More Warnings Against Arming the Kiev Regime

As the shrill calls from Washington to send weapons to Ukraine grow in volume, so do the warnings that taking such action would make the crisis worse. Washington Post foreign affairs correspondent Ishaan Tharoor in a blog posting Feb. 11 under the title “3 reasons the U.S. should not arm Ukraine,” quoted a number of experts, among them Jeremy Shapiro of Brookings, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt, as to why this would be a bad idea.

The theme common among them is that Russia is not likely to back down. Tharoor’s ultimate lesson, however, comes from former Carter Administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, in 1979, traveled to Pakistan to work out ways to make the Soviets “bleed for as much and as long as is possible” in their occupation of Afghanistan.

“The legacy of that American plan to build up the Mujahideen and make the Soviets bleed’ is, of course, still being unraveled,” writes Tharoor. “No one wants an Afghanistan scenario, but the calculation behind arming Kiev now is not that different from the one in Brzezinski’s mind more than three decades ago. Sanctions are already in play; some members of Congress think it’s time to apply even more pressure.” He continues, “American interventions almost invariably seem to turn into thorny entanglements with unforeseen complications and consequences.”

“Ultimately, the only imaginable solution is a diplomatic settlement that turns down the heat in the region and allows for rapprochement between Russia and its western neighbors,” Tharoor concludes. “An influx of Western weaponry and military aid could have the opposite effect, paralyzing any hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough and perhaps even prompt a full-scale Russian invasion.”

Like so many others, however, he’s trapped by the axioms of geopolitics and therefore can’t come up with a real, long-term solution to the crisis.

Stephen Walt, in the Foreign Policy essay (“Why Arming Ukraine is a Really, Really Bad Idea”) that Tharoor references, essentially argues that the “deterrence” theory behind the Atlantic Council/Brookings Institution report of last week that calls for providing the Kiev regime $3 billion in arms, is what’s leading us to disaster. The backers of that report, Walt writes, are all defending the policy that has played a central role in creating the crisis in the first place.

“As the critics warned it would, open-ended NATO expansion has done more to poison relations with Russia than any other single Western policy,” he writes.

What applies, instead, Walt argues, is the “spiral model” of international relations, when a country’s apparently aggressive actions are actually motivated by fear and insecurity.

“When insecurity is the taproot of a state’s revisionist actions, making threats just makes the situation worse. When the ‘spiral model’ applies, the proper response is a diplomatic process of accommodation and appeasement (yes, appeasement) to allay the insecure state’s concerns,” Walt writes, which requires “a serious effort to address the insecurities that are motivating the other side’s objectionable behavior.”

In other words, sending in more weapons will escalate the crisis, not cause Russia to back down.

He points out that the crisis didn’t begin with Russian ambitions in Ukraine, but rather Western ambitions to pull Ukraine into the Western sphere of influence.

“The failure of U.S. diplomats to anticipate Putin’s heavy-handed response was an act of remarkable diplomatic incompetence, and one can only wonder why the individuals who helped produce this train wreck still have their jobs,” Walt writes.

“The solution to this crisis is for the United States and its allies to abandon the dangerous and unnecessary goal of endless NATO expansion and do whatever it takes to convince Russia that we want Ukraine to be a neutral buffer state in perpetuity. We should then work with Russia, the EU, and the IMF to develop an economic program that puts that unfortunate country back on its feet,” Walt concludes. “Arming Ukraine, on the other hand, is a recipe for a longer and more destructive conflict. It’s easy to prescribe such actions when you’re safely located in a Washington think tank, but destroying Ukraine in order to save it is hardly smart or morally correct diplomacy.”

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