THE world is suddenly becoming distinctly less safe. However justified its military intervention in South Ossetia, Russia’s annexation of the region along with the other breakaway Georgian community of Abkhazia, has provoked widespread international outrage. The Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko made a point of visiting the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, while Russian troops were still driving into Georgia’s interior, to demonstrate solidarity with a fellow neighboring state of Russia. Now the Ukrainians are proposing to raise the rent that Moscow pays for its Black Sea fleet base in the Crimea and the Yushchenko administration is repeating its request to be allowed to join NATO and the European Union.
A spiral appears to be starting which could end up drawing Washington and Moscow into serious confrontation. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made it clear in an interview with the BBC that his country was in no mood for compromise and more chillingly, it will defend the rights of Russian citizens, wherever they may be. It was Moscow’s issuance of passports to many of the South Ossetians that provided the grounds for its intervention in Georgia. Some 17 percent of Ukraine’s population is native Russian, a proportion that rises to closer to 50 percent in the Crimea where the Russian fleet is based. If the Kremlin chooses to repeat the passport exercise with Russians in the Ukraine, to say nothing of the sizable Russian minority in Latvia, the stage could be set for serious trouble. The alleged protection of the interests of ethnic Germans by the Hitler regime was the excuse for the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, followed months later by the military occupation of the rest of the country. In 1938, despite treaty obligations to the Czechs, the world sat on its hands because there was nothing it could realistically do. The betrayal of the Czechs by the British and French was shameful but from that moment on, both countries began to rearm because they realized the Nazis could not be trusted.
If the Ukraine is tipped into political chaos by the Kremlin in the same way as Georgia, will Europe and the United States draw the same lesson? Are we indeed really on the brink of a new Cold War? Russia feels threatened by Washington through NATO. The West protests that there is no threat, even though they perceived threat from Iraq at one time and is now talking of threat from another “rogue” state: Iran.
The fact is the US missile screen; NATO’s military action against Serbia and its expansion to include central European members can all be taken to justify the Kremlin’s alarm about a real threat.
Something has to happen to stop the sharply rising static of tension. The newly assertive Kremlin policies are wildly popular among Russians, but in the modern, highly integrated world, naked chauvinism is a poor guide. As the talk gets tougher, so compromise will be harder to find. Could it be that the Chinese, fresh from their tremendous Olympic triumph, will choose to cement their central role on the world stage by offering to host a crisis summit? Someone needs to mediate in this worsening atmosphere of distrust and belligerence and Beijing looks to be the most qualified to take the job.
