Apologies to Ukraine

My apologies to the people of Ukraine.  Our leaders continue to rant and rave as if they are going to risk military confrontation with Russia over the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, as if Russia can be forced to hand back Crimea.  It's cruel, the false hopes they persist in encouraging.  They're liars, and they can't admit the truth.

Sorry to have to say it, but the Ukraine you knew is gone...forever, and no amount of bluster or outrage will bring it back.  No, it isn't fair, but as parents say to their children, life isn't either.  And we tolerate plenty of unfairness we could do something about, never mind the things we can't.  Men earning more than women isn't fair, or whites earning more than minorities, or CEO's earning multiples in the hundreds of what their lowest paid employees get.  We tolerate income inequality, just as we tolerate homelessness, poor families going hungry, disproportionate incarceration of minorities, businesses colluding against consumers, politicians selling their office to the highest bidder.  We imprison whistleblowers pointing out the crimes of our governments, whilst war criminals go free.  We have an exceptionally high tolerance for unfairness generally.

And as for unfair territorial disputes or questions of sovereignty ?  We allow our greatest trading partner to bully its neighbours, and persistently threaten one of them (a peaceful democratic ally of ours) with use of military force up to and including nuclear weapons.  We've allowed an entire population in the West Bank and Gaza to be held hostage as political pawns, to be kept in amber as a perpetual 'refugee' population, decades after the wars that made them refugees.  We allow a population of twenty-five million in North Korea to be imprisoned under an insane radical dictatorship that threatens us with nuclear war because it suits the People's Republic of China to have it there between them and US-ally South Korea as a buffer state.  We won't be waging any 'wars of liberation' in North Korea anytime soon, will we ?  An entire state sacrificed for the realpolitik concerns of China, and we won't do anything about it...because we can't.




So what, that's different because Ukraine is European ?  And the sovereignty of European states must remain inviolate, unlike say all those countries whose borders are violated on a regular basis by the US military ?  We topple 'regimes' at whim all over the world (many of which we created in the first place), when it suits us.  We invaded a country in 1989 so that George Herbert Walker Bush could look tough we could arrest its leader on drugs charges -- a leader we once trained and funded.  We only recently began to draw down our efforts at 'regime change' in Cuba, just this last year, more than five decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis.  And just this last year we encouraged and abetted the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Ukr.....Whoops

When it suits our interests and we have the ability to act, we will, sovereignty be damned, territorial integrity be damned.  There aren't many countries that we're afraid of, that could stand up to us in any meaningful way.  During the Cold War there were two: The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.  After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we decided to treat Russia as an irrelevance.  We ignored pleas for help from the Russians as their people nearly starved under Yeltsin, more intent on looting the corpse of the USSR than in helping a people we'd convinced ourselves for decades were 'The enemy', 'Evil', 'Godless heathen Commie Scum'.  We gloated over the victory, we danced on the grave of the USSR.  We forgot our pledges to Gorbachev, and rolled right over the borders of Eastern Europe, expanding NATO and the EU as fast as we possibly could.  We tried to peel Russia's trading and military partners away.  We ringed Russia round about with American military bases.  And we did it all convinced that Russia could not possibly ever be a threat again, ever stand up to us.  Our leaders had nothing but contempt for Russia, and made no attempt to conceal it.

But as we were fighting our futile wars in the Middle East, Russia was rebuilding, re-arming,
modernising.  Russia started flexing is muscle a little bit more, culminating in the conflict with Georgia, when that idiot Saakashvili unwisely invaded South Ossetia.  We complained about that one alright.  We ranted and raved.  But we did nothing.  And we didn't learn anything.

And then we got greedy.  Expanding the European Union into all those other Eastern European countries wasn't enough (gotta have that cheap labour and natural resources).  Bringing the Baltic states into NATO wasn't enough.  All the military bases in Central Asia weren't enough.  No, now we had our sights on Russia's biggest regional partner, a country whose history is deeply interwoven with that of Russia.  A country that amongst other things, thanks to Nikita Khrushchev, included Crimea, the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.  We had the rest of Europe, now we'd have Ukraine too.  The Russians don't like it, fuck 'em !  We rejected any involvement of the Russians in discussing the association agreement with the EU, and when Vladimir Putin made it very clear there would be severe consequences to going through with the deal, and essentially blackmailed Yanukovych and Ukraine economically, we left Yanukovych standing between a rock and a hard place.  He asked us to help, asked for economic assurances should he go forward with the deal.  And we told him...to go fuck himself.  As we do.

