When trying to decipher what is going on in Ukraine, observers should recall that this scenario has played out several times before.
The last time was in the years 1979 to 1983. Then, an explosive mixture of Soviet foreign intervention, a growing nuclear threat, lucrative German trade deals with Moscow, and, perhaps above all, weak U.S. leadership nearly tore the Western alliance apart.
That era produced the largest and most virulent anti-U.S. peace movement of the postwar period. It witnessed a major U.S.-European dispute over the sale of a large-diameter gas pipeline to the Soviet Union. It also ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These elements are again at the center of conflict. And again, the stakes are high.
Thirty-five years ago, perceived weakness vis-à-vis Russia cost one U.S. president his job after only one term. The current incumbent, Barack Obama, has often been compared with Jimmy Carter. However, Obama has emerged strongly to condemn Russian behavior and promise a firm U.S. reaction to any further incursion into Ukrainian territory.
Unfortunately, just as in Carter’s time, Obama’s strong words came after a long period of U.S. neglect of the transatlantic relationship. As he pivoted toward China, Obama seemed to have forgotten that the European project was far from complete.
Obama ignored repeated Russian warnings that Moscow’s goal was not partnership with the West but the construction of a competing center of power. No one seemed to take this message seriously until several hundred thousand Ukrainians spelled out the truth on Kiev’s Independence Square.
At the heart of the problem in 2014, as in 1982, is a petulant, unstable Russia that has not moved beyond anger and resentment over the decline of its big-power status.
True to his KGB inheritance, Russian President Vladimir Putin has systematically created crises on his borders as a means of drawing attention away from Russia’s declining fortunes. As in the 1980s, Russian frustration has been deepened by a growing Westward focus of one of the main pillars of its world. Then, it was a Poland unsettled by the anti-Communist Solidarność movement. Today, it is Ukraine.
After several weeks of heavy debate, the Ukraine crisis has reached a standoff of sorts. Russia now has Crimea, but it is being severely punished by the markets and, to some extent, by Western sanctions. As in 1982, Russia’s threat of further military confrontation could end in economic collapse. Russia seems almost to be taunting the West by amassing troops on the Ukrainian border and stationing short-range missiles close to Poland and the Baltic states.
There is also evidence that the range of Russia’s new R-500 cruise missile exceeds the limits prescribed in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a 1987 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both classes of weapons would be able to reach Germany.
Moscow’s overstretch in the 1980s marked the last serious Soviet effort to stabilize its own world by overturning the postwar European order. It also sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Similarly, Putin’s invasion of Crimea seems aimed at firming up his domestic power base by destroying the post–Cold War order. He too is destined to fail.
In 1982, the decision by the then German chancellor Helmut Kohl to defy the peace movement and to station U.S. medium-range missiles in Germany took the wind out of Soviet sails and ushered in the Soviet collapse. Today, globally interlocking financial networks will rapidly transfer resources out of Russia with each new altercation with the West. Punishment will come much faster than it did for the largely isolated Soviet Union.
But upheaval will come to the Atlantic world, too.
The West has learned to its dismay that even in a globally networked world, Russia continues to define diplomacy as a zero-sum game. No amount of EU democracy building can erase the damage done when Russia repudiates the post–Cold War settlement. Europe’s history has been a continuous and often violent ordering and reordering of borders and peoples. These ethnic confrontations and the continuing euro crisis have combined to invalidate a central element of the European vision.
The West must also heed a further warning from the past: aggressive behavior in Russia is more likely to draw German compliance than opposition. In the 1980s, the fear of war with Russia had risen to a fever pitch. Even the most senior levels of the German political and business elite began to question the wisdom of continued Western demands for German reunification.
Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s historic speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate burst this bubble. His famous words were aimed not at the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev but at Bonn. Amid growing concerns about flagging German commitments, the United States decided to make a clear statement that Germany should not question the rights of the Four Powers upon which postwar Western security had been based.
This time round, it is the EU that is likely to be the butt of German fears. The EU has not succeeded in achieving either of Germany’s essential psychological requirements—internal fiscal stability and completion of the European project with Russian participation.
Americans often misjudge the depth of German psychological dependence on achieving this goal. They look at Russian economic and military power and conclude that it is too weak to cause trouble in Europe anymore. But it is exactly this weakness that helps Russia dig deeply into Germany’s almost pathological fear of conflict with the East. An American “retilt” toward Europe is more than overdue.
John Kornblum is a senior counselor at Noerr LLP and a former U.S. ambassador to Germany.
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