Time to get real on Ukraine

Donald Trump’s overtures to Russia have upset many people across the West. From left to right, Canberra to Canada and London to Lithuania, politicians and pundits are in a state of shock and grief. It’s appeasement, another Munich, the end of the US alliance system — all these barbs have been hurled at the President. 

There’s no question Trump hurts American credibility and prestige by treating allies with contempt: Friday’s heated exchange in the White House was an unedifying moment in American diplomatic history.

But while Trump may have blundered in the way he initiated negotiations with Russia, it is imperative to improve relations with Moscow and end the Ukraine war. History is a good guide and today’s strategic circumstances justify this pursuit, which was once called détente.

US rapprochement with Russia — and the hostility it provokes in America — is an old story. At the height of the Cold War, Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan reached an accommodation with Moscow. The American people applauded their efforts at reducing East-West tensions while (of all people) leading conservatives opposed the detente between the superpowers.

The difference today is that diplomatic outreach towards Moscow has the support of Trump’s MAGA base but has provoked scorn and derision from the mainstream media and a broad swath of the foreign policy community otherwise known as “the Blob”.

Go back to 1959, just three years after Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to crush the uprising. President Eisenhower, a Cold Warrior who helped orchestrate the defeat of Nazi Germany 15 years earlier, invited Nikita Khrushchev to America for a 13-day visit. The media hailed Ike as a peacemaker while Democrats welcomed the USSR leader’s trip across the US.

But conservative hardliners were aghast. According to William F. Buckley. Jr., the so-called patron saint of American conservatives, the great offence of the visit was not Khrushchev’s blood-soaked hands, but that US leaders had reached out for a handshake and stained their own hands.

Russia is surely capable of mischief, but it’s a declining power incapable of dominating Europe

Nixon’s overtures to the Communist world took place not only during the Vietnam war, but also when Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was raging and only a short few years after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed its pro-Western protestors. The American people applauded the old red baiter’s embrace of détente, as did official Washington and many world statesmen.

But conservatives were furious. In his first term, Nixon had crossed right-wing redlines by declaring himself a “Keynesian” and implementing wage-and-price controls. But it was not until Nixon’s volte-face with both Moscow and Peking that the right broke ranks. In the lead-up to the 1972 presidential election, a dozen leading conservatives publicly suspended their support for the president, backing a congressman’s ill-fated primary campaign against Nixon.

In the early 1980s, Reagan had assessed détente as “a one-way street the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims” and charged that Moscow was prepared “to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat” to promote world revolution. Yet a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had prompted the Carter administration’s isolation of Moscow, Reagan met with Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva (1985), Reykjavik (1986), Washington (1987) and Moscow (1988).

Several prominent conservatives reacted with shock and horror. From the National Review magazine to Washington Post columnist George F. Will and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, former supporters of Reagan felt betrayed.

Reagan defended the arms-control treaties he reached with the Soviets by saying the US would “trust but verify.” But for some conservatives, this phrase was nonsensical: How could the Kremlin ever be trusted? The Wall Street Journal published several editorials in the winter of 1987-88 condemning Reagan for being “snookered into letting the Soviets turn arms-control talks to their own purposes.”

For the hard-liners, Eisenhower’s summits, Nixon’s détente, Reagan’s negotiations and now Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin all follow in the shameful tradition of Munich, the purported peace agreement in that Bavarian city in 1938 that actually fuelled Nazi expansionism and led to World War II. 

And yet these past cases of US diplomacy had positive consequences. By breaking a 23-year-old taboo on negotiating with the leaders of Communist China, America exploited the Sino-Soviet split to shift the global balance of power in its favour. It’s also widely recognized that the Reagan-Gorbachev summits helped end the Cold War between the nuclear-armed superpowers.

Which brings us back to Trump’s pursuit of rapprochement with Moscow, which not only attracts the ire of earlier conservative critics of détente like George Will and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also is condemned across the political spectrum, including French socialists and the left-wing Guardian. Never mind that it’s been 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and international politics is no longer conceived as a Manichaean life-or-death struggle between two superpowers who were not only competing for power all over the planet, but were also ideological enemies of the first order.

For all the alarmism about a new Munich, today’s Russia lacks the economic and military capacity to draw a new Iron Curtain across Europe. And it has long since abandoned communism. But Russia, like any great power, will protect its near abroad, and will mightily resist encroachment on its borders that it sees as a threat to its security. Of course, this is why Moscow is so determined to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

Meanwhile, Europe remains dependent on the US for its security, but Washington recognises its limits. Just as Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson would not take America to war when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia respectively, Trump will not send US troops, ships or planes to fight Russian forces in Ukraine, which is neither a vital US interest nor a member of NATO. 

There is much to be said for ending a war that Ukraine and the West cannot win and has cost so much in blood and treasure— especially for Ukraine. (What, after all, is the alternative? That Europe alone funds the war and sends peacekeeping troops to Ukraine without US security guarantees — and more Ukrainians die while Russia annexes more land?) It also makes good strategic sense for Washington to settle this deadly conflict because it has helped create a strong alliance between China and Russia, while at the same time making it difficult for the US to pivot fully to Asia to deal with China, its principal geopolitical foe.

Russia is surely capable of mischief, but it’s not the Soviet Union. It is a declining power that is not capable of dominating Europe. China, on the other hand, is much more powerful and is bent on challenging US military power in the Asia Pacific and dominating that region if it can. As Trump’s foreign-policy advisers advocate, it’s prudent for the US to reorder its priorities and focus its efforts on containing the only great power capable of overturning the order in a geopolitically significant region.

Being deeply engaged in the Ukraine war — even if US troops are not directly involved — only hinders US efforts to deter China. There are limits to even American power, especially when it spends more on servicing its debt than spending on defence.

As the esteemed Australian foreign-policy commentator Owen Harries used to remark, one impediment to clear thinking about post-Cold War US foreign policy had been the conspicuous divorce of ends and means. He liked to quote the American realist Walter Lippmann, who in Harries’s judgement penned the single most important sentence ever written about American foreign policy:

Without the controlling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, its purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.

By wilfully ignoring the principle that ends must have some relation to means, a huge gap has opened between America’s global pretensions and its ability to finance them. And that, exactly, is a gap President Trump — or at least his advisers — seem intent on closing.

Whether Washington is successful in reaching a meaningful peace deal in Ukraine remains to be seen. Whether Trump can pull off a “reverse Nixon” — if this is indeed the ultimate aim of negotiations with Moscow — is also in question. Trump is no statesman and has no one of the calibre of Henry Kissinger or George Schultz to advise him, as Nixon and Reagan did. But his rapprochement with Russia makes strategic sense.