The (Ex) Washington Realist

There was a deeply ambiguous aspect to Reagan's legacy to which I think some mention ought to be made in any retrospective consideration of it. This was its limited embrace of anti-communist rollback.

In the early 1950s, some Republicans called for rolling back the Soviet empire in Europe, a view that the Eisenhower administration resisted in the various eastern European uprisings of the 1950s. The reason for US restraint was a prudential sense that US intervention in eastern Europe would bring Soviet escalation.

After 1981, the Reagan administration began to send aid to the mujahiddin in Afghanistan, a clear decision to support the rollback of Soviet power insofar as this might be possible with a low level of US involvement. The Russians chose not to escalate in response, even though Soviet forces were engaged in actual combat in Afghanistan and the war there was thus an unprecedented test of Soviet military credibility.

It can be argued that Afghanistan was not as vital to Soviet security as eastern Europe and that what Reagan authorized was to that extent a lower risk. But we know the true importance of Afghanistan to Moscow only in hindsight. I don't believe this was as clear in the early 1980s.

Reagan's decision to lend support to the mujahiddin was a calculated risk; what was prudential was the level of support, but not the decision to give it. Once it became clear that the Russians wouldn't retaliate at the level of our initial covert involvement, we upped our assistance to include providing the Afghans with Stinger missiles, hardly an act of US caution either.

The difference then, and the relevant difference for today, was that the Reagan approach was to arm people to free themselves rather than our own forces to free others. But US aid to the Afghans could have provoked a more aggressive leadership in Moscow to attack insurgent bases over the Durand Line, widening the war and possibly forcing us to defend Pakistan. As things turned out, the blowback was not Soviet escalation but an escalation of jihadism against us.

Reagan's actions revealed a willingness to bring down other governments, even though he resisted military involvements in other places. Proponents of realism and proponents of rollback can both lay claim to his legacy.
 

Nicholas Gvosdev:

"The members of the Atlantic Community believe that Ukraine belongs to Europe. Ukraine needs to be integrated into Western alliances without undermining Western-Russian relations."

This memorandum ignores a basic axiom of good strategic planning -- that one does not set goals without serious consideration of whether they are achievable. It simply prejudges what is actually a central point at issue -- whether it is possible to incorporate the Ukraine in NATO without 'undermining Western-Russian relations.'

Moreover, the question of whether it is possible to incorporate the Ukraine in NATO without 'undermining Western-Russian relations' is closely linked with the question of whether such incorporation is possibly without risking a grave exacerbation of the very real internal tensions between different ethnic and linguistic groups in the country. It is, for one thing, worth remembering that the Crimea is only part of the Ukraine because of Khrushchev's ukaz in 1954.

This is also a question best not prejudged.

The Russian Permanent Representative to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, said flatly last month whatever happened with the Western Ukraine, the Crimea was not joining the Alliance. He went on to suggest that the Ukraine would 'crumble away as soon as "orange" political forces make practical attempts to drag the country into NATO.'

Empty words? Possibly, but I would not bank on it. It is also material here that because NATO has broken past assurances to the Russians, these will have every reason to make worst case assumptions about the long-term implications of the incorporation of the Ukraine in the Alliance -- Sevastopol as a U.S. Navy base, perhaps?

It is also somewhat questionable -- to put it mildly -- whether announcing that you did intend to incorporate the Ukraine in NATO, but are going to go about very slowly, provides a viable means of avoiding the problems.

If the Russians decide that it is a basic national interest to prevent a united Ukraine joining NATO, they are going to be as resistant to seeing this happen in the longer term as they are to seeing it happen in the shorter.

It may be that defining the incorporation of a united Ukraine in NATO as a long-term objective will mean that power-brokers in Russia feel they need to do nothing about at the moment. But there is no guarantee that they will think this sensible. They could well think that if fomenting Crimean separatism was in their long-term strategic interest, they might as well start sooner rather than later.

There is no reason why other people should work to timelines set by Americans or Europeans.
 

David Billington:

Rollback does not start in the Fifties -- it is clearly spelled out as a core U.S. objective in the NSC 20/4 paper accepted as national policy by Truman in November 1948.

