US VASSALS BLOCK UKRAINE PEACEJeff Rich on why Britain and Europe cannot end the Ukraine war while Washington still sets the terms
I sat down with historian Jeff Rich of The Burning Archive to discuss the seemingly intractable challenge of ending the war in Ukraine. Jeff spent 33 years as an Australian official before turning to global history. I spent 24 years as a British diplomat, including four and a half years at the British Embassy in Moscow after the Ukraine crisis began. We come at the problem from different directions but landed in the same place. This is not a two-party war. It is a five-party war: Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, the United States and Britain. Each is trying to finish it on its own terms. None of them has built a peace process. That is why the search for a single “deal” keeps failing. The Peacemonger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A single peace deal won’t be enough to settle four different conflicts at once, something I wrote about for Responsible Statecraft in June. Jeff’s answer is similar to mine; a multi-treaty settlement. He draws on the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 — the practical fact the catastrophe of the Thirty Year War was ended with several treaties, not one. He also draws on the Cambodia settlement of the early 1990s. That war mixed a civil conflict, an East–West confrontation and a split inside the communist world. The way out was a UN mandate and a UN transitional authority that gave China a face-saving off-ramp from the Khmer Rouge. The parallel with Western sponsorship of the present Ukrainian government is uncomfortable, yet unavoidable. Peace for Ukraine will emerge from separate interlocking tracks: Russia–Ukraine terms to end the fighting; a deal on EU–Ukraine accession, which will be as complicated as ending the war; an agreement on the long-term Europe/UK relationship with Russia; neutrality for Ukraine in treaty form; and a long-term settlement between Washington and Moscow. Jeff would add a UN authority inside Ukraine, treat Britain as its own actor rather than an EU afterthought, and sees the reconstruction of Ukraine as a practical work through that helps Europe and Russia remember how to deal with each other as neighbours. On “perfidious” Britain he is blunt. London has played a particularly damaging role in Eastern Europe and should stop tagging along after a European union it chose to leave. I did not dissent. British policy since 2014 has been long on posture and short on a theory of how the conflict ends. Buying American LNG at three times the price of piped Russian gas is not strategy but the behaviour of a vassal. That is the larger problem. Eighty years after 1945, Britain and Europe remain unable to conduct a foreign policy that is not first cleared in Washington. Jeff calls NATO the enemy within Europe’s own institutions. I have come to see the EU, as it now operates, in much the same light: not a peace project amplifying states, but another instrument of American compliance. John Mearsheimer’s claim that the United States military presence was the “pacifier” of Europe is an American story. Germany’s return as a prosperous neighbour did more for European peace than garrison politics. The obstruction is political. European states have progressively given away political sovereignty and forgotten the economic, social and cultural glue that made the European project a successful peace project until the early Noughties. The diplomatic embargo of Russia was a British idea in 2014 that has gradually infected all European Member States and is gleefully endorsed by the mainstream media. What is missing is a Western statesman prepared to treat Russia as an equal rather than a defendant, and to fly through a hailstorm of press flak to pursue peace through diplomacy. Until Britain and Europe recover the habit of acting for themselves, they will keep reinforcing failure and calling it resolve. China, as the only permanent member of the Security Council not a direct party to the war, and India, should play a role in the overarching peace process to provide more balance to the talks. Watch the full conversation on The Peacemonger here. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your nationality and religion, I wish you much peace. You're currently a free subscriber to The Peacemonger. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |