I find the idea of “realism” in international politics, as explained in the letter from the former British ambassador to Russia Sir Anthony Brenton (“Trump ‘simply said what everyone has long known’”, February 17) wholly baffling when applied to Donald Trump and Ukraine, unless realism simply means what a political leader considers to be in their own or their country’s self-interest and advantage at a given moment.
What Trump the realist has done is to give Russia more than it could have possibly dreamt of and far more than it has earned on the battlefield, where Russia have failed to score the victory over Ukraine they expected to achieve in a week.
What is being carelessly gifted to Vladimir Putin is the prospect of full control of the southern and eastern flanks of Ukraine, Novorossiya as Putin has always conceived it; a collapse or forced change in the leadership in Kyiv; and an externally imposed commitment to Ukrainian neutrality — in effect loss of national sovereignty. All accompanied by a major rupture in relations between the US and Europe, and within Nato. The stuff of dreams for the Moscow leadership, who surely cannot believe their good fortune.
Can anyone seriously contend that this is in the “realist” interests of the US, let alone Europe and Ukraine? Ukraine’s state and society will probably be seriously destabilised, with knock-on effects to the whole of Europe and beyond.
An emboldened Russia will feel able to move still further into Georgia and Moldova while at the very least making threatening noises to the Baltic states with their significant and often marginalised Russian minorities.
Does anyone seriously think that a disinterested US would be able to treat these as purely European problems to be resolved by enlarged European defence forces?
As panicky EU governments begin their unseemly struggle to increase military spending, I am reminded of the American boast that the US had won the cold war with the Soviet Union thanks to Ronald Reagan’s fantasy Star Wars project, whereby the US threatened massive increases in defence expenditure and forced a near bankrupt Soviet Union with its stagnating economy and increasingly disaffected population to follow suit. Sounds familiar?
Could it be payback time for a triumphant Russia?
Duncan Leitch
Former Adviser on Regional Development, Government of Ukraine, 2000-2013, Hertford, Hertfordshire, UK