What to do if you're a craven corrupt politician faced with such a choice ?  Do a deal with Russia ?  Or blow up your country's economy ?  And so Yanukovych did a deal with Russia, and in so doing sealed his fate.  Democratically elected leader overthrown, and new Western-friendly government installed.  Result !  And the Russians would just let it happen: Let Ukraine join the EU, and then NATO.  Let Crimea come under NATO control.  WHAT THE FUCK DID WE THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN HERE ?  That the Russians would just roll over as we brought Ukraine into our direct orbit ?  Are our leaders nuts ?  Were they on drugs ?

Now as to the whole deal with large powerful countries maintaining 'spheres of interest' in what they consider 'their backyard'...  We say that's not fair of course, that in Russia's case it must not be tolerated.  (The PRC...well apparently we're not bothered so much there.)  Now keep in mind here that the 'we' I'm talking about is a grouping of Western nations dominated by a country called the 'United States of America'.  A country that with the Monroe Doctrine in Eighteen-fucking-twenty-three declared practically the whole of the western hemisphere to be its exclusive domain.  That saw itself as having ultimate dominion over the entirety of the Americas.  When the then USSR meddled in the backyard of the US in Cuba in 1962, it nearly led to World War Fucking Three.  How is the Russian government or people's view here hard to understand ?  How can the US of all countries not see how encircling a country and bringing its closest neighbours into a foreign economic and military orbit might be seen as a threat ?

So what to do now.  Do we want further enmity and distrust with Russia ?  Are we willing to risk a new Cold War ?  A Hot War ?  A nuclear exchange with the largest nuclear power on the planet ?  But, but...Hitler.  But, but...appeasement... Chamberlain...Munich...  Even if one thinks the comparison between Vlad and Adolf is in any way fair, Adolf didn't have nukes, did he ?  Maybe Kerry and Auntie Hillary are right, and Vladimir Putin is Hitler reborn; an evil insane maniac who having successfully tested Western strength in Ukraine will then proceed to roll tanks into the Baltic States and Poland...risking World War Fucking Three...  They could be right -- He could be Hitler reborn.  If he is, frankly we're all fucked.  Or...he could be a relatively rational leader, who seeing a dominant foreign power that consistently treats his country as if it were still a mortal enemy encircling it, is looking for a way to limit the influence of the West, to establish buffer zones between Russia's territory and ours.  To buttress Russia's borders with frozen conflicts such as those in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, such as that of Transnistria, and now...that of Eastern Ukraine.  He could be looking to make sure that the country whose very name arguably means 'borderland' remains trapped between East and West, neither fish nor fowl.  As, absent our insane ambitions, it might have remained more simply and more peacefully...  For those in Ukraine with democratic aspirations to seek a brighter future in Europe...No, it's not fair.  Not at all.  It sucks.  And we can't do anything about it.  Ukraine is gone.

Really, assuming our leaders aren't mad enough to risk war with Russia (a dangerous assumption with some of the idiots in the EU, never mind the lunatics in the US Congress), all we can do is try to manage the optics as we inevitably give Putin what he wants.  There's no military solution here, as even Angela Merkel acknowledges, and as for the idea that sanctions and economic blockades will work...well, see Cuba.  Last I checked,  Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford: all gone.  Castro brothers: still in power decades later.  One way or another, Putin will get his buffer zone, and the rest of the world will have to learn to live with it.  Frankly, the alternatives are even worse, and if anything, that buffer zone might be as much in our interest as Russia's, not that we'd ever admit it.

We live in the real world, not the fantasyland so many of our leaders imagine themselves inhabiting as latter-day Winston Churchill's, and in this real world, sometimes the best option is a shit sandwich.  That we're here at all to debate this shit is largely down to the fact that during the same Cuban Missile Crisis I mentioned earlier, the two most powerful men on earth, each being urged by their military advisers to act forcefully, to strike first...blinked. (If we're honest, it was more Nikita then JF, but still).  And so we'll hold our noses and do a deal with Putin, despise him and distrust him as we may.  No, it's not fair.  Yes, it does suck.