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A long version of Ambassador Matlock's article was circulated in the Moscow Fire Group a few days ago (see Appendix at the bottom of this message). I had some serious concerns about the article, and responded in that forum. Since I won’t be able to attend the next Russia and Near Abroad lunch, here is a copy of what I wrote, should any group members be interested.
Respectfully submitted,
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Appendix: Matlock Document
TODAY’S CRISIS OVER
UKRAINE
An avoidable crisis
That was
predictable,
Actually
predicted,
Willfully
precipitated, but
Easily
resolved by the application of common sense
By Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
We are being told each
day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are
massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens
are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff
are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against
panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir
Putin, the Russian president, has denied that he has any intention of invading
Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and
that in particular, Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be
members. President Biden has refused to give such assurance but made clear his
willingness to continue discussing questions of strategic stability in Europe. Meanwhile,
the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the
agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with
a large degree of local autonomy—an agreement with Russia, France and Germany
which the United States endorsed.
Maybe
I am wrong—tragically wrong—but I cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are
witnessing an elaborate charade, grossly magnified by prominent elements of the
American media, to serve a domestic political end. Facing rising inflation, the
ravages of Omicron, blame (for the most part unfair) for the withdrawal from
Afghanistan, plus the failure to get the full support of his own party for the
Build Back Better legislation, the Biden administration is staggering under sagging
approval ratings just as it gears up for this year’s congressional elections. Since
clear “victories” on the domestic woes seem increasingly unlikely, why not
fabricate one by posing as if he prevented the invasion of Ukraine by “standing
up to Vladimir Putin”? Actually, it
seems most likely that President Putin’s goals are what he says they are—and as
he has been saying since his speech in Munich in 2007. To simplify and
paraphrase, I would sum them up as: “Treat us with at least a modicum of
respect. We do not threaten you or your allies, why do you refuse us the
security you insist for yourself?”
In
1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers, ignoring the rapidly
unfolding events that marked the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the
1990s, considered that the end of the Cold War. They were wrong. The Cold War
had ended at least two years earlier. It ended by negotiation and was in the
interest of all the parties. President George H.W. Bush hoped that Gorbachev
would manage to keep most of the twelve non-Baltic republics in a voluntary
federation. On August 1, 1991, he made a speech to the Ukrainian parliament
(the Verkhovna Rada) in which he endorsed Gorbachev’s plans for a voluntary
federation and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” The latter phrase was
inspired by Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakurdia’s attacks on minorities in Soviet
Georgia. For reasons I will explain elsewhere, they apply to Ukraine today. Bottom
line: Despite the prevalent belief, both among the “blob” in the United States,
and most of the Russian public, the United States did not support, much less
cause the break-up of the Soviet Union. We supported throughout the
independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and one of the last acts of the
Soviet parliament was to legalize their claim to independence. And—by the way—despite
frequently voiced fears—Vladimir Putin has never threatened to re-absorb the
Baltic countries or to claim any of their territories, though he has criticized
some that denied ethnic Russians the full rights of citizenship, a principle
that the European Union is pledged to enforce.
.
But, let’s move on to the first of the assertions in the subtitle:
Was the crisis
avoidable?
Well,
since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no
further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would
have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the
alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in
harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.
Maybe
we should look at this question more broadly. How do other countries respond to
alien military alliances near their borders?
Since we are talking about American policy, maybe we should pay some
attention to the way the United States has reacted to attempts of outsiders to establish
alliances with countries nearby. Anybody remember the Monroe Doctrine, a declaration
of a sphere of influence that comprised an entire hemisphere? And we meant it!
When we learned that Kaiser’s Germany was attempting to enlist Mexico as an
ally during the first world war, that was a powerful incentive for the
subsequent declaration of war against Germany. Then, of course, in my lifetime,
we had the Cuban Missile Crisis—something I remember vividly since I was at the
American Embassy in Moscow and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages to
Kennedy.
Should
we look at events like the Cuban Missile Crisis from the standpoint of some of
the principles of international law, or from the standpoint of the likely
behavior of a country’s leaders if they feel threatened? What did international
law at that time say about the employment of nuclear missiles in Cuba? Cuba was
a sovereign state and had the right to seek support for its independence from
anywhere it chose. It had been threatened by the United States, even an attempt
to invade, using anti-Castro Cubans. It asked the Soviet Union for support.
Knowing that the United States had deployed nuclear weapons in Turkey, a U.S. ally
actually bordering on the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader,
decided to station nuclear missiles in Cuba. How could the U.S. legitimately
object if the Soviet Union was deploying weapons similar to those deployed
against it?
Obviously,
it was a mistake. A big mistake! (One is reminded of Talleyrand’s remark..”Worse
than a crime …”) International
relations, like it or not, are not determined by debating, interpreting and
applying the finer points of “international law”—which in any case is not the
same as municipal law, the law within countries. Kennedy had to react to remove
the threat. The Joint Chiefs recommended taking out the missiles by bombing.
