A culpa do conflito que se verifica na Ucrânia, como é do conhecimento geral das pessoas honestas e razoavelmente informadas, é dos Estados Unidos e da União Europeia.
Surpreendentemente, a própria revista
"Foreign Affairs" partilha dessa opinião, o que nos faz supor que "está o mundo às avessas".
Transcreve-se o artigo:
Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
According to the prevailing
wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on
Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes,
annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet
empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as
other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext
for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its
European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The
taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a
larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it
into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the
West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning
with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since
the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement,
and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand
by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western
bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically
elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup”
-- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he
feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine
until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After
all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its
core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and
repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided
by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international
politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little
relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole
and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law,
economic interdependence, and democracy.
But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis
there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore
it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in
attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border.
Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even
greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.
U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border.
THE WESTERN AFFRONT
As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders
preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an
arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But
they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger
and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The
Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the
mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.
The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and
brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred
in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start.
During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for
example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign
of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian
Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the
whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail
NATO’s eastward movement -- which, at any rate, did not look so
threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia,
save for the tiny Baltic countries.
Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008
summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and
Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but
France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly
antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the
alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it
issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and
boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”
Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a
compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister,
said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge
strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for
pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two
countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One
Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very
transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would
cease to exist.”
Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have
dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent
Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO,
had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist
regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia
weak and divided -- and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between
the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces
took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point.
Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal
of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion
continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in
2009.
The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it
unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster
prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU
economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to
their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was
forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the
EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the
eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO
expansion.
The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow
has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in
Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding
pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S.
assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs,
estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than
$5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.”
As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National
Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than
60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s
president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.”
After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010,
the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its
efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s
democratic institutions.
When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in
Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears
are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post,
“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the
ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added:
“Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing
end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
CREATING A CRISIS
Imagine the American outrage if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico.
The West’s triple package of policies -- NATO enlargement,
EU expansion, and democracy promotion -- added fuel to a fire waiting
to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a
major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to
accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave
rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following
three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one
hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve
the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a
deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were
held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the
next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to
the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could
legitimately be labeled neofascists.
Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not
yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland
and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment
demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,
proclaimed after Yanukovych’s toppling that it was “a day for the
history books.” As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had
advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy
Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did.
No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in
Yanukovych’s ouster.
For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West
had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to
take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into
Russia. The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of
Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of
Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians
compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of
Ukraine.
Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in
Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making
it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he
would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep.
Toward that end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support
to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the
country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian
border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the
rebels. And he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia
sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports. Putin is playing
hardball.
THE DIAGNOSIS
Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge
expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi
Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a
buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian
leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy
until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand
idly by while the West helped install a government there that was
determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should
understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers
are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory.
After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers
deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less
on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an
impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in
it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on
many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and
Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries
against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made
crystal clear.
Officials from the United States and its European allies
contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow
should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to
continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia,
the alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new
member states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia
Council in an effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia,
the United States announced in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile
defense system on warships in European waters, at least initially,
rather than on Czech or Polish territory. But none of these measures
worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO enlargement,
especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians, not the
West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.
To understand why the West, especially the United States,
failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork
for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when
the Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits
advanced a variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there
was no consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the
United States and their relatives, for example, strongly supported
expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect such countries as Hungary
and Poland. A few realists also favored the policy because they thought
Russia still needed to be contained.
But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a
declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional
economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that
enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in
eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this
perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved
the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually
react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I
think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever.
No one was threatening anyone else.”
The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer.
Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement,
including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed
that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international
politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist
logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the
“indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it;
it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat
in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look
like western Europe.
And so the United States and its allies sought to
promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic
interdependence among them, and embed them in international
institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had
little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO
enlargement. After all, given the EU’s past achievements, Europeans were
even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer
mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in
Europe.
So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse
about European security during the first decade of this century that
even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO
expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now
accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President
Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked
repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those
ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view
of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis
reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first
century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country
on completely trumped-up pretext.”
