met with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French Premier--led to that result.  The border territory also included the Czech fortifications and what was left of Czechoslovakia was defenseless. Six months later, Slovakia seceded and Hitler took over and annexed the rest of what is now Czechia.  That territory sat out the Second World War, and when the Allies won, a restored Czech government expelled its three million Germans into Germany.

The peaceful defeat of the USSR in 1991 corresponds to the defeat of Germany in 1918.  The USSR gave way to a much-reduced Russia, shorn of the Baltic States, Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asian republics, and most of all, Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, but never managed to join NATO.  Russia, like Germany after 1919, suffered very severely economically from its defeat and the collapse of its regime, and it took just 8 years, not 14, for Vladimir Putin, a man dedicated to restoring Russia's former greatness, to take power.  Putin began, we have learned, by staging a fake terrorist attack that killed dozens of Russians as a pretext for resuming the war against Chechnya.  He managed to turn Belarus into a satellite and briefly bring a pro-Russian leader to power in Ukraine.  That government, however, fell, and in 2014 he simply annexed Crimea--an excellent parallel, it now occurs to me, to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria.  He also started a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and in 2022 he invaded Ukraine without warning.  At that moment I suggested here that NATO should seriously consider getting into the war then and there.  I am not aware of a single other person to make that suggestion, but NATO, led by the United States, provided Ukraine with critical economic and military aid, and Finland and  Sweden joined NATO.  Ukraine quickly rolled back the initial Russian gains but could not mount a successful counterattack and now is very slowly giving ground in a war of attrition.  An invasion of Russian territory around Kursk--an excellent strategy--unfortunately had to be abandoned.

As peace has been discussed, the key issue has become clear: will Ukraine remain an independent nation?  Russia insists that it must not--and the deal that Witkoff has drafted gives into that demand.  The deal gives Russia all the territory that it has occupied, and more.  It would require Ukraine to change its constitution so as to renounce NATO membership and forbid NATO troops from entering Ukraine.  It will severely limit the size of the Ukrainian army.  Like the Munich agreement, it includes only the vaguest security guarantees for what will be left of Ukraine.  If Ukraine accepts it, it will take only a few years for Russia to destabilize its government and proclaim the need for Russian troops to restore order, as Hitler did in what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Donald Trump, playing the role of Chamberlain, has given Ukraine one week to accept the deal.  The rest of NATO finds itself in the role of France in 1938.  If it tells Ukraine to fight on, as the Baltic States and Poland, at the very least, certainly want to do, it will have to assume the responsibility of providing all necessary assistance, which will not be easy.  They will also have to assume the risk of war with Russia.  Whatever decision the British, French and Germans make, this is a turning point in modern European history.  There is no longer a United States government across the Atlantic willing to help with their defense.  

An odd mixture of people, it seems, will support the 28-point plan to end Ukrainian independence.  Here is historian Niall Ferguson, drawing the ire of former chess champion and activist Gary Kasparaov:

"The best is the enemy of the good. Contrary to recent press speculation, the draft 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine is in fact a reasonable basis for negotiations. Journalists can gripe about it as they griped about the 20-point Gaza plan. But wars are not ended by op-eds."

This is not too surprising.  Ferguson bizarrely established his reputation as an historian with his book The Pity of War, which argued that Britain in 1914 should have allowed Germany to win the First World War.  A lifelong resident of different parts of Oceana, he now seems willing to share the world with Eurasia and Eastasia and abandon the 1945 dream of a world of truly independent states.  That is also the policy of the current government of the United States, which has no respect for sovereignty within our own hemisphere.

Ukraine, unlike Czechoslovakia in 1938, has made it clear for four years that it has what it takes to defend its independence, and has fought heroically under very impressive leadership.  Russia also lacks a quick path to victory, as long as Ukraine gets enough assistance.  Sadly, the United States has abandoned the role that it played for a century.  This is a danger and an opportunity for the great nations of Europe.

Living in a dangerous world

At least since the time of the French and American Revolutions, international politics have involved conflicts among different domestic political systems.  In the periodic crises in the international system since the 1790s, the warring parties have fought in part to establish their own form of government.  The Napoleonic Wars ended with the old aristocracy firmly entrenched in Great Britain and bureaucratic monarchies firmly in control in nearly all of Europe.  In the 1860s the victory of the democratic North over the aristocratic South in the American civil war helped lead to the institution of some form of democracy in Britain France, and Germany.  William II of Germany and Woodrow Wilson both saw the First World war as a context between absolute monarchy and democracy.  In the Second World War, the communist USSR and the democracies in Britain and France fought National Socialism in Europe and the Japanese military regime in Asia.  In each case, the resolution of the crisis left some forms of government more popular than others, helping to determine the course of politics for decades to come.

We are now sliding into the next great international crisis.  I have never thought that it was going to lead to all-out world war on the scale of twentieth century conflicts, but it does revolve, in part, around an ideological struggle.  Among the three most important world powers, the United States still stands for democracy, in theory at  least, and for an open global political and economic order.  Both Putin's Russia and Zhi's China stand for something very different: an authoritarian model of government that they specifically distinguish from the weak, divided, socially permissive democracies of the decadent west.  Both also have rhetorically challenged the US claim to lead the world and determine the rights and wrongs of international disputes.  And both have festering territorial demands.  Putin clearly wants to restore more of the old USSR, and looks longingly at the Baltic states.  China insists that Taiwan remains a part of it and has extensive claims on the seas and islands surrounding them.

