YALTA II: WESTERN MOSCOW-CENTRISM INVITES NEW INSTABILITY IN FORMER SOVIET EMPIRE

(Washington, D.C.): The just-completed
NATO ministerial meetings in Brussels
provide the latest evidence of the
dangerous course being charted for the
Atlantic Alliance. It is a course more
likely to erode than enhance the security
of Europe and the 44 year-old
organization’s future viability.

This evidence is to be found in two
specific actions: (1) the approval given
by foreign ministers representing the
sixteen member nations to a
highly-diluted U.S. initiative dubbed
“Partnership for Peace” and (2)
their pointed warning to Ukraine that it
would not be permitted to become even a
“partner for peace” unless it
proceeded to surrender to Russia all
former Soviet nuclear weapons still on
its territory.

Partnership for Spheres
of Influence

In recent days, a bipartisan tag-team
representing arguably the most prominent
heavyweights in the American foreign
policy establishment — Henry Kissinger
and Zbigniew Brzezinski — have roundly
denounced the “Partnership for
Peace” proposal. With scarcely
concealed contempt, these former top U.S.
decision-makers characterize this
proposal as little more than an attempt
to subordinate U.S. interests in a free
and democratic Eastern Europe to a
Washington-Moscow axis of increasingly
dubious value.

As the former National Security
Advisor to President Carter puts it:

“The vague ‘Partnership for
Peace’ signals American
reluctance to override Russian
objections to any widening of
NATO. That ‘partnership’ involves
limited and mainly technical NATO
collaboration with any
former Communist country of
Central Europe and Eurasia,
whether or not it is a democracy
and is vulnerable to dangerous
territorial or ethnic conflicts.
This is thus an indirect
rejection of the Central European
states that can claim to have met
the criteria for NATO
membership.” (Emphasis
added.) href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

Dr. Kissinger, former National Security
Advisor and Secretary of State in the
Nixon and Ford Administrations, is even
more scathing:

“Where I draw the line is
when the [Clinton] Administration
declares every partner in the new
Partnership to be eligible for
membership in NATO — though it
was not indicated how or by what
procedure. A political process
like Russia’s, which has led to
two attempted coups in two years,
should not be given a veto over
NATO membership or be declared
eligible for NATO membership
itself.

“If the purpose is to avoid
‘blocs’ and ‘discrimination,’
there will never be a good time
for East European membership
without Russia; and if it is made
dependent on Russia, Moscow will
have been given a veto or the
option of watering down the
existing institutions to the
point of irrelevance. And if,
later on, Eastern Europe is taken
into NATO because Russia has
turned out badly, the crisis will
surely be exacerbated. We
resisted blackmail when Russia
was strong. Does it make sense to
permit Moscow to blackmail us now
with its domestic weakness?“
(Emphasis added.) href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

Blackmail It Is

Make no mistake: Russia is
engaged in blackmail — both of
the West and of the erstwhile captive
nations enslaved in the former Soviet
empire.

Euchring the West: For
Western consumption, Evgenii Primakov, a
former bag-man for Mikhail Gorbachev,
confidante of Saddam Hussein and present
director of the largely unreformed
successor to the Soviet KGB, pulled out
the brass knuckles: According to RFE/RL
Daily Report, he told a press conference
in Moscow on 25 November that the
incorporation of Poland, Hungary and
Czech and Slovak republics into NATO
would compel Russia to “undertake a
total review of its defense concepts,
operational plans and deployment of
forces.”

Such warnings had the desired effect.
Not only has the Atlantic Alliance
effectively agreed that the nations of
Central and Eastern Europe remain firmly
within Moscow’s sphere of influence and,
therefore, ineligible for membership in
NATO. They have made matters worse by
indicating that future conflicts
involving such non-members will be none
of NATO’s business. As is often the case,
Britain’s Foreign Minister Sir Douglas
Hurd best articulated the West’s latest
appeasement stance: In Brussels
yesterday, he said, “Unless it is
threatened itself, it is unlikely that
NATO will intervene in the wars of other
people.”

Coercing the ‘Near-Abroad’: Meanwhile,
Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev
was trying to intimidate newly
independent states of the former Soviet
Union by proposing “dual
citizenship” for their ethnic
Russian minorities. So alarming was this
signal that even President Nursultan A.
Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan — traditionally
one of the more subservient and reliable
from Moscow’s point of view among the
former apparatchiks running successor
states — said of Kozyrev’s statement:
“When someone talks about the
protection of Russians not in Russia but
in Kazakhstan, I recall the times of
Hitler who started with protecting the
Sudeten Germans [in
Czechoslovakia].”