In essence, the two sides have been operating with
different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and
acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts
have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The
result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a
major crisis over Ukraine.
BLAME GAME
In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO
expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of
expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians
are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the
real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational,
telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt
has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is
mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who
should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign
policy.
Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets
the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by
expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation, Putin,
having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is
right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will
eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia’s
neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf
Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake
of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain Russia
before it dominates its neighbors and threatens western Europe.
This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin
were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions
would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is
virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any
other territory in Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who
supported NATO expansion were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was
about to use military force. Putin’s actions in Crimea took them by
complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous reaction to
Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin said he opposed Crimean
secession, before quickly changing his mind.
Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability
to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire
country. Roughly 15 million people -- one-third of Ukraine’s population
-- live between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the
Russian border. An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain
part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation.
Furthermore, Russia’s mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning
into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of
Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly
occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the
resulting sanctions.
But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine
and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to
successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S.
experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq,
and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military
occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to
subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to
events there has been defensive, not offensive.
A WAY OUT
Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that
Putin’s behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it
is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on
their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further
aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that “all options are on the
table,” neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to
use force to defend Ukraine. The West is relying instead on economic
sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection
in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place
their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level
individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile
banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened to
unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of
the Russian economy.
Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are
likely off the table anyway; western European countries, especially
Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might
retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if
the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures,
Putin would probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that
countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect
their core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia
represents an exception to this rule.
Western leaders have also clung to the provocative
policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S.
Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told
them, “This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise
made by the Orange Revolution.” John Brennan, the director of the CIA,
did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the
White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the
Ukrainian government.
The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern
Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the
European Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, “We have
a debt, a duty of solidarity with that country, and we will work to
have them as close as possible to us.” And sure enough, on June 27, the
EU and Ukraine signed the economic agreement that Yanukovych had
fatefully rejected seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of
NATO members’ foreign ministers, it was agreed that the alliance would
remain open to new members, although the foreign ministers refrained
from mentioning Ukraine by name. “No third country has a veto over NATO
enlargement,” announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general.
The foreign ministers also agreed to support various measures to
improve Ukraine’s military capabilities in such areas as command and
control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally
recoiled at these actions; the West’s response to the crisis will only
make a bad situation worse.
There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however --
although it would require the West to think about the country in a
fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon
their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral
buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the
Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so
much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there.
This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government would have to be
pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the contrary, the goal should be a
sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western
camp.
To achieve this end, the United States and its allies
should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine.
The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine
funded jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and
the United States -- a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its
interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank.
And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts
inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western support for another
Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S. and European leaders should
encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights, especially the language
rights of its Russian speakers.
Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this
late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world.
There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a
misguided strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries
are likely to respect a state that learns from its mistakes and
ultimately devises a policy that deals effectively with the problem at
hand. That option is clearly open to the United States.
One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to
determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to
prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine
to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might
often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights
such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states
get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a
military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United
States certainly did not think so, and the Russians think the same way
about Ukraine joining the West. It is in Ukraine’s interest to
understand these facts of life and tread carefully when dealing with its
more powerful neighbor.
Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes
that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact
remains that the United States and its European allies have the right
to reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to
accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign
policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the
dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will
cause, especially for the Ukrainian people.
Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled
relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia
constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time --
and that the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present
policy. But this viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining
power, and it will only get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a
rising power, moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate
Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States and its
European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest,
as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has
proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO
member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has
expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never
have to honor its new security guarantees, but Russia’s recent power
play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and
the West on a collision course.
Sticking with the current policy would also complicate
Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States needs
Russia’s assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through
Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize
the situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all
three of these issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin
who pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under
which Syria agreed to relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding
the U.S. military strike that Obama had threatened. The United States
will also someday need Russia’s help containing a rising China. Current
U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer
together.
The United States and its European allies now face a
choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will
exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process
-- a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can
switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one
that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its
relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.
