Dear CCI Friends,
In my opinion, the most succinct article written about the current Ukraine crisis and its resolution is below. Read it to understand how the United States (and Russia) must deal with the situation to avoid grave calamities including a nuclear war.
Please share your comments with us. We can use them to add more weight to Ambassador Hunter’s succinct diagnosis/prognosis offered below.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
The West Must Accept thatRussia is a Key Player in Europe
Putin has been sending warning signals for over a decade; once the Ukraine crisis is over, nothing will be the same.
February 9, 2022
By Robert E. Hunter
As the United States tries to cope with the crisis in Ukraine, missing so far is a clear sense of “what next?” — that is, once the current imbroglio is over, as inevitably it must be.
As Vladimir Putin continues to keep the West and the world in suspense about his intentions, at least one thing is clear: there will be no going back to the status quo ante. Even if Mr. Putin decides that he has made his point and would like to deescalate, the character of security and other arrangements in Europe will be different from what they were before this crisis.
Russia will henceforth be a “player,” certainly in Europe, to a degree it has not been since the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years ago or at least since the West, in particular the United States, stopped taking seriously legitimate Russian security interests around 1998. For nine years before that, there was a serious attempt to create what George H.W. Bush had called, and Bill Clinton also pursued, a “Europe whole and free” and at peace. From then on, after those U.S. officials who understood the demands of trying to make this grand strategy work had left government, the default position became that, as the “sole superpower,” the United States (along with NATO) could do what it wanted in Europe and Russia be damned.
Looking at what has happened this past year, no one can say that Putin didn’t give fair warning, as early as his presentation in January 2007 at the Munich Security Conference (attended by this author), when he excoriated Washington for trying to have everything its own way. He was ignored. Russia was further ignored when, in 2008, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” not because the allies believed it — they didn’t — but rather to deal with a major misstep by the G.W. Bush administration in its desire to enlarge NATO well beyond what could be needed for Western security.