Nineteen eventful years have elapsed since Ukraine achieved independence, and 234 since America did the same.
The circumstances could hardly have been more different, which helps to account for Ukraine’s capacity for accommodating to complex and ambiguous geopolitical realities, and America’s clear impatience with them, bordering on disdain.
The American Revolution, as we refer to our bid for independence, entailed a straightforward process of rebellion against a tyrannical overlord, the raising of an army, victory and the severing of ties. It then became a matter of allowing stable political institutions that were already in place to function unimpeded.
Moreover, there was an ocean separating the new republic from Britain, and no ethnic or linguistic friction between sections of the new nation. It was a cut-and-dried affair.
None of these features are to be found in Ukraine’s achievement of independence, which unfolded in more ambiguous ways — though no less historically significant for that. Indeed, it is a matter of conjecture as to how Ukraine would have achieved independence had the central authority in Moscow not helpfully collapsed.
Adding to the complexity surrounding independent Ukraine’s birth was the tangled history of Ukraine’s relations with Russia, the country’s internal ethnic and linguistic contradictions, and the appalling effects on society and the economy of 70 years of Marxist-Leninist misrule.
Just as independent Ukraine was coming into being, we Americans were undergoing a crisis of our own self-conception.
Likening ourselves at the outset of our national life to an idealized vision of ancient Greece (agrarian, peaceable and republican), we adopted, in the crucible of the Civil War, a more Roman self-conception.
By the late 20th Century with the American-led war against Serbia, we found ourselves, like ancient Rome, slipping our republican moorings and embarking on an outright imperial course. Here is former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice writing in Foreign Affairs: “It is America’s job to change the world, and in its own image…The old dichotomy between realism and idealism has never really applied to the United States because we do not accept that our national interests and our values are at odds…We prefer preponderances of power that favor our values, over balances of power that do not. We have dealt with the world as it is, but we have never accepted that we are powerless to change the world.”
U.S. President Barack Obama seems to reject this sort of hubris, and yet Rice’s statement certainly expresses the view of much of America’s foreign policy elite, regardless of party.
America’s career of empire nearly landed newly independent Ukraine in a terrible bind.
Had Ukraine and Georgia been members of NATO in August 2008, when Russian forces crossed into South Ossetia, and had NATO invoked Article 5 providing for collective defense of a member state under attack, Ukraine would have found itself at war with Russia.
Conversely, NATO might have done the prudent thing and looked the other way. In that case, NATO would have been revealed to be a paper tiger—prompting Ukraine to wonder why it had joined NATO in the first place, and NATO to question the wisdom of undertaking missions that supersede its mandate and competence. In rejecting NATO membership and opting instead for non-aligned status — the most convincing manifestation of sovereignty — Ukraine has demonstrated a new ability to discern, pursue and defend its national interest even in the face of pressure from outside to do otherwise.
This is the hopeful message for Ukraine on the 19th anniversary of its independence: Ukraine has shown it has the courage and the confidence to follow a non-aligned course, not against any other nation or group of nations, but for Ukraine.
Kyiv’s new independent foreign policy opens the prospect of a pan-European entente, a new European balance of power anchored in the pursuit of mutually beneficial relations among Berlin, Kyiv, Moscow and Paris, possibly including Warsaw. This is the key to countering the challenge posed by a rising China, a resurgent jihadist movement within Islam, and the general morbidity of a Europe awash in secular materialism.
Will Washington play ball — i.e., ditch the empire, and revert to the proud independent republic of George Washington? The U.S. foreign policy elite has next no intention of doing so, but events — in the Middle East, in world markets, and/or internally — may force their hand. Rice says the U.S. prefers “preponderances of power” to balances of power.
Sometimes your power is not as preponderant as you think it is, and sometimes that is a blessing in disguise.
Anthony T. Salvia is executive director of the Kyiv-based American Institute in Ukraine. Previously he served as a U.S. President Ronald Reagan appointee in the U.S. Department of State; he also worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Moscow. The organization’s website is www.aminuk.org.
Read also ‘One Russian’s view of Ukrainian statehood‘ by Stanislav Belkovsky.
