This is no time to ship lethal arms to Ukraine

I question the judgement of those who support giving lethal arms to the Ukrainian army; supported the US going to war with Iraq in 2003 and with Libya in 2011, the former which unbalanced much of the Middle East and the latter which has left a country almost destroyed, semi-ruled by malicious militias; and who supported in 1998 the West going to war against Serbia in order to wrest away its province of Kosovo and give it independence — a move which, ironically, Russia (and Spain, worried about its Basques) opposed, arguing that this would set a precedent for territorial separation by force of arms.

I am also trying to work out where President Barack Obama stands on Ukraine.

His vice president, Joe Biden, seems to be running with the foxes while he himself is running with the hares.

Take the president’s interview on CNN the weekend before last. Until then, the official White House line had been that the crisis was instigated by President Vladimir Putin to block Ukraine from creating a democratic government. 

But in that broadcast, as my esteemed fellow columnist, William Pfaff, observed, “Obama conceded to an American TV audience that the official US narrative concerning the war in Ukraine isn’t true”.

On CNN Obama said: “Mr Putin made this decision around Crimea and Maidan not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protest in the Maidan and Ukraine’s then-president (Viktor Yanukovych) fleeing after we (the US and the European Union) had made a deal to broker power in Ukraine.”

Pfaff adds his own authoritative interpretation of the reasons for what happened next: “Believing that the Maidan demonstrations last February had been secretly contrived by the West (easy for Putin to suspect because of the presence of EU representatives, as well as an American assistant secretary of state and a visit to Kiev by CIA officials), Putin retaliated by adroitly seizing Crimea, for many years a Russian territory, but Ukrainian only since 1954”.

I find it easier to work out where German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands.

Although she was party to the counterproductive EU attempt to pull Ukraine into the EU orbit by insisting that a new trade deal would mean that Ukraine should shun Russia’s own Eurasian Economic Community, whereas it should have been allowed to face both ways, and also party to a Western policy that still refuses to say loud and clear that NATO does not expect Ukraine to ever join NATO, she now realises that the West has put itself on the slippery slope.

She is trying to persuade both sides from sliding down this slope.

The other day, confronting those who seek tougher sanctions on Russia and sending arms to Ukraine, she urged patience: “I am surprised at how faint-hearted we are and how quickly we lose courage.”

By stealing the language of the “hard” school, she has pulled the carpet from beneath them. It is they who have to prove that this will not lead to a dangerous confrontation with Russia, or even war.

The Western publics will never agree to fight over a piece of a far-away country and a people it knows little of.

This is not Chamberlain’s appeasement. What is appeasement is that the Russian government until recently accepted with barely a murmur that the West, ignoring its own implied promises, would not expand NATO so far east.

Russia appeased the West, not vice versa.

Now, belatedly, the expansion right up to Russia’s border rankles.

The West’s behaviour in Ukraine convinced Putin that the West would like nothing better than to push the reach of NATO up to Ukraine’s border with Russia.

If Obama lets himself to be swept along by hardline advisers and senators, and orders the military to ship in heavy weapons, the US will not have the other big NATO powers going along with it. Neither Germany nor France, nor Spain, nor Italy, nor the UK.

Leaders know their electorate would not tolerate it. I do not think Obama will either.

Apart from the CNN quote above, which suggests he understands Putin’s point of view, Obama certainly does not want to leave office with a proxy war with Russia raging.

If he does not want to attack Syria or put boots on the ground to fight the so-called Islamic State, if he is happy to get the US out of Afghanistan and not to seriously re-enter the Iraq imbroglio, he is not going to go up against Russia, even via the indirect proxy of the Ukrainian army.