Alarmingly, the governments of both Russia and China seem far more firmly established, at this moment, than our own.  Zhi is strengthening the control of the Communist Party and the state over public opinon and the economy, reversing the trend of the last couple of decades.  Putin has a stable authoritarian regime without serious opposition that has weathered the impact of economic sanctions.  The United States government is unorganized, almost leaderless, and floundering on mnay fronts.  Most key State Department positions have not even been filled.  Low-level functionaries in the White House such as Steven Miller and Jared Kushner are evidently exerting important influence on foreign policy.  The kind of policy process that has allowed our government to survey the world scene and identify the most important threats seems not to exist any more.

Meanwhile, the President has brought us to the brink of war with North Korea, and is reversing the Obama Administration's move towards peaceful co-existence with Iran.  What disturbs me more than anything is how easy it would be to set off a replay of the events that led to US involvement in the Second World War.  In an increasingly anarchic world, war anywhere can easily lead to war almost anywhere else.

Thus, in 1939, Japan was already in the third year of its attempt to subjugate mainland China, and the Japanese were claiming a special leadership role in Asia, an idea that the United States rejected in favor of the maintenance of an "open door."  In September of that year, Hitler invaded and conquered Poland, and the British and French declared war on Germany. Then, the next spring, Hitler successively invaded Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, forcing France to conclude an armistice, and leaving Britain perilously exposed to a possible German invasion.  Those events had enormous repercussions in the Far East,.  The French, who ruled Indochina, and the Dutch, the rulers of what is now Indonesia, would clearly not be able to defend those territories against a Japanese attack.  The British would be hard put to defend Malaya, Singapore, Burma, and perhaps even India.  The Japanese moved into northern Indochina almost at once and laid plans to go further.  Meanwhile, the US government also prepared to meet German or Italian moves into French, Dutch and British possessions in the western hemisphere.  The lend-lease agreement of September 1940, in which FDR gave Churchill 50 destroyers in exchange for US bases in an Atlantic arc of British possessions from Newfoundland to Trinidad, moved the US defense line hundreds of miles to the east.  A year later, in the second half of 1941, with the US effectively at war against German U-boats in the Atlantic, the Japanese decided to attack British, Dutch, French and American possessions in the Far East, beginning on Decmeber 7, 1941.

The possibility that some one in Washington, it seems to me, needs to think about,. is that war--perhaps in North Korea--could easily tempt Putin to move into the Baltic states, claiming a need to protect their ethnic Russian inhabitants, or China to move further away from its coastline.  It would be extremely difficult, I think, for the US to react effectively to such moves while fighting a war against North Korea (or, for that matter, while fighting one against Iran.)  Putin has pointed out many times that successive US Administrations have acted unilaterally to alter borders (in Yugoslavia in 1999) or to overthrow governments (in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011) without getting the permission of the world community.  He did the same thing in Crimea in 2013 and has weathered the subsequent sanctions.  He could certainly do it again.

Traditionally the world's leading power has a strong interest in maintaining peace.  That was what Bismarck understood in Europe after 1871, and what American leaders including Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon understood in their time.  Peace does not seem to be one of Donald Trump's priorities. He is more interested in intimidating or defeating enemies and proving that we can "win" again.  Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush managed to achieve similar goals in Grenada and Panama, but those nations were close to the US and did not have nuclear arms.  War against North Korea and Iran could very easily set off a new era of worldwide conflict.  No one would come out of it better off than when they began.

Elections and Democracy

Elections, leading to democracy, are of course the centerpiece of the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq. Universal, equal voting has indeed become the only real source of legitimacy in the western world during the last two centuries, and remains one of the United States' greatest gifts to civilization. Yet the rich and varied history of democracy, both in the United States and elsewhere, shows that elections only contribute to true freedom and social peace within the context of an enduring consensus on fundamental questions and mutual respect across ethnic and regional lines. When consensus fails, elections merely reveal the extent of division with a society and can pave the way for civil war or the disintegration of the state. Meanwhile, developments both in the United States and Iraq are raising another question: how can an Administration promote true democracy abroad while trying to undermine it at home?

Nowadays, when the idea of the unstoppable, continuous advance of democracy has become conventional wisdom, we forget that its spread during the twentieth century, even in Europe, has been distinctly uneven. In the wake of the First World War all the new or enlarged states of Eastern Europe--Poland, the three Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria--began as democracies, but by the mid-1930s nearly all of them were under some form of military or authoritarian rule. (The same shift, of course, occurred in Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933.) The case of Czechoslovakia, a state composed mainly of Czechs, Slovaks and Germans, was especially tragic and especially revealing. Originally the new state organized multi-ethnic political parties based upon economic principles or upon religion, but a revival of German nationalism during the 1930s had a dramatic effect. In 1935 the neo-Nazi Sudeten German Party, led by Konrad Henlein, swept the elections in the German districts, and began agitating for autonomy. Hitler adopted their cause in 1937-38 and used it to bring about the break-up of Czechoslovakia at the Munich crisis. The election of 1935, in short, had proven that the Sudeten Germans, as they were called, no longer wanted to live in a unified Czechoslovak state, and the international community accepted that verdict.
The story of the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and its subsequent history, together with developments in other parts of Europe through the twentieth century and continuing until today, is a sober reminder of a great failure of western civilization: our inability to devise political systems or ideologies that will enable members of different ethnic and religious groups to live together indefinitely in peace. (My book, Politics and War, discusses this at length.) When Nazi Germany fell in 1945, the Czechs convinced the Soviets and the western powers to put Czechoslovakia back together--but they also secured permission to expel the three million Sudeten Germans as punishment, in effect, for having broken the state up. (The displacement of more than ten million Germans from territory that was given to Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945, and from various Eastern European countries as well, was one of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing in history.) And when in the early 1990s Czechoslovakia threw off the Soviet yoke, it became apparent that the Slovaks had never become accustomed to Czech domination either, and the belief of those who in the 1930s had argued that the state was a purely artificial construction was in effect borne out. The same thing happened, of course, at far greater human cost, in Yugoslavia.

