One of the first things one learns in the diplomatic academy is to resist the urge to presume the motives of an opponent. That’s easier said than done. Here is a typical recent example: ‘West’s failure to hold Syria’s Assad accountable motivated Russia’s Putin’. Motives, although unknowable, still do matter. There are a number of propositions regarding Russian thinking that need to be better understood if Russia and its enemies are ever to reconcile. 1. It is not easy to separate Russia’s actions in Syria from the response to them by the USA and other Western powers, and from Russia’s actions now in Ukraine. 2. That does not mean, however, that Western appeasement in Syria or elsewhere emboldened Russia to attack Ukraine. The story is much too complicated for that to have been the case, even if Western weakness, perceived or real, probably played some role in Russian calculations. 3. Russia’s grievances over what it has perceived to be Ukraine’s independent path go back several decades. That they may have been magnified or otherwise conditioned by subsequent events elsewhere is a different affair. 4. Another different affair is Russia’s relationship with, and perceptions of, NATO. The NATO-Russia relationship and the Russia-Ukraine relationship are intertwined but not identical in their exercise. 5. Yet another affair that needs to be differentiated is Western decision-making. For example, Barack Obama’s apparent about face over the use of force by his country in Syria is not the same as his general determination to ‘lead from behind’ with diplomacy to end the Syrian war – which is to say, not to lead at all but to follow events at a distance. It may be argued that the latter policy (or non-policy) had the most to do with the decision by others – not only Russians – to play a more assertive role in that war. 6. For the USA to refuse to have much to do with ending so big a war in the Middle East with so many important effects upon its own interests probably conditioned the thinking of other powers about the will of the USA and its allies to continue to play the important military, political, economic, and diplomatic roles they have assigned to themselves for decades. 7. But that was not the whole story. For combined with ostensible Western ‘restraint’ in the Middle East was a persistent meddling on the ground, which was too modest and incompetent to be effective but too transparent to be ignored. The West did intervene in the Syrian War, but in a way that was inimical to what it said it was trying to accomplish (‘Assad must go’). 8. Such unseriousness takes us back to NATO. Because it is impossible to separate Barack Obama’s cold feet over Syria from his strange and ostensibly reluctant decision to endorse an armed NATO intervention over a hypothetical crime against humanity in Libya. 9. The result of the Libya intervention was threefold: it did become an act of regime change, which sent an obvious message to Bashar al-Assad – nip your own Arab Spring in the bud and don’t relent; it demonstrated initially that European airpower was much less competent than many people thought, regime change notwithstanding; and it showed that the Americans and other NATO members had no qualms or regrets (again) over using the UN as a fig leaf for something international law shuns: an unprovoked, armed intervention for the ultimate purpose of regime change. UN Security Council Resolution 1973 marked the last time Russia would pay lip service to such multilateral diplomacy. From then on the rule of the jungle would govern, minus the cant. 10. In subsequent months the murder of Libya’s leader not only was celebrated in the most gratuitous fashion by the American secretary of state but also the intervention itself was later second-guessed by the American president, who said the way in which it evolved was the biggest mistake of his presidency; and that the only reason he agreed to it was because the British prime minister and the French president called in a favour over their military cooperation in Afghanistan, a commitment Barack Obama also said he wanted to end but somehow found himself redoubling in order to keep a campaign promise – the same reason that Joe Biden terminated it with almost no warning to those same allies. Therefore, speculating about Russia’s motives in invading Ukraine in 2022 must distinguish immediate, medium-term, and long-term grievances. As regards NATO, the grievances date as far back as 1949, and the alliance probably should not have grown or at the very least changed its name in 1992 if it was ever serious about making peace with its former adversary. It certainly should have signed a more substantial agreement with Russia than the one it signed in 1997. And it really should not have launched a military action, on European soil no less, against a country friendly to Russia in 1999. But apart from all that, if NATO still meant to retain any real authority or leverage with Russia, then it was hardly the American failure to bomb Damascus which prevented it from doing so. Much else happened besides; but Libya, not Syria, supplied the straw that broke the camel’s back. It may sound silly to assign blame for an unnecessary and tragic war to the fickle record of an alliance which is not a formal party to that war. The war’s root causes are found mainly in the long and complex relationship between Russia and its neighbours. Yet NATO is not disinterested. Its sins of commission and omission have contributed to a trend in which the rulers of insecure powers like Russia feel they have little to lose and much to gain if they take matters into their own hands, all objections and rules be damned… even if it is impossible to read enough minds to show exactly how and why that happened. If you liked this post from Talleyrand, why not share it? © 2022 Talleyrand Unsubscribe |