The paper is at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/coldwar/nsc20-4.htm.

The objectives of U.S. strategy towards Russia were actually first formally defined, and the reasoning behind them set out, in the NSC 20/1 paper of August 1948 -- which was very much the personal handiwork of George Kennan.

The paper is available at http://www.sakva.ru/Nick/NSC_20_1.html.

In the key NSC 68 paper of April 1950, both 'rollback' and fostering the 'seeds of destruction' in the Soviet system are defined as aspects of containment.

The paper is available at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-1.htm.

What is more difficult to define is 1. the salience of these objectives in the total strategic conceptions of Kennan and Nitze (who masterminded NSC 68) 2. the means by which they hoped to achieve them; and 3. the timescale on which they hoped Soviet power could be rolled back.
 

"There is no reason why other people should work to timelines set by Americans or Europeans."

Especially since US Treasury Secretaries go hat-in-hand to Moscow to beg Prime Minister Putin, against whom they wage unremitting information war, to lose more money investing in an economy/currency that is dropping like a rock.
 

David Habakkuk,

The memoranda you cite are revealing but if I understand them correctly they do not call for supplying arms to anti-Soviet insurgents. They call for peaceful pressure to bring change. The rollback that some in the United States wanted in the early 1950s (and to which I meant to refer) would have meant going to war and US policy did not go that far.
 

David Billington:

I omitted the June 1948 NSC 10/2 paper, which set up the Office of Special Projects, through which Kennan intended to manage the covert operations programme -- subsequently it became the Office of Policy Coordination, and was run by Frank Wisner.

I can't offhand find a copy of NSC 10/02 on the net. It's available in the standard collection of early Cold War documents edited by Etzold and Gaddis.

Certainly, NSC 20/1 glosses over the means that were to be used -- covert operations have to be kept covert.

The actual scope of operations was limited by a number of factors, including the need for deniability and scepticism in the military.

Describing the reaction of the JCS to Kennan's enthusiasm for an offer by Finnish refugees to engage in guerilla warfare against the Soviet Union in 1948 in his 2000 study Operation Rollback, the former NYT foreign correspondent Peter Gose writes (p. 94):

'The Joint Chiefs were scornful of Kennan's bold ventures, guerilla schools, and anti-Soviet brigades. The officers in Europe had had their fill of refugees, émigrés, "bandits," and partisans. They informed the State Department that these cadres and DPs might well include "a large sprinking of free-booters, criminals, and petty racketeers." Facing cutbacks in budgets for its own core purposes, the Pentagon was not eager to assume new and troublesome missions. But Kennan's imagination was fired up. He retorted that the State Department saw merit in the concept of guerilla warfare; "a beginning should be made to carry it out….. It would seem advisable to start the project with these men and gradually to build it up as a top secret undertaking." Top secret indeed, for the dispatch of thousands of anti-communist partisans behind the Iron Curtain would amount to quite a "counterforce," implying a policy considerably more aggressive than merely "containing" communism.'

Another very useful study is Gregory Mitrovich's Undermining the Kremlin, also published in 2000. The extensive use of Germans and German collaborators involved in the war in the East in 1941-6 is documented in among other studies the 1988 study Blowback by Christopher Simpson, and the 1982 study The Belarus Secret by John Loftus.

There is an interesting account of the British role in these covert operations in Richard Aldrich's 2001 study The Hidden Hand. One striking difference is that while in the U.S. the running was made by the diplomat Kennan, with a lot of scepticism in the military, in Britain the military were enthusiastic, and the Foreign Office sceptical.

Aldrich's study also brings out the way these events cast a long shadow:

'With the final achievement of Ukrainian independence in 1991, a vast stone memorial to the SS Galicia Division was erected. If this was a calculated affront to Moscow then it was successful, for in 1993 the monument was completely destroyed by a huge bomb.'

It is a history of which current enthusiasts for 'rollback' -- such as the authors of the Atlantic Community memorandum -- would do well to be aware.
 

David Billington:

Sorry, a small typo -- it is Peter Grose, not Gose. He was executive editor of Foreign Affairs.

