Valdai Club

When the Ukraine crisis began, Obama allowed US officials on the ground to pursue a grossly irresponsible and provocative anti-Russian policy without any possibility of the real economic or military policy to back it up.

When the Ukraine crisis began, Obama allowed US officials on the ground to pursue a grossly irresponsible and provocative anti-Russian policy without any possibility of the real economic or military policy to back it up.

The immediate crisis in Ukraine in 2014 was not of America’s making. After the Georgia debacle of 2008, Obama had in effect suspended the strategy of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia. The crisis in Ukraine stemmed from Russia’s attempt to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Union, and the determination of certain EU members (notably the Poles and Swedes) to block this by offering the Ukrainians instead a vague and grossly underfunded “Association Agreement”.

But when the crisis began, Obama allowed US officials on the ground to pursue a grossly irresponsible and provocative anti-Russian policy without any possibility of the real economic or military policy to back it up. Since then, the USA has acquiesced in the Minsk Agreement, but has made no serious effort whatsoever to get the Ukrainian side to fulfill its terms. What on earth, one may ask, was Victoria Nuland, a neo-conservative State Department official married to the arch neo-con Robert Kagan, doing in the Obama administration at all, given that her attitudes run clearly counter to his?
The answer is the figures like Nuland are still favoured by Hillary Clinton (Kagan is now moving into her political camp) ad much of the US foreign and security establishment; and that with regard to Russia, that establishment is still conditioned to pursue what are in effect Cold War attitudes. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Communism, the rise of China and of Islamist terrorism and extremism – none of these developments have had any real effect in changing these attitudes. To change them would require a President closely involved in and informed about issues concerning Russia, with a political mandate far stronger than Obama’s, and with a Secretary of State he could fully trust.

A much bigger danger is one that is rarely seen as an Obama mistake, but which could prove a vastly greater one than the continued hostility to Russia.

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