Recipe for Avoiding Arms

We could not have imagined a worse context for celebrating the 70th anniversary of the landing in Normandy. In fact, it had been years since we’d felt a similar renewed climate of opposition between the allies of that time: on the one hand Russia, one of the main players in the epic battle against Hitler — if not the main protagonist — and on the other, the Europeans and Americans. Even if he is not a new Hitler, by annexing Crimea Vladimir Putin has challenged the post-Cold War equilibrium that he considers a disequilibrium — as far as the lack of recognition of Russia’s interests and dignity is concerned — with arrogance and adventurism.

Americans and Europeans were caught by surprise, in part because of a scant understanding of a political reality that cannot be reduced to Putin’s figure. Exactly during these days, just to cite a single aspect of this reality on which we had best reflect, the prestigious Levada Center [of Russia] released the results of a survey which showed that 71 percent of participants demonstrated, to avoid any euphemism, what we could define as anti-American opinions. Also published was a comparison of the relative data from an analog survey carried out during the 1990s when only 10 percent of Russians had shown hostility toward Americans. The danger of the revanchist turn in Russian foreign policy lies above all, perhaps, in the popularity of a leader who has made himself into an interpreter of the frustration of a great majority of people that are not nostalgic about communism, certainly, but about the greatness of an empire, whether czarist or Soviet.

The concern of Russia’s neighbors is certainly understandable, especially for the Balts and the Polish, whose history justifies the worst suspicions toward their eastern neighbor. In order to assuage them, Obama — who during his West Point speech a few days ago had excluded a military response as a solution to all problems — found no better way than to declare the allocation of an additional billion dollars in military spending, at the same time resuming the extortion of the Europeans to do a lot more in burden-sharing [through] a more balanced separation of the burdens for armaments. But the renewed “Russian question” will certainly not be resolved through military spending. We do not believe that F-35s, to take as an example something very relevant to the debate that concerns us, can face off with the militias of eastern Ukraine. On the other hand, even if it is legitimate for the Americans to ask the Europeans to do more — and more importantly to do better — in the area of common defense, Putin’s arrogance certainly is not dependent on his belief in being able to count on a nonexistent military superiority. The Balts and the Polish are already under the umbrella of NATO’s Article 5, which defines an attack on a member country as one against the entire alliance, and Ukraine’s weakness — what allows Moscow to play dirty and heavy-handed — is only marginally a military one, and actually political one.

But what happened at Benouville castle, where the top representatives of the victorious nations in World War II and Germany reunited to commemorate the landing of June 6, 1944? It would be premature to sound the now silent alarm and celebrate a hypothetical substantial turn, yet something has reared its head. After a verbal escalation that promised little that was positive — and especially after the meeting of the G-7 in Brussels — a firm, joint, but not necessarily credible position (the internal divisions in the European order are not a mystery) was achieved. Something happened in Normandy that at least allows us to hope that politics are not dead, that there might be something more — especially more promising — at the disposal of the Americans and Europeans beyond the sanctions and military spending, which are both useful only if conceived in service of a politico-diplomatic strategy.

As was immediately identified, the meeting between Obama and Putin was certainly a simple, “informal conversation,” but it’s important that it happened especially because the gestures between the American and Russian presidents — their body language — were obviously cold, and there was no reciprocal recognition during the public celebrations. They were like “divorced parents at a child’s graduation,” wrote The New York Times today.

The White House quickly gave an interpretation of the conversation that will certainly be picked up, not because it is necessarily authentic (a Russian spokesperson is defending a different enough version of it this very moment) but because it is possible to glean from it interesting elements of the policies of the American administration. According to the spokesperson, Obama particularly emphasized how the election of a new Ukrainian president — something Putin should recognize, in addition to stopping his support of the separatist militias in the east of the country — presents an opportunity to reverse the current escalation. Surely those who oppose Obama, who have never before been as active as they are these days, will accuse him of weak firmness in the attempt for an impossible dialogue. But alongside all the incertitudes that we could attribute to him emerges, yet again, that basic realism that makes virtue out of necessity [through] the avoidance of promising what cannot be fulfilled, or embarking on undertakings that could only result in failure — as his predecessor in the White House did disastrously.

In a certain sense, Obama tends to make this a “bilateral” problem, prioritizing Russia-Ukraine relations. And how can you reprimand him if you consider how unsustainable Kiev’s economy and security is in the context of a black and white choice between Russia and Europe, East or West? We should add that we are not dealing with a pathetic illusion. The celebrations in Normandy provided an opportunity for a meeting between Putin and new Ukrainian President Poroshenko — an all but radical character, and like the other oligarchs we see lined up on the Ukrainian side more than on the Russian one, prepared to negotiate, accept compromises and avoid dangerous breaks.

We hope that a war in Ukraine will not take place. But not only for the Americans, it will remain a problem of how to confront — through a combination of starting and ending dialogues — with a difficult and worrisome Russia; a Russia we have ignored after the collapse of the USSR at our own risk and danger. It should not be this difficult. We won the historic match with the Soviet Union exactly through a combination of containment, balance of power and detente. It’s strange that it is possible to imagine that today, from all points of view, the same match cannot be won against a much less formidable adversary: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.