Harsh Political Realities

By  Volodymyr Kish

Over the past year or so, and particularly since the election of President Obama in the U.S. and President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, many Ukrainian nationalists have begun to lament at how Ukraine has been abandoned by its former supporters and allies.  Ukrainians have always looked upon the United States and Europe as being its friends in its quest to achieve freedom, independence, democracy and true statehood.  After all, are these not the very principles that the so called “western world” espouses as the cornerstone of its foreign policy towards the rest of the world that is not so blessed with these fundamental human and social rights?

It has therefore resulted in no end of disappointment and disenchantment to recognize that the foreign policies of late of both the U.S. and most European states have tilted sharply away from Ukraine and towards a rapprochement with Ukraine’s ancient and current nemesis, Russia.  Of course, Ukraine has not helped its cause by shooting itself in the foot by its colossal failure to capitalize on the opportunity created by the Orange Revolution to prove to the world that it had politically matured as a people and as a nation state. Instead of taking the bold and necessary steps towards reform, we showed the world that when it comes to political and economic affairs, we are just another corrupt banana republic. 

Of course, we Ukrainians were also more than a little naïve in believing that American and European policy was based primarily on high moral and democratic principles.  As any serious scholar of history knows full well, the foreign policies of most nations, and particularly the great powers, is ruled primarily by self interest.

In the case of the U.S., for most of the Twentieth Century it was locked in a life and death ideological struggle with the Communist movement, concretely represented in the form of the Soviet Union.  Within that struggle, it considered any enemy of its chief adversary as a friend by definition.  It therefore looked upon the Ukrainian cause with sympathy, and when the USSR fell apart, it strongly supported the newly nascent country of Ukraine as a useful insurance policy should either the Communists or Russians get imperialistic ambitions once again. 

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has realized that the Russians are no longer a real military threat to them, merely another economic competitor, and that is an area where the Americans are confident of their abilities and superiority.  A new ideological enemy has sprung up in the meantime in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, and the Americans are now looking to cultivate the Russians because of their strategic geographic location as allies to combat the scourge of Islamic terrorism.  In this latest ideological struggle, the Ukrainians can be of no real significant benefit to American interests, so they have pushed Ukraine and the Ukrainian cause to the fringes of their foreign policy priorities.

As for Europe, their lack of enthusiasm to try and bring Ukraine into the European Union is even simpler to understand.  Russia is the primary supplier of petroleum and natural gas products to most European countries.  Their shutting off of natural gas supplies to Europe on two occasions in the past several years had less to do with a pricing dispute with Ukraine, and more with demonstrating to the Europeans that the Russians had the power to bring the European economy to its knees any time they chose to do so.  The message was received loud and clear by the major European powers, who have put any thought of integrating Ukraine into Europe on the backburner, and are now bending over backwards not to displease the Russians.  This is the harsh reality of pragmatic geopolitics.  The corollary to all this of course, is that it gives the Russians a free hand in how they deal with their Ukrainian neighbours without the Europeans getting their noses too out of joint. 

What all this means, bottom line, is that Ukrainians are once again on their own when it comes to determining their future.  They can count on very little tangible support from the “western world” as they try to resist the ambitions of their Russian neighbours.  Ukrainians must once again show the Russians and the rest of the world that they will not meekly re-integrate into a new Russian empire.

Waging such a battle though must first begin with a genuine effort to unite all the democratic forces in Ukraine into a united political front.  Ukrainians showed during the Orange Revolution that they can indeed take that first step; now they must also demonstrate that they learned the lessons from the failure that followed and are not just another “corrupt banana republic” to risk political capital on.