Tuesday 1 August 2023

THE POLICY OF CONTAINMENT IS A FAILURE

1 August 2023


Here is a thoughtful article on George Kennan. Kennan, going back to Mackinder, is credited with the American policy of containment. True but also rather ironical. George Kennan did advise that NATO trying to take Ukraine would be the brightest of red lines for Russia.

Instead of containing Russia militarily, which has the American thread of wanting to divide potential rivals, we in Europe should be including Russia - politically and militarily Russia could have joined Nato as Putin had hoped; economically as supplier of cheap energy and raw materials; and culturally remembering that Russia is more European than it is Asian.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1257094.shtml

All these opportunities lost. America must have its enemy to kick against and understand its young self. Supremacy, exceptionalism, number one - these are all problems of the developing ego.

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As this column has said from the very start, this foreign policy adventure will end in failure and likely the greatest of all American foreign policy disasters, possibly the end of the American Order. This would be something that we in the West wish to avoid - we wish to be allies of America but free to not be invariably aligned to America because our interests are often different.

The Ukrainian offensive began on 4 June and in two months has made absolutely no progress other than capturing a few hamlets. It has not touched the Russian front line and the muddy season is almost upon us. This will put an end to the offensive and the prospects of renewing it in the winter ice or the spring are zero.

So to what will happen next, especially with an election year 2024? It seems to me that the neocon and other nasty elements of the foreign policy elite will be driven out of town and more reasonable minds, more mature egos, interested in combining assets rather than divide and rule, will take over and enter a negotiated settlement.

What will such a negotiated settlement look like? Probably it will meet the initial aims laid out in December 2021 for a neutral Ukraine and a changed regime in Kiev with a government more understanding of Russian security needs and how these might be compatible with its own.

Russia is interested in taking territory that will push back its front line with Nato, and that it can hold with support from the local popn. Russia would not want to return land to find the shelling restarts, or it's reoccupied by the nasties, by Nato even.

In the case where Russia needs land as a buffer but the local people are not sympathetic, there it would need to change the government I'd have thought, meaning the kievian regime. But even a new and Moscow-leaning gov in U would need solid security arrangement that benefits both sides....govts come and might go.

Surely it is not just Ukraine: the whole of that line from the Baltics down to Romania and Bulgaria needs fixing and not an arms race, not just balance of power, but an agreement to limit troops and weapons the length of the E-W divide. How to disarm and to verify? Strikes me that Russia would have to join Nato for security arrangements to be made permanent.

Russia with the upper hand and backed by BRICS+, we'd be looking minimum at a Ukraine about 55 to 60% of pre-2014 (4 oblasts, plus another 4, Odessa), no access to the Sea, a sympathetic govt watchful of the interests of Poland to its West and Belarus to its North. And long term acting as one part of an East - West  buffer.

Sad to say but is this a new Iron Curtain? And how ever can anything be built between two parties who thoroughly mistrust each other?

All so lamentable and regrettable. When I think about how things could have been so very different with Russia included in NATO, with Russia included in European culture to which it is much closer than Asian culture, with a Russia included economically as a supplier of cheap energy and raw materials, a Russia included socially technologically and educationally.

When I think of a Europe more independent of America, which could be a global leader, for example in matters of the environment or security, and instead is relegated to a third class after thought in world affairs.

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