In Iraq today, President Bush sees progress because of the increased Sunni participation in the referendum that approved the constitution, but the results of that election seem much more likely to break Iraq up than to democratize it. The Shi'ites and Kurds, having crafted a constitution that will allow them to set up quasi-independent states in the south and in thenorth, voted overwhelmingly for the constitution; the Sunnis, who still hope to rule a united Iraq, overwhelmingly rejected it, even though they barely failed to get the 2/3 negative vote in three provinces that would have sent the drafters back to the drawing board. The next round of elections on December 15 will probably confirm these results. Nothing suggests that the Sunnis will accept the disintegration of the country--or Shi'ite domination of a united Iraq--simply because they have been outvoted.

And thus, the coming elections, sadly, may resemble the American election that we would rather forget--the election of 1860. That election chose Abraham Lincoln by a large popular plurality--but it also showed that the break between the North and West on the one hand and the South on the other had become complete and irrevocable. Lincoln and Southern Democrat John Breckenridge won a total of 252 electoral votes (180 for Lincoln); centrist candidates Stephen Douglas and John Bell won 41. Secession and civil war followed immediately.
The situation in Iraq deeply disturbs the other Arab nations in the region because the Sunni-Shi'ite fault line threatens to tear apart many of the states created after the First World War, including Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Bahrain, and others. That is the powder keg which the decision to remove Saddam Hussein is now igniting in Iraq, where civil war in mixed areas has already begun. Should the conflict spread, the Middle East will live in great turmoil for many years.
And meanwhile, the revelation that American military authorities have been paying Iraqi newspapers to print American-produced stories raises further doubts about the sincerity of the Bush Administration's democratic push. As many commentators have already noted, this policy, whether approved in Washington or not, clearly reflects the Administration's image of democracy, since they have been caught two or three times paying journalists within the United States (and since Fox News and Clear Channel function as propaganda arms of the Administration.) The Republicans run the Congress in defiance of democratic principles. House Democrats rarely can propose amendments to legislation, and the Republican leadership uses conference committees--originally designed to reconcile the two houses--to rewrite legislation in ways that neither house has approved. The Republicans went to the Supreme Court to bypass the will of the voters of Florida in 2000 and overruled career attorneys to get Tom Delay's Texas redistricting plan approved by the Justice Department, padding their majority. Democracy, to them, is a system to be manipulated to get a majority into power, to enable that majority to do whatever it wants. No one should be surprised that our public diplomacy is failing. The world can see through the product we are trying to sell.

The last 13 plus years

Last week I marked the 1,000,000th visit to historyunfolding.com, and it occurred to me that I might repost an early effort today to provide some perspective on what had happened since then.  Instead, I have decided to do a quick survey of the most important changes in American and world culture sine the late fall of 2004, when I debuted.  It was a very long time ago and that galaxy already seems pretty far away.

At home, George W. Bush was just about to win a very narrow re-election victory, thanks to carrying the key states of Florida (comfortably) and Ohio (pretty closely.)  That victory owed something to the issue of gay marriage, which Karl Rove had decided to turn into a wedge issue for the campaign by getting it onto the ballot in numerous states.  The Republicans also controlled the House and the Senate--the latter quite narrowly--and President Bush was looking forward to a productive second term.  However, he unwisely made the privatization of Social Security his main legislative proposal, and it was so unpopular that it never even came up for a vote.  Then came the federal government's failure at the time of Hurricane Katrina.  The economy had been growing for a couple of years, although less robustly than it has recently, and the housing bubble was really getting going.  It would not burst for another three years.  The Bush Administration had started us down the road to energy independence through fracking, which would later have dramatic consequences. I will return to developments here in the US later.

Meanwhile, in 2004, the Iraq War was going very badly, an not for another two years did the US manage to stabilize the situation somewhat.  That apparent victory, of course, turned out to be temporary, and although ISIS no longer rules an part of Iraq, the relationship of the Sunni eras to the Iran-backed government remains very unclear today.  Afghanistan was pretty much off the radar in 2004, but Pakistan, apparently, was about to mount an offensive there, with results that continue to this day.  Meanwhile, the turmoil in the Middle East which we unleashed in Iraq has spread, first to Lebanon, then to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.  The clash between Shi'ites and Sunnis which we unleashed in Iraq now occupies the whole region, and the US government is now pretty much lined up on the side of the Shi'ites.   In Palestine, the new elections which President Bush had called for were two years away. When they took place in 2006, Hamas won the Parliamentary elections.  Since 2004 Israeli politics have swung way to the right, and the government of the United States is now, for the first time, completely behind the Israeli government position on peace talks, making any real settlement impossible.

