Ukraine crisis: 'The more diplomatic activity, the less chance we will rush into war'
Russia has mobilized 127,000 troops around Ukraine. At the Russian-Ukrainian border on Wednesday. (Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
by Julien Gester , New York correspondentAfter a week of incessant and sometimes heated exchanges around the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, to which Joe Biden's United States has continued to respond with the offensive (threat of sanctions and deployment of troops in Eastern Europe), Emmanuel Macron is going to Moscow on Monday . He must meet Vladimir Putin there to try to outline the bases of a compromise likely to open the way to the "de-escalation" that Westerners are calling for. A specialist in the post-Soviet space, questions of international security and the foreign policy of the United States, Rajan Menon, researcher at the American think tank Defense Priorities (of which he directs the Grand Strategy Program) and at the of Columbia, deciphers the stakes of this visit of the French president, who will go in stride to Kiev.
What can we expect from Macron's visit to Moscow?
In the United States, the consensus suggests that Putin's plan, by massing troops on the border, is to attack Ukraine. But we must not exclude, and this is what I believe, that his primary intention was perhaps to attract the attention of the West. If so, he succeeded tremendously: he obtained written responses from the United States, which were much more creative than those from NATO; Macron has spoken with Putin, and visits him; the Germans got involved. Russia has returned to the center of the field of vision of the main Western leaders. On the European side, with the possible exception of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Macron is the most important figure in the eyes of Putin, for whom only Germany and France matter. He has given up on Poland, sees Boris Johnson as a totally discredited figure and the puppet of the United States, and the other countries are too small. He knows that if NATO's position should evolve towards a reasonable compromise, it will happen thanks to the influence of Paris and Berlin. Finally, the more diplomatic activity there is, the less chance there is that we will rush into war, because the Russians will have obtained the demonstration that they are taken seriously. The war would have a huge cost for Russia, and Putin knows it.
Can a way out of the crisis emerge from this meeting?
Macron cannot promise to permanently close NATO's door to Ukraine. But there are intermediate solutions. So far, NATO's response to Russian demands has been, to put it bluntly, "Fuck you." The American answer is certainly firm, but accompanied by very interesting proposals [for a compromise]. Macron's discussions with Putin could lead the French president to then discuss separately with the United States, in order to work to bring these positions closer together.
Washington adopted a much more alarmist line than its European allies, repeating that the risk of war was “imminent”. How do you explain it?
Compared to Europe or even Ukraine, the degree of excitement and absolute antipathy towards Russia is much more pronounced in the United States. There are complex reasons for this, but let's say that if you read the op-eds published in the American press, you will find there a rather monochromatic and unequivocal point of view on Russia. This has an effect on public opinion: even if Americans pay little attention to international politics, what they read consists of this constant stream of alarmist analyses. To be fair, the Russians did create this crisis. They have mobilized [around Ukraine] 127,000 soldiers, it is a very important force, which cannot be minimized. Europeans are also aware of this. French and Germans have good intelligence services, so they are not blind. But I welcome the way President Macron and Chancellor Scholz keep saying the best way to avoid a confrontation is to calmly engage in diplomatic dialogue with the Russians – which doesn't mean giving them everything they want. . The downside of the theatrics [of the US response] is that it can create such a hostile climate that it pulls the rug out from under the negotiations.
Isn't this American excitement also linked to domestic political issues?
Yes. President Biden, who has spent his life in politics, knows that ultimately war must be avoided. There will be a compromise with Russia, and Biden will be portrayed here by hardliners – a large part of the Republican Party – as a kind of Neville Chamberlain [the British Prime Minister who signed the Munich Accords in 1938, editor's note] of modern times. Washington's dispatch of troops to the Baltic countries and Poland as well as the arming of Ukraine constitute a response to a serious threat but it is also, for the President, a means of covering himself. If there is a compromise, he can say: "Listen, I not only settled the crisis through negotiations, I took very firm measures, threatened sanctions, sent 3,000 soldiers to the eastern flank of the NATO, armed Ukraine. The Russians got the message.” It is therefore, of course, strongly linked to the internal politics of the United States, which I have never known to be more poisonous and violent than today. It has become almost impossible to disagree with someone without immediately becoming an “enemy”, or to explain Russia's complex motivations without having to immediately defend yourself from being a Putin sympathizer!
And yet, in this extremely divided political space, Biden succeeded, on this file, in obtaining the approval of many Republicans who, ordinarily, are in the systematic filibuster.
Precisely: the President has done everything necessary to make it very difficult to tax him with weakness. Because the thing everyone agrees on is that if there is a war, we are not going to send American men and women to die in Ukraine. Other than that, Biden has done everything in his power to respond to the pressure, which leaves no space for hard-line conservatives to blame him for his inaction or slackness.
El País revealed on Wednesday the written responses of the United States and NATO to Russian requests. Do you see in these documents possible avenues for a way out of the crisis?