Nicholas Gvosdev:

Another view of contemporary Ukrainian realities, from Gordon Hahn on the new website Russia: Other Points of View

'The current Ukrainian government is now deeply involved in a politically-motivated campaign of historical 'revisionism' or falsification, to demonize Russia as Ukraine prepares to take up the West's offer to join NATO. For example, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry is creating a film that portrays the Russian Imperial Army's defense of Sevastopol against Western forces during the Crimean War (1853-56) as a defense led solely by Ukrainians. Of course, it was not -- and if it were, this would make Ukrainians more partners in, rather than victims of Russian rule.

'More outrageously, the current Ukraine governing forces' new version of Soviet history portrays Ukraine and Ukrainians purely as victims of the Soviet regime, and the Russians as its beneficiaries and purveyors. Stalin's induced famine in Ukraine is now being characterized as an attempt by Moscow (read: Russia) to commit genocide against Ukrainians. This ignores the multi-ethnic and Russian population in Ukraine, not to mention in southern Russia itself -- who all got the same disastrous treatment under the Stalin's ''collectivization'' policies. Worse yet, recently Ukrainian nationalists successfully lobbied Ukraine's western province of Ivano-Frankovsk to allow former units of the Nazi SS army, native Ukrainians, to hold parades in the province's capitol and to receive the same pensions awarded to Soviet army veterans in Ukraine. The grounds for such policies: that Ukrainians who supported the fascist Nazis did so understandably, given the 'complex times' of the 1930s-40s.'

(Full piece is at:

http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2008/06/ukrainian-russi.html#more.)

Actually, I think there is a good deal to be said for the view that the support of many Ukrainians for the Nazis at the time was understandable. The choices facing those who, in Nadezhda Mandelstam's words, 'scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin', were often difficult.

But those of us who have grown up in more fortunate places and times should be doing our best to lay the ghosts of the past in Eastern Europe -- not to fan the flames of old hatreds.

And to encourage Ukrainian nationalists to indulge their anti-Russian feelings by leading them to believe that the West can be relied on to protect them from the possible consequences of so doing is as dubious morally as it impolitic -- shall I say 'unrealistic' -- in prudential terms. Are Americans going to fight to defend Khrushchev's grant of the Crimea to the Ukraine? I very much doubt whether British squaddies are -- especially if the Russians start making noises about cutting off our gas supplies.

Almost seventy years ago, my country's Prime Minister gave the Polish leader Colonel Beck a 'guarantee' -- which in practice meant giving Poland the rope to hang itself, which Beck promptly did. I think we should be chary about doing the same with Timoshenko and Yushchenko.
 

David Habakkuk,

"Top secret indeed, for the dispatch of thousands of anti-communist partisans behind the Iron Curtain would amount to quite a "counterforce," implying a policy considerably more aggressive than merely "containing" communism.'"

The documents and books you reference are quite interesting and deserve to be included in any account of early Cold War thinking. But plans to foment unrest in eastern Europe never went as far as arming insurgents. The only known attempt to link with insurgents in the late 1940s were the defectors parachuted back into western Ukraine in 1949 and these were sent for intelligence purposes only.

"More outrageously, the current Ukraine governing forces' new version of Soviet history portrays Ukraine and Ukrainians purely as victims of the Soviet regime, and the Russians as its beneficiaries and purveyors. Stalin's induced famine in Ukraine is now being characterized as an attempt by Moscow (read: Russia) to commit genocide against Ukrainians. This ignores the multi-ethnic and Russian population in Ukraine, not to mention in southern Russia itself..."

If Ukraine had not had its independence revoked under Lenin, the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine as well as the ethnic Ukrainians of the center and west would have been spared.

Regarding the dispute over Crimea, I should think the best claim is that of the Crimean Tatars and that they should have it as a neutral territory.

I share your hope that the past does not become the cause of future conflict. The future of all of these nationalities lies in some form of association; whether as part of the EU or not matters less than whether the ties are free of intimidation. Fortunately, nobody in Moscow or in the western European capitals really seems to want to precipitate a confrontation.
 