There has been a great swing towards authoritarianism around the world.  Russia was already on that path in teh early 2000s under Vladimir Putin and has remained upon it.  Meanwhile, the Russians in 2008 resumed independent action in foreign affairs, invading North Georgia, and later annexed Crimea and started a border war with Ukraine which continues. Putin has emerged as an outspoken opponent of the "unipolar" US-led world, and his intelligence agencies are busily trying to subvert the politics of the United States and other western nations. The US and NATO have taken new steps to try to stabilize the Baltic states. Authoritarian governments now rule Hungary and Poland, and in general, the swing towards democracy in Eastern Europe that began in 1989 has turned out to be as ephemeral as the one after 1919.  At the same time, Turkey, which had been the most westernized state in the Islamic world since about 1920 and which in 2004 was dreaming of joining the EU, has become an authoritarian dictatorship based in part on the Muslim religion.  Pakistan, another long-time US ally, is also on its own more Islamic path.

In East Asia, China in 2004 looked like it might embark on some political liberalization to match its newfound economic freedom, but that trend has now definitely been reversed, as President Xi prepares to take over for life.  Both Japan and India have more nationalist governments although neither one is threatening any drastic action at this time.  North Korea's nuclear program, already a source of concern in 2004, has progressed much further and threatens to bring about war with the US.
Looking further around the world, an authoritarian regime continues to rule Venezuela, and a new one has taken over in the Philippines.  Several Central American nations face internal chaos, and Mexico has been completely unable to cope with its drugs cartels.  Most of South American, however, remains in pretty stable shape, relative to earlier decades.

Perhaps the most alarming developments, however, have occurred in Western Europe and the United States, where the political systems and coalitions that have ruled the most advanced areas of the world for fifty to sixty years and in varying degrees of trouble. David Cameron's decision to hold the Brexit referendum turned out to be disastrous, and Teresa May has not had the courage to challenge it.  Great Britain itself is barely holding together against the challenge of Scottish nationalism.  Established parties have fallen to all-time lows in the Parliaments of Germany and Italy, and Spain is threatened with a breakup of its own.  The European economy is finally beginning to move forward but it has a long way to go.  Immigration into Europe, stimulated by turmoil in the Middle East, has created huge problems for political establishments.  In the midst of the general trend, Emmanuel Macron scored an impressive victory in last year's French elections, winning a majority for his party and undertaking major reforms.  Although he naturally faces opposition he remains the most hopeful sign in western politics.

In the United States, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to signal a resurgent liberalism, but such did not turn out to be the case.  Thanks to a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court, gay marriage did become legal throughout the land, but abortion rights remained under attack.  More seriously, although Obama presided over a good recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Depression, he did not fundamentally alter the system that had given us that crisis.  The Dodd-Frank law was rather tentative and now Republicans are undoing it.  The Affordable Care Act has been partially repealed.  Inequality continued to grow through the Obama years.  And Republicans used the economic crisis and resentment against Obama to mobilize around the country, regaining the control of first the House, then the Senate, and most of the nation's state governments.  Guided by the Koch brothers' political network, they have been turning energy producers lose, cutting back workers' rights, and generally undoing the role of government that began with the Progressive Era.

The election of Donald Trump, as I have said many times, could take place only in the context of the collapse of the US political system as we have known it. Neither major party could find a candidate who could beat an outsider who traded on television and tabloid celebrity and hateful rhetoric.  Although Trump now has some real achievements to his credit, the crisis is continuing because foreign influences upon him are the subject of an independent investigation, and because he does not know how to attract, and keep, a competent team around him in the White House, which looks more like an early modern French court than the seat of a modern government.  Critical parts of the federal government, including the once-proud State Department, are now hardly functioning at all.  The Trump Administration, meanwhile, is trying to impose tough immigration policies and increased deportations against states such as California that are determined to treat all immigrants like full citizens.  This is beginning to look like the most serious crisis in federalism since the civil war, and I have no idea how it will turn out.

As in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and again in the 1930s, the question is whether western democracy can surmount new challenges and prevail against a trend towards authoritarian rule.  I am increasingly afraid that a failure to agree on certain key issues may lead to more authoritarian solutions, even in some of the old western democracies.  Alternatively, it is not impossible that the oldest democracies, Britain and the US, might break up.  The trends since 2004 have not been hopeful.  Within another 13 years, I suspect, we will see a move towards more stability--but what it will look like, I do not know.

Coming to pass?

     In 1996, William Strauss and Neil Howe published The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. Drawing on their earlier work in Generations: The History of America's Future, they predicted that a great crisis would strike American life sometime around the year 2005.  On pp. 272-3, they tentatively predicted five ways in which this might come about.

      1.  A state, nearing bankruptcy, lays claim to its federal tax payments, setting off a constitutional crisis.

      2.  A global terrorist group "blows up an airplane," leading to American retaliatory strikes, and terrorist threats to blow up an American city with nuclear weaspons.

       3.  The President claims emergency powers after Congress refuses to pass a budget, forcing a government shutdown.

        4.  After an epidemic of a new communicable disease hits American cities, the President mobilizes the National Guard to impose quarantines, and large-scale violence breaks out.

        5.  Anarchy breaks out in the former Soviet Union, threatening local war and the lives of American citizens. (They specifically postulated a civil war in Lithuania.)

While none of these events, obviously, has occurred in exactly the way they speculated they might, I think it is fair to say that all but the first either happened in some form, or are well on their way to happening as I speak.  To this list I would add the possibility of a large-scale cyber-attack in response to sanctions imposed upon Russia or, perhaps at some later date, China.   More importantly, however, the mood of crisis within the United States is not passing away.  It is getting worse.

