What are the Very Serious People saying about Western policy toward Russia these days?
The Foreign Affairs YouTube channel presents a panel discussion at the Yalta European Strategy Annual Meeting earlier this month. The somewhat-lacking-in-subtlety title gives a good idea of what actual content there is in the discussion: “Has the West Learned from Its Mistakes After Years of Neglecting Ukraine to Cooperate With Russia?”1
It’s mostly notable for the visibility that the Foreign Affairs journal, the famous foreign policy organ of the stereotypically establishment Council of Foreign Relation (CFR), gives it. Both Foreign Affairs and CFR are important sources on foreign policy issues. But both operate in a Very Serious People environment where it is is considered better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right, to use the famous phrase from John Maynard Keynes about the establishment economic os his day.
The Yalta European Strategy (YES) forum began in 2004 and is focused on issues around Ukraine. If its own current self-description is any measure, it’s not a hotbed of hippie pacifist thought.2
Why pay attention to an hour of hawkish hyperbole?
This is notable not because of the substance of the discussion - of which there isn’t very much - but because it’s a glimpse at some of the polemics that can currently pass for ideas among the Very Serious People.
The four panelists are as follows, with photos added because the video doesn’t have text identifying them while they are speaking.
Radoslaw Sikorsky is a former Polish Foreign Minister, currently a member of the European Parliament, and, it’s worth noting, the husband since 1992 of the very hawkishly anti-Russian commentator Anne Applebaum. The other panelists refer to him as “Radek.”
Zabby Minton Beddoes is the editor-in-chief of The Economist. Her comments are the most substantively interesting because she delivers some pragmatic and reality-based judgments on the function of sanctions. So does Fareed Zakaria in the audience during the question period.
Yehor Cherniev and Lesla Vasylenko are members of the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
I’m not sure how useful it is to include sitting members of the Verkhovna Rada in a discussion like this. Because the two of them basically compete with each other to see which one can more emphatically declare that Russia is evil to the core of its existence, that the Putin government has to be removed, that the country has to be humiliated and subjugated, etc. Listeners can judge whether that unsympathetic summary is a fair one. Not that Sikorski’s comments are much better. But he at least doesn’t sound like he’s auditioning for a Dr. Strangelove remake.
In the audience, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul offers a bizarre, neoconservative-like fantasy about how the US should have immediately expanded NATO to the borders of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992. McFaul can be coherent and sensible when he puts his mind to it. The panel was apparently not held on one of those days.
At some risk of over-generalizing, Ukraine is following what we might call a particular “eastern European” foreign-policy narrative which is echoed by Poland and the three Baltic states that constantly stresses the perfidy and danger of Russia and accuses Western countries like Germany (especially), France, and the US of being appeasers and weaklings in their Russia policies. To a certain extent, this is a diplomatic division of labor within the EU countries, although geographic realities and past history certainly have something to do with it.
Germany is generally more than happy to be berated for being too peacenik rather than things for which it was rightfully criticized prior to 1945. On the panel, Sikorski single out Germany and its then-Chancellor Angela Merkel for not being willing to grant Ukraine NATO candidate status at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. Though people familiar with that situation may be inclined to ask how the course Sikorski is defending would have provoked a less hostile response from Russia.
A recent Reuters retrospective notes:
Some analysts see [the NATO Bucharest decision] as the worst of both worlds: It served notice to Moscow that two countries it once ruled as part of the Soviet Union [Georgian and Ukraine] would join NATO - but brought them no closer to the protection that comes with membership.”3
The panel included no criticism of the Cheney-Bush Administration’s role in producing a decision that basically everyone now recognizes as having been a fiasco. Certainly not Sikorsky, who, as he brags on the panel, supported the Cheney-Bush neocon position. Heckuva job, Roddik!
To his credit, he at least distances himself a bit from the kamikazi view of the two Ukrainian parliamentarians:
But on dealing with Russia, I have a slightly different view. Because I don’t see how you can conduct foreign policy on the grounds that a country is inevitably always going to make the wrong choices. I believe you always have to give your partners what Americans called an “off-ramp,” the opportunity to make the right choice.
And of course it’s very difficult for Russia. We have discovered in the last few years that in our own societies, the proportion of population devoted to rule of law, liberal values and so on is less than we thought. And in Russia it’s even lower …
He goes on to sketch out some major security considerations that historically Russia has had to confront. In other words, Ukrainian-nationalist-nihilist views of Russia are neither realistic nor particularly helpful. (You don’t have to read between the lines too hard to see that he though the two Ukrainian panelists were making amateurish comments.) Sikorsky is also making a slap at the incumbent Polish government, which he does not support, for its departure from EU standards of democratic governance.
Has the West Learned from Its Mistakes After Years of Neglecting Ukraine to Cooperate With Russia? Foreign Affairs YouTube 09/26/2023. (Accessed: 2023-30-09).
About YES. Yalta European Strategy website, n/d. <https://yes-ukraine.org/en/about> (Accessed: 2023-30-09).
Gray, Andrew (2023): Bucharest declaration: NATO's Ukraine debate still haunted by 2008 summit. Reuters <https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/natos-ukraine-debate-still-haunted-by-bucharest-pledge-2023-07-10/> (Accessed: 2023-30-09). 07/10/2023.