Mr. Billington,

"If Ukraine had not had its independence revoked under Lenin,..."

It wasn't Lenin who did that. Petaliura's independent Ukrainian government had been driven to Poland by the Whites. The Bolshies then drove out the Whites. Then Petaliura returned in the wake of the Polish invasion in 1920, to be driven out of Kiev with them subsequently.

Mr. Habbakuk,

"And to encourage Ukrainian nationalists to indulge their anti-Russian feelings by leading them to believe that the West can be relied on to protect them from the possible consequences of so doing is as dubious morally as it impolitic -- shall I say 'unrealistic' -- in prudential terms. Are Americans going to fight to defend Khrushchev's grant of the Crimea to the Ukraine? I very much doubt whether British squaddies are -- especially if the Russians start making noises about cutting off our gas supplies.

Almost seventy years ago, my country's Prime Minister gave the Polish leader Colonel Beck a 'guarantee' -- which in practice meant giving Poland the rope to hang itself, which Beck promptly did. I think we should be chary about doing the same with Timoshenko and Yushchenko."

Indeed, especially since Western aid and support for Yushchenko is doing nothing to help Ukraine out with her actual problems. Ukraine's death rate is as high as Russia's, while her birth rate is stuck at about the level Russia's was in the aftermath of the 1998 economic collapse. Ukraine has the fourth highest population decline rate in the world, with over 1000 fewer Ukrainians seeing the sunrise than did the day before. Despite this, Presdent Yushchenko makes much more of an issue of a very flexible number of Ukrainians dead 70 years than Ukrainians dying now. Mr. Putin at least, while he was president, addressed Russia's demographic problems in a very straightforward manner, and Russia's birth rate has risen about 20% since he became President.

By their support of Yushchenko, all the West really shows is that they will defend Ukrainian independence to the last Ukrainian.
 

Anonymous at 10.49:

I must confess to a personal interest in this.

My sister-in-law is West Ukrainian -- although with a Russian mother. When we went to Kiev four years ago for her wedding, she repeatedly addressed people in Ukrainian. In every single instance, bar none, they responded in Russian.

I did not take this as meaning that people in Kiev wanted to be back in Russia -- while I think many people in the Crimea probably do.

But I do think that if the Ukraine did begin to fragment, the whole business could turn very nasty.

I think it is a basic interest of Europeans, and Russians, to preserve the status quo in the Ukraine.

But one simply cannot do this if one defines 'Europe' in a way that excludes Russia, and then attempts to include the whole of the Ukraine in this 'Europe'.

David Billington:

'But plans to foment unrest in eastern Europe never went as far as arming insurgents. The only known attempt to link with insurgents in the late 1940s were the defectors parachuted back into western Ukraine in 1949 and these were sent for intelligence purposes only.'

While the declassification of relevant materials has actually been quite limited, making confident judgements difficult, it seems reasonably clear that -- by contrast to the ambitious plans of Kennan and Wisner -- the actual scope of operations involved was quite small.

However, your claim that no attempts were made to 'link with insurgents' is simply not brought out by the evidence produced in the books I have cited. I recommend in particular Peter Grose's study.

The matter is actually material, because it seems likely that these operations are highly relevant to the shift in Soviet contingency planning for war in the late Forties from focus on the contingency of a new war with Germany and Japan in 15-20 years time to planning for a possible war against a coalition led by the United States in a much more limited time frame.

Describing the background to this crucial shift in Soviet thinking in the late Forties in his 1987 Brookings Institution study Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy, the most intellectually significant figure in post-war British military intelligence, Michael MccGwire noted that:

'From 1948 onward evidence of a sustained Western attempt to establish a partisan capability in Poland, Albania, the Baltic States, the Soviet Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Georgia mounted. None of these were successful, and the last of the Ukraine partisans were finally destroyed in late 1952.'

As to current issues: a counterfactual argument about what would have happened had the Ukraine not had its independence revoked under Lenin is, if I may so, of somewhat limited relevance to the practical policy questions facing us today. The same applies to the claim of the Crimean Tartars to the Crimea.
 