Thus, despite thirteen years of trying fruitlessly to roll back Islamic militance in the Middle East with American military power, the Obama Administration has reacted to the beheading of two Americans in exactly the way ISIS hoped it would: by launching another war.  Having reached the United States and killed one American resident, Ebola is now causing panic and some are calling for closing our borders to travelers from affected West African states.  Today's New York Times reports that the Republicans, in a last blitz of campaign ads, are claiming that the Obama Administration cannot handle the problems of our out-of-control world.  They are calling for stronger action, both to close borders and to destroy ISIS in the Middle East.  This might mark the beginning of a critical new trend.

A great deal, it seems to me, is going to depend on next months' elections.  Republican control of the Senate is now the more likely outcome, but far from a certain one.  Should it occur, I suspect the last two years of Obama's presidency will rival the last two years of Andrew Johnson's as one of the most turbulent in American history.  Mitch McConnell recently told a Koch brothers-sponsored conference that in that event, the Republicans will use the power of the purse to defund every part of the federal government that they do not like.   Yet the Republican call for stronger government is a countervailing trend--all the more so since the world is out of control and nowhere near stability.

I feel sure there will be more individual Ebola cases in the United States, and it is possible that new cases are already incubating in Dallas it, like HIV, gets into the right (or wrong) population at the right or wrong time.  The war with ISIS, meanwhile, is not likely to go well.  I personally don't think ISIS is likely to mount a major terrorist attack in the US, but if they could, there would undoubtedly be a strong push for some devastating action in return.  And Putin could try to pull off a quick occupation of one of the Baltic states at almost any moment, calling our bluff (which is all it is so far) and leaving NATO in disarray.  If one or more of these events takes place,  it seems possible that in the 2016 election each of the two candidates might be trying to persuade the nation that he or she has what it takes to take drastic action abroad and at home to deal with a new set of problems.   Hillary Clinton might have the chance to be not only the first female president, but also one of the most powerful and impactful presidents in our history.  This would be an enormous departure from either her husband's or Barack Obama's administration, but times are changing fast.  Republican candidates are also beginning to talk tough, and it will be interesting to see exactly what they propose.

I am not proposing these scenarios optimistically.  It has been a very long time since our political class was as unimpressive as it is now.  Increasingly it is the product of an educational system that tells its graduates very little about what the world is really like, and how people have managed to improve it in past eras.  Private wealth as been getting stronger and public authority weaker for a very long time.  We also have a very substantial body of opinion that will shrink from any kind of drastic measure to solve any problem, out of hostility to the very idea of coercive government.  Things have gone far enough, however, to say bluntly the Strauss and Howe's works have been born out as prophecy, as well as history.  The outcome, which they were much too wise to predict, remains undetermined.

Why NATO Should Prepare to Fight for Ukraine

When the Vietnam War began in earnest in 1965 I was 18 years old, and like most Americans, I accepted that it was necessary to stop Communist aggression.  Within three years I had changed my mind, and decades later, in the 1990s, I wrote a book on how that catastrophic mistake had come about.  I supported the first Gulf War in 1991 because it had a clear, limited objective and had the support of nearly the entire world, but I was very skeptical about our attempt to pacify Afghanistan and I totally opposed the decision of invade Iraq in 2003.  Regime change to fight dictatorship and terrorism clearly failed there, and it failed once again in Libya and in Syria.  Nor is this all.  I was skeptical about the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, and a month ago I would have welcomed an agreement to have Russia stand down its troops on Ukraine’s border in exchange for a pledge by Ukraine not to join that alliance.  Now, however, events have completely changed my perspective.  In my opinion, the NATO alliance should be planning and preparing to intervene to defend Ukraine, certainly with air power and perhaps with more than that.  They must not do so without a thorough estimate of their chances of success, but if such an estimate reaches a favorable conclusion, they should go right ahead.

As I have written elsewhere, the Russian invasion will be a turning point in the 21st century.  If Putin succeeds we will be living in a world where great powers can send troops across their borders (or across water) to extend their territory and influence.  Longtime observers believe that Putin covets all the territory of the old Russian Empire—including the Baltic States, Finland, and Poland, as well as huge territories in the Caucasus region and Central Asia.  The Baltic States and Poland now belong to NATO, but how can we expect Putin to believe that NATO will actively defend them if it shies away from confronting him in a much larger and more significant country?  The Chinese government will also undoubtedly be emboldened to attack Taiwan—which appears much harder for the US to defend than Ukraine is right now.  How will South Korea and Japan view their alliances with the US if Taiwan falls?  

Analogies to the western powers’ delayed response to Hitler’s moves in the 1930s are certainly appropriate—and they make intervention now even more sensible.  To have fought for Czechoslovakia in 1938 would have been a largely symbolic act—it would almost surely have fallen rapidly to Hitler, and could only have been liberated after a very long war.  Poland in 1939, for which the British and French did go to war, could offer only a few weeks’ resistance.  Ukraine, however—a much larger country with an area the size of Texas with over 40 million people—is putting up heroic and effective resistance against the Russian Army, and might even be able to prevail without NATO intervention.  Russia, clearly, was not ready for combat on this scale—and NATO intervention could easily provide the coup de grace.  I personally doubt very much that Vladimir Putin would survive a military defeat.  The nation that declared itself the leader of the free world 75 years ago should not depend on a Ukrainian victory or a coup in Moscow to achieve a critical objective.

