Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History Hall Gardner crimea, global rivalry, and the vengeance of history Copyright © Hall Gardner, 2015. All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 54676- 0 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii General Introduction: The Vengeance of History 1 1 Renewed Cold War? World War II? World War I? Or Nothing of the Kind? 17 2 Genesis of the Russia- Ukraine Conflict 29 3 Soviet Collapse and the Russia- Ukraine Conflict 43 4 Origins of the Russian Backlash 59 5 Uneven Polycentrism and the Global Crisis 81 6 A Cross- Historical Method 99 7 Why Major- Power War Is Still Possible, Though Not Inevitable! 127 8 Future Pessimistic Scenarios 149 9 Once, and If, the Dust Settles 169 Notes 199 Selected Bibliography 235 Index 239 Preface Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History picks up on my previous two Palgrave- Macmillan books, Averting Global War (2007) and NATO Expan- sion and US Strategy in Asia (2013). Averting Global War warned of a potential Georgia- Russia war in addition to the possibility of a Russia- Ukraine conflict. NATO Expansion and US Strategy in Asia had proposed the “internationaliza- tion” of Russian port of Sevastopol, plus the formation of a regional “peace and development community” for the Black Sea and Caucasus regions involving a system of joint NATO-EU- Russian security guarantees, with the deployment of international peacekeepers. These options were proposed as an alternative to a NATO enlargement to Georgia and Ukraine and in order to prevent the eventual partition of the Black Sea region into pro-NAT O and pro- Russian states. These proposals were made precisely in the hope that it might still be possible to avert the burgeoning Russian pan-nationalist threat to retake Crimea in opposition to both NATO and EU enlargement in the midst of Ukrainian bankruptcy and sociopolitical strife. Now, however, the Crimean crisis represents the return of history with a vengeance in that it impacts political-economic and financial relations between Russia, China, the European Union, and much of the world, in addition to interlinking directly and indirectly with a number of regional conflicts through- out the globe, including the “wider Middle East,” South and Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Indo- Pacific. While the Crimean crisis represents the latest manifestation, but not the root cause of the decline of US-EU- Russian relations in the post–Cold War period, the annexation indicates the need for the United States and the European Union to begin to work toward a coherent global strategy toward Russia that includes consideration of China, India, Japan, and other ris- ing powers and socio- political movements and that is designed to avert the potential for much wider regional conflicts— if not the real possibility of a major- power war. viii l Preface Proposals for the internationalization of the Crimea and Black Sea region, among other options involving power sharing and joint sovereignty for island and resource disputes in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere, would represent steps toward peace and reconciliation with both Russia and China and with all other states concerned— that is, once, and if, the dust begins to settle. I would like to thank Sara Doskow and Jeff LaSala for their support for my third Palgrave-Macmillan book project, plus Megan Bailey at Scribe for her assistance in finalizing the text. My AUP assistants, Anna Wiersma and Hannah Victoria, were of great help with the index. Andrei Grachev, William Hartung, Robert M. Hayden, Jan Kavan, and Nick Petro all provided useful information. And I thank my anonymous reviewer for his praise and positive suggestions! And finally, I thank my wife, Isabel, my daughters, Francesca and Celine, and Celine’s husband, Alan, for putting up with another book project, with more soon to follow! Hall Gardner (Paris, June 11, 2015) General Introduction The Vengeance of History n March 1997, I was invited to Warsaw to participate in the Committee on Atlantic Studies conference, “NATO and Peacekeeping,” sponsored by Ithe Polish prime ministry and the Ministry of Defense. As I did not see any Russian representatives present, and as at least two Ukrainians had been invited as observers, my suspicion was that the conference was already symbolic of the beginning of the end of efforts to sustain positive relations with Moscow. As I was preparing my discussion on NATO- Russian- European peacekeeping deployments in ex- Yugoslavia, a dark- haired, pale- faced man in a black suit came out of a back door with my first book, Surviving the Millennium, in his hands. He opened the book and pointed to a page in the last chapter in which I had outlined a number of pessimistic scenarios for the future including one in which “secessionist movements in a bankrupt Ukraine could demand Rus- sian (and/or Polish intervention).” It was a statement that had been preceded by the sentence, “Russian pan- nationalists may claim to protect the Russian ‘diaspora’ while concurrently seeking to secure access to the Crimea.”1 With piercing eyes, the man asked whether I was “trying to be provocative” and then abruptly pivoted 180 degrees and disappeared into the maze of offices. It was Kafkaesque. As depicted in that book, which was written during a period of triumphal optimism just five years after the demolition of the Berlin wall, that pessimis- tic scenario may actually have been too extreme, but only because the book had assumed that Kiev might attempt to retain its former Soviet nuclear arse- nal as a “Gaullist” deterrent. (The book had argued against Kiev retaining its nuclear weapons, an option that had been supported by the neorealist John Mearsheimer, among others, at that time.) Written before NATO had begun its new eastward expansion as pushed by the US Congress since 1992, the book clearly pointed to the possibility that a crisis in a bankrupt Ukraine could lead 2 l Crimea, Global Rivalry, and the Vengeance of History Russia to seize Crimea and that such a conflict might draw in not only Russia but potentially also Poland, if not other states as well. Surviving the Millennium consequently argued against enlarging NATO in such a way that could eventually provoke a backlash by Moscow while concurrently overextending American and NATO defense capabilities in both political and economic terms. As an enlarged NATO, which had ini- tially been created as a collective defense and not a cooperative security, organization, would most likely be a more politically divided NATO, it could then become even less effective as a potential fighting force if Russia or another state did eventually pose a significant threat. In order to reduce the possibility of a Russian backlash— coupled with a weakening of NATO resolve due to an excess of additional members—the book proposed an alter- native strategy. That proposal was for NATO to build up the Partnership for Peace initia- tive and extend security assurances to all eastern European states, in coordina- tion with the then Western European Union and Russia, with NATO-Russian peacekeeping deployments in Bosnia as a stepping stone to an enlarged and neutral system of cooperative- collective security for the entire Euro- Atlantic region. This proposal was further developed in my next book, Dangerous Cross- roads (1997). Several months after its publication, Surviving the Millennium was criticized by Francis Fukuyama in his April 1995 Foreign Affairs book review.2 It was clear that the individual who proclaimed that the “end of history” was at hand and that liberal democracy (with all its mind- numbing imperfections) represented the apogee of social governance had misread the text. The book was not divided into two “disjointed” halves, as he asserted, and the title referred to surviving the dangers that Homo geopoliticus would soon face just after, and not before, the turn of the new millennium. But more important, he had misread the stra- tegic rationale for my proposal to deploy international peacekeepers under a general UN or Organization for Security and Co- operation in Europe (OSCE) mandate in eastern Germany and throughout eastern Europe in cooperation with NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP). The strategic concept was not only to obtain Russian confidence and “allay Russian fears,” as he put it (which was nonetheless crucial), but it was also to help build up, unify, and stabilize eastern Europe and all the region between Germany and Russia. Rather than intervening into eastern European hotspots after conflict began, as was the case for Bosnia at the time, the idea was to forge a militarily integrated system of regional defense under a general UN or OSCE mandate, backed by NATO, the Western European Union and Russia, so as to build a separate and neutral Euro-Atlantic command structure that could, in effect, coun- terbalance both European/German and Russian pressures and influence.