Fortunately, Kennedy stopped short of that, declared a blockade and demanded
the removal of the missiles.
At
the end of the week of messages back and forth—I translated Khrushchev’s
longest—it was agreed that Khrushchev would remove the nuclear missiles from
Cuba. What was not announced was that Kennedy also agreed that he would remove
the U.S. missiles from Turkey but that this commitment must not be made public.
We
American diplomats in Embassy Moscow were delighted at the outcome, of course. We
were not even informed of the agreement regarding missiles in Turkey. We had no
idea that we had come close to a nuclear exchange. We knew the U.S. had
military superiority in the Caribbean and we would have cheered if the U.S. Air
Force had bombed the sites. We were wrong. In later meetings with Soviet
diplomats and military officers, we learned that, if the sites had been bombed,
the officers on the spot could have launched the missiles without orders from
Moscow. We could have lost Miami, and then what? We also did not know that a
Soviet submarine came close to launching a nuclear-armed torpedo against the
destroyer that was preventing its coming up for air.
It
was a close call. It is quite dangerous to get involved in military
confrontations with countries with nuclear weapons. You don’t need an advanced
degree in international law to understand that. You need only common sense.
OK—It
was predictable. Was it predicted?
“The most profound
strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War”
My
words, and my voice was not the only one. In 1997, when the question of adding
more members to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), I was asked to
testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my introductory
remarks, I made the following statement: “I consider the Administration's recommendation
to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved
by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most
profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from
improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that
wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that
could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet
Union collapsed.”
The
reason I cited was the presence in the Russian Federation of a nuclear arsenal
that, in overall effectiveness, matched if not exceeded that of the United
States. Either of our arsenals, if actually used in a hot war, was capable of
ending the possibility of civilization on earth, possibly even causing the
extinction of the human race and much other life on the planet. Though the
United States and the Soviet Union had, as a result of arms control agreements
concluded by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, negotiations for
further reductions stalled during the Clinton Administration. There was not
even an effort to negotiate the removal of short-range nuclear weapons from
Europe.
That
was not the only reason I cited for including rather than excluding Russia from
European security. I explained as follows: “The plan to increase the membership
of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the
end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only
during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought
of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It
is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new
members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the
principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it
can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not
appear to be the aim of the Administration, and even if it is, the way to reach
it is not by admitting new members piecemeal.”
Then
I added, “All of the purported goals of NATO enlargement are laudable. Of
course the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are culturally part of
Europe and should be guaranteed a place in European institutions. Of course we
have a stake in the development of democracy and stable economies there. But
membership in NATO is not the only way to achieve these ends. It is not even
the best way in the absence of a clear and identifiable security threat.”
In
fact, the decision to expand NATO piecemeal was a reversal of American policies
that produced the end of the Cold War and the liberation of Eastern Europe.
President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a goal of a “Europe whole and free.”
Soviet President Gorbachev had spoken of “our common European home,” had
welcomed representatives of East European governments who threw off their
Communist rulers and had ordered radical reductions in Soviet military forces
by explaining that for one country to be secure, there must be security for
all. The first President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting on
Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed
to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States
would not “take advantage” of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into
NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be “taking advantage.”) The
following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a
unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of
NATO jurisdiction to the east, “not one inch.”
These
comments were made to President Gorbachev before the Soviet Union broke up. Once
it did, the Russian Federation had less than half the population of the Soviet
Union and a military establishment demoralized and in total disarray. While
there was no reason to enlarge NATO after the Soviet Union recognized and
respected the independence of the East European countries, there was even less
reason to fear the Russian Federation as a threat.
Willfully precipitated?
Adding countries in Eastern Europe to NATO continued
during the George W. Bush administration (2001-2009) but that was not the only
thing that stimulated Russian objection. At the same time, the United States
began withdrawing from the arms control treaties that had tempered, for a time,
an irrational and dangerous arms race and were the foundation agreements for
ending the Cold War. The most significant was the decision to withdraw from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) which had been the cornerstone treaty
for the series of agreements that halted for a time the nuclear arms race. After
the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in
Northern Virginia, President Putin was the first foreign leader to call
President Bush and offer support. He was as good as his word by facilitating
the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had harbored Osama ben
Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had inspired the attacks. It was clear at that
time that Putin aspired to a security partnership with the United States. The
jihadist terrorists who were targeting the United States were also targeting
Russia. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued its course of ignoring Russian--and
also allied--interests by invading Iraq, an act of aggression which was opposed
not only by Russia, but also by France and Germany.
As
President Putin pulled Russia out of the bankruptcy that took place in the late
1990s, stabilized the economy, paid off Russia’s foreign debts, reduced the
activity of organized crime, and even began building a financial nest egg to
weather future financial storms, he was subjected to what he perceived as one insult
after another to his perception of Russia’s dignity and security. He enumerated
them in a speech in Munich in 2007. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
responded that we didn’t need a new Cold War. Quite true, of course, but
neither he, nor his superiors, nor his successors seemed to take Putin’s
warning seriously. Then Senator Joseph Biden, during his candidacy for the
presidential election in 2008, pledged to “stand up to Vladimir Putin!” Huh?