To intervene NATO would have to face the risk of nuclear war squarely, just as Eisenhower and Kennedy did over Berlin and in the Cuban missile crisis.  Putin, like Khrushchev in those days, has made nuclear threats—but even at the height of the Cold War, nations contemplating their use generally realized that there is only one critical issue regarding them—the need not to have one dropped on one’s self.  If Putin has in fact put Russian nuclear forces on alert, then the West should do the same. Eisenhower and Kennedy understood that the US could not appear to fear nuclear war more than its adversary.  It remains insane for anyone to cross that threshold.

Nothing has done more to destroy the domestic prestige of the US government than the failed wars of the last 57 years.  So scarred are we by bad wars that we may not be able to recognize a better one.  To lead NATO as it saves Ukrainian independence and dramatically shifts the world balance of power would be the biggest international victory the US has won in at least 30 years, and give our own people renewed pride in our nation.  It would also take advantage of an entirely new spirit in Europe, where Germany is drastically increasing defense spending and the Finns and Swedes now want to join NATO as well.  Intervention, to repeat, must not be undertaken before a thorough assessment is complete.  If it can be successful, however, it would secure the most significant military outcome since 1945—and one that the world desperately needs.

ps.  This is I think the most important commentary I have written in the 17 + years of historyunfolding.com, and I wanted it to appear in a major publication.  I sent it to three such: two of them rejected it without real explanation within a couple of days and the third has declined to reply at all.  None of them, as far as I can see, has published anything else taking a similar point of view.  I have thought a lot about what this means and may write about that later on.  Meanwhile, I hope readers will share it as widely as possible.

Putin's speech

On October 24, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, gave a speech at a Russian "discussion club" as part of symposium entitled, "The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules."  The speech is long and repetitive, but it provides Americans with a perspective they need to hear to understand the world we now live in, and how we got here. Putin is now using Russian troops to help ethnic Russian rebels (whose real local strength we will never know) establish new independent Republics in eastern Ukraine.  This is, obviously, a disruption of the postwar international order and the idea of the rule of law.  These were the topics of his speech

The thrust of the speech was simple: that it was the West, and more specifically the United States (although he generally spoke in vague terms), that first changed the rules of the game.  We did so, he argues implicitly, first in 1999, when the Clinton Administration undertook the war against Yugoslavia on behalf of the Kosovars with the support of NATO, but in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution.  He has a point.  George H. W. Bush, who fought in the war that established the UN, did not go to war with Iraq in 1991 before he had secured United Nations support, including the support of the USSR.  Bill Clinton, born the year after that war ended, must have known Russia would not support this new conflict, but he went ahead anyway, believing, in the best Boomer fashion, that he was right.  Fortunately, he was at least successful.

That, however, was a relatively modest initiative compared to the action taken by George W. Bush in 2003, when he decided to overthrow the Iraqi government without the support of the Security Council, world opinion, or most of our allies, with the single major exception of Great Britain.  And that war, as Putin pointed out, has been an immeasurable catastrophe, splitting Iraq effectively into three pieces, one of which is now allied with Iran and one of which is largely under control of the ISIS.  Barack Obama brought the troops out of Iraq (and despite all the criticism he is now taking for having done so, it is not clear that he had any choice in the matter), but his liberal interventionist team escalated the fighting in Afghanistan, encouraged the Arab spring, and arranged the strikes that helped bring down Qadaffi in Libya.  Then, last fall, the government of the United States blessed the street protests in Ukraine that brought down the elected government.  A released phone intercept suggested that the State Department, in the person of Victoria Nuland, the wife of neoconservative Robert Kagan, was indeed trying to take advantage of the situation to install an American client government on Russia's border.  Putin responded by annexing Crimea and fomenting rebellions in eastern Ukraine--supported, now by Soviet forces.  He has also been sending Soviet jets across NATO airspace--including the airspace of the United States.

I am not suggesting that Putin is motivated by any but a new form of Russian imperialism, much less that his actions are a just punishment for our own sins.  I am, as a good friend explained to me some years ago, a consequentialist--I judge acts by their results, not by their intentions.  Putin is showing us that two can play the same game.  More importantly, while we are using street demonstrations, air strikes and invasions to bring down governments in faraway countries of which we know little or nothing, he is doing so on his own borders, where we cannot intervene, and where he disposes of formidable military assets, as well as some political ones.   I am extremely concerned, as I wrote some weeks ago, that the next move will be a lightning occupation of one or more of the Baltic states, a real prize, which will strike a blow at the heart of NATO by proving that the Clinton Administration, indeed, decided in the 1990s to extend American influence well beyond its natural limits.

Putin suggests that we need new rules for a true new international order.  I agree with the sentiment, although I'm not sure that he is really sincere.  He does point to the chemical weapons agreement he helped negotiate with the Syrian government and the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program as promising steps.  (Another is this week's China-U.S. climate change agreement, of course.)  I am afraid, however, that he was simply playing to his constituency.. (The speech has been almost ignored in the US.)  The genie is out of the bottle: we are in a new age of anarchy, such as those I wrote about in Politics and War.  Since the new age features precision-guided munitions rather than mass armies, we still may well not see millions of casualties, but the world will take a long time to shake itself into a new and more stable shape.

President Trump?