The Russian proposals were so absurd that it was not certain that a formal response would be given to them. But the United States did, and it seems to me that their counter-proposals are very constructive. President Putin will certainly never obtain a document in which Washington and NATO undertake never to welcome Ukraine as a member. But the Americans paved the way for a new strategic arms reduction agreement that would succeed New Start (which expired in 2021). They offered to address the differing views relating to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which Trump exited in 2019 . They suggested that the Russians could inspect NATO missile defense sites in Poland and Romania, in order to allay their fears that Tomahawk missiles could be installed there, on condition that the Russians agree that we can inspect two of their sites. Finally, there have recently been numerous incidents where Russian and American warships or aircraft have come very close to each other in the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea or the Mediterranean. The US response also addresses this, proposing to discuss confidence-building measures. All this seems significant to me. But the Ukrainian crisis is a very serious symptom of a more general problem.
That is to say ?
After the Cold War, the United States built a security order in Europe that excluded Russia. At present, people complain about Putin's “pathological” obsession with NATO expansion. I don't particularly like the regime he leads, but you have to remember that historically, when the idea of NATO expansion was first proposed and then started to be implemented in 1999, Boris Yeltsin said from the start that he did not like this policy. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was no longer the head of the Soviet Union, said he didn't like it either. So there has never been sympathy or even indifference to this strategy within the Russian establishment. Gorbachev tried to counter it with an inclusive European security order, stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.
The tragedy of Russia is that the United States had a very clever strategy after the Second World War through NATO and the Marshall Plan, which contributed to prosperity in Europe for several decades. However, this kind of creativity was not demonstrated, I am afraid, at the end of the cold war. I am not saying that everything Putin does today can be excused in the past, but that the Ukraine problem must be seen in a larger context. And I like the documents brought to light by El País because the United States precisely suggests ways to improve this European order.
Putin made it clear that the West brushed aside his demands. Do you think, despite everything, that he can take the path of compromise?
The risk that Putin “overplays” his hand exists. It has brought the world to the brink of war between Russia and Ukraine, with a high risk of escalation on a larger scale, although I am not sure that will happen. He issued this long list of demands, which he says must all be met, with no room for compromise. But you can't say to NATO and the United States: “Here is my list. Sign, take it or leave it. Now that the Americans have opened the door to dialogue on a large number of issues raised by Putin, he must make a choice. Does he really want to take the risk that this prospect of dialogue collapses, by sticking firmly to his position of a request for a written guarantee on Ukraine's non-membership of NATO, which he will never obtain? ? I recently co-wrote a column to suggest the possibility of a moratorium on the rapprochement between Ukraine and NATO. Not that Kiev becomes "neutral", as some have suggested, because that cannot work for reasons of democratic sovereignty, Ukrainian internal politics, and because Crimea is occupied and the Russians support two breakaway republics in ballast. But a moratorium of twenty years, for example? Putin could then no longer be of this world.
How do you judge the role played by Europe in this crisis?
I don't understand why the European Union, whose GDP is about eight times that of Russia and whose technological base is far more sophisticated, fails to articulate a conception of what Macron called strategic autonomy , so that today it continues to depend on the United States. Europe would have a much stronger voice if it were strategically autonomous and able to define a common conception of its own defence. It is not for lack of resources, but of will. However, Europe should unite to weigh more in crises like this, especially since in the end, the consequences will be much greater for Europeans than for Americans.
What do you think prevents it?
I think the United States doesn't really want Europe to grow up. Because being the protector of Europe, Japan, South Korea and Australia has the merit of establishing a status as a world leader. So we often complain here, and have done so since President Kennedy at least, that Europeans do not devote a sufficient percentage of their GDP to defence, or a sufficient share of their military budget to the acquisition of arms. But when Europe raises the question of strategic autonomy, like Emmanuel Macron, the American establishment in international politics does not express any kind of sympathy for this idea.
Biden, like Obama and Trump before him, however, has sent clear signals that he wants to make Asia, not Europe, his priority.
There is a consensus today in the American establishment: Russia is a problem, but China is a much bigger one . Perhaps even the only country in a position to truly challenge the Pax Americana. Because of this strategic reorientation, but also because of the need to deal with urgent domestic constraints – the deplorable state of our infrastructure or the shameful number of homeless people , to name a few – American resources will be increasingly turned, in terms of national security, towards the Far East. The question is whether Europe is ready for this change or not. And Macron is aware of it.
Finally, how do you explain that this crisis, whose roots are ancient, is breaking out now?
That's the most important question, isn't it? One view, if you listen to former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, for example, is that it has nothing to do with NATO expansion. What would really worry Putin is the advance of democracy, which he doesn't want to see in Ukraine because of its cultural similarities with Russia, and their common border and history. The problem with this argument is that Ukraine has already been a democracy, albeit not perfect, since August 1991, when it officially became independent. I think the reasons why this is happening now are other, and multiple. First of all, the Russians were furious when NATO, at the Bucharest summit in 2008, half-opened the door to the future membership of Georgia and Ukraine. However, what happened after the Russian-Ukrainian conflict of 2014-2015? Strategic security cooperation between Europe and Ukraine, but especially between Washington and Ukraine, has increased considerably. Ukrainian ports have been refitted to accommodate American warships, local soldiers are being trained by the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. And all this, in part, by the fault of Russia. Putin's view is that this trajectory will inevitably lead Ukraine to join NATO, which he cannot accept.