To tie this in with Nik's more recent post on Rogozin, Rogozin is pretty vocal in his comments that Ukrainians and Russians are pretty intertwined and that the West is trying to pursue a British imperial "divide and rule" policy by fomenting disagreements.
 

Anonymous 10:49,

"It wasn't Lenin who did that. Petaliura's independent Ukrainian government had been driven to Poland by the Whites. The Bolshies then drove out the Whites. Then Petaliura returned in the wake of the Polish invasion in 1920, to be driven out of Kiev with them subsequently."

The situation was indeed chaotic. But Lenin was in charge of Russia and he was the last foreign ruler in charge of Ukraine at the end of 1920. He could have restored the country's independence and he chose not to do so.
 

David Habakkuk,

I apologize for my last post. The Grose book does draw on sources that I did not see when I did my own research on insurgency using redacted documents and published memoirs. My understanding was that these contacts were of an exploratory kind but clearly there was a broader range of them than I found, as well as a more explicitly subversive purpose, and you are quite right to call my attention to these.

My larger point was that the U.S. did not make the kind of commitment to rollback then that it did in Afghanistan under Reagan. By the mid-1950s, the focus of US activity had shifted to psychological operations (eg. Radio Free Europe) and a more explicit policy of non-intervention in the Soviet zone. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, exactly the reverse sequence occurred. The US raised the level of its arms assistance to insurgents.

I agree that the past should not be an obstacle to the resolution of current problems. But if critics of the Ukrainian government are going to cite history is an issue, then I'm sure you would agree that it is appropriate for historians to respond.

I don't see how it is counterfactual to state that Ukraine lost its independence to Russian re-conquest and that the loss of independence exposed the population (ethnic Russian as well as ethnic Ukrainian) to the horrors of Stalinism. I do hope that all nations in the region can respect the fact of these events and still move on to find common ground.

Regarding Crimea, do you favor leaving it as part of Ukraine or ceding it to Russia, if you do not think a neutral Tatar state would be practical?
 

Thanks for all the comments here--and I'd encourage crossposting at the Atlantic Community as well--
 

Mr. Billington,

So your point has gone from "Lenin revoked Ukrainian independence" to "Lenin, after having spent blood and treasure driving his enemies out of Ukraine, from whence they had mounted a major offensive towards Moscow in 1919, failed to give Ukraine back to Ukrainian Nationalists, who had just recently thrown their lot in with one of those enemies."

That hasn't made your point stronger, to say the least.

But it does point out why the present Russian government is so unpopular with the US foreign policy elite. Having gotten used to a continual flow of preemptive concessions from the Russian government when Kozyrev was Foreign Minister, we came to take this as the natural order of things. So now, when a Russian leader mounts a vigorous defense of Russian views and interests, our response has a significant element of outrage.
 

David Billington,

I'm sorry if I sounded ill-tempered.

It is very easy not to notice some of the less innocent undersides of early Cold War strategies, both in the U.S. and Britain -- partly because there has been an awful lot of disinformation put out, in both countries, designed to obscure from view aspects of those strategies about which many of those involved came to have reservations.

A major source of this disinformation, incidentally, is Kennan.

An ironic and not inconsequential effect of this, in Kennan's case, is that he himself has done a great deal to make the anti-nuclear polemic which is central to his writings since he lost influence appear either eccentric or incomprehensible.

The actual effect of our complacent understandings of the Cold War is to encourage proliferation -- if indeed nuclear 'deterrence' saved us from the overwhelming conventional power of the Red Army, why should not such 'deterrence' save the Iranians from the overwhelming conventional power of the U.S. Army?

Placing myself in the position of an Iranian policy planner, I can easily compile a memorandum to the Supreme Jurisprudent, contemptuously dismissing any doubts that may exist in the Iranian elite about the wisdom of attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. It would draw on the writings of eminent 'security studies' experts and historians -- such as Sir Lawrence Freedman, Martin van Creveld, John Lewis Gaddis, and Tony Judt.

An irony is that such people commonly treat Kennan as semi-deity, but simply ignore his fundamental reservations about 'deterrence' strategies.