What in the world had Putin done to him or to the United States?[*]
Although
President Barack Obama initially promised policy changes, in fact his
government continued to ignore the most serious Russian concerns and redoubled
earlier American efforts to detach former Soviet republics from Russian
influence and, indeed, to encourage “regime change” in Russia itself. American
actions in Syria and Ukraine were seen by the Russian president, and most
Russians, as indirect attacks on them.
President
Assad of Syria was a brutal dictator but the only effective bulwark against the
Islamic state, a movement that had blossomed in Iraq following the U.S.
invasion and was spreading into Syria. Military aid to a supposed “democratic
opposition” quickly fell into the hands of jihadists allied with the very Al
Qaeda that had organized the 9/11 attacks on the United States! But the threat
to nearby Russia was much greater since many of the jihadists hailed from areas
of the former Soviet Union including Russia itself. Syria is also Russia’s
close neighbor; the U.S. was seen strengthening enemies of both the United
States and Russia with its misguided attempt to decapitate the Syrian
government.
So
far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep—to
the point of seeming to select a prime minister. It also, in effect, supported
an illegal coup d’etat that changed the Ukrainian government in 2014, a
procedure not normally considered consistent with the rule of law or democratic
governance. The violence that still simmers in Ukraine started in the
“pro-Western” west, not in the Donbas where it was a reaction to what was viewed
as the threat of violence against Ukrainians who are ethnic Russian.
During
President Obama’s second term, his rhetoric became more personal, joining a
rising chorus in the American and British media vilifying the Russian president.
Obama spoke of economic sanctions against Russians as “costing” Putin for his “misbehavior”
in Ukraine, conveniently forgetting that Putin’s action had been popular in
Russia and that Obama’s own predecessor could be credibly accused of being a
war criminal. Obama then began to hurl insults at the Russian nation as a whole,
with allegations like “Russia makes nothing anybody wants,” conveniently
ignoring the fact that the only way we could get American astronauts to the
international space station at that time was with Russian rockets and that his
government was trying its best to prevent Iran and Turkey from buying Russian
anti-aircraft missiles.
I
am sure some will say, “What’s the big deal? Reagan called the Soviet Union an
evil empire, but then negotiated an end of the Cold War.” Right! Reagan condemned the Soviet empire of
old—and subsequently gave Gorbachev credit for changing it—but he never
publicly castigated the Soviet leaders personally. He treated them with
personal respect, and as equals, even treating Foreign Minister Gromyko to
formal dinners usually reserved for chiefs of state or government. His first
words in private meetings was usually something like, “We hold the peace of the
world in our hands. We must act responsibly so the world can live in peace.”
Things
got worse during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. Accused, without
evidence, of being a Russian dupe, Trump made sure he embraced every
anti-Russian measure that came along, while at the same time flattered Putin as
a great leader. Reciprocal expulsions of diplomats, started by the United
States in the final days of Obama’s tenure continued in a grim vicious circle
that has resulted in a diplomatic presence so emaciated that for months the
United States did not have enough staff in Moscow to issue visas for Russians
to visit the United States.
As
so many of the other recent developments, the mutual strangulation of
diplomatic missions reverses one of the proudest achievements of American
diplomacy in latter Cold War years when we worked diligently and successfully
to open up the closed society of the Soviet Union, to bring down the iron
curtain that separated “East” and “West.” We succeeded, with the cooperation of
a Soviet leader who understood that his country desperately needed to join the
world.
All
right, I rest my case that today’s crisis was “willfully precipitated.” But if
that is so, how can I say that it can be
Easily resolved by the application of common sense?
The short answer is because it can be. What President
Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security
structure in Europe that insures Russia’s security along with that of others is
eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is
threatening none. By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest
of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine
from Russian influence—the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color
revolutions”—was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon
forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Now,
to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the
United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the
Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russophobic stance (a
story requiring a separate study) that it will take great political skill to
navigate the treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome.
President
Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own
troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to
show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? For what? Nobody is
threatening Poland or Bulgaria except waves of refugees fleeing Syria,
Afghanistan and the desiccated areas of the African savannah. So what is the 82nd
Airborne supposed to do?
Well,
as I have suggested earlier, maybe this is just an expensive charade. Maybe the
subsequent negotiations between the Biden and Putin governments will find a way
to meet the Russian concerns. If so, maybe the charade will have served its
purpose. And maybe then our members of congress will start dealing with the
growing problems we have at home instead of making them worse.
One
can dream, can’t one?
Singer Island, Florida
February 12, 2022
[*] Senator Biden, as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997, had approved NATO expansion. Throughout his tenure in the Senate he opposed lifting the trade restrictions imposed by the Jackson-Vanik amendment even though they never should have applied to the Russian Federation.
