On Wednesday, 16 March, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken declared that the sanctions against Russia would last until it was no longer possible for it to launch another such attack against an adjoining country. That statement is either grandiose political rhetoric or a manifesto for change, not just in Russia’s regime, but in its political culture and military capabilities.
In an NPR interview, Blinken “insisted that U.S. sanctions against Russia are ‘not designed to be permanent,’ and that they could ‘go away’ if Russia should change its behavior. But he said any Russian pullback would have to be, ‘in effect, irreversible,’ so that ‘this can't happen again, that Russia won't pick up and do exactly what it's doing in a year or two years or three years’.”
As stated, the declaration is right as a matter of policy but wrong by implied practice. Russia has attacked Ukraine with tanks, artillery, rockets, drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and jets, and has threatened to use weapons of mass destruction like chemical weapons and nuclear bombs. Unless its conventional military weaponry is reduced to the minimum to protect borders and preserve order, and its WMD arsenals eliminated, Russia will be able to resume such an attack on any bordering state the day after it withdraws from Ukraine. Unless its military capability is thus radically diminished, “irreversibility” is an impossibility and a temporary postponement a palliative. The policy is right, its demands daunting.
For the past few centuries, Russia has been imperialistic because it is paranoiac. Its paranoia goes back to the Tatar and Mongol invasions from eastern and central Asia in medieval and renaissance times. In modern times, the invasions of Napoleonic France and Hitler Germany from western Europe have reinforced Russia’s traditional fears of brutal attacks. As the dominant member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russia installed friendly governments in the occupied countries of eastern Europe throughout the Cold War to provide a buffer on its western border. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, constituent Soviet states established their independent countries and governments. Within a decade, Putin ascended to power in 2000 and has worked to expand Russia’s authority or boundaries to these adjacent states; Ukraine is merely the latest such effort. Since paranoia knows no bounds, Russia’s paranoia seeks protection, its efforts manifest in its imperialistic tendencies to expand its boundaries, thereby to increase protection from real or imagined foreign invasions.
Nothing that any country or group of countries can do can soon or significantly reform Russia’s political culture based on its paranoia. Putin’s defeat in Ukraine, whether by military eviction or political erosion, will establish an opportunity to revise the current international order in Europe and much of the world. That opportunity requires a resolve for which NATO countries are not known, not to waste Ukrainian sacrifice and heroism, and the triumph of democracy in eastern Europe on a short-term pause in hostilities By now, NATO countries should realize that short-term peace with Russia would be no more than a prelude to another war with Russia.
The end of war in Ukraine enables its reconstruction and requires the reconstitution of Russia. Presently, a third-world country with nuclear weapons, Russia must rebuild itself as a third-world country without them. Much of the impetus to rebuild must come from sustained sanctions. Just as sanctions are playing a large role in Russia’s defeat, so they should be maintained to ensure that Russia’s economy remains too impoverished to support a large role in international affairs, whether military, political, or economic, for the foreseeable future. Sanctions should impose such high domestic costs on Russia that it cannot afford to attack neighboring countries or continue to occupy previously seized territories.
To achieve this goal, NATO’s objectives should be to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, to enable the emergence of new Russian leadership to establish a non-totalitarian government, and thereby to disarm its imperialistic, paranoiac impulses. Until these objectives are reached, sanctions in all their rigor should continue. The price of lifting them should be the prior, complete elimination of strategic offensive weapons and weapon systems—missiles, drones, bombers, and submarines—; the elimination of nuclear munitions, chemical stockpiles, their delivery systems, and related production and storage facilities; and the implementation of an unfettered NATO inspection regime. All lifted sanctions should have a snap-back mechanism for violations.
The issue is whether NATO wants to win the battle for Ukraine but lose the war for peace—or not. To make Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine “irreversible” and not merely to postpone renewed Russian aggression there or elsewhere for “a year or two years or three years” requires a collective determination to prevent Russia from re-arming and to keep it disarmed. Otherwise, history will repeat itself. NATO will repeat the mistakes of the Allies after World War I which allowed Germany, resentful and revengeful after defeat, to re-arm—with World War II the result. If it repeats those mistakes, NATO will face an even more belligerent, better prepared, and more determined Russia. That likelihood means one thing: NATO can win the war, cannot win the peace, and will risk World War III.
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