So Vlad the Terrible is now occupying Ukraine’s version of the Sudetenland. As with 1938 Czechoslovakia, the rest of the country will follow in due course.
Both the 2014 seizure of the Crimea and Russia’s current actions violate the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, in which Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States promised “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” as the first of six items. In return for these assurances, Ukraine surrendered nuclear weapons which were in its hands. I wonder if Ukrainians now think it was wise to trust us?
There are doubtless those who think that turning our back on a country whose borders we swore to maintain is a small price to pay for peace. They are wrong. After taking a few months to digest Ukraine Vlad will likely next turn his attention to the Baltic states, once again claiming that they are mistreating and oppressing their Russian minorities. Because weakness breeds adventurism. So we will rinse and repeat the current crisis – with one notable exception.
The Baltic republics are NATO members, which means the mutual defense obligations of Article 5 apply. If the treaty is to survive, and we are today seeing very good reasons why it should, Russian pressure will have to be vigorously opposed. Whether we have the will to do so anymore is an open question – obviously and particularly in Putin’s mind. He thinks, as aggressive tyrants have thought before, that there is no limit to what he can accomplish against opponents who are weak and feckless. He may be wrong, as others have been in the past – but he better be shown that sooner, rather than later. Before we find ourselves in a war which expands out of control.
Of course it may already be too late. On the other side of the world Vlad’s brother dictator Xi Jinping is doubtless watching the Ukraine crisis unfold with great interest and no little humor. Xi wants Taiwan, and he has created great expectations at home that China will get it – and soon. He is using the same sort of rationale and ratcheting up the same military pressure that Putin did – it’s almost as thought they talked it over when they got together in Beijing for the Olympics. Now he has only to bide his time until the rest of the world is distracted by some great monstrosity in Ukraine to make his move.
Do not doubt: from Tallinn to Taipei, states which have thrown in their lot with the liberal democracies of the West are under threat from the expansionist dictatorships on their borders. This period in both Europe and Asia is every bit as fraught as that of the 1930s, and for the same reasons. We know how that existential challenge came about and was resolved – and at what cost. We know what a close-run thing it was.
And now we have that rare chance to find out what we would have done, had we been there then.
I’m not hopeful.