It is interesting to look at Kennan's considered -- if partly apologetic -- verdict on how Western strategy went wrong, as presented in a long dispatch he wrote from Moscow in September 1952, which is reproduced in the second volume of his memoirs and available on the web at:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB14/doc1.htm

As to the Ukraine.

Nations, in the sense we know them in Western Europe, are characteristically the creation of centralising governments, poets, primary school teachers -- often helped with a good deal of blood and iron.

Conditions in the old agrarian imperial systems in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, as in the Middle East, were commonly inimical to the creation of nations in this sense.
There was certainly not a coherent Ukrainian 'nation' -- a people with a common sense of identity inhabiting a defined territorial space -- at the end of the First World War. One can get a graphic sense of this in The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov's novel about events in Kiev in that chaotic time.

As regards the Crimea, I would strongly favour maintaining the status quo, for fear of the implications of unraveling it.

If Rogozin is right and senior Ukrainian figures have indeed been told that the path to the West runs through NATO, then I fear the prospects of doing this may be uncertain, to put it mildly.

What makes this all nonsense on stilts is that it is deeply unclear that there will be a NATO in fifteen or twenty years.

In this connection a piece by David Calleo on divergent EU and U.S. geopolitical interests is interesting, although I am sceptical of some of his conclusions.

Among other interesting pieces of information, we learn that 'a Gallup poll in 139 countries showed that the Bush Administration was least popular among its tradition allies.' In Germany and Belgium 8% approved of the Bush Administration -- the same figure as approved of the Russian government for Germany, and a lower figure for Belgium, where 10% approved of the Russian government.

(See http://www.europesworld.org/EWSettings/Article/tabid/78/Default.aspx?Id=0e38b09b-a00b-4168-bee2-ef4b0ad18ab8.)

But then of course a large part of the European elite soldiers on in blinkered fashion with the project of creating an ever wider and deeper Union -- blithely ignoring the fact that popular opinion is not behind them.

It sometimes happens that couples whose marriage is in difficulty have a baby, in the hope that this will keep them together. But often they break up in any case, and the existence of the baby causes massive problems!
 

Anonymous 3:10,

"So your point has gone from "Lenin revoked Ukrainian independence" to "Lenin, after having spent blood and treasure driving his enemies out of Ukraine, from whence they had mounted a major offensive towards Moscow in 1919, failed to give Ukraine back to Ukrainian Nationalists, who had just recently thrown their lot in with one of those enemies."

I thought that Ukrainian nationalists looked for foreign support only after Russians had invaded their territory. The situations were not strictly comparable because of the circumstances you cite but if Lenin had recognized Ukrainian independence, as he did that of Finland and the Baltic states, Ukraine would have been spared the consequences of Stalinism in the 1930s.

"But it does point out why the present Russian government is so unpopular with the US foreign policy elite. Having gotten used to a continual flow of preemptive concessions from the Russian government when Kozyrev was Foreign Minister, we came to take this as the natural order of things. So now, when a Russian leader mounts a vigorous defense of Russian views and interests, our response has a significant element of outrage."

The problem I think is that we have taken positions on matters that the Russians consider to be internal (or nearly internal) affairs. Perhaps estrangement is unavoidable as long as these issues remain. It would be unfortunate if relations deteriorate further because Russians still regard America with some admiration. There were two State of the Union addresses in 2006, one by the President of the United States and one by the President of Russia. Guess which one mentioned Franklin Roosevelt in a flattering way.
 

Mr. Habakkuk,

I didn't interpret your postings as ill-tempered in the slightest; I very much appreciate the patience and substance of your replies, which are a form of peer review in the best sense. I fell behind current research and I am glad that you brought me up to date.

"The actual effect of our complacent understandings of the Cold War is to encourage proliferation -- if indeed nuclear 'deterrence' saved us from the overwhelming conventional power of the Red Army, why should not such 'deterrence' save the Iranians from the overwhelming conventional power of the U.S. Army?"

"It is interesting to look at Kennan's considered -- if partly apologetic -- verdict on how Western strategy went wrong, as presented in a long dispatch he wrote from Moscow in September 1952..."

In his dispatch Kennan made a valid point that military preparations are not a defense against political change. We may have overestimated the Soviet conventional threat for the reasons he cited.

