61 - A Path to Peace: Appeasing Dictators No More
“Appeasement with dictators does not lead to peace. It leads to war and conflict because they only respect the language of power, strength, and unity.” Those are the well-considered words of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO secretary-general from 2009 to 2014, after having previously served as Denmark’s prime minister. He was speaking during an interview with Ravi Agrawal, the editor of Foreign Policy. I bring what he said to the attention of readers of this Newsletter because I suspect that many of you will not have seen his remarkable testimony.
Rasmussen takes strong issue with French President Emanuel Macron’s oft-voiced worries that NATO and the West will unnecessarily “humiliate” Putin, thus backing him into a tight corner and making ending the Ukrainian war difficult, if not impossible. Macron continues to talk to Putin the bully, hoping (against current evidence) that he can persuade Putin to declare “victory” and go home, a naïve concept.
Rasmussen, like Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, rejects cosseting Putin in any way, shape, or form. Their cogent argument encapsulates what the bitter and deadly struggle in Ukraine is all about: “We cannot save Putin from humiliation,” says Rasmussen. “The cost of face-saving for Mr. Putin will be much higher than an outright defeat for the Russian troops in Ukraine. That’s why my conclusion is that Ukraine must win this war, because if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop. He will continue into Moldova, Georgia, and eventually also put pressure on the three Baltic states. That’s why the Ukrainians must win, and they have the will to fight. It’s our duty to give them the means to fight.”
Macron and others in Europe, and presumably strategists in the Pentagon, appropriately worry that a Putin humiliated and cornered by what Russians might perceive as a major defeat (should it come to that) will turn to nuclear weapons as his penultimate or ultimate means of grasping victory from defeat – or at least causing consternation in NATO and Washington.
But Rasmussen is remarkably sanguine: “I’m not that concerned because Putin knows very well that if he were to use weapons of mass destruction, tactical nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, there would be a determined NATO military response.”
NATO’s former leader agrees that the causes of Russia’s underwhelming military effort in Ukraine surprised him, as they have other leaders of Europe and the U. S. “We…overestimated the strength of the Russian military,” he concedes. Its unexpected weakness, Rasmussen conjectures (along with views expressed in earlier issues of this Newsletter) has been due to corruption. Additionally, he believes that few appreciated until now “the brutality and the ambitions of President Putin.” We should have known, however, since Putin made evident in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas, and Syria that he would stop at nothing, pulverizing whole cities and vast civilian populations to gain his personal goals, and realize his global ambitions.
Rasmussen, along with this Newsletter, also takes issue with American “realist” academics and New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman’s oft-expressed views that the West and NATO erred by welcoming Georgia and Ukraine eventually into their ranks in 2008, and for placing troops and sizable caches of weapons along Russia’s borders in the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, plus putting missile batteries in Poland.
Putin has only been using those supposed “provocations” to rationalize his imperial ambitions. Rasmussen even suggests that NATO made two fundamental mistakes in its dealings with Russia in the decades before the war. 1) In 2008, NATO should have outlined a clear path into NATO for Georgia and Ukraine instead of just talking about, doing little, and appeasing Putin. 2) In 2014, after the “illegal” annexation of Crimea, the sanctions applied by the West were far too “mild.” “That gave Putin the impression that he could, almost without any cost, continue and grab land by force.” And so he has. “We have been too naïve for too long,” Rasmussen declared.
Even President Zelensky may have been naïve, not believing Putin would launch an invading force into Ukraine until he did, and it was too late. But Zelensky rallied his people and their resistance, including this week’s new behind the lines guerilla action, and Ukraine has so far avoided being annihilated. But it might now be torn asunder, its patrimony separated into disparate, disaggregated, and pulverized sections in the east cut off from the west.
As Ukrainians fight their war and our war for the freedom of humankind and to ensure the sanctity of a rule based international order (what we thought we had won at the end of World War II and later with the collapse of the Soviet Union) we should willingly pay higher fuel prices at the pump and endure supply chain shortages. Africans, north and south, will go hungry because of the war, too, with shortages of wheat, barley, and sunflower oil (possibly being relieved if Turkish warships end up escorting grain shipments out of Odesa).
But those are all sacrifices worth making to make sure that neither Putin nor some Putin clone ever again threatens the peace and prosperity of the world by prosecuting a war that is narcissistically driven, a vanity combat to satisfy one kleptocrat’s personal ambitions. In the end, let us not appease war criminality anywhere.