As I write this on Sunday 13 February, the New York Times is reporting that there are credible plans for a Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday, so this may prove to be a very unwise little blog to post, because from what I can see all the advantages for Putin lie in not invading Ukraine. He has achieved his goal, which is to get the Europeans to acknowledge that the European security architecture is not secure and that Russia has legitimate complaints that need to be addressed. His previous actions in Georgia and the Donbass restrict the sympathy in France and Germany for his view, but do not eliminate it.
Putin is aware, as are we all, that the Ukraine crisis is useful for the US for two reasons. It creates a context where it can call on its European allies to rally around the NATO flag and so reassert American leadership/hegemony after the Trump hiatus. It also opens up a space for a power move in energy politics that would make Europe more dependent on US sources of gas. However the EU, France and Germany in particular, clearly has decided that the US can no longer be relied on to guarantee the European peace and certainly does not wish to pursue the energy transition on US terms. The EU is also strongly pursuing a strategy of digital sovereignty which is deliberately hostile to the US digital giants. One of the most important pieces of leverage the US can exert within the EU is the Eastern members' reasonable fear of Russian revanchism. If Putin actually invades all these dominos fall and the prospect of an independent European geopolitics recedes for another decade.
So how does this end? If Ukraine were to independently renounce any aspiration to join NATO, but were to be fast-tracked into the EU (which has a set of other neutrals like ourselves and the Swedes), that would meet everyone's needs, except the Americans. Ukraine gets to be firmly embedded in a robust international institution. France gets the independent European geopolitical activity and credit for solving the crisis, Russia gets to negotiate in a European space, where it can carry enormous weight. Germany can continue to denuclearise, and Europe gets the room to build the energy infrastructure linking the wind farms in the Atlantic to the solar panels in the Mediterranean that it has planned for 15 years. Russian gas enables the transition, which clearly creates its own issues, but that can be managed in what we in Ireland refer to as the totality of relationships. Over the medium term that dependency will wane.
The loser in any deal like this would be the US. This kind of deal is the European-led alternative to the strategy of containment through confrontation favoured by Washington. And Washington may be right. Russia may be an insatiable destablising international actor. The problem for Europe is that the risk of the US being led in the near future by an ethnic nationalist is higher, so over the medium term, even if one favours the more hard-line stance toward Russia, how can one be sure it will be sustained? Better to create what Mitterand called our common European home.
Putin, like Sun-Tzu, may well win the battle without ever having to fight, as long as the war he is trying to fight is for Russia's place in Europe and not the re-establishment of the Russian empire. And for Ireland? We live within constrained sovereignty, and completely understand that we simply can't do anything in international politics that threatens the real interests of our neighbours. I'm sure Ukraine understands that too. The beauty of the European model of collective security is that it allows us to have effective sovereignty, but to exercise that means accepting limitations. It also means, for Ireland, having to accept responsibility for our security, and taking up the same military stance as the other European neutrals. The Report of the Commission on the Defence Forces published this week, very much moves Irish foreign policy in this direction.
Given the strategic setback he can inflict on the US by not invading why would he possibly resort to force? The lure of the easy military victory may prove too strong, but there are very recent examples that illustrate how little is gained by those sort of victories.
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