I wonder, though, if the die on nuclear proliferation wasn't cast when Stalin turned down the Baruch Plan in 1946 to internationalize nuclear technology. How realistic this plan was can be argued, but I think Russia deserves a measure of blame, along with the West, for the initiation of the nuclear arms race.

Kennan attributed the Atlantic Pact to Western perceptions of the Soviet threat; this was surely the main reason, but the Atlantic Pact also owed something to the Atlantic federalism of State Department officials such as Ted Achilles and Will Clayton. This idea has been forgotten but it was a significant influence in the 1940s and somewhat more of a realist notion than world federalism.

The parallel you draw with Iran is fascinating: they may indeed see us today in the same way that we saw the USSR in the early 1950s. In trying to prevent an American attack that is probably of doubtful likelihood, Iran may bring about the nuclearization of its neighbors and the risks that attend this development.

Re: Ukraine

"Nations, in the sense we know them in Western Europe, are characteristically the creation of centralising governments, poets, primary school teachers -- often helped with a good deal of blood and iron."

"Conditions in the old agrarian imperial systems in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, as in the Middle East, were commonly inimical to the creation of nations in this sense."

"There was certainly not a coherent Ukrainian 'nation' -- a people with a common sense of identity inhabiting a defined territorial space -- at the end of the First World War. One can get a graphic sense of this in The White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov's novel about events in Kiev in that chaotic time."

National identity was certainly not as well-defined in Ukraine as it was in Poland. But I believe the Ukrainians began to feel a national identity going back to the poetry of Shevchenko, and it has been argued (eg. Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen) that the major nation-states of Europe were not really nations in the modern sense until the late 19th century. The Ukrainian language is quite distinct, and land tenure was different from Russia, which was why collectivization in the 1930s hit Ukrainians especially hard. Even the Soviets recognized a national identity in forming a Ukrainian SSR, although it is possible that Soviet policy and repression did as much to create and deepen Ukrainian national feeling as it did to reflect it.

"If Rogozin is right and senior Ukrainian figures have indeed been told that the path to the West runs through NATO, then I fear the prospects of doing this may be uncertain, to put it mildly."

I find it hard to believe that any responsible official in either NATO or the EU would encourage Ukraine to apply for NATO membership against Russian opposition. But the Ambassador was no doubt authentically expressing the seriousness of Russian concern over any possible move to draw Ukraine closer to the West at this time.

"What makes this all nonsense on stilts is that it is deeply unclear that there will be a NATO in fifteen or twenty years.... In this connection a piece by David Calleo on divergent EU and U.S. geopolitical interests is interesting, although I am sceptical of some of his conclusions."

Although I am not a Gaullist myself, as a student I found Calleo's perspective on Europe and trans-Atlantic relations a stimulating challenge to some of my own views. The more likely prospect I think is that both Europe and North America will recede as an influence in the world together, if they are unable to belong to a stronger world community together.

I would be surprised if NATO actually dissolves, as I think that would force Europe to federate in order to prevent the return of national armies to national control. But if America tires of policing the world, or can no longer provide the necessary security, Europe may have to pull together to defend itself. That moment could be fifteen or twenty years from today.

"But then of course a large part of the European elite soldiers on in blinkered fashion with the project of creating an ever wider and deeper Union -- blithely ignoring the fact that popular opinion is not behind them."

"It sometimes happens that couples whose marriage is in difficulty have a baby, in the hope that this will keep them together. But often they break up in any case, and the existence of the baby causes massive problems!"

One of the posters at the Atlantic Community website described Europe as an orchestra of poorly tuned instruments :) But it may sound better to South America, Africa, and other regions that have ambitions of closer integration. If the example of Europe succeeds in bringing the rest of the world to a more civil kind of society, it may improve the world despite itself.
 

Re: Rogozin:

Have you two seen the ad Rogozin starred in for the Rodina Party in 2005, where he and an old man come across a group of Azerbaijanis eating watermelon (yes, watermelon) in a park, tossing the seeds and insults at a respectable Russian mother pushing a tram, only to be stopped by Rogozin, who says, "Excuse me, can you pick up this mess?" and then the old man puts a firm hand on the shoulder of one of the Azeris, "Do you speak Russian???"

