Note the reference to the invitation at a Nato summit meeting in Apr 2008 of Ukraine joining Nato. It was OPPOSED by Britain, Germany and France.
Stefan Lemieszewski
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9153271/europes-nightmare-neighbour/
The Spectator
8Mar2014
Europe's 'new world order' is letting Vladimir Putin run riot
Pax Americana died six years ago. We're now seeing what has taken its place
John Sullivan
[ GRAPHIC ]
If Vladimir Putin’s invasion and occupation of the Crimea brings to an end the Pax Americana and the post-Cold War world that began in 1989, what new European, or even global, order is replacing them? That question may seem topical in the light of Russia’s seemingly smooth overriding in Crimea of the diplomatic treaties and legal rules that outlaw aggression, occupation and annexation. In fact, it is six years behind the times.
To understand the situation in the Ukraine, we need to go back to the Nato summit in Bucharest, in April 2008. There, Putin stated Russia’s opposition to the proposal from President George W. Bush that Nato should take the first steps to inviting Georgia and Ukraine to become members. He found unusual allies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, joined by France and Britain, led the opposition to it. The proposal was kicked into touch.
Five months later, Georgia, provoked by Russia’s creeping annexation of its break-away territory, launched an attempt to recover South Ossetia. Five days later, it lost the war to Russian forces — ‘on manoeuvres’, naturally, just across the border. Two Georgian provinces are now sovereign states or, more candidly, de facto Russian provinces.
The moment the Pax Americana’s evaporated was when President Nicolas Sarkozy, representing the French presidency of the EU, jumped on a plane to Moscow to negotiate a ceasefire with Putin on terms that essentially ratified the Russian occupation and annexations. This stopped Bush and Nato from helping to shape the West’s response, which might then have been at least rhetorically tougher.
This shift of power within the alliance from Washington to Berlin-Paris-Brussels was not unwelcome to Bush’s successor. Within six months of taking power, President Obama had cancelled plans for US anti-missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, whose governments had spent much political capital to accept them. In the case of Poland, he made matters worse by informing Warsaw of this decision on 17 September 2009 — the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. It was probably the worst kind of insult: an unintended one.
In July that year, however, 22 alarmed leaders in central and eastern Europe — including Václav Havel and Lech Walesa — had sent an anguished open letter to Obama regretting that his administration was turning away from their region. Was it because he felt that its problems had been solved?
If so, he was wrong on several scores, but especially one: ‘The political impact of [the Russo-Georgian] war on the region has already been felt. Many countries were deeply disturbed to see the Atlantic alliance stand by as Russia violated… the territorial integrity of a country that was a member of Nato’s Partnership for Peace and the Euroatlantic Partnership Council — all in the name of defending a sphere of influence on its borders.’ This was a shrewd but paradoxical point — and for western Europeans a low blow. What the Havels and Walesas wanted from American involvement was not only America’s greater protective power, but also its tougher attitude to Russian claims on its ‘near abroad’.
On paper, the Europeans should have been more critical than Washington towards the treaty and legal violations listed in the letter. For the previous five years, America’s Robert Kagan and Europe’s Robert Cooper had been depicting a West divided between ‘modern’ Hobbesian Americans, who saw international relations in terms of power, and ‘post-modern’ Kantian Europeans, who saw them in terms of law. Both authors caught the rhetoric of their foreign policy establishments accurately enough. If that picture had been fully accurate, however, the Europeans would have been more indignant about Russia’s violations of international law, and more determined to impose legal and other non-military sanctions in response. In fact, they perfected the techniques of not really noticing such things and, when Russia forced them on their attention, of forgetting them as quickly as possible.
Both Kagan and Cooper had recognised that post-modern, law-governed international society needed a policeman to enforce the rules. But Obama’s America had now gone home. Oddly enough, that too seemed to suit the western Europeans, who proceeded on the radical assumption that policemen weren’t necessary in a Kantian continent. Mrs Merkel quickly smoothed over the unpleasantness with Putin in the interests of mutual prosperity. Her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder appealed to the US to ignore the letter. And Obama more or less obliged by sending Vice-President Biden to smooth ruffled feathers in Prague and points east.
So the Pax Americana faded fast away, but it was replaced not by a Pax Europea, but by a vacuum. Ukraine may decide what fills it.
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