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- iHaveNet.com: World
Russia: A Real Risk of War
by William Pfaff
Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea and threat to Ukraine are causing damage he perhaps did not anticipate: disorientation of the United States and profound division in Europe, especially in Germany, and in
American Secretary of State John Kerry has given an interview to the
He is quoted (without confirmation) in another publication notably neo-conservative in outlook, The Daily Beast, as privately describing the Russians as "thugs," and the Russian foreign minister as "a liar." He made an angry attack on the Russian television international service, Russia Today, for declaring that he had threatened
At the same time there is near-silence from the Pentagon and from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and senior commanders, including General Martin Dempsey, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This might be interpreted as prudence on the part of the military men who would bear the price of a war that civilian officials brandish as if only words were the weapons. This was true last year when Mr. Obama was drawing red lines in Syria to the applause of administration civilians motivated by war-like sentiments or the self-righteousness of interventions to save the foreign victims of civil wars from one another. The military men looked on apprehensively.
An echo to Mr. Kerry's belligerence has come from
This agitation in Washington finds little counterpart in NATO Europe, to the dismay and sometimes anger of Washington officials and commentators, who put it down to Europeans' material and moral weaknesses. Of all the European countries, only Britain and France possess forces (including nuclear forces) which are capable of independent national action in all the dimensions of warfare. The other
European critics of this stance, such as Clemens Wergin, the foreign editor of the German Die Welt group, denounce those Europeans who defend or rationalize Vladimir Putin's policies as effectively bribed by European economic ties to Russia; or as reactionaries who share president Putin's hostility to the modern West's secular values, moral lassitude, lack of discipline and leadership, and abandonment of religion; or they are simply anti-American.
These are not accusations that can be applied to such a figure as Helmut Schmidt, Germany's strongest and most important Chancellor of the Cold War years, who first of all says that the U.S.,
As this column, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger in the past, and many others in Western Europe and the U.S. have warned many times, the deliberate and humiliating extension of
It is extremely dangerous because Ukraine itself now has a provisional government in Kiev of extreme weakness and utterly confused goals and expectations. Its police are incompetent and corrupt and its army obsolete in equipment, with troops of dubious competence, divided by the same forces that divide society. It is incapable of imposing order.
It is inconceivable that a re-united and pro-western Ukraine will come out of this. The country is already divided. Realism says: so be it. Let the regions vote. If the Russian-speakers want a referendum, let them have it -- as free, impartial, and competently supervised as the international community can manage.
Would Russia cooperate?
It offers a way to get what it wants without fighting for it. Would the people accept the outcome? Not every Russian-speaker wants to be a Russian. A nation permanently divided? Let everyone find out. Would there be a Yugoslav-style civil war? If one began after a referendum, the international community might be able to intervene immediately and halt it. Russia would have an interest in stopping it because of its possible ramifications inside Russia itself. Wars are uncontrollable. Russia might be on the verge of finding that out.
Available at Amazon.com:
Archie Brown, Russia: A Real Risk of War: Political Leadership in the Modern Age
Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective
Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History
Article: Copyright ©, Tribune Content Agency, LLC
"Russia: A Real Risk of War"