Regarding Russia and Ukraine, where are the statesmen?

I remember well the fear over the presence of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. The U.S. was so alarmed about these missiles near its shore that it enacted a quarantine/ blockade of Cuba, risking a nuclear confrontation. The U.S. clearly ignored Cuba’s sovereignty and its right to have those missiles.

Fortunately, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev reached a compromise. The Soviet Union agreed to remove their missiles in exchange for the U.S. promise not to invade Cuba again and for the U.S. removal of its nuclear-armed missiles from Turkey.

Incredibly, we are now moving closer to another nuclear crisis over a similar situation. It’s now Russia that’s concerned over the possibility of NATO weapons and forces near its borders, particularly in Ukraine.

In December 2021 the U.S. rejected Russian proposals about its security concerns. Russia then invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Some history might help our understanding of this current situation. After the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. and West Germany pushed for reunification of Germany. Secretary of State James Baker (under President H.W. Bush) promised that if the Soviets would allow reunification, NATO wouldn’t expand farther east.

This promise was key for the Soviets who suffered previous devastating invasions by Western European nations. For example, during WWII estimates are that the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people, about 13% of its 1939 population. The Soviet Union was thus understandably concerned about a possibly hostile military alliance coming closer to its border.

President Bill Clinton was the first of four U.S. presidents who broke this promise. In 1998, Thomas Friedman solicited George Kennan’s reaction to the Senate’s ratification of NATO’S eastward expansion. Kennan, architect of the U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union after WWII, said: ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

This expansion continued despite increasingly stronger Russian protests and warnings from U.S experts. For example, William Burns, the current CIA Director, has been long involved in U.S. relations with Russia. According to a Feb. 7, 2022, article by Peter Beinart, on the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Promise Ukraine membership in NATO, he wrote, and “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.” Beinart’s article includes quotes from several other U.S. officials raising similar points.

As a further provocation, the U.S. strongly supported the far-right’s violent coup against Ukraine’s democratically elected President Yanukovych in 2014. This coup, besides yielding a strongly PRO-NATO president, led to a deadly civil war in eastern Ukraine for the past eight-plus years and to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Germany and France shepherded negotiations allegedly designed to end the civil war but, appallingly, the negotiations weren’t in good faith. Instead they bought time for Ukraine to build up its military.

The U.S. and other NATO nations have responded to the 2022 Russian aggression by undermining negotiations and by providing Ukraine with ever more powerful weapons to defend itself/defeat Russia. As the war drags on, it appears that neither side is likely to win a decisive victory. More importantly, the continued military escalation increases the risk of a nuclear disaster. It’s past time for negotiations and compromises to end the destruction of Ukraine and the horrific killing and suffering. Sadly, when we need statesmen, our political establishment thinks escalating war is a sane policy.