[Ira Straus on Ukraine, NATO] re JRL-2014#201 (Adomanis)

NATO meeting file photo

From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com
Subject: re JRL-2014#201 (Adomanis)
Date: Sept 23, 2014

Re: 11. Forbes.com: Mark Adomanis, Ukrainians Still Don’t Want To Join NATO.

It is disappointing to see such a misleading article, from one of the few pro-Russia writers still around who has generally been accurate and had a grasp of reality.

The article actually does not say anything about what it claims to say. Its contents are only about the views of two of the most pro-Russian oblasts in Ukraine, not about Ukraine as a whole. The problem is that it equates the views of those two oblasts with the views of all Ukraine, when they are in truth far apart — opposite, and separated by 25-30 percentage points.

In reality, for the first time in history some surveys show that a slim plurality of Ukrainians nationwide want to join NATO. Other surveys show a slim plurality against joining.

This is a huge shift in favor of NATO, compared to the past. There had always been a large plurality nationwide in Ukraine, often a supermajority, against joining NATO.

Even in the two Eastern/Southern Ukrainian oblasts that the article is talking about, there has been a major shift toward joining NATO . A strong plurality there is still against it, but far less than just a couple years ago.

What caused the shift is simple: the Russian pressure and invasion. The shift began already during Yanukovych’s last year, in face of the Russian pressures on him to be more authoritarian, crack down more harshly, and join the Eurasian Customs Union. The shift continued with the Russian invasions of Crimea and “Novorossiya”.

Russian pressures on Ukraine have in this way, for the first time in history, created a real possibility of Ukraine joining NATO without and against Russia.

If analysts have led Russia to think that its pressures and attacks on Ukraine have kept it out of NATO, then they have misled Russia badly. It is those very pressures and attacks that have created the only possibility of what Russia and its supporters are presently saying that they are trying to prevent.

One might argue that Russia was misled also, by some other misconceptions peddled by pundits, into thinking it could use NATO rules to keep Ukraine out of NATO, by means of seizing Ukrainian territory.

On this see http://www.atlantic-community.org/-/the-myth-that-ukraine-cannot-join-nato-while-russia-occupies-some-of-its-territo-1 . However, the bulk of the evidence is that the NATO question had nothing to do with Russia’s actions. Russia’s pressures on Yanukovych, and on post-Yanukovych Ukraine, were due to Russia’s fear of the EU as an obstacle to its wish to dominate Ukraine, and its anger at Ukraine even under Yanukovych for not going along all the way with its wishes, an anger that grew into fury later. It overplayed its hand — and pressured Yanukovych into overplaying his hand, but not as much as Russia wanted him to — and its pressures backfired. The NATO question was made up as a rationalization for those pressures after the fact.

In all its years from its formation in 1992 to 2013, the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO patiently explained — to those both in the West and in Russia who were impatiently raising the issue, and raising the diplomatic temperature, from their opposite ends — that there were only two ways Ukraine could ever join NATO: either (1) because Russia was also joining NATO, and so Ukrainians would no longer fear NATO membership as dividing them from Russia; or else (2) because Russia was putting so much hostile pressure on Ukraine that Ukrainians would accept joining NATO as a protection from Russia no matter what the cost to their connections with Russia.

The Committee advocated for the first scenario. It did not anticipate that the second scenario would come to pass. For Russia to put that degree of hostile pressure on Ukraine ran contrary to expectations. But to a significant extent — incompletely, in the ambiguous way everything happens in the real world — the second scenario has now come to pass.

It was Russian pressures, not any kind of Maidan or NATO pressures, that changed the former impossibility of Ukraine’s joining NATO without Russia. It was Russia, and Russia alone, that destroyed what was until very recently the stable, solid guarantee it had from Ukrainian public opinion against Ukraine’s ever joining NATO separately.

Joining alongside Russia would have been by far the preferable scenario. One can blame the West and Russia alike for the failure to make this the main public scenario; for instead leaving public thinking and planning to slide by default into the scenarios of competing pressures on Ukraine from East and West. Conceivably, in the future, the more favorable scenario could be revived. But the reality today is very different.

Whether it would be wise for NATO to let Ukraine join today is a separate question from the simple facts of the matter about Ukrainian public opinion. And a complicated question — far more complicated than it ever was previously. The popular support in Ukraine is still far from what would be desirable, for NATO’s institutional interests, but is far closer to adequate than ever before; and circumstances are not ones of peacetime optimal desirability, they are conditions of invasion and threat of further invasion. This is not the 1990s when NATO membership was promoted largely for the sake of democratic stabilization. It is now a strategic question not a moral reform question: a matter of the risks and necessities of protecting such democracy as exists. One can argue this either way, or several ways; two of the more practical scenarios are given at http://www.atlantic-community.org/-/after-wales-further-steps-for-nato . The optimal scenario remains the one that now looks utopian: for Russia to pull out from its conquests, let the NATO matter revert to the back burner, and give time for the both-join-together scenario to be revived.

Ira Straus
U.S. Coordinator
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO

 

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