Donald Trump, the media, and Hillary Clinton--in that order--have succeeded in nearly eliminating serious policy discussions from this campaign.   Trump fills the airwaves with outrageous statements, Clinton responds with commends on the outrageousness of Trump, and the media breathlessly wonders whether Trump has gone too far.  Clinton's emails and her health have also taken up a lot of space, and this week we have been reminded of how easy it is for a terrorist bomb (which did not even kill anyone) or a police shooting to take over the news.  But the next President will, in fact, make important decisions on a wide variety of topics.  This week, Evan Osnos of the New Yorker has written an article based on months of research detailing exactly what the impact of a possible Trump election might be, and what Trump would do.   It is so unusual and so important that I have decided to spend this week's post summarizing it.

Led by Chris Christie, it turns out, Trump's organization is hard at work planning a Trump Administration--just as federal law provides.  The government has given them office space on Pennsylvania Avenue and they are making lists of possible appointees and of dramatic steps that Trump might take immediately after taking office.  One popular idea, it seems, is to begin by undoing some of President Obama's executive orders or renouncing certain executive agreements with foreign nations, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change.  The executive branch has very broad powers pertaining to immigration, and Trump could indeed ban immigrants from certain countries immediately after taking office.  But these dramatic steps, it seems, are only the tip of the iceberg.  Based on the men whom Trump is talking to--several of whom spoke freely with Osnos--it seems that his Administration would be likely to complete an extreme form of the Reagan revolution, returning yet again to supply-side economics and reducing the role of the federal government. 

Specifically, Newt Gingrich--one of Trump's intimates from the political establishment, and perhaps the Baby Boomer who has had the greatest influence on American politics--talks about taking civil service protections away from federal government workers, firing some of them, and provoking a conflict with civil service unions similar to the one that Scott Walker successfully fought out in Wisconsin.  President George W. Bush tried to open the door to something similar in 2001 when the Department of Homeland Security was formed, refusing to give full civil service protection to its employees and obviously trying to set a precedent that could be applied more broadly within the federal government.  Gingrich apparently believes such measures would unify the Republican Party behind Trump.

On economic policy, Osnos interviewed Stephen Moore, the founder of the Club for Growth and an adviser to Herman Cain in 2012, who is a firm believer in supply side economics.  Trump, Moore said, is very interested in cutting taxes on businesses, which Moore claims, once again, will stimulate the economy.  This is, of course exactly what both Reagan and Bush II did when they came into office, and some tax cuts would also have probably followed the election of any of the more traditional Republican candidates this year,.   Trump, however, has given his ear to one of the most extreme proponents of low taxes, who presumably also believes that new deficits will force new cuts in government spending.   The Democrats may control the Senate next year, but Democrats in Congress caved in to both Reagan and Bush II on taxes, and enough of them might easily do the same again if Trump wins.  Nor is it clear to me that Democratic Senators would mount a filibuster to stop the repeal of Obamacare.

Osnos spends the biggest part of his article on foreign policy, talking to academics and former policy makers about the potential impact of stands that Trump has taken.  His threats to withdraw from various trade agreements, including the TPP (which of course is not yet in effect) and NAFTA, could easily shake world markets. It turns out that his senior adviser on trade and China is a professor named Peter Navarro, who wants somehow to eliminate our trade deficit with China on the spot.  Trump's veiled threat to try to renegotiate the terms of the US overseas debt--the same stratagem he has used so often and so successfully with his own enterprises--could have much more serious consequences for markets.  More serious, to me, are Trump's repeated calls for a re-evaluation and recasting of America's alliances, including our attitude towards the Baltic States, NATO members whom Vladimir Putin obviously would love to return to the Russian sphere of influence, which included them for most of the last four centuries.  Osnos spoke to analysts at the RAND corporation, where recent war games showed that NATO, as presently configured, who have no chance of stopping a sudden Russian armored incursion into those states.  It seems most unlikely that Trump would undertake the strengthening of the alliance that would evidently be necessary to deter Putin from taking this step.

On no issue, of course, has Trump made firmer declarations than immigration.  Even if he chose to deport only a fraction of the 11 million illegals he has threatened to expel, this would involve a massive expansion of federal police forces, extraordinary hardship for a few million people, and disruption of the American economy.  His wall would soak up all the infrastructure money that we desperately need for other purposes.  Osnos dos not discuss the possibility that private citizens might be deputized to help round up our intimidate immigrants, or that some might do so on their own in response to a new President's rhetoric.

The Clinton landslide which I, among any others, thought possible just a few weeks ago now seems extremely unlikely.  The calculations of fivethirtyeight.com now give Trump a 42% of victory, which is very close to the chance he would have if the election were decided by the flip of a coin.  There is no evidence that Trump will become a centrist if elected. On economic policy, in particular, he has surrounded himself with radical elements, and he would have the full cooperation of the Republicans in Congress.  This is a critical election, potentially as significant as 1860 or 1932.  Both of those, in retrospect, were won by the right candidate, and by an overwhelming electoral majority. That will not happen this time.

Why Putin is winning

Last week, on her way to Minsk with her ally Francois Hollande to reach a new cease-fire accord involving Russia and Ukraine, Angela Merkel made a rather striking statement about the past and the future.  Citing the difficulty of resolving the situation satisfactorily, she remarked that she was a small child when the Berlin Wall went up, and that it took about three decades for it to come down.  Similar patience, she implied, was needed to deal with Putin's ambitions and this crisis.  I am afraid that Chancellor Merkel does not understand the age in which she is living and the differences between our world today and the one in which she, and I, grew up.  Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, understands it very well.

