Mahir Ali :
Last week’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) summit in the Welsh city of Newport was hyped up as a momentous occasion that would reinforce the relevance of the Western military alliance, which has struggled to identify a raison d’etre since the collapse of European communism.
Its role in the post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan has turned out to have been less than a resounding success. Likewise its incredibly misguided intervention in Libya three years ago, which facilitated the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi but in its wake left an utter mess that is yet to be sorted out.
The consequences of whatever actions Nato undertakes in Iraq may well turn out to be equally uncongenial, but the forays of the so-called ISIS have nonetheless offered it some kind of goal to strive for. Inevitably, that provided a significant agenda item for Newport – which, incidentally, was hosting the first Nato summit on British territory since 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.
The current host, David Cameron, signposted an even more key concern, meanwhile, when he told a European Union summit in Brussels the previous week, contributing to the hot air over Ukraine: “We run the risks of repeating the mistakes made in Munich in ’38… This time we cannot meet [Vladimir] Putin’s demands. He has already taken Crimea and we cannot allow him to take the whole country.”
Although Ukraine is not a Nato member state, the problems in its east have provided the alliance with a European crisis to tackle. Even before the Western leaders congregated in Newport, there were indications that a rapid response force would be proposed as a means of challenging Russian aggression. Such a force did indeed turn out to be one of the more cogent outcomes of the summit, even though its deployment in Ukraine is more or less out of the question. Beyond that, however, Putin deftly blunted Nato’s potential sting by proposing a ceasefire plan for eastern Ukraine and persuading his counterpart in Kiev, Petro Poroshenko, to accept it.
Poroshenko was a lionised guest in Newport, and undermining his declared aims would have put Nato in an absurd position. Thus outmaneuvered by Putin, it could do little else but to lamely endorse the truce, possibly in the expectation that it would be violated sooner or later, validating its narrative about Moscow’s belligerence.
The Ukrainian president communicates frequently with his Russian counterpart, which is evidently crucial in maintaining the ceasefire declared last Friday following talks in Minsk between government and rebel representatives.
There have been violations, but none of them serious enough to jeopardise the truce – although that is no guarantee it will hold for very long.
In the days before the Soviet Union conclusively imploded, the US administration endorsed Mikhail Gorbachev’s view that Moscow’s militarily withdrawal from Eastern Europe must not presage an expansion of Nato. That spoken agreement has subsequently been violated with impunity. Ukraine and Belarus are among the only former Soviet republics to Russia’s west that have not been sucked into an alliance that has lately once again demonstrated that it has not substantially shifted from its anti-Russian moorings.
Cameron’s reference to 1938 was intended as a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” pact with Adolf Hitler, which shortly thereafter proved unsustainable. When Russia looks pack to that period, it sees the absence of buffer states that exposed it to a lightning Nazi invasion.
Josef Stalin’s appeal to nationalism, rather than communism, was crucial in the Soviet defeat of the Nazi menace – notwithstanding the collaborators who cropped up in the Baltic republics as well as Ukraine. The significance of the fact that the authorities in Kiev enjoy neo-Nazi support is not lost either on Moscow or on the Russian-speaking Ukrainians who dominate the country’s east. Many of them are determined to secure independence, but autonomy within a Ukrainian context should suffice, provided Russia is willing – as it appears to be.
Putin is in many respects a nasty character, who last week warned the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, that if he gave the word, his forces could take Kiev within a fortnight. That would, obviously, be an incredibly stupid step, and there are no indications that Putin intends to take it. But it certainly wouldn’t pay to provoke him, thereby feeding into a frenzy that could unleash a third world war.
It’s a delicate situation out there in Ukraine. But it can be handled relatively peacefully, provided the idiotic likes of Cameron and Yatsenyuk can be dissuaded from provoking a catastrophe.
(Mahir Ali is based in Sydney)