Russia’s heavy-handedness toward the
“near-abroad” is also paying
off. Tens of thousands of Russian troops
are deployed in Estonia and Latvia,
Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and
Tajikistan, in several cases as the direct
result of Moscow’s efforts to
destabilize the respective national
governments and foment internal
conflicts. Increasingly, Russia is
asserting its right — and the
international community’s acquiescence —
to justify armed interventions in the
“near-abroad” with blue-painted
“peace-keeping” units. Of
course the sort of
“nation-building” the Kremlin
appears to have in mind seems more likely
to be in the model of Peter the Great
than Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his
supporters.

Strategic Folly Toward
Ukraine

Perhaps the most egregious example of
successful Russian hegemonism and Western
acquiescence to it is to be found in
recent posturing over Ukraine. Within the
past week, President Clinton, the Kremlin
and NATO foreign ministers have taken
turns trying to extort Ukraine into
surrendering all remaining nuclear
weapons to Moscow. Kiev continues to
back-and-fill in response — one day
conditioning ratification of the START I
treaty to such an extent as to eviscerate
its pertinence to Ukraine; the next
suggesting that full denuclearization
will proceed apace if only large
infusions of funds are forthcoming; and
so on.

Never mind that it is far from clear
that Western interests will best be
served by denuclearizing Ukraine. href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾
Never mind either that the real value of
the strategic arms agreements whose
implementation depends on Ukrainian
cooperation is far less than is generally
asserted. href=”#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾
The unalterable fact of life is that
Western active assistance to Moscow’s
campaign of disarming Ukraine is going to
destabilize the situation, not
promote stability.

In this regard, consider in particular
the effects of pronouncements by the
Belgian, British and German foreign
ministers on the margins of yesterday’s
NATO ministerial. Belgium Foreign
Minister Willy Claes said “I don’t
know how Ukraine could benefit from
[NATO] membership under present
circumstances” proclaiming that NATO
should exclude Ukraine from any military
cooperation agreement unless Kiev agrees
to rid its territory of all nuclear
weapons. British Foreign Minister Douglas
Hurd similarly declared that Ukraine was
even jeopardizing its membership in the
North Atlantic Cooperation Council since
it had been invited into the council with
the expectation that it would become
non-nuclear. German Foreign Minister
Klaus Kinkel said categorically that
“For Russia and Ukraine, [NATO]
membership is out of the question.”
If Ukraine will be so isolated by the
international community that it cannot
even be a “partner for peace”
unless it is disarmed, could Moscow not
be forgiven for concluding that the West
would approve of any preemptive action it
might take to neutralize Ukraine’s
nuclear stockpile?

The Bottom Line

As the Atlantic Alliance heads toward
what is being trumpeted as a critical
summit meeting in January, it is
imperative that an urgent reassessment be
made of the strategic implications of
what amounts to a Yalta II
understanding with Russia.
Encouraging Russia to act on its
ambitions to dominate a sphere of
influence stretching from Poland in the
west to the Baltic Sea in the north to
Iran in the south and Vladivostok in the
east will not promote international
security. To the contrary, it will
endanger it.

Worse yet, giving wide latitude to the
political, bureaucratic and industrial
forces in Russia most closely associated
with these ambitions will do no favors to
Boris Yeltsin and what remains of his
reformist agenda. The West’s refusal to
stand up to such forces when they were
weak has only emboldened them and
encouraged Yeltsin to postpone moving
more vigorously against them when he was
strong. Now that their relative positions
have been reversed is no time to
reinforce such trends by further,
benighted acquiescence and appeasement.

– 30 –

1. Dr. Brzezinski’s op.ed. entitled “A
Bigger — and Safer — Europe,” New
York Times, 1 December 1994.

2. See
Dr. Kissinger’s op.ed. in the 24 November
1994 Washington Post,
appropriately entitled, “Not This
Partnership.”

3. In
this regard, see the Center’s Decision
Brief of 24 June 1993, What
Strobe Talbott Won’t Tell the Senate
Today: Insisting on a Nuclear-Free
Ukraine is Folly href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=93-D_50″> (No 93-D 52)
concerning the case for permitting
Ukraine to retain a credible nuclear
deterrent.

4. See,
for example, the Center’s analyses of
START I and II: a White Paper entitled Stop
‘START’: The Case Against Ratification of
the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,
24 September 1992 and Decision Brief
When Will We Ever Learn? Last Bush
Foreign Policy Paroxysm Produces Flawed
START II Accord — For Wrong Reasons href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D_150″> (31 December
1992, No. 92-D 150).