BTW Mr. Habbakuk, I would be interested in reposting your articles on the Russia-Ukraine-Crimea issue at Russia Blog.
 

Mr. Billington,

"There were two State of the Union addresses in 2006, one by the President of the United States and one by the President of Russia. Guess which one mentioned Franklin Roosevelt in a flattering way."

That of President Putin, of course. And here's why. Roosevelt believed in actual cooperation, as opposed to the Bush-Clinton-Bush practice of "Here's what you've got to do next. Here's some more sh#t for your face." The Russian government remains open to real cooperation, on a wide range of issues. What is required is Western efforts to deal seriously with Russian views and proposals.

If not, well, the West needs Russia far more than Russia needs the West, so if the West wants to play hardball they will find a formidable Russian team on the other side, in an immensely strong position.
 

David Habakkuk said...

Charles:

If you are interested in reposting anything of mine over at Russia Blog, I would be most happy.

David Billington,

Re the position of the Ukrainian language in the early twentieth century.

Perhaps a British analogy, drawn from my own family experience, may be helpful.

My grandfather came from a town in South Wales, Barry, which was created out of nothing in 1884 in to export the 'steam coals' which were then the only fuel which could provide the pressure required by fighting warships and express trains.

One of its creators was an ethnic Welsh enterpreneur called David Davies. He told his countrymen bluntly: if you want to go on eating black bread and sleeping on straw, then say 'let the Welsh language live for ever'. But if you want to eat white bread, he informed them, they needed to English.

They did. The Welsh grammar school movement which sprang up towards the end of the century provided education in English -- then as later, its proponents, including my grandfather, thought there was nothing an expensive British private school could do that a Welsh local authority school could not do as well or better.

Although education certainly opened up massive opportunities for the Welsh in a globalising economy -- Welsh ironmasters were active all over the world, notably in the Ukraine -- this was not simply a matter of economics. Young people who came through these schools -- some like my grandmother who really were from a peasant background -- soaked up the intellectual and cultural ferment of the time.

But this was all in the English language. Quite deliberately, my grandparents did not teach their children Welsh.

While the Russian and British situations are very different, one thing they have in common was that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw both dramatic industrial growth intellectual and cultural creativity.

Certainly there was a Ukrainian literature. But compared with the great flowering of Russian literature and art of the pre- and immediate post-revolutionary period, Ukrainian literature was I suspect hardly more significant for many of the ambitious young than Welsh literature was for my grandparents. (What would you prefer: to write in the language of Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov -- or that of Shevchenko?)

This did not mean that my grandparents did not feel Welsh. As to my father, it depended upon whom he was talking to. Confronted by Englishmen from expensive schools, he tended to feel extremely Welsh. But for what he saw as sentimental Welsh linguistic nationalism, he had the contempt David Davies had had.

But he was never forced to choose. And where people have complexities of identity, it really is imperative to try to avoid putting different parts of people's sense of themselves in conflict. Those Ukrainian nationalists who portray the Stalin-inflicted famine as something deliberately done by Russians against Ukrainians are neglecting this basic principle.

It was essentially the same point about the need not to bring identities into conflict that was disregarded by the British and Americans in Iraq -- although the key issue was sectarianism rather than ethnicity/language. They assumed that Iraq was a cohesive 'nation', disregarding sectarianism. In fact, it was a place where there were strong sectarian identities -- but also a lot of people with mixed and complicated identities. The policies pursued after the toppling of Saddam actually pushed people into having to choose -- leading to an extreme sectarian polarization, which will be very difficult to reverse.
 

"But he was never forced to choose."

I think this is the difference that matters.

"The policies pursued after the toppling of Saddam actually pushed people into having to choose -- leading to an extreme sectarian polarization, which will be very difficult to reverse."

I believe the Iraqis now have half a million men under arms and I doubt there is much more we can do in terms of providing security. The question is whether the constitutional framework can win sufficient allegiance to work. I guess we will know the answer over the next year.