Dementing Europe a dangerous friend.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

On May 21 Russia and China announced that they had signed a gas deal that had been a decade in the making.

Under the deal, Russia will supply 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China per year for the next 30 years.

The agreement will trigger the construction of a 4,000 kilometre “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline that will draw upon new sources of Siberian gas and drive it on to China.

What’s just happened is big in international strategic terms and I wonder, given our increasingly heated pre-occupations with the first Abbott-Hockey budget, who here in Australia will notice and understand. 

European syndrome 

In the run up to the federal budget, my old friend and colleague, Greg Sheridan, wrote two great pieces around the theme of the “European disease” and whether Australia had been infected by it. If you haven’t read them, you really should: 

• “Levy a tolerable price to get our house in order,” (The Australian, May 1, 2014) 

and 

• “The dangers of becoming a little Europe in Asia,” (The Weekend Australian, May 10 – 11, 2014). 

Greg’s preoccupation was with European syndrome and how it manifests itself in domestic politics. My own is with how it works out on the world stage. In the tragic case of Ukraine, catching the European bug has meant having your country, or bits of it, torn from your grasp. 

In early November 2013, I made a two-part prediction to a Ukrainian friend. The first part was that there would never be another Orange Revolution; the second was that Russia would never tolerate Ukraine joining the EU or NATO. 

If we can overlook the fact that 90-odd people were killed on Kiev’s Maidan (the Orange Revolution of 2004-05 was bloodless), then I’m prepared to concede that the first part of my prediction was wrong. But, on the second part, I was spot on. 

Miscalculation all round 

What boggles the mind is this: if an occasional traveler in Ukraine, and a linguistically-challenged student of Ukrainian affairs, like me, could see what’s coming, how is it that the political leaders of the Maidan did not see it? 

In the New Testament there is a fine exposition of how prudential judgment operates in the field of international relations: 

“Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an embassy and asks terms of peace.” (Luke 14:31 – 33) 

From the Maidan experience we learn that none of its leaders, apparently, did this calculation or, if they did, they got the arithmetic horribly wrong. 

Fatherland Party leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk; UDAR leader, Vitali Klitschko; Svoboda leader, Oleh Tyahnybok; and, thundering from her prison cell, former Prime Minister, Fatherland party secretary and lately released Yulia Timoshenko: all got things badly wrong. 

Bear logic 

I mean, if you are a weakish bear cub and you live next door to a large, robust and aggressive old male bear — quite ready, when needful, to eat small bears for dinner — then you’d think that bear logic would counsel modifying cubbish behavior accordingly. 

Bear logic, however, there was none where the leaders of the Maidan were concerned. They reckoned they could thumb their noses at neighboring big bear and invite onto their patch beasts of another species whose sole aim was to deny big bear his longstanding practice of grazing and fishing in little bear’s territory and to hem in the old codger. 

Well, how wrong can you be? 

Big bear is having none of it. He’d been wandering in bear cub’s territory for over 300 years before bear cub blundered shakily into the world – since 1654, in fact, and the Treaty of Pereyaslav, when the Ukrainian Cossacks fatefully invited him in. And, for at least 200 of those years, beginning with the Polish Partitions (1772−1795), big bear had owned the place pretty much outright. That’s an interest going back quite some time before the US Declaration of Independence. 

“History and tradition,” replies the EU, snapping its fingers, “has nothing to do with it.” 

“That’s the Old World in which the Russian big bear is stuck. In the new international order, rights alone rule. The Ukrainian cub is free by right to reject Russia in favor of other neighbors and to give them, instead of Russia, a say in the shaping Ukraine’s affairs.” 

Well, yes. Except that “rights” have less to do with it than we might think.

If Ukraine has a future as an independent nation, then it can only be as a stand-alone country between Russian and the EU. 

Sure, Ukraine can choose between its neighbors. But what if one of those — Russia — has the power to register its objections emphatically? In that event, Ukraine’s rights diminish in value and its freedom of action shrinks. When these things happen, prudential judgment is vital. 

False friend 

At this point, the EU proved a false friend to Ukraine. 

Instead of warning it against the dangers of behaving as if Russia could be ignored, it encouraged Ukraine to accept the EU’s wrinkly-armed embrace. 

Then, behaving absurdly as if it were had the power and intention to support Ukraine, Europe sent its ambassadors into the midst of the Maidan to encourage defiance of their legitimate, albeit corrupt, government and its own belated, if unedifying, recognition that Russia cannot be wished away. 

What possessed the EU’s foreign policy supremo, Catherine Ashton, to walk the Maidan glad-handing the protestors when she could deliver nothing? 

Was it a kind of dementia, like when some elderly people forget who they are? 

What induced Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, to hurl himself into the same project of getting Ukraine into the EU? 

It’s perfectly comprehensible that Poland would want to protect its exposed southern flank by fostering Ukraine’s accession to the EU “empire”. 

But did the Polish government and foreign minister really believe that Poland could lead the West to rally around Ukraine? 

Get real! 

Germany is hog tied and bound by Russian gas pipelines, and France is selling its helicopter carriers to Russia. Were they about to sacrifice their national interests to increase Poland’s national security – and that by expanding a debt crippled EU, whose financial repair already exacts a crushing toll, to assume responsibility for another basket case economy? 

You’d have to be joking. But Mr. Sikorski is an admired figure and a serious person. 

In short, the EU – and its members individually – have proved themselves in Ukraine’s case to be dangerous busybodies. 

While I have advocated in these columns diplomatic support for Ukraine, the kind that the EU has offered has been disastrous. 

It would have been better, in hindsight, for Ukraine to have suffered diplomatic isolation. That would have been a salutary experience for its pro-western political parties and their leaders. They might have been compelled to think more deeply and calmly about how to deal with their powerful neighbor. It might have made a statesman out of one or another of them. 

If Ukraine has a future as an independent nation, then it can only be as a stand-alone country between Russian and the EU. 

If the crazy oldies who run the EU knew their own interests better, they would delegate to Germany and Poland the task of helping Ukraine to rebuild its political institutions, to reform and reshape its legal system and bureaucracy, and to rebuild its armed forces – but strictly as German and Polish projects, conducted without EU meddling, and without any suggestion that Ukraine could join the EU or NATO any time soon, if ever. 

Fail in this project, and Europe could find Russia one day on the line of the Carpathians. 

Is that what the Europeans and Ukrainians want? 

Meantime … 

Meantime, Russia has signed a 30-year gas deal with China. 

Sure the deal has been a long time in the pipeline (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!). The fact, however, that it has been sealed now, when Europe has proved reckless in its contempt for Russia’s version of the Munro Doctrine, is hugely significant. 

What’s happened does not mean the formation of a new “Sino-Soviet” bloc. The ideological underpinnings of that are dead and gone. It is, however, the beginning of a realignment of interests and one which finally has crystalized out under the catalytic influence of Europe’s plain dumb determination to mess with Russia’s strategic “borderlands”. 

One would have thought the penny might have dropped after Georgia. But no. Memory and attention span both fail with the onset of European Disease. So now Russia is strengthening its east in order to hold on to its west. 

How America has allowed Europe — let alone encouraged and led her! — to push China and Russia together by recommitting the Georgian error is another gob smacking story. 

But, if we did not see it before, then surely, as of May 21, it clicked: Western policy in Ukraine has turned into a blunder of potentially vast magnitude that will ripple across the Pacific. 

*This is an edited version of an article oringally published on the Henry Thornton blog.