How We Won the Cold War, but Lost the Peace

How We Won the Cold War, but Lost the Peace

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-we-won-the-cold-war-lost-the-peace-1119709/04/14

Nicolai N. Petro

Post-Conflict, Foreign Policy, History, Diplomacy, Russia, Ukraine, United States

"The key emotional and cognitive transformation that must be achieved, and that was not achieved by this first post–Cold War generation, is to recognize that Russia is an inalienable part of Europe."

To have any hope of healing the deep wound in the very heart of Europe that is the crisis in Ukraine, we must first separate two crises that have become intertwined. One is the crisis of Ukrainian statehood. The other is the crisis of Russian relations with the West.

The crisis of Ukrainian statehood cannot, in fact, be resolved by Western intervention. One reason is that even the most generous package of Western assistance imaginable is still an order of magnitude too small to stabilize the entire Ukrainian economy. Another reason is the West’s persistent failure to grasp that the current crisis is not the result of the civil war. Rather, the civil war is the result of the failure to resolve fundamental issues of national identity and statehood in a manner that satisfies both Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians. The fateful decision by Western governments to back one interpretation of Ukrainian nationhood in its effort to dominate over the rest merely ensures that this conflict will continue for decades to come.

The second crisis that of Russian relations with the West is the result of the unfortunate decision to hold relations with Russia hostage to the success of Ukrainian statehood. Since the success of a Ukraine identity whose conceptual roots rest in a relatively small and highly localized portion of the population (Galicia) is far from assured, such a linkage can only lead to the deterioration of relations to the point of outright hostility and confrontation. Having put all their eggs in the Ukrainian nationalist basket, however, both the current government in Kiev and its Western supporters now have every incentive to blame Russia for any and all failures.

But while the current crisis has a precise origin—the overnight disavowal by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland of the February 21 transfer of power agreement signed between president Yanukovych and the opposition—it has been over twenty years in the making.

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