transformation that might ensure a more cooperative relationship in the future.”
That paragraph lays out everything that is wrong with dropping the moral element from foreign policy. For the sake of a vague hope for “a more cooperative relationship in the future,” the Clinton administration fought to keep the Iranian nuclear program and Chechnya massacre off the table. The money wasn’t the issue; a few billion dollars wasn’t going to make or break either country, although Yeltsin certainly needed all the help he could get as the 1996 election approached. (I campaigned for him myself.) Instead of tying foreign aid and foreign policy to the immoral slaughter of civilians in Chechnya, Clinton expressed concerns, made vague remarks about how it might drive other countries toward joining NATO (which it did), and called it an internal affair.
Clinton and Europe missed the chance to draw lines of acceptable behavior for Russia, at least anywhere beyond the Baltic States. In Central Asia and the various conflict zones in the Caucasus, the West tacitly supported a Russian sphere of influence. As the New York Times reported in October 1994, two months before Russian forces stormed into Chechnya, the West refused to provide peacekeepers to the newly formed states, allowing Russian ones to step in to manage the conflicts they themselves had provoked.
Reagan and his moral foreign policy had shown the way, but it was now completely abandoned. It was not based on what could be done unilaterally. No one could ever imagine that the United States or NATO would directly aid the Chechen separatists, for example. The important element was to show clearly and consistently that human rights mattered and that human lives mattered. Clinton was so invested in hoping “for a more cooperative relationship” that he could not simply state that massacring civilians and helping a state sponsor of terror build a nuclear program were unacceptable.
This record of immoral passivity also puts more nails in the coffin of the myth of Russian humiliation. Clinton treated Yeltsin in good faith throughout, provided Russia with intelligence on Iran, began to massively demilitarize Europe, and even helped disarm other ex-Soviet states with the effect of guaranteeing Russian preeminence. Nineteen ninety-four was the year the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the UK all sat side by side at a long table in Hungary to sign what would be known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
This brief document is far from a comprehensive treaty or even a security guarantee, but its intent and purpose was clear. Ukraine was giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under heavy pressure from Russia and the United States. In exchange, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma wanted a public pledge from Clinton, Yeltsin, and John Major that they would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
Obviously Russia violated the agreement when it invaded and then annexed Crimea in March 2014. As for the other signatories, there are no means of enforcement in the memo and the only promised response is to seek UN Security Council action “if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”
When I spoke to the first Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, in Kyiv in late 2014, he was adamant that the United States had betrayed Ukraine to Putin by reneging on the obligations Clinton assumed in Budapest. He said it had always been Clinton, even more than Yeltsin, who had pressured him and the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus to relinquish their nuclear arsenals. No doubt this was a worthy goal and a worthy achievement at the time. But what does it say when twenty years later Ukraine is practically helpless
That paragraph lays out everything that is wrong with dropping the moral element from foreign policy. For the sake of a vague hope for “a more cooperative relationship in the future,” the Clinton administration fought to keep the Iranian nuclear program and Chechnya massacre off the table. The money wasn’t the issue; a few billion dollars wasn’t going to make or break either country, although Yeltsin certainly needed all the help he could get as the 1996 election approached. (I campaigned for him myself.) Instead of tying foreign aid and foreign policy to the immoral slaughter of civilians in Chechnya, Clinton expressed concerns, made vague remarks about how it might drive other countries toward joining NATO (which it did), and called it an internal affair.
Clinton and Europe missed the chance to draw lines of acceptable behavior for Russia, at least anywhere beyond the Baltic States. In Central Asia and the various conflict zones in the Caucasus, the West tacitly supported a Russian sphere of influence. As the New York Times reported in October 1994, two months before Russian forces stormed into Chechnya, the West refused to provide peacekeepers to the newly formed states, allowing Russian ones to step in to manage the conflicts they themselves had provoked.
Reagan and his moral foreign policy had shown the way, but it was now completely abandoned. It was not based on what could be done unilaterally. No one could ever imagine that the United States or NATO would directly aid the Chechen separatists, for example. The important element was to show clearly and consistently that human rights mattered and that human lives mattered. Clinton was so invested in hoping “for a more cooperative relationship” that he could not simply state that massacring civilians and helping a state sponsor of terror build a nuclear program were unacceptable.
This record of immoral passivity also puts more nails in the coffin of the myth of Russian humiliation. Clinton treated Yeltsin in good faith throughout, provided Russia with intelligence on Iran, began to massively demilitarize Europe, and even helped disarm other ex-Soviet states with the effect of guaranteeing Russian preeminence. Nineteen ninety-four was the year the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the UK all sat side by side at a long table in Hungary to sign what would be known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances.
This brief document is far from a comprehensive treaty or even a security guarantee, but its intent and purpose was clear. Ukraine was giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under heavy pressure from Russia and the United States. In exchange, Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma wanted a public pledge from Clinton, Yeltsin, and John Major that they would “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
Obviously Russia violated the agreement when it invaded and then annexed Crimea in March 2014. As for the other signatories, there are no means of enforcement in the memo and the only promised response is to seek UN Security Council action “if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”
When I spoke to the first Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, in Kyiv in late 2014, he was adamant that the United States had betrayed Ukraine to Putin by reneging on the obligations Clinton assumed in Budapest. He said it had always been Clinton, even more than Yeltsin, who had pressured him and the presidents of Kazakhstan and Belarus to relinquish their nuclear arsenals. No doubt this was a worthy goal and a worthy achievement at the time. But what does it say when twenty years later Ukraine is practically helpless
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