Chairs Pulled Up But Wheels Off

medium120671265It has been encouraging to see Trump and Zelenskyy meet at the funeral of Pope Francis. This confirms how well US-Ukraine relations have survived the many tensions of the last three months. And yet, current American attempts to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv will fail. At least this is what people familiar with East European affairs expect. Since Trump returned to the White House in Jan, what’s been missing from the ‘new’ American search for a compromise between Russia and Ukraine? Any substantial increase of international pressure on Moscow.During the last three years, Kremlin has put up a list of demands that violates, in a scandalous way, fundamental rules of post World War II international law in general and post communist European security order in particular. In essence, Moscow continues to demand from Washington and the rest of the world that they throw out of the window, with regard to a regular UN member country, the two most basic principles of the modern state order: territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Surprisingly, Washington has, in its proposal for the latest negotiation round, partly satisfied Russia’s demands. The Trump administration has offered to formally recognise the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and to cancel Ukraine’s official Nato membership perspective existing since 2008. These US concessions do not only undercut world security by demonstratively disregarding the integrity and sovereignty of a fully recognised, entirely peaceful, and, since 1991, properly independent state. They are also paradoxical within the context of US foreign policies of earlier Republican administrations. A written Nato membership perspective was provided to Ukraine as well as Georgia at the Nato Bucharest Summit in early April 2008 — on the insistence of George W Bush. And in 2018, during the first Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued an official “Crimea Declaration” — saying that US “rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored”.The second Trump administration has now reversed both former GOP foreign policies and one of the first Trump administration’s most explicit pledges towards Ukraine. It has made these and other incredible American compromises vis-à-vis Kremlin without any tangible material successes. So far, there is no soothing of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. In fact, US’s demonstrative turning away from international law, Western principles, and American foreign political traditions has had, until now, the opposite results. It has led to an increase of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities. Washington’s strange international behaviour not only vis-à-vis Ukraine, but also in other regards, one fears, will continue to encourage Moscow to behave even more aggressively. Trump’s new course may even lower Kremlin’s so-far prevalent hesitation to risk direct military escalation with a Nato state. If so, a prime candidate for attack is Estonia, a Nato member since 2004. Estonia hosts the most Russian city outside Russia, Narva, and follows a particularly restrictive approach towards Russian residents, trade and tourists. A Russian advance into a country like Estonia has become more likely after the publication of Trump’s recent odious proposal to Ukraine. An attack on a Nato member state would touch upon US obligations under the 1949 Washington Treaty establishing the Alliance. While Trump’s plan is supposedly about peace, it is putting US — at least as long as it takes the Washington Treaty seriously — at risk of a direct military confrontation with Russia. Moreover, Nato’s mutual support promise has been undersigned by altogether 32 countries. This implies that a relatively minor armed conflagration in, for instance, the Baltic region could quickly escalate into an all-European or even a world war.The most far-reaching consequences of Trump’s turnaround concern the worldwide regime of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Russia, its official political friend China, as well as now its quasi-collaborator US are all official nuclear-weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). When Ukraine became independent in 1991 it was a country with thousands of atomic warheads but agreed to become a non-nuclear weapon state under NPT. In exchange it received guarantees from NPT’s five official nuclear-weapon states, which also happen to be the UN Security Council’s permanent members. Only France and UK are still observant of the five security assurances issued to Ukraine in Dec 1994.Washington’s public agreement to recognise Crimea as Russian, and its undisguised pressure on Kyiv to make concessions vis-à-vis Moscow put the logic of non-proliferation on its head. NPT as well as the conventions on chemical and biological weapons no longer look like worldwide arrangements to prevent mass destruction — but ploys to keep non-nuclear-weapon states defenceless vis-à-vis expansionist great powers. A more and more likely scenario is that countries around the world will officially or unofficially leave the non-proliferation regime, and arm themselves with WMDs, thereby creating domino effects, if not arms races in their regions. As in other fields of US domestic and foreign affairs where the second Trump administration is currently disrupting old arrangements, Washington’s new approach to the Russo-Ukrainian War constitutes, even within narrowly understood American national interests, a strange development. US is disassociating itself from the very world order that it once principally co-created and from which it has benefitted for 80 years. The distrust that Washington currently sows concerning the rules-based order in general and US foreign policies in particular will have aftereffects increasingly disadvantageous to or even dangerous for US itself.The writer is an analyst at Swedish Institute of International Affairs and a columnist based in Stockholm