Who Caused Putin's war in Ukraine?

conversationette with an ally

I am attending the Maritime Security Challenges 2022 conference in Victoria this week where between 160 and 180 delegates will discuss ‘Pacific Seapower: Strategic Comeptition in the Indo-Pacific’. My initial conversation was not about that theme, however. Instead, it was a fascinating example of an European’s assessment of actions causing consequences which has Indo-Pacific applications.

I hopped into a seat on the alternate bus for conference delegates when our initial bus refused to start en route to the afternoon cruise with the Canadian Navy. The guy in the seat next to me wasn’t particularly friendly but he finally admitted to being French rather than from a Pacific nation. While he looked forward to learning more at the conference about China , this gentlemen has been spending most of his time lately on Putin’s naval adventures against Ukraine.

In trying to learn something useful, I asked what the thought of the Ukraine war’s current trajectory; my seatmate wanted to discuss its past. His primary message was that the conflict could have been avoided. I asked him to tell me specfically how that should have been done. He said we should never have talked in public about expanding NATO because it undermined Russia’s security. My seatmate, who never gave me a name, opined that the Clinton administration’s advocating for NATO to include former Soviet states, potentially including Ukraine, almost thirty years ago sewed the seeds for this war in 2022. My French interlocutor said Russia’s insecurities were so profound that NATO expansion offered nothing but danger for Russia in the past three decades as Putin struggled to explain to his population why the west sought to threaten them with troops potentially deployed on Russia’s border in former Soviet states such as Ukraine. This gentlemen added that Putin went to war in order to assure his population their borders would be secure and that the west ought remember that alternatives to Putin as rulers in Russia could easily be worse. He concluded that the decisions taken at any point don’t always break into conflicts immediately, such as 1994 or 1995, but when leaders cannot see a way out of their constraints as occurred earlier this year. He further projected that the same was true when discussing China and possible alternate rulers to Xi Jinping.

It was a breathtaking analysis of what has been going on for the past thirty years.

I find Putin’s behaviour utterly callous, crass, and self-justifying but I have long worried that NATO expansion provided him with some cover for aggressive actions which we have seen for almost a generation now. The most basic thing a government does is protect its people. While we never thought we threatened Russians, and Bill Clinton repeated that many times along with his administration during the 1990s, but that never guaranteed the Russians bought the argument. That is the problem: we cannot always control how events are seen by other countries, people’s, or leaders. It’s folly to argue, as we often do, that they know we don’t mean them harm. Well, they don’t know that for sure. Seriously, they don’t know that we are always good people with good intentions. Fear, deep-seated fear, is a pervasive reaction in states that have known invasion and war. World War II was an outside invasion which Russians never want repeated by anyone. Putin took that and has been running with it since his Munich 2007 speech condemning the George W. Bush for its aggressive actions in the Middle East.

As we pulled into His Majesty’s Canadian Dockyard in Esquimalt, I thought about the commitments we are hearing about regarding Taiwan. This conversation occurred the same day as President Joe Biden met with General Secretary Xi Jinping for the first time in several years, certainly since Biden assumed the White House and Xi embarked on his third term as General Secretary. I have no doubt Taiwan was front and center in each man’s concerns while approaching the other. China firmly needs to believe it can prevent Taiwan from going its separate way formally while preparing Taiwan to come to see that reunification is the only path that will work. Washington seeks to prevent the extinguishing of Taiwan’s democracy while leaving options open for the people of island to have a say in their future. I am firmly convinced that domestic groups in both Washington and Beijing clearly believe their leaders must remain steadfast on their positions into the foreseeable future but with these different aims by both sides.

The commitments made, or sometimes avoided, on Taiwan began when President Nixon’s visited China fifty years ago. Nixon and Mao Zedong issued a communique in 1972 'the 1972 Communique'which China claims is sacrosanct and which the United States says merely reported discussions between Nixon and the Chinese leadership on issues including Taiwan. It was not a treaty in our eyes because the Executive cannot make commitments in our system without the Senate ratifying them. Similarly, President Jimmy Carter’s decision to ‘Normalise’, meaning shifting of diplomatic recognition from Taibei to Beijing, in 1979 was another non-binding communique for the United States while China found it an iron-clad commitment between two heads of state. 'Joint Communique of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China', 1 January 1979. Follow on legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, called the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, is law stating the United States would look unfavourably upon China coercing the people of Taiwan, obligating the United States to sell ’arms of a defensive nature’ to Taiwan to allow the island to defend itself if necessary; the Act does not say the United States will defend Taiwan.'Taiwan Relations Act' of 1979 Along with Ronald Reagan’s 1982 communique on reducing arms sales to Taiwan, 'U.S.-PRC Joint Communique', 1982 commitments evolved and expectations fractured for three sets of political actors. These steps started to raise anxieties, curiously, in both Taiwan and China—and ultimately even in Washington— with regard to future commitments as the United States began a path called ‘strategic ambiguity’ on how we would handle the defense of Taiwan should China push violently for reunification. This occurred against the backdrop of a more confident, powerful China willing to exert its power to get its way, a condition not true when this era began in 1972.

Most citizens (and apparently many politicians charged with making policy decisions, sadly) have never read or probably even heard of the Three Communiques, the Taiwan Relations Act, the Six Assurances, or any of the other documents the U.S. government refers to in answering questions or making policy choices about Taiwan.For a nonpartisan discusson of this topic, see Susan V. Lawrence and Caitlin Campbeil, 'Taiwan: Political and Security Issues', 7 October 2022 This is an extraordinarily complex area of U.S. national security policy even in an era of great contradictions and aspirations. Yet the expectations, fears, and hopes set into motion over the past half a century, if not all the way back to the Guomindang establishing themselves on the island of Formosa following defeat by the Communists in 1949, each exist in three separate places: Taiwan, mainland China, and the United States. We are seeing these expectations, fears, and hopes shift as if they were each on a three dimensional gyroscope in the minds of each of the peoples involved. The dangers of miscalculation due to one of those gyroscopes falling grow daily and the United States and China both have nuclear weapons which could become part of a horrible conflict if passions were to outstrip governments’ ability to assure their peoples on the future regarding protecting commitments made years back—as my French seatmate believes was true for Russia and Putin.

As the United States debates how to handle Taiwan and China, we too must recall that long-term anxieties exist in China and Taiwan. That is no justification for what Russia did in Ukaine nor would it be justification for China on Taiwan. But, strategic fears are real artifacts of historic experiences and they are not uncommon. We would do well to remember that as we move forward rather than assuming that other governments are merely cynically using those fears. They may indeed by cynics but the violence of war would be horrible just the same. FIN