The Berlin Wall was not a turning point in the Cold War in Europe; indeed, it could not fairly be described as an offensive measure undertaken by the Soviet Union.  When the US, Britain and the USSR drew up their occupation plans for Germany in the last year of the Second World War, they split the country into three (later four) zones of roughly equal size and population, but decided to put their headquarters in Berlin, well within the Soviet zone.  (At least one American planner realized that this decision might cause problems and suggested putting the headquarters at the intersection of the three zones, but he was one of those singularly brilliant people to whom no one listens until it is too late.)  That meant that the American, British and French garrisons in Berlin were stranded within Soviet-occupied territory.  After 1949 they were stranded within the German Democratic Republic, which the western powers refused to recognize in deference to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.  Even before then, in 1948, the Soviets had taken advantage of the situation to cut off land access to West Berlin.  The allies responded with an airlift and Stalin lifted the blockade after about a year.  The blockade was an offensive measure that had failed.

The Berlin crisis reached its peak in 1958-61, when Soviet premier Khrushchev--the most adventurous Soviet foreign policy leader ever--repeatedly threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany and turn the control of access of Berlin over to the East Germans.  If they denied access and the West tried to force its way through, general war would result.  This was the prospect Khrushchev threatened John Kennedy with in Vienna in 1961.  But meanwhile, the Berlin situation had created crisis for East Germany.  Because Germans could move freely through all of Berlin--even using the subway--East Germans could escape to the West at will.  The flow of refugees became a flood in the summer of 1961 and the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, insisted that it must stop.  According to summaries of recent scholarly studies (which I have not read in their entirety),  the wall was Ulbricht's idea, not Khrushchev's. It did not change West Berlin's status, although it encircled West Berlin--it merely made it impossible for East Germans (like Merkel's family) to cross into West Germany.  (I have no idea whether Merkel's family had entertained such ideas.)

In any event, by 1961, the situation in Europe had been stable for some time. NATO and the Warsaw Pact had both been formed and their armies faced one another along West Germany's borders. Thousands of American nuclear weapons were stockpiled in Europe to fight a war with the USSR, should one begin.  Communist governments controlled all Eastern Europe, and revolts in East Germany (1953), Poland (1956) and Hungary (1956) had been crushed.  Political means had kept Communist parties out of governments in the West since 1947.  A decade after the Wall went up, Chancellor Willy Brandt, one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century, began stabilizing the situation still further, recognizing Germany's postwar borders and opening relations with East Germany.  The rest of the West followed suit in the Helsinki agreements of 1975.  They officially accepted the division of Europe, and it was 14 years after that that the Wall came down.

The problem American policy makers have dealing with the situation that has emerged over the last 25 years is their Hegelian obsession with the idea that American values have triumphed, once and for all, and that anyone who stands in their way may be safely ignored.  Thus, breaking promises that James Baker made to Mikhail Gorbachev, the US in the 1990s extended NATO eastward to Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, and eventually, to include all the former members o fthe Warsaw Pact.   In 1999 the US led NATO in the war against Yugoslavia, detaching Kosovo, over Russian opposition.  We assumed that Ukraine would follow the western model as well, but it failed to produce an effective democratic government. 

What distinguishes Putin from his western adversaries is his recognition that American unipolarity has failed to bring about stability, and that his western borders include a number of weak stakes with immature political systems that are open to foreign influence and intimidation.  Hungary now has a semi-Fascist government quite comparable to Putin's, and its leader has acknowledged his kinship with the Russian leader. The Russians exert considerable influence in Bulgaria.  And now, having already annexed Crimea, they have used armed force effectively to detach eastern portions of Ukraine.  Here an analogy with Hitler in 1938 is relevant: the British and French let Hitler have the Sudetenland, the largely German-inhabited portion of Czechoslovakia, at Munich, on the assumption that he would go no further.  Six months later he broke up what remained of Czechoslovakia and occupied what is now the Czech Republic.  Putin may simply want the rest of Ukraine to remain weak and chaotic, or he may want to turn it into a satellite like Belarus instead.  In any case, the situation on Russia's western borders and in Eastern Europe as a whole has nothing in common with the situation in 1961.  It is dynamic,. not static, and Putin is using the instability and weakness in the region to enhance his power. 

I cannot help wondering whether the generation of Merkel and Hollande have gotten too accustomed to deferring to superpowers.  The Europe of the EU would not have been possible without American protection and support.  For 24 years now--really, since the first Gulf War--the Middle East has replaced Europe as the most important focus of American foreign policy, and a new power has emerged in Russia.   I would be very interested to read the appreciations that are coming out of the French and German foreign offices these days, but the heads of government of those countries seem to be resigned to letting Putin have what he wants, at least in Ukraine.  How they will feel if he tries to extend his sphere into some of the new NATO nations is not clear, although they have signed on to NATO's new rapid deployment force.

In times of strong governments and alliances, status quo powers can more easily make their will felt--and in Europe, both the US and the USSR were status quo powers for most of the Cold War.  But in times of weak governments with less legitimacy, a disruptive regime has far greater opportunities.  Putin understands this.  He also understands that the United States was first off the mark using the instability of the post-Cold War period for its own purposes, expanding NATO, making war on Yugoslavia, and invading Iraq.  As he repeatedly makes clear in speeches, two can play this game.  So far, no Asian nation has decided to do the same.  But the long-term future of Europe is once again in doubt.