Ukraine’s sorrow vs Others’

Ukraine, which has been seeking NATO membership, shares its borders with NATO countries as well as two of its aggressors—Russia and Belarus. PIC/BBC

The Russian invasion of Ukraine reconfirms the Thucydidean truth: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." We have been admiring Ukrainians for valiantly resisting the Russian Army. Yet our admiration is like a dying flame, for we know Ukrainians will likely have their freedom snatched. They will die in numbers, have their families ripped apart, and a generation will become impoverished - and suffer.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had been opposed to Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had earlier taken into its fold countries that were constituents of the erstwhile Soviet Union or allied to it. NATO's expansion has pushed its frontline to the border of Russia, alarming its elite and prompting Putin to say his country has "nowhere further to retreat to - do they think we'll just sit idly by?" His invasion of Ukraine ostensibly bears out Thucydides' assertion that the "strong do what they can."

But the truth, as always, is tangled.

Mary E Sarotte, in Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, cites documents to show that the then American Secretary of State James Baker, in February 1990, sounded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev out with a "hypothetical bargain." Sarotte describes Baker's bargain thus: "What if you let your part of Germany [East Germany] go, and we agree that NATO will ‘not shift one inch eastward from its present position [in West Germany]'." German chancellor Helmut Kohl and British Prime Minister John Major, too, had echoed Baker in their meetings with Russian officials.

These conversations partially explain why Putin suspects NATO's eastward push is a betrayal designed to hem Russia. True, "hypothetical bargain" cannot be construed as an undertaking, more so as Baker's proposal was never legally formalised.

Sarotte writes, "Critics both inside and outside the Administration advised [US President Bill] Clinton that the way in which Washington was expanding NATO was diluting the alliance, humiliating Moscow, and undermining arms control." But such cautions were to no avail. "The question inside the Administration was no longer how to expand NATO but how far - and the answer was ‘to the Baltics,'" writes Sarotte. To the Baltics meant going right up to the Russian border (see map).

In 2004, a year after the US had invaded and occupied Iraq, Baltic countries were made NATO members. No longer as weak as it was in the 1990s, Russia began taking countervailing measures, facilitating South Ossetia and Abkhazia to break away from Georgia in 2008, annexing Crimea in 2014, and invading Ukraine last month. Putin wants the post-1997 NATO expansion to be reversed.

As a sovereign nation, Ukraine has the right to decide the alliances it wishes to stitch. Ukraine's and NATO's acceptance of Russia's demands would imply undermining the idea of national sovereignty and giving, at the very least, a de facto sanction to the right of the strong to dictate terms to the weak. This has the US and Europe to justifiably argue that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has subverted the rule-based international order.

Their argument glosses over their own past record. There is a long history of the US disregarding the sovereignty of nations much weaker than itself, of declaring war on them, or destabilising them by staging coups or bolstering militant groups opposed to regimes Washington detested.

Think of Vietnam, Iran in 1953, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Panama, Brazil… Instances of American intervention in the Americas in the 20th Century would easily count over 100. After World War II, the US guarded its neighbourhood from becoming part of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. This bred paranoia among American presidents, leading them to perceive every radical socio-economic reform as a communist plot against capitalism.

Two examples will prove the point. In 1951, Guatemala's democratically elected President, Jacobo Arbenz, decided to expropriate uncultivated land from big farms for distributing it among peasants. Guatemala's richest landowner then was the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Stung, the US sponsored a coup to depose Arbenz in 1954, plunging the country into four decades of violence that killed 2,00,000. Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983, because he thought it was building an airstrip for the Cubans and Russians to use. It was, in fact, meant to boost tourism. When told that more than 100 nations had opposed the invasion in the United Nations, Reagan quipped, "It didn't upset my breakfast at all."

The collapse of the Soviet Union had the US go haywire. For instance, it fabricated the lie of Iraq possessing nukes to invade and occupy it. Till date, 2,88,000 people have perished in the violence triggered by the invasion. According to military historian Andrew Bacevich, the US has bombed or invaded or occupied 14 Muslim countries between 1980 and 2014. In just 2016 - the last year of Barack Obama's presidency, the US dropped 26,171 bombs on seven countries.

It is evident the weak who have suffered at the hands of the strong are mostly citizens of developing countries. Ukraine's suffering rends the world's heart, as it should. Iraq's or Latin America's sorrows did not have the Americas and Europe wailing, as it should have. Unequal emotions to the same suffering in an unequal world!

The writer is a senior journalist
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